Round The Horne - Cultural Influence

Cultural Influence

Like The Goon Show before it, Round the Horne fed off and contributed to the nation's vernacular. Obscure but innocent words like posset (a medieval drink made with curdled milk) became cues for instant giggling, especially among adolescents in school. Thus Rambling Syd Rumpo may say "Green grows the grunge on my Lady's posset", making it difficult to approach the murder scene in Macbeth (Lady Macbeth: "I have drugged their possets") with the seriousness it deserved.

The frequently used word futtock, rarely encountered outside the radio show (apart from Ronnie Barker's comedy film Futtock's End), had a spillover effect on words like fetlock, as well as its obvious phonetic similarity to the words fuck and buttock. (Futtock is in fact a harmless nautical term — a shortening of the phrase 'foot-hook'.) The word nadger was already known from The Goon Show ("The Nadger Plague"), but is now generally understood to refer to the testicles.

Mining obscure and invented words for double entendres was a feature of Larry Grayson's act, who preferred to use well-known words with phallic connotations (e.g. barge-pole) in his particular version of comedy. However, there is a well-established tradition of double-meanings in British comedy, examples of which can be found in the work of Max Miller.

Round the Horne played an important role in establishing gay culture within the public consciousness. Julian and Sandy and their use of the gay slang polari gave the country a sympathetic weekly portrayal of non-threatening openly gay characters, many of whose catchphrases passed into everyday usage. A good example of this is the adjective "naff" to denote bad or shoddy, even used by the Princess Royal (as a verb) in a clash with the press some years later. They were able to get away with innuendo that would have been unheard of a mere ten years before — in one episode, Sandy refers to Julian and his skill at the piano as: "a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright"; innocuous in itself, unless one knows that a 'cottage' was the polari term for a public toilet where men met for anonymous sexual encounters and 'upright' referred to an erection.

Its influence on the Monty Python team can be gauged by the fact that Goosecreature was used more than once by the Pythons for character names (Mrs. Yeti-Goosecreature, Dr. Louis Yeti-Goosecreature).

Comparisons can be drawn between Round the Horne and the American sketch comedy television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1968–1973). Notably, Barry Took was the principal writer in the 1969 season; executive producer George Schlatter, a Canadian, was influenced by Round the Horne on CBC repeats of BBC original programming, and searched out Took for his programme.