You'll have to hurry to catch it, because it closes on 12 March, but I can thoroughly recommend the Albany Theatre Company's Round The Horne: 50th Anniversary Tour at the London Comedy Museum.
In the 1960s the radio comedy Round the Horne was extraordinarily popular and this production puts you in the place of the audience at the recording of a couple of episodes of the show.
Much of the script was filth (if only in the listener's mind) but the writers Barry Took and Marty Feldman got away with it because the show was centred on the urbane, establishment presence of Kenneth Horne.
Here are a couple of examples of the humour. Kenneth Williams as Rambing Syd Rumpo singing The Ballad of the Woggler's Moulie above and the opening of the sketch Bona Law below...
HORNE: Can you help me? I've erred.
SANDY: Well, we've all erred, ducky. I mean, it's common knowledge, ennit, Jule?
HORNE: Will you take my case?
JULIAN: Well, it depends on what it is. We've got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time.
1 comment:
I felt incredibly stupid when, twenty years or more after first hearing the "Bona Law" sketch, I finally got the pun on Bonar Law (and when I mentioned it to a friend, who'd known the sketch about as long, he hadn't got it til I mentioned it). Feldman and Took's scripts were so dense with jokes that they stand up to repeated listens in a way *very* few other comedy programmes do...
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