I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and transcription discs

One surreal effect of what I presume was a transcription disc of Round the Horne was hearing Douglas Smith quote Tennyson's The Brook - "I come from haunts of coot and hern" - followed by inexplicable laughter from the audience.

Looking at a book of scripts sometime later I saw the intended payoff was something like: "Well, it's the King's Road, actually, so it's more just coot."

This suggests that cuts on transcription discs weren't always about running time. Certainly, listening to some Horne episodes on BBC 7 in the past year or so with restored sections in audibly poorer quality there seemed a clear divide between sections cut for being too parochial for listeners abroad and cuts which were the result of censorship. Might this two-pronged approach apply to ISIRTA too?

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Listening to the Goon Show transmitted today I noticed what I assume is an edit, unless Milligan / Larry Stephens used the gag more than once.

- Why did you desert your post?
- It had woodworm in it.

The continuation, which I remember from a volume of the published Goon Show Scripts, runs something like:

- Old jokes won't save you.
- Why not - they saved Monkhouse and Goodwin.

If that is a cut, it's understandable, as the fame of Monkhouse's former comedy partner Dennis Goodwin wasn't exactly long-lasting, and may have been confined to the UK in any case, although an alternative explanation may be that a personal attack on contemporaries such as this didn't make the broadcast.

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If that's the case, the cut seems wronger - it's one thing to assume that people don't know about Monkhouse & Goodwin, it's another to give the impression that Monkhouse was only ever a solo act.

Mind you, the idea that Bob pinched or recycled jokes certainly persisted long after the separation from Goodwin. I recall a Weekending sketch shortly after the Brixton riots, when people were being asked to return looted items: Monkhouse had been seen in the area carrying a large brown paper parcel ...

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There was also an earlier bit of mild scandal about Monkhouse having allegedly illicit copies of films (as opposed to copies of illicit films) - think the Weekending thing may have been about that, which may in turn have compounded the belief that he "borrowed" jokes. From my memory of his autobiography it was eventually sorted.

I believe, but can't swear to it, that in an edition of Huddlines there was an aside: "Alright, Bob, start recording NOW!"

Incidentally I've never felt that BM had funny bones but from the many documentaries on which he featured I always trusted his judgement about comedians - it was clear that comedy was his lifetime's study and joy as well as his profession.

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I listened to the Goon Show evening repeat (having nothing better to do as I sat in a noisome bus and then walked through the park on my way home, alright?) and heard:

- Why did you desert your post?
- It had woodworm in it. And I didn't want to catch it.

No Monkhouse. Which suggested that Milligan may have done a bit of his own recycling, and sure enough, when I googled part of the line I found a show from the following year which had the Monkhouse line.

goonshowscripts.afra...

But you could well argue that Milligan is not so much recycling himself as embellishing, and improving, a gag. According to an article by Joe Page on another website the dig at Monkhouse and Goodwin is "perhaps a reference to their selling English comedians second hand material already used in America by the likes of Bob Hope":

www.bloc-online.com/...

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Far better (and far more representative of BM's tastes, I suspect) was a series called What a Performance fronted by Bob which had generous extracts from Sid Field and many others. If it ever comes around again (Channel 4, I think) it is well worth catching.

Last night's Channel 5 show, like the others in the series, did not suggest researchers had hunted high and low, or spared no expense, for examples (there was in the Ken Dodd or Bruce Forsyth show a rotten, fifth generation clip from Laurel and Hardy in Flying Deuces, far from their best, and not serving to illustrate what one commentator had just said).

And in the Monkhouse one, brief clips of Keaton and Harry Langdon seemed inadquate to sum up the enthusiasms of a man who used, in my childhood, to introduce a TV programme entirely devoted to silent comedies called Mad Movies.