''Beyond Our Ken'' is a

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

radio comedy programme first broadcast between 1958 and 1964. It starred

Kenneth Horne Charles Kenneth Horne, generally known as Kenneth Horne (27 February 1907 – 14 February 1969), was an English comedian and businessman. He is perhaps best remembered for his work on three BBC Radio series: ''Much-Binding-in-the-Mars ...

, with

Kenneth Williams Kenneth Charles Williams (22 February 1926 – 15 April 1988) was a British actor and comedian. He was best known for his comedy roles and in later life as a raconteur and diarist. He was one of the main ensemble in 26 of the 31 ''Carry ...

Hugh Paddick Hugh William Paddick (22 August 1915 – 9 November 2000) was an English actor. He starred in the 1960s BBC radio show ''Round the Horne'', performing in sketches such as "Charles and Fiona" (as Charles) and " Julian and Sandy" (as Julian). He an ...

, Betty Marsden,

Bill Pertwee William Desmond Anthony Pertwee (21 July 1926 – 27 May 2013) was an English actor and comedian. He is best remembered for playing Chief ARP Warden Hodges in ''Dad's Army'' and P.C. Wilson in '' You Rang, M'Lord?''. Early life Pertwee was bo ...

, and, as announcer, Douglas Smith. The title is a play on the name Kenneth and the familiar expression "beyond our ken" ('' ken'' being a mainly Northern English and Scots word meaning 'knowledge or perception'). The show ran for seven series, and a total of 121 shows. The scripts were by Eric Merriman, with

Barry Took Barry Took (19 June 192831 March 2002) was an English writer, television presenter and comedian. His decade-and-a-half writing partnership with Marty Feldman led to the television series '' Bootsie and Snudge'', the radio comedy ''Round the Hor ...

as co-writer in the first two series. Musical accompaniment was provided by the BBC Revue Orchestra, with musical interludes mostly by the

Fraser Hayes Four The Fraser Hayes Four, originally called The Fraser Hayes Quartette, was a British close harmony vocal group, formed by the musicians Jimmy Fraser (born James Fraser Potts; 2 February 1922 – 25 September 2001)''U.S., Social Security Applications ...

. When the show finished it was replaced by the series ''

Round the Horne ''Round the Horne'' is a BBC Radio comedy programme starring Kenneth Horne, first transmitted in four series of weekly episodes from 1965 until 1968. The show was created by Barry Took and Marty Feldman, who wrote the first three series. The f ...

'' (1965–1968), which built on, and exceeded, the success of the earlier show.

Background

Eric Merriman had written some material for

, when the latter was an aspiring

stand-up comic Stand-up comedy is a performance directed to a live audience, where the performer stands on a stage and delivers humorous and satirical monologues sometimes incorporating physical acts. These performances are typically composed of rehears ...

.Took, p. 137 They subsequently collaborated in writing material for

for

radio shows, and in June 1957 the

producer Jacques Brown asked Merriman to devise a thirty-minute show with Horne as the star. The proposal was for a series depicting a fictional week in Horne's life. The original working title was ''Don't Look Now'', but a senior official in the BBC's Variety department thought the title weak, and Took was asked to suggest some alternatives. His own preferred title was ''Round the Horne'', and Merriman favoured ''Hornerama'', but from Took's list the BBC chose ''Beyond Our Ken'', and it was under that title that Merriman and Took completed the script for the pilot show. For the supporting cast it was agreed that the show required a strong team of versatile comedy actors who could play a wide range of parts. They were drawn from the West End and BBC radio and television. From

revue A revue is a type of multi-act popular theatre, theatrical entertainment that combines music, dance, and sketch comedy, sketches. The revue has its roots in 19th century popular entertainment and melodrama but grew into a substantial cultural pre ...

the show featured the actors

Ron Moody Ron Moody (born Ronald Moodnick; 8 January 1924 – 11 June 2015) was an English actor, composer, singer and writer. He was best known for his portrayal of Fagin in '' Oliver!'' (1968) and its 1983 Broadway revival. Moody earned a Golden Glob ...

and

and the singer Pat Lancaster; from BBC television, Betty Marsden; and from radio

.Johnston, p. 171

Production history

The pilot was recorded on 2 October 1957. It was well received by the studio audience and the BBC agreed to go ahead with a series. The project was put on hold in February 1958 after Horne suffered a

stroke Stroke is a medical condition in which poor cerebral circulation, blood flow to a part of the brain causes cell death. There are two main types of stroke: brain ischemia, ischemic, due to lack of blood flow, and intracranial hemorrhage, hemor ...

that left him partially paralysed. He made an almost complete recovery – left with only a slight limp – and was able to return to broadcasting. There followed seven series of the show, beginning in July 1958 and ending in February 1964. Moody left after the first series, concluding that he was less suited than his colleagues to radio performance. His replacement was

, whom Horne had encountered in Pertwee's early days as a performer, and whose versatility impressed him. After the second series, Merriman and Took fell out, and the former rejected Horne's plea that Took should be invited to contribute material to future shows. Merriman insisted on being recognised as the sole writer for the duration of the show.

Series

In 1964 Merriman quarrelled with the BBC and refused to go on writing ''Beyond Our Ken''. The BBC proposed to continue without him, keeping Horne and the team together in a show provisionally titled ''It's Ken Again'', to be written by Took and his new writing partner,

Marty Feldman Martin Alan Feldman (8 July 1934 – 2 December 1982) was a British actor, comedian and writer. He was known for his exophthalmos, prominent, strabismus, misaligned eyes. He initially gained prominence as a writer with Barry Took on th ...

