Round the Horne main characters

Main regular characters

The cast of Round the Horne, 1968. Left to right: Hugh Paddick, Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Horne, Betty Marsden, Douglas Smith

Kenneth Horne

The persona adopted by the writers for Horne was not greatly different from his real-life one, and largely the same as that of his Beyond Our Ken character: the urbane, unflappable, tolerant but sometimes surprised central figure, around whom the other characters revolved. The Times called Horne the "master of the scandalous double-meaning delivered with shining innocence", and in Round the Horne he combined the role of straight man to the flamboyant Julian and Sandy, Rambling Syd Rumpo and J. Peasmold Gruntfuttock with that of genial host of the show. Feldman called him "the best straight man I had ever seen", who nonetheless had "a lot of funny lines"; Jonathan Rigby, who played Horne in a stage show, Round the Horne ... Revisited, thought him "a stand-up comedian with a posh accent ... part of his genius was that he was able to be himself".

Horne introduced some programmes by reading out the answers to last week's (non-existent) questions:

The answer to question one: complete the first lines of the following songs – "If I Were a Blackbird I'd ..." The answer is I'd Whistle and Sing, and I positively will not accept any other suggestion. The second song was "There's a Rainbow Round My ..." Now we got an amazing number of replies to this. We haven't had so many since we asked you to complete "Over My Shoulder Goes ..." Really, it makes it very difficult for us to keep up the high reputation for sophisticated comedy we've never had.

At other times he would give a short lecture on justly forgotten figures from history, such as Robert Capability Lackwind, allegedly the inventor of Toad in the Hole, or Nemesis Fothergill, known to ornithologists – and the police – as the Birdman of Potter's Bar. In many episodes his opening slot was announcing the day's forthcoming events, such as International free style gnome fingering at the five-minute Hippo Wash Brompton Oratory, Swan Upping at Downham and Swan Downing at Upham, and the two-man Rabbi bob sled championship down the escalators at Leicester Square tube station. He would close the programmes by commenting on the final sketch, or announcing a competition to complete a limerick with two fecund opening lines ("A young market gardener from Bude, Developed a cactus quite lewd ...") or with a public service announcement such as this police message:

If any passer-by in Lisle Street last Saturday night witnessed a middle-aged man stagger out of the Peeperama strip club and get knocked down by a passing cyclist, would you please keep quiet about it as my wife thinks I was in Folkestone. Goodbye. See you next week.

Douglas Smith

At the start of the first series of Round the Horne Douglas Smith took the traditional role of a BBC announcer on comedy shows, introducing the programme and its component parts and reading the credits at the end. As the show developed, the writers gave him more to do. In the second series Smith continually interrupts the programme to promote "Dobbiroids Magic Rejuvenators" (from "the makers of Dobbins Medical Cummerbunds for horses") and Dobbimist horse deodorant for UFO ("under fetlock odour"). In the third and fourth series he is included in the movie spoofs, playing a range of roles including a rumbling volcano:

Horne: ... And see there – dominating the island, the sacred volcano of Gonga – played by Douglas Smith with a hole in his head and steam coming out of his ears.

Paddick: What an awesome sight – snow mantling his mighty summit and lava oozing down his sides.

Smith: That's porridge, actually. I had a hurried breakfast this morning.

Horne: Shut up, Smith, you're a volcano. You just loom over us and rumble ominously.

Smith: Yes, I told you. I had a hurried breakfast.

Horne: Shut up, Smith.

Smith: Rumble rumble.

Horne: That's better.

His other roles include a telephone box, an inflatable rubber boat, a drophead Bentley and a cow:

Smith: Moo Moo – Splosh!

Horne: Splosh?

Smith: I kicked over the milk pail.

By the fourth series Smith has risen to the heights of playing the World ("You've just gone through my Khyber Pass travelling on a camel"), and in one programme he gets a solo singing spot, barracked by Paddick and Williams ("Letting an announcer sing! It's a disgrace!") performing "Nobody Loves a Fairy When she's Forty".

Beatrice, Lady Counterblast, née Clissold

The first of the new characters was an elderly ex-Gaiety Girl (played by Marsden) known as Bea Clissold in her theatrical heyday, when she was "the pure brass of the music hall", and subsequently an aristocratic widow. She has been much married and much divorced, and has retired to live in seclusion at Chattering Parva, waited on and complained about by her octogenarian butler, Spasm (Williams). Horne interviews her each week in the early programmes, when she reminisces about her life and husbands. In a commentary on the show's characters published in 1974 Took wrote, "Her anecdotes of past marriages combine the lurid with the turgid as the narrative flashes back on leaden wings to the turn of the century and the exploits of the young Bea Clissold". She appeared in the first programme of the series, and was a major feature of its early episodes. After she ceased to be one of the central characters she continually popped up with her catch phrase, "Many times, many, many times", originally referring to the number of times she was married, and later an all-purpose innuendo.

