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.
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Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has “never had a chance, poor devil,” you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.”
—Margot Asquith (1864–1945)
“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)