Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                               PRESENT MIRTH HATH PRESENT LAUGHTER

It was almost a ritual in the late 1950s and early 1960s when I was a little kiddie slightly on my way to teenager-dom. Dad would turn on the radio in our living room at the appropriate time and we’d listen to My Word. What a witty BBC programme it was. Two women (most often Nancy Spain and Anne Scott-James) would answer questions about the meaning of obscure words. Then they were asked to say where certain chosen literary quotations came from. After this, the witty script-writers Frank Muir and Denis Norden would take over. (Muir and Norden had become well-known for scripting the 1950s comedy show Take It From Here with “The Glums” and other broad jokery). They would be asked to concoct outlandish stories about how these quotations came about. What they came up with were long, funny anecdotes, always ending with outrageous puns. Muir’s and Norden’s anecdotes were the highlight of the show and the thing most quoted and laughed about when each episode was remembered.

                                           Muir and Norden in their prime
 

I remember my father puffing on his pipe and congratulating himself on the number of literary quotations he was able to identify before the panel on the radio had identified them. This seemed to little me the epitome of sophisticated wit. My Word [I have this from Wikipedia] was broadcast from 1956 to 1967, and was then continued in a modified form from 1967 to 1988, but by that time television had invaded New Zealand and we no longer listened regularly to the show or to much spoken radio in general. I treasured my vague memories of My Word (which was followed by the rather more tepid My Music) and continued to think it was sophisticated highbrow entertainment.

Then, beginning last year, disaster struck. The BBC allowed recordings of My Word to be played on line. I sat down at my computer, found the right programme, and waited for a deluge of witticism. Alas, it didn’t happen. I discovered that, as often as not, the show’s moderator Jack Longland had to help out the panel when it came to defining recherche words or identifying literary quotations. They were not so erudite after all. Worse, I found Muir’s and Norden’s anecdotes to be over-long and ending with such contorted puns that they barely made sense, or barely fitted the quotation they were guying [There’s a word you don’t hear often now!]. There was the occasional funny quip, the occasional pun that hit the spot, but it now seemed awfully twee, dated and a little too cosy – middle-class English people patting themselves on the back. I regret to say I had also heard rumours [true or untrue I know not] that in fact Muir’s and Norden’s punning anecdotes were scripted and rehearsed well before the live-show went on air. Perhaps they were not spontaneous.

I feel caddish about writing all this, but it was another proof that certain types of humour don’t fully weather the test of time. I think back to other BBC radio comedies we enjoyed when I was a kid. There was Beyond Our Ken (broadcast from 1958 to 1964) and its successor Round the Horne (1965 to 1968) wherein the unflappable, strait, avuncular and congenial Kenneth Horne dealt with the likes of loud-voiced Betty Marsden and the multi-voiced Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, who could mimic many characters but who were best known for their camp performance as Julian and Sandy. When I got to university, I often heard fellow-students saying they despised the Julian and Sandy characters, because they were a cruel stereotype of homosexual men at a time when gay guys were often discriminated against. But the reality was that, in real life, both Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick were homosexual, they enjoyed playing their camp roles, and they are now often cited as pioneers in putting gayness to the fore on the media and making the wider public aware of the cant Polare language. Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne were good fun at the time but, when now heard [also available on line], they are repetitive and very dated.

Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams laugh uproariously, encouraging Kenneth Horne and Betty Marsden in Round the Horne.
 

And the same is true of another 1960s BBC radio comedy I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, which was slightly more aligned to a younger audience. Its cast mainly came from Cambridge university, including Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graeme Garden, David Hatch, Jo Kendall (the only woman in the show and much under-used) and Bill Oddie. Funny that at the time it seemed a sparkling new sort of comedy with all its university wit – my brother and I listened to it devotedly – and yet now it seems just another collection of funny voices, old-fashioned puns, predictable stereotypes and jokes that came from Joe Miller.

The clever kids from Cambridge, Tim Brooke-Taylor, David Hatch, Jo Kendall, Bill Oddie and the towering John Cleese.
 

Oh dear! What a sour puss I am. But the hard reality is that comedy does date and can date badly.  Some time ago on this blog, I made a similar case in a piece called The Flies Crawled Up the Window. There is much comedy that has survived through long ages. There is some patter that is still funny [check the best of the Marx Brothers – though they too had their duds]. Sometimes I’m inclined to think the most enduring comedy is pure slapstick as practised by silent comics such as Max Linder, Keaton [the very best of them], Chaplin and Lloyd. But the thing is that, on the whole, their comedy wasn’t topical and therefore could remain jocular.

But where old BBC radio comedy shows are involved truly, as Bill Shakespeare said in Twelfth Night present mirth hath present laughter… but only in the present.