Julian and Sandy

Main article: Julian and Sandy

From "Bona Bijou Tourettes":

Sandy: Jule had a nasty experience in Málaga

... he got badly stung.

Horne: Portuguese man o' war?

Julian: I never saw him in uniform.

The camp pair Julian and Sandy (played by Paddick and Williams) made their debuts in the fourth programme of the first series and rapidly established themselves as a permanent fixture throughout the run of Round the Horne. They are out of work actors whom Horne encounters each week in new temporary jobs. The writers' original idea was that the characters should be elderly and dignified Shakespearean actors filling in as domestic cleaners while "resting" (i.e. unemployed), but the producer, John Simmonds, thought they seemed rather sad, and at his suggestion Took and Feldman turned the characters into chorus boys. In a typical sketch Horne looks in at a new establishment, usually in Chelsea, with a title such as "Bona Tours", "Bona Books", "Bona Antiques" or "Bona Caterers", and is greeted with, "Oh hello, I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy". The latter adds, using the gay and theatrical slang, palare, "How bona to vada your dolly old eek again", or "What brings you trolling in here?" Having first appeared as house cleaners, they are later shown working in a variety of implausible jobs. Took summed them up: "From working as part time domestics while 'resting' they progressed to running almost every trendy activity going from fox-hunting in Carnaby Street to the gents' outfitting department of MI5".

The use of palare enabled the writers to give Julian and Sandy some double entendres that survived BBC censorship because the authorities either did not know or did not admit to knowing their gay meaning. In the fourth series, Sandy tells Horne that Julian is a brilliant pianist: "a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright", which to those familiar with gay slang could either refer to pianistic excellence or to – illegal – sexual activity in a public lavatory. At the time, gay male sex was a criminal offence in Britain. Julian and Sandy became nationally popular characters and are widely credited with contributing a little to the public acceptance of homosexuality that led to the gradual repeal of the anti-gay laws, beginning in 1967.

J. Peasmold Gruntfuttock

Gruntfuttock is guided by "voices" and one can only hope that one day they'll guide him into the Grand Union Canal.

Barry Took.

A week after the debut of Julian and Sandy came the first appearance of J. Peasmold Gruntfuttock, first broadcast on 5 April 1965. Played by Williams, Gruntfuttock is described by the writers as "the walking slum". In his first appearance he is a job applicant at the BBC, inspired by voices in his head, and keen to get on close terms with one of the female presenters. In later programmes he is first the king and then dictator of Peasmoldia, a small enclave in the East End, and subsequently Brother Gruntfuttock, member of an obscure religious community. He writes in regularly with incorrect and sometimes physically implausible answers to last week's questions:

Finally, we had "I get a kick out of ...". Well, Mr Gruntfuttock of Hoxton, I think we all know what you get a kick out of. And on looking at the list you sent me it's my considered opinion that you are running a severe risk of doing yourself a permanent injury.

In the fourth series he is a persistent caller of the spoof phone-in, the Round the Horne Forum of the Air, airing his peculiar personal obsessions in between bouts of heavy breathing. He was Feldman's favourite Round the Horne character; the two authors wrote of Gruntfuttock, "He married beneath him – which gives you some idea what his wife Buttercup (Betty Marsden) must be like. All in all not a couple one would wish to meet on a dark night or indeed at any time."

Charles and Fiona

What would London's West End Theatre be without these ineffable thespians? How can one describe them without invoking the law of libel? They're earthquakingly, mind-bendingly, stomach-turningly, heart-stoppingly, knee-tremblingly awful.

Barry Took.

Charles and Fiona are supposedly characters played by an extremely theatrical actor and actress: "ageing juvenile Binkie Huckaback" (Paddick) and Dame Celia Molestrangler (Marsden). The two, originally based on the theatre stars Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, were introduced in the eighth programme of the first series, and quickly became a fixture. They appeared in parodies of "stiff-upper-lip" dramas by Noël Coward and others; their fictitious plays had titles such as Present Encounter and Bitter Laughter. Their agonised love affairs are punctuated by brittle, staccato dialogue, in which they talk of their emotions in tortuous sentences:

Fiona: All I could think of back here was you out there thinking of me back here thinking of you out there – back here. Needing you, wanting you, wanting to need you, needing to want you.

