The BBC Third Programme offered listeners a rich diet of
drama, classical music, concerts and talks but there was little in the way of a
light repast. "Is it too much to hope," asked Alan Pryce-Jones
writing for the BBC Quarterly in
1951, "that to all the other pleasures of the intelligence may be added
during the next five years a more frequent experience of the intelligent
chuckle?"
Comedy on the Third offered nothing in the way of belly
laughs and recordings with a live audience. Indeed, as the then Controller,
John Morris, observed in 1956 "it has been known for a listener to
complain of the introduction of humour into the Programme".
But humour there was, mostly of the "intelligent
chuckle" kind. Trawling through the BBC Genome site it is possible to pick
out a number of comedy programmes that graced the schedules of the Third
Programme and Radio 3.
How to Listen
I've already written about the programme that launched the
Third Programme on 29 September 1946 and the occasional series of How to programmes that followed.
The Private Life of
Hilda Tablet (1954) was a supposed investigation into the life of composeress
Hilda Tablet from the pen of Henry Reed. Hilda had first appeared in Reed's
1953 play A Very Great Man Indeed billed
as a mock-solemn account of a critic's research into the life of an imaginary
novelist named Richard Sherwin.
Hilda Tablet, played with masculine gusto by Mary O'Farrell
and her companion the soprano Elsa Strauss (Marjorie Westbury) were supposedly
a spoof, all played deadly seriously, on the composer-singer ménage of Benjamin
Britten and Peter Pears. However, is seems that Reed modelled them on composer
Elizabeth Lutyens. So obvious was the connection that Lutyens and her novelist
husband Edward Clark talked of suing Henry Reed.
The part of Henry Reeve, the critic whose voice is central
to each of Reed's plays, was taken by Hugh Burden. Other characters were played
by members of the BBC Rep including Carleton Hobbs, Norman Shelly and Deryck
Guyler. Subsequent plays were: Emily
Butter - An Occasion Recalled (1954), the occasion being the first
performance of Hilda Tablet's opera; Through
a Hedge - Backwards (1956); The
Primal Scene, as it were (1958); Not
a Drum was Heard (1959), being the war memories of General Gland as played
by Guyler; and finally Musique Discrete
(1959).
Recordings of all the Henry Reed plays are on YouTube.
The Third Division
This is one of the great missing radio series as sadly no
recordings exist. This 1949 comedy, a follow-up to the 1948 Home Service comedy
Listen My Children, had a pre-Goons
line-up that included Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine as well
as Benny Hill, Robert Beatty, Benny Lee, Patricia Hayes and Carole Carr. The
scripts were by Frank Muir and Denis Norden.
Interviewed recently about The Third Division Norden said: "We weren't given much guidance what
the BBC wanted except that it shouldn't be like the Light Programme or the Home
Service. It was a revue, to use a slightly old-fashioned term: we had two bands
to provide the music."
Frank Muir, writing in his autobiography A Kentish Lad, recalls that he and Denis
Norden "wrote a spot for Peter in Third
Division; he played all the street traders in what we called Sellers' Market. We also used his
extraordinary gift for character voices in sketches, one of which was a parody
of those Fitzpatrick Traveltalks which seemed to be a part of every cinema
programme in those days ('...and as the sun sinks slowly in the west we bid farewell
to Bali, Isle of Enchantment...'). We called our version Bal-ham, Gateway to the South.
Peter was very quickly taken famous and was persuaded by
George Martin (whom later produced the Beatles' records) to record a comedy LP.
Peter asked us if he could include three of our sketches which he had enjoyed
performing: the mad headteacher of a progressive school talking to a timid
potential parent, an interview with a moronic pop star and his gaoler/manager
('Come back here! I've told you repeatedly, where the carpet starts, you
stop!'), and Bal'ham, Gateway to the
South".
Muir goes on to say how some forty years later a group of
Balham businessmen decide to spruce up the centre of the neighbourhood and, in
the belief that the sketch had put Balham on the map, decided to erect a statue
in the likeness of Peter Sellers. Anxious to affirm their copyright Muir and
Norden wrote a light-hearted letter of retort staking their claim and
suggesting that the group would now "involve itself in the expense of
putting up two statues". Offering a compromise they said that "for a
trifling sum, we would be prepared to go along to the new shopping centre and
stand there personally".
In Third Gear
This was a one-off programme on the Third Programme's tenth
anniversary in which Peter Jones and Peter Ustinov "pay homage to their
betters". Based on the successful Home Service series In All Directions.
Hardluck Hall
This is the other Third Programme comedy that has failed to
survive. Tantalisingly it's a 1964 collaboration between David Nobbs and Peter
Tinniswood - at the time both submitting scripts to That Was the Week That Was - set in a "somewhat stately home
somewhere in England" called Hardluck
Hall.
Nobb's, writing in his autobiography I Didn't Get Where I Am Today, has only a little to offer in the
way of enlightenment about the series: "Peter and I achieved two other
distinctions. We wrote the first comedy ever to be on BBC Radio's Third Programme.
We also wrote the last comedy series ever to be on BBC Radio's Third Programme.
You've guessed it. It was the same one.
Hardluck Hall -
shades of my beloved Thomas Love Peacock - was satirical. The names of the
characters - Priscilla Houseproud, Sir Sidney Servall, Tom Ology, Robin Robot,
Doreen Nylon - fill me with dismay now, but it was better than it sounds,
expolited radio techniques inventively, and was great fun to do. A splendid
cast, including Valentine Dyall, Hugh Burden and Stephen Moore, seemed to enjoy
it hugely. Peter, of course, went on to do a lot of marvellous radio work. The
producer, Richard Thomas, emigrated to new Zealand, but I don't think it was as
a direct result of the series".
