Horne of plenty

ROUND The Horne was one of the legendary radio comedies of the 1960s, regularly entertaining Sunday lunchtime audiences of 15 million and turning gay couple Julian and Sandy, Dame Celia Molestrangler and singing sensation Rambling Syd Rumpo into household names.

The main cast of Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, Betty Marsden, Douglas Smith and Kenneth Horne didn't do too badly either.

So imagine the surprise of the last surviving show writer Brian Cooke - the list of comedy conspirators includes Barry Took, Marty Feldman and Cooke's long-time writing partner, Johnnie Mortimer - when not one single theatre producer expressed interest in reviving RTH as a theatre experience.

So he funded Round The Horne... Revisited himself and is following a 2004 West End hit with a tour, which arrives at Newcastle's Theatre Royal next month - and tickets are moving faster than a Williams monologue.

Cooke says: "I'm the producer and main backer because nobody else wanted to do it. Nobody had any faith in this show, only me. I sent it out through my agent, who represents Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayne, and only got back a few lukewarm letters. All I wanted to do was reproduce the recordings of Round The Horne from the 1960s because they were very theatrical experiences. So we put it on in the back of the White Bear at Kennington, which holds about 25 people, and we had a budget of about £5,000, which I put up, and it worked."

An offer to stage the show at London's The Venue, just off Leicester Square, was perfect because the theatre is at basement level, just like The Paris Studios in Lower Regent Street, where the 1960s Round The Horne was recorded on Monday nights in front of a live audience.

"Then we got favourable reviews and offers came in if changes could be made to the show so I said **** off and put up a quarter of a million quid myself, which I couldn't afford. I took a gamble and, thankfully, it worked because it was a labour of love."

Reflecting on why so many of the "baby boomer" generation still love the show he adds: "It was 40 years ago and TV wasn't around much. I often wonder what we looked at when we listened to the radio. It was 15 million people tuning in and most TV shows would kill for an audience like that today. Cross Channel ferries used to race across to get within transmission range. I was lucky to be involved in the final series when Marty Feldman left to go off and become famous. He sent us a telegram when Barry, Johnny and I did the first show saying 'Who needs luck when you've got talent?'"

Cooke feels that Round The Horne and The Goons were groundbreaking comedies in their time. He says: "You have to remember that the cast (which also included Bill Pertwee at one time) had been together for six years on a show called Beyond Our Ken. The new show was originally supposed to be called It's Ken Again until Barry Took came up with a much better title.

"Barry and Marty took over from another writer and had to devise a whole new set of characters, including Julian and Sandy, who were the first gays that most people ever met, albeit on the radio. People were quite understanding of how camp they were and they nattered and argued like an old married couple, so people weren't afraid of them and therefore they opened doors to later comics like Julian Clary and Graham Norton."

Around 80 per cent of the material is taken from the 16 to 18 shows that Cooke helped to write, together with some brand new material for Julian and Sandy because he couldn't resist doing the Bona School of Cookery.

"But it's set in the 1960s when Fanny Craddock was around and with a signature dish of coq au vin 'less coq more vin'... that kind of thing.

"Comedy has got faster in the past 40 years even though Round The Horne was fast in its day, so we've had to tighten things up."

He's also added the new character of Gypsy Rose Swansoiler to enlarge the role of Betty Marsden (played by Sherry Baines), partly because the running time is now 90 minutes, instead of 28 minutes which included musical numbers from bands like The Fraser Hayes Four and the Max Harris Group.

Cooke says: "Back in those days, Kenny Williams used to stick his bum out and pose and people would complain because they didn't know what the audience was laughing about. You usually knew what was going on because the only ad-libs we used was Williams cackling that laugh of his in the background."

He recalls that often the first time that cast members got to grips with the script was tearing open envelopes just before the 'cold' readthrough followed by a final rehearsal before the live recording.

Oddities of recording also included straight man Kenneth Horne, a director with toy-maker Chad Valley, banning the use of the word Monopoly because it was game made by rival business Waddingtons.

The quintessentially English performer and ex-wing commander was all too aware of the regular battle between the writers and the BBC watchdogs and even trotted out the line: "If I see an innuendo in a script... I whip it out immediately", on several occasions.

"The thing is, on the printed page asking someone to 'get out a shammy and show 'em your crystal ball' looks perfectly innocent until it's part of a Bona Clairvoyants sketch."

Success meant finding the right Kenneth Williams impersonator and Cooke admits he and director Michael Kingsbury probably saw 1,000 candidates - including an unforgettable impersonator with a strong Welsh accent - before Paul Ryan came along. Stephen Critchlow is the establishment-accented Horne, while Jonathan Moore plays Paddick and Stephen Boswell is Smith.

Cooke's saddest duty is to honour the memory of his three collaborators by splitting the profits four ways - "even though I'm doing all the work".

But on a happier note, the man who went on to write TV's Man About The House, George And Mildred and Robin's Nest, is creating a Christmas special and putting the entire experience into a book.

"Occasionally, I feel like an Abyssinian tree frog with someone saying 'find him a mate quick because this is a dying species'."

* Round The Horne... Revisited is at Newcastle Theatre Royal, November 22-24. Box Office: 0870 905 5060.