Charles: I don't have the words for it.

Fiona: I know.

Charles: I know you know.

Fiona: I know you know I know.

Charles: Yes, I know.

Their sketches customarily end with an unexpected twist, such as the revelation that they are living in a telephone box, or are dining at the Ritz in the nude, or trysting in a refrigerator. Barry Took wrote that they were his own favourite Round the Horne characters. During the second series they were dropped in favour of a new feature, "The Seamus Android Show" (see below) but were quickly brought back.

Chou En Ginsberg and Lotus Blossom

In the ninth show of the first series Chou En Ginsberg (Williams) appeared for the first time. He is a parody of the stereotypical far-Eastern villain Fu Manchu. The first part of his name was borrowed from Chou En-Lai, the then Chinese premier; for comic contrast the writers wanted an incongruous second name and experimented with "Chou En Murphy" and "Chou En McWhirter" before settling on "Ginsberg". He always announces himself as "Dr Chou En Ginsberg, MA (Failed)". He appears regularly in the James Bond parodies, "Kenneth Horne, Master Spy", plotting a fiendish international crime, luring Horne into his clutches but then being outwitted.

Chou was joined in the next show by his concubine, Lotus Blossom (Paddick) who is, in the words of her master, common as muck. A drawing of the two by William Hewison in Took and Feldman's 1974 book Round the Horne shows a diminutive Chou alongside a large, looming and graceless Lotus Blossom bulging out of her cheongsam. Her attempts to entertain Special Agent Horne with her songs and dances cause him more distress than Chou's threats of death.

Rambling Syd Rumpo

Main article: Rambling Syd Rumpo

Ah, the agony of the artist, and here is an artist who's been responsible for more agony than almost anyone alive: Rambling Syd Rumpo

Horne, introducing him.

First heard in the tenth show of the first series, and a fixture thereafter, Rambling Syd (Williams) is an itinerant folk singer. The writers describe him as "one of the last of the breed of wandering minstrels who are fast dying out – thank heavens". Often misappropriating the tunes of genuine folk songs, Rambling Syd's lyrics consist of dubious-sounding nonsense words such as these, from the "Runcorn Splod Cobbler's Song":

I sing as I cobble and hammer my splod

Tho' my trumice glows hot and my trade be odd

I sit as I gorble and pillock my splee

For a cobbler's life is the life for me.

Or, to the tune of "Foggy Dew":

When I was a young man

I nadgered my splod

As I nurked at the wogglers' trade.

When suddenly I thought

While trussing up my groats,

I'd whirdle with a fair young maid.

Took said of the character that his "bogus ethnic patter and totally meaningless songs" created the illusion of "something terribly naughty going on" – but that any naughtiness was in fact in the listener's mind.

Daphne Whitethigh

The character was loosely based on the television cook Fanny Cradock. Described by Took and Feldman as "fashion reporter, TV cook, agony aunt, pain in the neck", Daphne Whitethigh (Marsden) is a hoarse-voiced pundit, "whose advice on the placing of the bosom or the way to prepare Hippo in its shell is an absolute must for all those trendy moderns who want to look and feel frightful". Among her helpful cooking tips are that although rhinoceros is not very appetising you do get marvellous crackling; her recipes for yak include yak à l'orange, yak in its jacket, and coupe yak. She advises followers of female fashion that bosoms are still out, but may be on the way back (Horne says he will keep a light burning in the window) and her other useful pointers include how to use cold cream to remove those baboon claw marks from one's hip, and how to avoid crow's feet round the eyes: refrain from sleeping in trees.

Seamus Android

Hello. All right, well now – ha ha. All right. Well I mustn't let my tongue run away with me. Now I know you can't wait to and neither can I, so I won't, and with that – goodnight

Seamus Android.

Described by Took as "an unskilled television labourer whose gift of the blarney and wistful Irish charm could empty any theatre in three minutes", Seamus Android is a parody of the broadcaster Eamonn Andrews, whose weekly television chat show was broadcast live on Sunday evenings. Took and Feldman had appeared on Andrews's show and been astonished by "the non-sequiturs and other nonsense he came out with". Seamus Android was the only regular character played by Pertwee, who was otherwise cast as what Took called "the odds and ends" – the minor characters and straight parts. Android's interviewees include the much married actress Zsa-Zsa Poltergeist, the Hollywood producer Daryll F. Klaphanger, and the star of The Ipswich File, Michael Bane; promised appearances by such as Lord Ghenghiz Wilkinson, the dancing cloakroom attendant, Nemesis Poston, the juggling monk, and Anthony Wormwood-Nibblo, the Hoxton cat thief and heiress fail to materialise. As Pertwee was not in the cast for the last series, Android was dropped.

