Round the Horne was a half hour BBC radio sketch show that aired for
four seasons in the late sixties. As a kid, I used to listen to
it on shortwave, on the BBC World Service, and it probably had a
permanently warping effect, even though half the jokes and most of the
double-entendres went flying over my head at that age.
[Check out BBC 4 Extra, where Round the Horne runs perpetually, with a different show added each week.]
It was written mainly by Marty Feldman (Igor in Young Frankenstein)
and Barry Took, who was later responsible for bringing together the
members of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and went on to write for Laugh-In
for a while. The show was emceed by Kenneth Horne - thus
the name - who served as a benign, paternally indulgent means of
holding things together, and featured a series of sketches with ongoing
characters played by Kenneth Williams (the brilliantly camp one), Hugh
Paddick, Bill Pertwee, and Betty Marsden. There was also a staff
announcer - a parody of a strait-laced, plummy-voiced BBC announcer - Douglas Smith, who
introduced the show and was occasionally brought into the sketches:
Round
the Horne succeeded in stuffing more double-entendre into a segment
than anything before or since, and it did this airing on Sunday
afternoons. This was stuff that no US station would or could
possibly have put on the air, not because it was indecent, but because
it really sounded that way. For instance, Try to Slip a Double-Entendre Past the Producer Day:
Or at a hunt banquet:
(The whipper-in is the member the hunt whose job it is to keep the pack
of hounds focused on the fox, and not run after stray chickens.)
And this:
Julian and Sandy
Paddick and Williams played Julian and Sandy, a highly camp couple of
perpetually out-of-work actors who each week had a new temporary
job. Horne would walk into their shop-of-the-week and be greeted
by Paddick: "Hello, I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy," and then:
When Horne decides he needs a pet:
Or wants his garden landscaped:
When Horne wants to publish a book, he drops in at the fashionable
Chelsea publishers, Bona Books, and Julian show him his blurb:
One of the best lines of the series, here in Bona Law
(remember this is post-Wolfenden report, pre-sodomy law repeal in the
UK), as Julian and Sandy take a turn as lawyers:
Dame Celia Molestrangler and Binky
Huckabuck
Marsden
and Paddick played Dame Celia Molestrangler and "aging juvenile" Binky
Huckabuck, thirties-era actors who were in turn playing Fiona and
Charles in a series of films that would have been written by Noel
Coward, if only he'd thought of it,
with hilariously brittle dialog about not-quite adulteries. Films
like Blithe Laughter, Private Fever, Brief Ecstasy, Forbidden Encounter...
Brief Ecstasy:
Blithe Laughter:
There was generally a parody of either the James Bond or detective
genre. Horne played a Bond figure, with Williams as "Dr. Chu En
Ginsberg, MA (failed)." The evil Ginsberg's sidekick was his
concubine Lotus Blossom, "full of eastern promise," and played in a
bass Cockney voice by Paddick. But there were also parodies of
the US television show Burke's Law (as Horne's Law), and The Avengers.
Unfortunately the fourth season was missing Feldman, who had moved on,
and Pertwee, who was cut as an economy measure. And that was the
last season, as Kenneth Horne succumbed to a heart attack at an
industry banquet before the fifth season could start.