Kenneth Williams wrings out every last innuendo from this double entendre laden music hall classic. From the 1960s BBC Radio comedy series Round the Horne.
I was in the audience when this was recorded at the BBC Paris studio in Regent Street, it was recorded on a Monday lunchtime so most of the audience was students and OAP's.
I remember listening to Round The Horn. The Goonshow and The Navy Lark in the late Fifties and the Sixties. The casts of these shows were geniuses there is no one like them nowadays. Still don't know how they got away with half the stuff they did.
I doubt Simon Cowell's face would even move these days.......and can you imagine the OTT campery of Walliams at the sound of this song? Very disturbing.
I am an avid listener of R4 extra and on Tuesday this week I turned on the radio and heard applause and what should follow? This very recording! What a fantastic show and what a legend KW was.
I understand that someone complained about this song being broadcast on Round The Horne in the mid-60s, referring to " modern, smutty comedy.". Kenneth Horne pointed out that the song was actually around 70 years old at the time.
There are quite a few different versions of this, all with the same lyrics, yet none of them are near as filthy or hilarious as this one. All down Williams's suggestive delivery. He could make anything sound rude. So when the material is actually rude it's a wonder he wasn't banned
I am so jealous! I first heard Round The Horne when I was a teenager in the 1990's and was surprised at how relatively well it's aged. Even now it's funnier than just about every alleged comedy programme on Radio Four.
Amazing that this was broadcast at Sunday Lunch-times up to the death of Kenneth Horne. Most vintage comedy tends to leave me cold, but this one is the exception.
#"Oh, what a beauty, I've never seen one as big as that before, Oh, what a beauty, it must be six foot round, or even more... He's big, he's round, he's ugly... He's very very fat, I never knew a peanut could grow as big as that..."
I don't think it's really "Music Hall". The song is on a record by The Wurzels, attributed to Edrich Siebert (1952). Though it certainly does sound like something from the age of Marie Lloyd. Whatever the song's origin, Williams turns in a wonderful performance.
It was written in the 1950s in the style of Marie Lloyd and other risqué music-hall acts of pre- 1914 London. Of course, if this song had been around in 1900 and Lloyd had sung it anything like this, the theatre would have been closed down instantly and there would have been a riot, followed by her imprisonment for public obscenity. They were kind of strict back then...
There's actually a third verse which Williams could have made all his own, really wrung out the innuendo, but great to hear it done by one of the masters, all the same.
I dunno, this probably would be allowed - that's the whole point of innuendo. I seem to remember a story that Marie Lloyd ( or one of her contemporaries) wrote a song called "She sits among the cabbages and leeks", which she was told was too suggestive. She rewrote it as "She sits among the cabbages and peas" - and that was fine ! No accounting sometimes, eh.
@@colindurham5085 Actually I just listened to the Billy Cotton 78 on YT and tbh, the third verse doesn't really add anything in terms of comedy- they're just repeating that the song really is about an award-winning vegetable and not a knob at all (as if!)