Dentures

Played by Paddick, this is the only regular Round the Horne character who had in all essentials already appeared in Beyond Our Ken, where he was named Stanley Birkinshaw. In Round the Horne he has no regular name, and appears in various capacities. He is a man with ill-fitting false teeth; his diction distorts all sibilants, and sprays saliva in all directions. Dentures often opens the show in the style of a toastmaster ("My lordsh, ladiesh and gentlemen," etc). In the second series he appears as "The Great Omipaloni, the world's fastest illusionist – and also the dampest". In the third series he is Buffalo Sidney Goosecreature, adversary of the Palone Ranger, and in the fourth he is Angus McSpray ("Rishe againsht the Shasshenachsh") to Williams's Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Julie Coolibah

The invention of Mortimer and Cooke, Julie Coolibah (Marsden) appears in the fourth season. She is an Australian visiting London, deeply suspicious of British men ("I know you Pommies are sex mad"). Every time she talks to Horne she interprets his innocent remarks as sexual overtures:

Horne: Good to have you back.

Julie: What do you mean by that?

Horne: Nothing, just extending the hand of friendship.

Julie: Yeah? With what purpose in mind, might I ask?

When Julie manages to find work in London she has constant difficulties coping with the men. As a bus conductress she is outraged when a passenger gives her fourpence and asks "How far can I go for that?" She tells Horne, "I cracked him with my cash-bag and put him off".

Notes and references

Sources

Books

• Alexander, Richard (1997). Aspects of Verbal Humour in English. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. ISBN 978-3-8233-4936-5.
• Baker, Paul (2004). Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang. London: Continuum. ISBN 978-0-8264-7343-1.
• Bonner, Frances (2016). Personality Presenters: Television's Intermediaries with Viewers. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-27949-0.
• Dibbs, Martin (2019). Radio Fun and the BBC Variety Department, 1922–67. London: Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-95609-1.
• Feldman, Marty (2016). Eye Marty: My Life in Words and Pictures. London: Coronet. ISBN 978-1-4447-9273-7.
• Foster, Andy; Furst, Steve (1996). Radio Comedy, 1938–1968: A Guide to 30 Years of Wonderful Wireless. London: Virgin Books. ISBN 978-0-86369-960-3.
• Gilbert, Harriett (1993). The Sexual Imagination from Acker to Zola: a feminist companion. London: Cape. ISBN 978-0-2240-3535-4.
• Hackforth, Norman (1976). Solo for Horne: A Biography of Kenneth Horne. London: Angus & Roberts. ISBN 978-0-207-95650-8.
• Idle, Eric (2018). Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography. London: Orion. ISBN 978-1-4746-1030-8.
• Johnston, Barry (2006). Round Mr Horne: The Life of Kenneth Horne. London: Aurum Press. ISBN 978-1-84513-123-4.
• Krutnik, Frank; Neale, Steve (2006). Popular Film and Television Comedy. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-94686-0.
• Lewisohn, Mark (1998). Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy. London: BBC Books. ISBN 978-0-563-36977-6.
• Medhurst, Andy (2007). A National Joke: Popular comedy and English cultural identities. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-16877-9.
• Morley, Sheridan (2005). Coward. London: Haus. ISBN 978-1-904341-88-8.
• Partridge, Eric (1992). A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, American and British, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day. Lanham: Scarborough House. ISBN 978-0-8128-8536-1.
• Partridge, Eric (2016). A Dictionary of the Underworld : British and American. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-90447-7.
• Ross, Robert (2011). Marty Feldman: the Biography of a Comedy Legend. London: Titan Books. ISBN 978-0-85768-378-6.
• Took, Barry (1981). Laughter in the Air. London: Robson Books and the BBC. ISBN 978-0-563-17197-3.
• Took, Barry (1989). The Best of Round the Horne: Fourteen Original and Unexpurgated Scripts. London: Equation. ISBN 978-1-85336-162-3.
• Took, Barry (1998). Round the Horne: The Complete and Utter History. London: Boxtree. ISBN 978-0-7522-2119-9.
• Took, Barry; Coward, Mat (2000). The Best of Round the Horne. London: Boxtree. ISBN 978-0-7522-1809-0.
• Took, Barry; Feldman, Marty (1974). Round the Horne. London: Woburn Press. ISBN 978-0-7130-0121-1.
• Took, Barry; Feldman, Marty (1976). The Bona Book of Julian and Sandy. London: Robson Books. ISBN 978-0-903895-70-5.