Take It From Here 2

Yes, it is of its time, as both its writers were aware. It can never be as funny as it was in that original context but some awareness of that historical background may help make it comprehensible, at least. Ought listening to comedy involve a history lesson? Well, why not, given the huge archive of BBC comedy?

This also relates to the announcer issue (more generally than a potshot at my nemesis, regular readers will be pleased to hear). If older programmes are introduced without a semblance of historical context (as with a recent Goon Show inspired by the Piltdown Man fraud and containing references to the still-banned Lady Chatterly's Lover), then it's hardly likely to entice younger listeners.

Some extracts, originally on another thread, from a book to which Muir and Norden contributed in the 70s:

Dennis Norden:

“What we also did … was to send up … family relationships, things that were fairly sacrosanct at the time. Ron and Eth started from a sketch we did about an engaged couple. We suddenly realised that one of the most hilarious and ludicrous positions to be in was this state of being engaged. It doesn’t apply now [1971]. We described it in one of the programmes as driving with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake. Nowadays it is driving with both feet on the accelerator. Strangely, there was something very sexual lurking behind it, though it could never be made explicit in those days. But that was what we were on about, that was what we found funny, that state of having to hold back all the time. Frustration. It was possibly the first glimmer of the permissive seoctity struggling to be born. People sort of recognised that if you were engaged the question was why don’t you go to bed together. But one never dared say it, never mentioned it. It was just simply this blind groping, this aching state, the tension. Of course we weren’t allowed to indicate any of this for a second, but I think it caught the public at a time when they were becoming aware of sexuality.

“Ron’s voice was funny, grotesque, Junes voice was absolutely true – we knew who she was founded on. There were a lot of cosy family serials and soap operas on the radio, so it was a slight send-up of them too. We wanted to make the father ghastly, an insensitive pig. It was a reaction against the non-Alf Garnettism of the time.

“… Eth was the sort of girl for whom women’s papers published photographs of ideal kitchens. .. we used to read them just to get the picture of Eth. .. What was extraordinary though was the number of letters we got from girls asking how we knew that when two people are alone they talk like Ron and Eth … The obvious answer was that your fiancé is a moron, but they didn’t see it like that. They saw him as the ideal fiancé, completely infatuated and dominated by both parents and girl That was how a fiancé should be…

“The Glums … were much more comic strip [than Steptoe]. They had characteristics rather than character. But we tried to slip in recognisable phrases, things we had heard ourselves or other people say. …I remember one phrase we gave Jimmy- ‘It’s not fit for ‘uman ‘abitation to live in.’ That was the kind of thing we strove for because you could think of your uncle saying it.”

Frank Muir:

“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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As a coda to the above, it seems a pity to me that historical context is, in the main, only provided on 7 when there is a fear of causing offence - ie attention will be drawn beforehand to dated attitudes about race and sex in certain sixties and seventies comedy shows, but that's about it.

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The brutish performance of Jimmy Edwards as Mr Glum is a big part of the enjoyment - eg the relish with which he informs us that Mrs Glum is "having an allover wash in the kitchen sink" in one episode. He, the character, is a counterbalance to the insipidity of Ron and Eth. In other words, Muir and Norden knew what they were doing. And there is a neatness to the Glums plots which survives on the printed page if you ever come across the scripts, issued in paperback in the seventies.