ITMA

I have listened to the odd episode of ITMA in the past and while I'd hate to purchase a boxed set there is a great curiosity value in hearing it from time to time - there are the seeds of The Goons in there if nothing else ... alright, and one may, perhaps, marvel at how easily pleased wartime audiences were. But the performers are good, and ITMA is referred to so often in books etc about the development radio comedy that a dutiful half hour listen should be seen as a kind of nasty but necessary medicine to cure your ignorance about that period before the golden age of fifties radio comedy. BBC 7 has also rebroadcast one of the army shows Charlie Chester was involved with, and I can only describe it as differently bad - but equally fascinating. Do we have to be saturated with The Goons and Hancock all the time?

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I heard it too and I do think there may have been some unedited semi-intentional moments of innuendo (if that makes sense), not dwelt on, but presumably used in the first place to help galvanise the audience.

Not certain whether they came from Ted Kavanagh's script, Tommy Handley as a performer wringing what he could out of it, or merely the audience over-excitedly picking up on the possibility of subliminal rudery in a BBC broadcast and Handley responding. Nor can I quote any of the lines, so perhaps I should ask whether other listeners shared this feeling.

Re that edition of the show in general, interesting to hear that some gags didn't appear to get a titter but, as today, the audience responded with applause to jokes perceived as clever. I also noticed there was a lot of wordplay which had no satiric intent but had a kind of musical power, aided by Handley's (and others') shotgun delivery so - a bit like those subliminal innuendoes - presumably the intention is to increase a sense of communal hysteria in the audience. You can certainly see what the Goons borrowed and capitalised on and as many readers will know Milligan took a particular satisfaction in sneaking rudenesses past the producer (Hugh Jampton etc).

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Certainly what you get in ITMA is something difficult to replicate today: the sense of taking part in an experience shared by the whole nation.

And the lack of Milliganesque bite which dates ITMA is also, I suppose, understandable in the circumstances: sales of Alice in Wonderland apparently experienced something of a boost in World War One, and I suppose the appetite for simple nonsense during times which seem without explanation is an understandable human need, radiating the consoling message that at least we're all in this confusion together.

The time for that edge of cynicism and satire (Goon Show potshots at military incompetence etc) comes later when there is the leisure to reflect. And I haven't researched it, but I would imagine the Goons' original audience would not have been as universal as ITMA's: a sharp fall-off in the older age bracket. Teenagers, ex-servicemen, but not their parents or grandparents. Unless the war unlocked an appetite for cynicism in everyone?

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This is taken from a current thread on Take It From Here, but it may be useful to paste an extract here as well. It's from a book called The Laughtermakers, published in 1971, by David Nathan. Frank Muir is talking about the extent to which ITMA, TIFH and the Goons are products of their time.

“Good comedy is relevant and local and pinned to a time. … ITMA needed the war. It was nothing before the war, fantastically good during the war and awful after the war. Take It From Here could only have happened after the last war which explains its temporariness. The best post-war show was the Goons, because they brought a new dimension into comedy. .. The Goon Show could have happened after any war. It was not the product of anything apart from Spike Milligan’s near-genius – if not complete genius. It came about through Spike’s – everybody’s – reaction against regimentation. It happened with Lewis Carroll when he threw off the mathematician’s logic. But it’s not only the writing end, it’s the receiving end as well. If Spike had written The Goon Show at any other time it wouldn’t have worked. The audience’s receptivity has to be right for that sort of show, or it doesn’t get off the ground. All the same, the Goons was a far more permanent sort of humour than Take It From Here. It was a far more positive creation. It influenced the whole world of humour.”

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I was recently reading David Robinson's book on Charlie Chaplin and came across part of a 1909 script from his Fred Karno days which might interest readers of this thread. What's surprising to note is how closely the rhythms match those the ITMA scripts and how easily one can imagine Handley as one of the speakers. This is from a piece called Skating, written by Chaplin's brother Sidney, Karno and J. Hickory Wood. Suppose this either means that ITMA had one foot in the past even before programmes like the Goons made it seem dated or that the cross-talk style is timeless.

"There we stood with our retreat cut off."
"Our what cut off?"
"Our retreat cut off."
"Oh, stop it."
"There we stayed for three days without food or water, think of it, not even a drop of water. What did we do?"
"We drank it neat."
[...]
"How's the world been treating you?"
"Oh, up and down."
"Are you working?"
"Now and then."
"Where are you working?"
"Oh, here and there."
"Do you like it?"
"Well, yes and no."
"What do you work at?"
"Oh, this and that."
"You're always in work, I suppose?"
"Well, in and out."
"Do you work hard? On and off."
"How much do you earn?"
"That and half as much again."
"Who do you work for?"
"Mr So-and-So."
"Well - are you looking for work?"
"I'm afraid to, in case I find it."

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Ah, I'll never forget the day when a surreptitious cash deal in a farmyard resulted in a meal which was able, for once, to feed our whole family by augmenting the dread Strachey-devised foodstuff: the dish was, of course, coq au snoek.

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On a more worthy note (I regretted my earlier post within nanoseconds of sending it), if Mr Strachey was associated with food shortages in general then the precise allusion might be to the prewar expectation of an orange in your Christmas stocking.

