Take It From Here

It certainly can't have been 1950 because of the the Glums, who didn't start till 1953. Judging from this website (see link below) the last programme broadcast on 7 actually appears to be from series 12, 1958-59, broadcast on 19 Feb 1959 - it's identified as "Mr Glum's Honeymoon Promise."

http://web.onetel.net.uk/~gnudawn/otr/tifh-1stlines.html

Assuming this website is correct ("Titles and broadcast dates taken from information compiled by the Global British Comedy Collaborative") and assuming the programmes are being broadcast in sequence (not a given with BBC 7, I realise) then the next programme will include a play on the word "disconsolate" cited by David Nathan in his excellent book The Laughtermakers as the peak of Muir-Norden punnery.

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As the Glums were 50% of the airtime it's less feasible than a Julian and Sandy compilation. But there was a paperback of Glums scripts issued around the late seventies/early eighties - and if you've listened to enough episodes you can hear Jimmy Edwards's Pa Glum bellow at finding Ron and Eth in a compromising position in your head (now THAT'S interactive radio!).

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Having mentioned it in my earlier post I have been looking over the chapter on Take It From Here in David Nathan’s 1971 book The Laughtermakers, which includes some sections which may be of particualr interest to readers of this and other threads about TIFH, The Goon Show and ITMA. First of all, Dennis Norden talks about the creation of, and intentions behind, the Glums then Frank Muir puts ITMA, the Goons and TIFH in historical context.

It’s a great book, and provided my first glimmer that comedy was a) also important to others and b) could be talked about intelligently. Other chapters cover Frankie Howerd, Morecambe and Wise, Pete and Dud, the early Pythons and many others. Unlike some other writers he’s not ponderous, he gets to the essence of a comedian quickly, and some of the summations in the book have stayed with me for thirty five years. There now seem to be a huge number of books written about Morecambe and Wise, for example (and not all of them by his son), but the twenty pages here really tell you all you need to know.

Here is Dennis Norden on the background to the Glums:

“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.”

And given the debates going on in other threads about ITMA and The Goon Show, Frank Muir’s comments at the end of the chapter may be of interest:

“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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Have to say I'm surprised that the above posting has been referred to moderation as it merely quoted at length from two of the BBC's own, Frank Muir and Dennis Norden. But as the word I'd better term the "oxy suffix" was used by Dennis Norden to describe the female listeners who wrote in to voice their approval of Ron that may have triggered alarm bells. If the post is not reinstated I'd simply like to say that Peter Nathan's 1971 book The Laughtermakers, from which I was quoting (copyright issues?) is well worth seeking out as it has a chapter on TIFH. But no more altruistic (and laborious) typing out for me ...

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Robbiesos, Annoyingly this week's episode (broadcast today, June 19th) was presumably correctly identified as 1950, as it was from the Joy Nichols era. Makes you wonder if we're going to hear a jumble of episodes from different times in the coming weeks. And whether the episode with the play on "disconsolate" will be broadcast among them or not. Have to say although I was glad to hear today's repeat the absence of the Glums does tend to heighten the groanworthy aspect of the programme, though there was a knowingness about some of the bad jokes - "Now I see why they call it the corn belt."