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Round the Horne is a BBC Radio comedy programme starring Kenneth Horne, first transmitted in four series of weekly episodes from 1965 until 1968. The show was created by Barry Took and Marty Feldman, who wrote the first three series. The fourth was written by Took, Johnnie Mortimer, Brian Cooke and Donald Webster. Horne's supporting cast comprised Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, Betty Marsden and, in the first three series, Bill Pertwee. The announcer was Douglas Smith, who also took part in the sketches. All except the last series featured music by Edwin Braden, played by the band "the Hornblowers", with a song in the middle of each show performed by the close-harmony singing group the Fraser Hayes Four; in the fourth series, the music was by Max Harris with a smaller group of players than the earlier series. The show was the successor to Beyond Our Ken, which had run from 1958 to 1964 with largely the same cast. By the time the new series began, television had become the dominant broadcasting medium in Britain, and Round the Horne, which built up a regular audience of 15 million, was the last radio show to reach so many listeners. Horne was surrounded by larger-than-life characters including the camp pair Julian and Sandy, the disreputable eccentric J. Peasmold Gruntfuttock, and the singer of dubious folk songs, Rambling Syd Rumpo, who all became nationally familiar. The show encountered periodic scrutiny from the BBC management for its double entendres, but consistently received the backing of the director-general of the BBC, Sir Hugh Greene. Horne died suddenly in 1969; the BBC decided that Round the Horne could not continue without its star and they cancelled plans for a fifth series that year. Over the following decades Round the Horne has been re-broadcast continually, and all 67 shows have been published on CD. In 2019, in a poll run by Radio Times, Round the Horne was voted the BBC's third-best radio show of any genre, and the best radio comedy series of all. History Background In 1957 the radio presenter and comedian Kenneth Horne was the compere on the popular Saturday evening comedy and music radio show Variety Playhouse. The programme's writers were Eric Merriman and Barry Took, and when the series came to an end, they prepared a script for a pilot episode of a new show, Beyond Our Ken. The show, in which Horne was joined by Kenneth Williams, Ron Moody, Hugh Paddick and Betty Marsden, was broadcast in October 1957. The series was due to begin in April 1958, but in February Horne suffered a debilitating stroke; he was temporarily paralysed down his left-hand side and lost the power of speech. The BBC postponed the series. After physiotherapy Horne was able to begin recording Beyond Our Ken in June, in preparation for the broadcast of the first series between July and November. Beyond Our Ken was written around the imperturbable establishment figure of Horne, while the other performers played a "spectrum of characters never before heard on the radio", including the exaggeratedly upper class Rodney and Charles (Williams and Paddick), the genteel, dotty pensioners Ambrose and Felicity (Williams and Marsden), the hoarse-voiced cook Fanny Haddock – a parody of the television cook Fanny Cradock (Marsden), the earthy gardening guru Arthur Fallowfield (Williams), the semi-articulate rock and roll singer Ricky Livid (Paddick) and Hankie Flowered, a parody of the comedian Frankie Howerd (Bill Pertwee). The first episode was not well received by a sample audience, but the BBC decided to back Horne and his team, and the initial six-week contract was extended to 21 weeks. Before the series came to an end, a second had been commissioned to run the following year. After the first series Moody was succeeded by Pertwee; Took left after the second series, leaving Merriman to write the remaining programmes on his own. After the seventh series of Beyond Our Ken ended Horne was scheduled to appear in a number of other BBC programmes; Eric Merriman objected, contending that he had made Horne into a star, and that "no other comedy series should be allowed to use him", according to Horne's biographer, Barry Johnston. When the BBC refused to withdraw Horne from the programme Down with Women, Merriman resigned from writing Beyond Our Ken and the show came to an end. After some pressure from Horne to keep the remainder of the team together, the BBC commissioned Round the Horne as a replacement on similar lines. They turned to Took, as one of the original writers of Beyond Our Ken, and his new writing partner, Marty Feldman. The name of the programme came from a pun on Horne's name, combined with the naval term "round the Horn", meaning to navigate the waters at the southern tip of South America, Cape Horn. The pair aimed to write what they described as "down-market material in an upmarket way". The scripts they produced led to a faster-paced programme than Beyond Our Ken, including more allusions to contemporary events, including politics and films. Format Round the Horne was based on a revue format, and contained parody and satire. The programme would include an introduction from Horne, who would sometimes give answers to a supposed quiz from the previous week, and then lead into sketches that would include a set-piece based on a film or novel, such as "The Man with the Golden Thunderball", and "The Three Musketeers". Martin Dibbs, in his history of the BBC Variety Department, writes that "the show was characterised by incessant innuendo and camp representation to an extent never before tolerated within the BBC." As in Beyond Our Ken, there was a cast of recurring characters. Took and Feldman developed new characters for Williams, Paddick, Marsden and Pertwee, whose ability to change between personas produced a programme described by the radio historians Andy Foster and Steve Furst as "a cast of thousands played by the same four accomplished actors". Horne's role was described in The Daily Telegraph as providing "the perfect foil to the inspired lunacy happening all around him". The media analysts Frank Krutnik and Steve Neale consider that as such, Horne's role was similar to that of Jack Benny, Fred Allen and Tommy Handley, "as a 'stooge' rather than a joke-wielder, frequently switching roles between announcer and in-sketch performer". Broadcasts 1965–1966: Series 1 and 2 The first episode of Round the Horne was broadcast on the Light Programme on 7 March 1965. It was described in Radio Times as "Five characters in search of the authors". The series consisted of 16 episodes and ran to 20 June 1965. The programme was produced by John Simmonds and included music from the Fraser Hayes Four and the studio orchestra, "the Hornblowers", conducted by Paul Fenoulhet; from episode six, Fenoulhet was replaced by Edwin Braden. Douglas Smith, an announcer and newsreader on the Home Service and the Third Programme, was used as the programme's announcer, but was given a larger role .... Discover the Charles F Horne The Editors Of New Word popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Charles F Horne The Editors Of New Word books.