In the superb Launder and Gilliat film Millions Like Us, which examines the experiences of a varied group of people in wartime (and is recommended as an antidote to Noel Coward's films) there's a caption which reads something like: "An orange is a small reddish-purplish pulpy fruit once common in Britain."

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There is a handy summary of the film here:

www.screenonline.org...

And one of its most affecting moments also offers a clue about the appeal of ITMA. The film is mostly set in a munitions factory and there is what appears to be genuine location filming in a large works canteen. Without giving too much away, when one character has suffered a tremendous shock she is eased into an awareness of the bigger picture through the communal singing of an old music hall song; gradually, through the example of her workmate, she begins to join in.

I suppose the relentlessness of the catchphrases in ITMA did something similar: it wasn't comedy meant to challenge in the way that the Goons did; it was about offering reassurance, familiarity at a time when it was most needed, and the catchphrases meant that all ages, young and old, had something to hang on to even when the odd bit of wordplay zipped by - though even then the crosstalk style of delivery reached back to the music hall (see earlier post re Charlie Chaplin).

And above all the programme conveys the sense of a communal experience which we can't begin to comprehend today. The most (possibly the only) sensible article I read at the height of Diana-mania was in the Guardian: it suggested that people were responding to a desire to be part of an event bigger than themselves, their own individual needs, and the death of Diana (for an illusory moment anyway) offered the closest experience to that since wartime.

Maybe there's also something about the way the various grotesque characters come and go but Handley remains resolutely centrestage, unfazed by any of them. So he was to radio comedy (literally at the centre of people's homes at the time) what Churchill was to the wider stage at that time, which would explain the impact of Handley's own funeral: both in some way represented the spirit of Britain.

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Was he also responsible for butter rationing? I recall Russell Davies playing a song by Elsie Carlisle called Please Leave My Butter Alone. And in AA Milne's volume of light verse for adults (he had a considerable career before and after Winnie the Pooh) written in WW2 called Behind (or Between?) the Lines there's a tribute to his much-missed butter:

There is, as must have been observed,
Butter and butter. Mine is salt.
For years my taste has never swerved,
My judgement never been at fault.

Saltless: the unrewarding stare
One gives to jokes one has not seen.
Salted: I take the morning air
As radiant as a May Day Queen.

It ends:

Keep, O keep your vaseline,
Be it ten shillings or a pound -
I give it to the war machine
To make its silly wheels go round.

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avianenoch, your post brings out something not always considered: that the personal associations we bring are part of the experience. (It doesn't rule out the possibility of critical assessment, in my view - just makes it more interesting and complex.)

I was part of the transistor age so don't have a radio equivalent but was certainly taught to associate watching a certain Midlands-based soap with pleasure by my cunning mother's regular placing of a bowl of hot chicken soup in front of me just as it was about to begin. It was both a privilege (singled out for this special attention, like Laurie Lee, mutatis mutandis, in Cider with Rosie) and a curse (an enduring addiction to the genre).

Radio was never a communal experience in our house so that radio comedy was something I discovered in my teens in the seventies when there was a spate of repeats (and Radio Two was always heavily nostalgiac). I regret missing out on that extra dimension, which I suppose is why the social context of these long-ago broadcasts is now of interest to me. In his autobiography and in several interviews Eric Sykes has referred to the experience of walking down a street on a hot night and hearing his script for Frankie Howerd in Variety Bandbox coming from every single open window and door; sad to think that that - and the hold that ITMA once had over a whole nation - will never happen again.

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By coincidence I was reading the autobiography of Jessie Matthews, the later Mrs Dale, a few months ago. Can't remember if the circumstances of her taking over the role were gone into in any detail, but her stage and screen career and personal life overall were fairly punishing with various breakdowns - though I think by the time of Mrs Dale her life was on a more even keel. The main thing I remember about her is the kindness she showed a then unknown and nervous Hutch who was the pianist in the Cochran revue One Dam [sic] Thing After Another; he later backed her on several recordings. Ah, Hutch - "One for the teenagers," as Roy Hudd would say. His life - in a recentish biography by Charlotte Breese - is an eye-opener.

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I'm reviving this thread, on topic, as I have just listened to the final episode of ITMA as broadcast on Bill Oddie's Comedy Controller show. It probably wasn't hugely different from earlier episodes which have cropped up on 7 if you examined it closely - yet it was. All very subjective but I couldn't help thinking the absence of a war did seem to make it sort of pointless, as Frank Muir said in a piece I've quoted earlier on in this thread: silliness which is heartening in the face of something horrible, but not quite beguiling enough on its own. And this episode - he died a few days later - was in 1949.

It was interesting to hear Oddie's take, which was that much early radio comedy felt as though it had simply been transplanted from the halls, without any real effort to change it. He also suggested you could "hear" Handley and others reading, by which I presume he meant either that the performances were too big, or maybe too controlled, for the intimacy of radio.

This sort of fits with the idea that the Goons (which Muir greatly admired, if you can find the earlier post quoting from the book The Laughtermakers) were a real breakthrough because they were conceived for radio - think of the speed of delivery (far more revved-up than ITMA's crosstalk) and the sophistication of those effects. Indeed there are instances of Milligan going down horribly in theatres and Sellers getting his revenge on the audience by coming on and playing a record - all the way through.