Characters
Beyond Our Ken featured characters similar to those later featured in Round the Horne, for instance Betty Marsden's Fanny Haddock (which parodied Fanny Cradock). It was also notable for Pertwee's Frankie Howerd impersonation, Hankie Flowered, and Hugh Paddick's working-class pop singer Ricky Livid – the name being a mickey-take on contemporary pop singers' stage names such as Marty Wilde and Billy Fury. Another favourite was Kenneth Williams' country character, Arthur Fallowfield, who was based on Dorset farmer Ralph Wightman, a regular contributor to the BBC radio programme "Any Questions?" Fallowfield's lines were full of innuendo and double entendre – on one occasion Horne introduced him as the man who put the sex in Sussex. Fallowfield's reply to any question began: "Well, I think the answer lies in the soil!" On one occasion, Paddick's character Stanley Birkenshaw, aka "Dentures", who would re-appear in Round the Horne, gave a noble and rather damp version of Hamlet's soliloquy: "To be or not to be, that issssssssssh the quesssssssssshtion ...".
Williams and Paddick also played a couple of camp men-about-town, Rodney and Charles, in many ways (although not as extreme) precursors of Julian and Sandy in Round The Horne.
Read more about this topic: Beyond Our Ken
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets
All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The major men
That is different. They are characters beyond
Reality, composed thereof. They are
The fictive man created out of men.
They are men but artificial men.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Of the other characters in the book there is, likewise, little to say. The most endearing one is obviously the old Captain Maksim Maksimich, stolid, gruff, naively poetical, matter-of- fact, simple-hearted, and completely neurotic.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)