Round the Horne

1 9 6 5 (UK)
16 x 30 minute episodes
1 9 6 6 (UK)
13 x 30 minute episodes
1 9 6 7 (UK)
21 x 30 minute episodes
1 9 6 8 (UK)
16 x 30 minute episodes

“Now for the young at heart and weak in the head, it’s ‘Round The Horne‘“.

This seminal BBC Radio Light Programme comedy series, starring Kenneth Horne, was based on a revue format. Debuting on March 7, 1965, the series was first transmitted in four series of weekly episodes from 1965 to 1968.

The programme was recorded in front of a studio audience with a supporting cast that included Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, Betty Marsden, and – in the first three series – Bill Pertwee. The announcer was Douglas Smith, who also took part in the sketches.

All except the last series featured music by Edwin Braden, performed by the band The Hornblowers, with a song midway through each show by the close-harmony singing group The Fraser Hayes Four. In the fourth series, the music was by Max Harris with a smaller group of players than the earlier series.

Regular characters included the uber-camp perpetually out-of-work actors Julian and Sandy who spoke almost exclusively in Polari (“How bona to varda your dolly old eek”); the disreputable eccentric J. Peasmold Gruntfuttock; elderly ex-Gaiety Girl Lady Beatrice Counterblast  – who had been known professionally as Bea Clissold (“many, many, many times”) – and her faithful octogenarian butler, Spasm (“we’re all doomed, doomed – I’ve got a touch of the dooms”); Daphne Whitethigh (loosely based on the television cook Fanny Cradock); Charles and Fiona (“I know”, “I know you know”, “I know you know I know”, “Yes, I know”); aggressive sex-obsessed Australian Julie Coolibah (“I know you Pommies are sex mad”); Seamus Android (a parody of Eamonn Andrews); and the itinerant singer of dubious folk songs, Rambling Sid Rumpo – who sang such delightful nonsense ditties as Green Grow Your Nadgers-O!, What Shall We Do WIth The Drunken Nurker?, and the timeless Ballad of the Woggler’s Moulie – who all became nationally famous.

Rumpo’s songs, allegedly collected from the hedgerows and byways of Old England, were full of heavily accented allusions to strange physical attributes such as goolies and groats, futtocks and moulies, while the choruses were sufficiently equivocal as to be capable of almost any interpretation:

“Rollock me fusset and grindle me nodes”, he would sing, to the delight of his audience, whose feeling was that somewhere beneath the surface there lurked wells of indecency whose depths could only be guessed at. Maybe they were right.

The show came under periodic scrutiny from BBC management for its double entendres, but it consistently received the backing of the BBC’s director-general, Sir Hugh Greene. He was rewarded with 15 million listeners tuning in each Sunday.

Round the Horne was created by Barry Took and Marty Feldman, who wrote the first three series. Took, Johnnie Mortimer, Brian Cooke and Donald Webster wrote the fourth.

Three weeks after the fourth series of Round the Horne finished, the first episode of Horne A’Plenty was broadcast on ITV. In a sketch-show format, with Took as script editor (and later producer), this was an attempt to translate the spirit of Round the Horne to television, though with different actors supporting Horne.

The first six-part series ran from 22 June to 27 July 1968, and the second from 27 November to 1 January 1969.

Kenneth Horne died suddenly in February 1969. The BBC decided that Round the Horne could not continue without its star and cancelled plans for a fifth series that year.

Cast
Kenneth Horne
Kenneth Williams
Hugh Paddick
Betty Marsden
Bill Pertwee
Douglas Smith
The Hornblowers
The Fraser Hayes Four