Round The Horne - Format

Format

Round the Horne featured a parody a week, several catchphrases, and many memorable characters. The show often opened with a deadpan delivery by Horne of "the answers to last week's questions" - questions which had never been asked, and which were laced with (what were for BBC Radio at that time) incredible double entendres and sexual innuendo, such as

"First, the 'Where Do You Find It?' question. Well, the answer came in several parts, as follows: wound round a sailor's leg; on top of the wardrobe; floating in the bath; under a prize bull; and in a lay-by on the Watford Bypass. At least, I found one there - couldn't use it - it was covered in verdigris. I gave it to the Scouts, actually, and they exhibit it proudly next to a daguerreotype of Baden-Powell's woggle."

Another type of opening featured announcements about a particular event, e.g. Coat A Sheep in Raspberry Jam Week, Immerse an Orangutan in Porridge Week, Smear A Traffic Warden in Bloater Paste For Asia Day, or something equally bizarre. This would be the excuse for all sorts of happenings, such as the two-man inter-rabbi bobsleigh championships (to be held on the down escalator at Leicester Square underground station — weather and platform tickets permitting), Formation Goat Nadgering, Paso Doble Jockey Wagging, Floodlit Horse Massage, and Nark Fettering on Ice, and reports of the latest activities of the Over-Eighties Nudist Leapfrog (or Basketball, or Judo) Team.

One of the most popular sketches was Julian and Sandy, featuring Paddick and Williams as two flamboyantly camp out-of-work actors, speaking in the gay slang Polari, with Horne as their comic foil. They usually ran fashionable enterprises in Chelsea which started with the word bona, for example Bona Pets, or in one episode a firm of solicitors called Bona Law - a play on the name of Prime Minister Bonar Law - and their claim "We've got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time" at a time when homosexuality was illegal.

"Fiona and Charles" was a regular in the show. Betty Marsden played Dame Celia Molestrangler, and Hugh Paddick was 'ageing juvenile' Binkie Huckaback (named after theatrical impresario Binkie Beaumont). Their characters — Fiona and Charles — were a pair of lovestruck, dated cinema idols engaging in stilted, extraordinarily polite dialogues, in scenes that were parodies of Sir Noël Coward's style, most particularly that of Dame Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter. Typical dialogue (in BBC English) included:

Charles: "I know."
Fiona: "I know you know."
Charles: "I know you know I know."
Fiona: "Yes, I know."

These sketches would also feature long lists of synonyms but finishing with the opposite, such as:

Charles: "I was certain, positive, convinced and doctrinaire, and yet... unsure."

Other characters included J. Peasemold Gruntfuttock (Williams), the world's dirtiest dirty old man (who wanted, above all else, to get his hands on Judith Chalmers). He was also the self-styled king (later dictator) of Peasemoldia, a small slum area in north London just off the Balls Pond Road, together with his wife Buttercup (Marsden), whose catch phrase was "Hello cheeky-face!" In the third series, it was reported that Gruntfuttock had died, and an entire programme was a tribute to him. Without explanation, the character was soon resurrected. In the same series, the Gruntfuttocks appeared as King Louis XIII and his queen in a spoof of The Three Musketeers.

Horne's adversary in many James Bond parodies was the Oriental criminal mastermind (and Fu Manchu parody) Dr Chu En Ginsberg MA (failed) (Williams, accompanied by his common-as-muck concubine Lotus Blossom, played by a cockney Paddick). Took while on holiday in India had noticed that many lawyers practised without qualification but to cover themselves had signs made bearing their name and the legend BA, DL etc. (Failed). There were parodies of popular British TV entertainers such as Eamonn Andrews ("Seamus Android", played by Pertwee), Simon Dee, Wilfred Pickles (both played by Williams), and "Daphne Whitethigh", presumably based on journalist Katharine Whitehorn and played by Marsden, a development of Fanny Haddock, her Fanny Cradock take-off from Beyond Our Ken.

The shows featured the supposed old English folk singer, Rambling Syd Rumpo, played by Williams, who sang such nonsense ditties as "Green Grow My Nadgers Oh!", "Song of the Bogle Clencher" and "Ballad of the Woggler's Moulie". All Rambling Syd's songs were new words set to old public domain folk melodies, such as "The Lincolnshire Poacher", "Oh My Darling, Clementine" and "Widecombe Fair". Another of Rambling Syd's verses ran:-

"In Hackney Wick there lives a lass,
Whose grommets would I woggle,
Her gander-parts none can surpass
And her posset makes me boggle!"

