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:
“Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.”
—Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)
“For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)