Ian Bryce Wallace OBE (10 July 191912 October 2009) was an English bass-baritone opera and concert singer, actor and broadcaster of Scottish extraction. His family intended him for a career in the law, but he was attracted to the stage. Originally an actor in non-musical plays, he was persuaded to try opera and made an immediate success. He played a range of buffo parts in operas, at Glyndebourne and internationally. Wallace maintained a simultaneous career in revue, straight theatre, and broadcasting. He appeared in pantomime and at the Royal Variety Performance. As a broadcaster, he was a long-time panellist on the BBC radio panel game My Music, and he presented a television series of introductions to operas in the 1960s, as well as appearing in light entertainment shows singing a range of songs from ballads to comedy numbers. He performed his one-man show for many years. Flanders and Swann wrote several songs for him, and their best-known novelty song, "The Hippopotamus", became indelibly associated with him. Life and career Early years Wallace was born in London, the only son of a Liberal Member of Parliament, Sir John Wallace and his wife Mary Bryce Wallace (née Temple). He was educated at Charterhouse School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read law and joined the Cambridge Footlights. During his World War II service in the Royal Artillery, he organised and starred in troop shows. Wallace was invalided out of the Army in 1944, after he contracted spinal tuberculosis, and decided that his career lay in entertainment rather than the law. He first appeared on the professional stage in Glasgow, in Ashley Dukes's The Man With a Load of Mischief. He made his London stage début in 1945 at Sadler's Wells in James Bridie's play The Forrigan Reel, directed by Alastair Sim. He was doubtful of his suitability for an operatic career, but in 1946 friends persuaded him to audition for the conductor Alberto Erede, who engaged him for the first season of the New London Opera Company. Opera Wallace made his operatic début at the Cambridge Theatre in 1946, as Colline in La bohème. He sang there with established operatic stars such as Mariano Stabile and Margherita Grandi. His other roles with the company were the Sacristan (Tosca), Bartolo (The Barber of Seville), Ceprano (Rigoletto) and Masetto (Don Giovanni). The critic of The Times thought Wallace overplayed the buffo element, both as