Another regular character, who had also first appeared in Beyond Our Ken, and who appeared in the script as "Dentures", was Stanley Birkenshaw, played by Paddick and characterised as a man with ill-fitting false teeth who was utterly incapable of pronouncing the letter S without spraying saliva all over the set. He would often appear as a character in a sketch; in the second series, when Horne decides he wants to be a seaside end-of-the-pier-show impresario, one of the acts he auditions is Dentures as 'The Great Omipaloni, the world's fastest illusionist - and also the dampest'; in the third series he was Captain Ahab in the first part of The Admirable Loombucket; also in the same series, in The Big Top, Luigi Omipaloni, the trapeze artist at Cuckpowder's Mammoth Circus, and Buffalo Sidney Goosecreature, the fearless desperado and adversary of The Palone Ranger; in the fourth series in Apache Story, he is Rain In The Face - Kenneth Williams, as Billy Two Cheeks, exclaims "He speaks with forked tongue!"; and in Bona Prince Charlie the appropriately named Angus McSpray - Horne remarks: "After he'd finished speaking, there wasn't a dry eye in the place - or a dry anything else for that matter." Dentures would often open the show in the style of a toastmaster: ("My lordsssss, ladiesssss and gentlemen," etc.) and on one occasion in the third series as a wrestling tournament MC; Horne comments after being introduced as 'Your referee for the contest - Kenneth "Man Mountain" Horne': 'That was Hugh Paddick, the wrestling vicar of St Barnabas Without.'

A regular character in the fourth series, and played by Marsden, was Judy Coolibar, an aggressive Australian who managed to find some kind of sexist insult in everything the male characters said. Another of Marsden's personas was Bea Clissold, Lady Counterblast, who starred in a series of sketches in the first series under the title The Clissold Saga, and who invariably managed to introduce her "many, many times" sexual innuendo. Lady Counterblast's butler, Spasm, another raving loony played by Williams, would croak, "We be all doomed; I got a touch of the dooms!"

Kenneth Williams's characterisations of himself as an egotistical, self-important actor were a regular feature; in reality, he was a consummate professional. He frequently interrupted the proceedings with deprecating comments about the quality of the script (often switching out of character into his "snide" voice that he'd perfected during his time on Hancock's Half Hour), he would try to seize roles from other cast members and so on. His seemingly constant strain for glory and limelight was exemplified by his "I need to be serviced" catchphrase. However, none of these rantings were ad-libbed, all were written by Took and Feldman. Williams could be heard every week cackling off-stage at one of Horne's double entendres ("that's yer actual French") - an often effective method of inducing audience laughter.

Also used to effect was announcer Douglas Smith's stuffy BBC vocal style. Smith would be cast as a car, an inflatable life raft, a shark, a lion, a river boat, a gun, a volcano, and in the fourth series, in the Bona Prince Charlie sketch, as England, and even more improbably, in the Round The World sketch, as the world ("... and it'll take Mr Williams more than 80 days to get around me!"). These roles would require such inane phrases as "snap snap", "rumble rumble", "roar roar snarl slaver", or "chug chug futt", preceded by portentous announcements such as "...and I, Douglas Smith, play the volcano". He would also slip in spoof commercials and sponsor's announcements for "Dobbiroids", the wonder horse rejuvenator, or "Dobbimist" horse deodorant (a cure for UFO: under-fetlock odour), or "Dobbitex" horse cummerbunds - he would claim that he'd been "got at": paid money to plug the product, because he claimed to be only paid a pittance as a senior BBC announcer, "I want things, I need things, things the other radio announcers have got!" At times, his announcements lapse into something approaching terminal narcissism - "this is strangely attractive, leggy gamin Douglas Smith, the one whose skin you love to touch..."

The writers were fans of the old variety show scene, and singalongs were not uncommon on Round the Horne, particularly at the end of a series or in a Christmas edition. In the fourth series, in the absence of The Fraser Hayes Four, the cast members were regularly called on to show off their vocal talents. Sometimes the songs represented original material, or on one occasion, Noël Coward's classic There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner, but just as often they were Cockney music hall chestnuts such as Little Bit of Cucumber. On one memorable occasion in the fourth series, Smith was permitted to sing Nobody Loves a Fairy When She's Forty, much to Kenneth Williams's disgust and Hugh Paddick's anger ("He must have bribed the producer!").

A fifth series had been commissioned, but was abandoned after Horne's untimely death of a heart attack in February 1969 at the Bafta Awards ceremony. Horne was presenting an award to Took and Feldman when he collapsed. Most of the cast of the show attempted to carry on after Horne's death with the 1969-1970 series Stop Messing About (one of Kenneth Williams's longest-lived catchphrases), with limited success. Joan Sims replaced Marsden.