. In the face of Merriman's furious objections, the new series went ahead, with the title changed to ''

''. Merriman was further embittered when the new show surpassed the popularity and reputation of ''Beyond Our Ken'' and he never forgave Took. Horne's biographer Barry Johnston comments "If Kenneth Horne had retired from broadcasting after the final episode of ''Beyond Our Ken'', he would still have been remembered as the star of two of the most successful radio comedy series ever. His place as one of the all-time greats of British comedy, however, is due to the extraordinary popularity of ''Round the Horne''." Nevertheless, in the words of the BBC, "While ''Beyond Our Ken'' might have been outshone by its successor, it shared much of the same DNA that made ''Round the Horne'' one of the greats".

Format

Like ''

ITMA ''It's That Man Again'' (commonly contracted to ''ITMA'') was a BBC radio comedy programme which ran for twelve series from 1939 to 1949. The shows featured Tommy Handley in the central role, a fast-talking figure, around whom the other ch ...

'' and ''

Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh ''Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh'' was a comedy show broadcast from 1944 to 1950 and 1951 to 1954 by BBC Radio and in 1950–1951 by Radio Luxembourg. It was written by and starred Richard Murdoch and Kenneth Horne as officers in a fictional RAF sta ...

'' before it, ''Beyond Our Ken'' interspersed comic sections with musical interludes, but it differed from them and all its other predecessors in the way the show opened each week. Instead of an opening signature tune, the programme began with a short sketch of a few lines, usually based on a punning reference to a film title (for instance a man running a flea circus for more than six years was the key to ''

The Seven Year Itch ''The Seven Year Itch'' is a 1955 American romantic comedy film directed by Billy Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay with George Axelrod. Based on Axelrod's 1952 The Seven Year Itch (play), play of the same name, the film stars Marilyn Monroe ...

''). After that the announcer, Douglas Smith, would welcome listeners and introduce the fictional guests appearing that week, such as "General Sir Gertrude Fanshawe, Marion Haste, The House of Lords Banjo Octet, Dizzy Barbirolli, and of course Mr Kenneth Horne, who prefers to remain anonymous".

Characters

''Beyond Our Ken'' featured regular characters. As panellists in a parody of ''

Any Questions? ''Any Questions?'' is a British topical discussion programme "in which a panel of personalities from the worlds of politics, media, and elsewhere are posed questions by the audience". It is typically broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Fridays at 20: ...

'' the cast gently burlesqued real broadcasting celebrities. Marsden's hoarse-voiced Fanny Haddock, Pertwee's camp Hanky Flowerd, Paddick's gormless Ricky Livid and Williams's suggestive rustic Arthur Fallowfield parodied, respectively, the cook

Fanny Cradock Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey (26 February 1909 – 27 December 1994), better known as Fanny Cradock, was an English restaurant critic, television cook and writer. She frequently appeared on television, at cookery demonstrations and in print with ...

, the comedian

Frankie Howerd Francis Alick Howard (6 March 1917 – 19 April 1992), better known by his stage-name Frankie Howerd, was an English actor and comedian. Early life Howerd was born the son of a soldier Francis Alfred William (1887–1934)England & Wales, Deat ...

, the pop star

Marty Wilde Marty Wilde, (born Reginald Leonard Smith; 15 April 1939) is an English singer and songwriter. He was among the first generation of British pop stars to emulate American rock and roll, scoring several 1950s and 1960s hit singles including " E ...

and the

West country The West Country is a loosely defined area within southwest England, usually taken to include the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Bristol, with some considering it to extend to all or parts of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and ...

farmer and pundit Ralph Wightman. Some of these characters had their own catch-phrases: Ricky Livid's was "I like the backing", and Fallowfield's response to every question began "The answer lies in the soil".Took, p. 138 Elsewhere in the programmes the regular characters included Ambrose and Felicity (described by Took as "a pair of doddering old idiots"), played by Williams and Marsden. Another – unnamed – ancient personage, played by Williams, had been doing whatever he was doing on each programme for "thirty-five years"; Stanley Birkinshaw (Paddick) was a man with ill-fitting false teeth speaking with distorted sibilants and spraying saliva in all directions. Another regular was the supposed BBC commentator Cecil Snaith, played by Paddick and written not by Merriman or Took but by Horne; Snaith's commentaries were invariably struck by disaster and ended, "And with that, I return you to the studio". Two regulars who always appeared together were the men-about-town Rodney (Williams) and Charles (Paddick), variously described as "jolly decent public school chaps", "frightfully correct", "a pair of effete young men", and "two frightfully, frightfully Mayfair types, doing ridiculous things together like dressing up as red Indians when they took a canoeing holiday".Freedland, p. 93

Recordings

As at May 2020 the BBC had licensed the release of the first four series of ''Beyond Our Ken'' on commercially available CD. In 2021 the BBC released two audiobook collections, the first containing all remaining episodes of Series 1-4, the second containing all episodes from Series 5-7. Several episodes are missing from the BBC archives. Series 1 is missing 9 episodes out of a total of 22. Series 2 is missing 7 episodes out of a total of 21. Series 4 is missing 1 episode out of a total of 20 episodes.

Notes, references and sources

Notes

References

Sources

* * * * * *

External links

* * {{BBC Online, id=comedy/beyondourken/, title=''Beyond Our Ken'' 1958 radio programme debuts 1964 radio programme endings BBC Radio comedy programmes BBC Light Programme programmes 1950s British radio programmes 1960s British radio programmes