David Nobbs may have been wrong on one account but he did,
to my knowledge, write the last comedy for the Third as Radio 3 came along in
1967, though the label for the evening's listening still stuck until April
1970.
Tribute to Greatness
The Third/Radio 3 seemed to relish the cod biography, see
Hilda Tablet above and The Atkinson
People below. This three part series, tucked away on Monday nights in
November 1969, was written by Myles Rudge and starred Kenneth Williams, Joan
Sims and John Moffatt. The script for the second programme, a tribute to that
fine thespian Plantagenet Runciman, is available online.
For once Kenneth Williams was not too scathing about this
show. In his diary entry for 11 September 1968 he records: "To the Gratfon
for this radio production. John Simmonds directing. It is called A Bannister Called Freda and again Myles
has written a brilliant script and Ted Dicks two marvellous songs. Joan Sims
& me playing all the parts & John Moffatt doing the Narrator -
superbly. Of course this is a pilot show & we've yet to see if the powers
approve it".
The Half-Open University
More send-ups, this time of the Open University, in these
two comedy shows that were the precursor to The
Burkiss Way. Airing in August and November 1975 it was written by Andrew
Marshall, David Renwick and John Mason. Burkiss
cast members Chris Emmett and Nigel Rees appeared alongside Timothy Davies and
Christine Ozanne. According to Rees "Burkiss
derived some of its half-academic, half-popular tone from the Radio 3
series".
The Atkinson People
This 4-part 1979 series saw the pre-Blackadder pairing of
Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis as they took
"satirical
and wry investigations into the lives of fictional great men". Unlike most
of the programmes in this list this series is available to buy and gets
repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra.
Patterson
There'll
be more on one of my all-time favourite comedies - this an 8-part tale of a
university lecturer in English Literature struggling with his students and his
marriage - in a future post.
This
'suite in six parts' detailed "the adventures of a hapless young
musicologist, who discovers some lost music by a composer 40 years dead but
still living on as a malign influence, a sardonic witness to our hero's
scholastic endeavours."
The
series was written by Colin McLaren, at the time the Archivist and Keeper of
Manuscripts to the Special Collections department at Aberdeen University, as
well as the author of a number of novels, radio monologues and short plays -
including the series 39 and Counting
(1981) with Michael Hordern, Dinsdale Landen and Hannah Gordon.
This
is the first part of Broomhouse Reach
as heard on Radio 3 on 23 November 1984. It stars David de Keyser as the
composer Martin Mendl with Timothy Davies as Timothy Liripet, Cyril Luckham as
Sir Hubert Fiske, Fanny Carby as Mrs Wix and Mark Jones as Nigel Scrote. The
series was directed by Piers Plowright. This is my recording of that programme,
not heard since its first outing.
A Selection of
Plays
I
won't attempt to list all the comedy plays that appeared on the Third and Radio
3 and I can't vouch for the comedic value of most of these productions; the
only one I've heard recently is Outpatient.
Amongst
the works of Rhys Adrian are: No Charge
for Extra Service (1979) with Elizabeth Spriggs and Nigel Stock, Watching the Plays Together (1982) with
Rosemary Leach and James Grout, Outpatient
(1985) with Michael Aldridge and Andrew Sachs, Toytown (1987) with Peter Vaughan, Upended (1988) with Norman Bird and Eva Stuart and Why Leo? (1988) with Richard Briers.
Cartoonist Mel Calman wrote The Big Novel (1986) with Richard Griffiths and Peter Woodthorpe.
Griffiths was also in the surreal Sweet
Tooth (1987) in which Calman "wrote parts for a collection of cakes
and pastries" and then in 1989 Rabbit
Man with Jim Broadbent playing a taxi driver who grows rabbit's ears.
One of Wally K Daly's earliest plays was also on Radio 3: Priest and Confessor (1975) starred
Richard Briers and the priest and Tony Haygarth as the man making his first confession
for many years.
This
1994 series of five programmes was Peter Cook's swansong in which he again
donned the persona of Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, "the complacent
aristocrat who'd wasted his whole life trying to teach ravens to fly underwater".
Like the BBC2 series A Life in Pieces
(1990/91) the premise was that Sir Arthur was reminiscing in a two-way
interview; on TV it was Ludovic Kennedy but for the radio series he was more
evenly matched with Chris Morris. According to William Cook, editor of a Peter
Cook anthology, Morris "left Cook enough space to land his punchlines, but
Morris also created a proper character of his own". All five editions are
on YouTube.
References:
BBC
Genome website
Various
editions of Radio Times
The Envy of the World
by Humphrey Carpenter (Phoenix 1997)
A Kentish Lad by Frank Muir (Bantam Press
1997)
I Didn't Get Where I Am Today by David Nobbs (William
Heinemann 2003)
Tragically I was an Only Twin:
The Complete Peter Cook edited by William Cook (Arrow Books 2003)
4 comments:
Thank you for this post - it led me to spending the next few days listening to all the Hilda Tablet plays on Youtube. They were wonderful!
So many thanks for intelligent and humourous pieces, especially broomhouse reach. Thank god for people like you !!
Who agrees with robin Holloway that Tippett's work after 2nd symphony. Concerto for orchestra. And two marvellous song cycles went very wonky !! Steven Johnson wrote/presented wonderful short talk on 2ndsymph.
Forgot to mention. I have been in lurve with Hilda tablet for at least 200 years. And it don't seem. Etc. Etc
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