Round the Horne (Revisited)

Round the Horne began in the spring of 1964 and remained a fixture until the death of Kenneth Horne in 1969. The show starred Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, Betty Marsden and Bill Pertwee (though the latter seems to have been erased from history for reasons we’ll get to later). The announcer – who became a bigger part of the series as time went on – was Douglas Smith. It is hard to say what it was about. Each show would feature Horne as the straight-laced host ostensibly presenting a sort of magazine show, this being a linking device to a series of sketches featuring Williams, Paddick, Marsden and Pertwee. It was written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman (with "Man About the House" creators Brian Cooke and Johnnie Mortimer replacing Feldman when he went to America) and the scripts are some of the cleverest ever written. Took and Feldman delighted in using language to delight the audience, baffle the censors and create catchphrases which I can attest are still remembered nearly forty years later. Round the Horne never transferred to television so hasn’t achieved the recognition of a Hancock’s Half Hour. Nor did it launch the careers of its performers in the way that the Goon Show, or I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again did. But it has been a corner stone of the BBC Radio Collection ever since the range began in the 1980s and there is life in the series to this day.

In October 2003 the lone surviving member of the Round the Horne family, writer Brian Cooke, presented "Round the Horne Revisited" – a stage production of classic RTH material. Instead of writing a play around Round the Horne he let the original words speak for themselves and, with a cast of look-and-sound-alikes, the show ran to great acclaim. It was broadcast on BBC2 on New Years Day 2005 (I missed it, dammit) and it has been one of the surprise hits of the last few years. A second selection of material was assembled and Round the Horne Revisited 2 debuted in London around the time the first show was shown on television.

We went to see the show at Manchester’s Lowry Centre – a strange looking building which has risen out of the decay of the Manchester Ship Canal docks. We were in the smaller of the two theatres and it was pretty much full. As I am still clinging to my upper-mid-twenties I may well have been the youngest person there. It was certainly an audience which skewed towards an older demographic. The backdrop was an old fashioned wireless (with each of the stations identified along the tuning dial) and the set, if you can call it a set, was designed to look just as a recording of Round the Horne would’ve looked back in the sixties. There were five old fashioned microphones (polished by a man in brown BBC overalls while the audience was filing in before the show), five chairs, a sound effects desk and three boards which declared "Applause" whenever they were illuminated. The cast wore sensible 1960s outfits, carried scripts and were entirely convincing as radio performers. Only Kenneth Williams (for ease of reference I’ll call him Kenneth Williams rather than "The man playing Kenneth Williams") obviously played to the crowd and that was because he always did. His famous laugh was to be heard when something in the script amused him whether he was in that bit or not.

We started with the celebrated "answers to last week’s quiz" which simply involved him giving rude sounding answers to unheard (and apparently quite innocent) questions. The programme actually quotes one which isn’t in the show and is to my mind the best one they ever did. I’m paraphrasing slightly but it went something like this.

Horne: The next question actually had two answers – "yes" and "no" were both correct. No other answer was acceptable.

The show didn’t feature anyone in the Bill Pertwee role. I’m not sure why – it could be because he was dropped shortly before Cooke and Mortimer joined the team so in writer Brian Cooke’s mind he wasn’t part of Round the Horne, or it could simply be that Bill Pertwee is still alive so recasting the role wasn’t thought appropriate. I’m thinking it was the former. Either way, the five-strong cast was perfectly balanced and a sixth member would’ve been somewhat superfluous. The vocal and physical resemblances were pretty good – Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Horne stood out as being the best recreations but that may simply be because they were the most recognisable members of the cast. Impersonating Kenneth Williams on stage has become something of a cottage industry and this particular incarnation was superb.

All the famous Round the Horne characters were all on display with varying degrees of success. I’m not a huge RTH aficionado and I’m afraid J. Peasemould Gruntfuttock passed me right by until I was researching this piece. Charles and Fiona were introduced each time (as played by Dame Celia Molestrangler and 'ageing juvenile Binkie Huckerback') so they were a little easier to recognise. One of their sketches was very good but the rest fell a little flat. Second on the list of most fondly remembered characters was folk singer Rambling Syd Rumpo and after an unsteady start (the actor was obviously used to getting a round of applause when Rumpo’s name was mentioned and chided us for not doing so) he was fantastic. The nonsense songs for which he is famous somehow worked a lot better live than they ever did for me on the radio. They are a classic example of my earlier statement that Took and Feldman using language to baffle the censors and delight the audience. The songs are pretty filthy but because they used made up (but rude sounding) words they got away with it.

But Round the Horne is probably best known for the point in each show where Mr Horne, in need of some service or other, calls upon Paddick and Williams at their screeching best...

"Hello..."

There were three Julian and Sandy sketches during the two hour show and although they were all good it might’ve been better to limit it. Round the Horne doesn’t have many famous characters and yet the writer felt the need to use familiarity wherever possible. It was perhaps the only weak part of the show – a familiar "face" would be trotted out for the third or fourth time and you couldn’t help but feel it was a bit repetitive. Which is of course a charge levelled at modern shows such as Little Britain but they (like the original Round the Horne) did it once a week rather than several times in an evening. I doubt Lucas and Walliams bring Lou and Andy out three times during their stage show. Cue emails saying "Actually they do". Because of the way the RTH show was structured – each half was treated as one "broadcast" - I could’ve accepted two appearances but more than that came across as unnecessary.

It would of course also baffle anyone who wasn’t a fan of the radio series. The stage performance didn’t cut any slack for anyone who didn’t instantly recognise everyone and everything. It wasn’t quite at the level of leaving in the cold those who couldn’t join in with the punchlines but the newcomer is unlikely to have understood much of what was going on. Just the rhythm of speech (and the speed of Kenneth Williams’ delivery) must’ve been learned over many years of listening to old recordings.

For fans of Round the Horne it is a very enjoyable show. Its two hours of great material and superb performances. It’s also a throwback to what it must’ve been like towards the end of the golden age of radio. Now, in the digital age, people are still buying and enjoying Round the Horne. Seeing this live show has prompted me to invest in a couple of CDs and has reminded me of just how good it really was.