Old Time Radio : 1940s BBC Comedy : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive (2024)

Old Time Radio of the 1940s, from England. Comedy.

This is a collection of BBC radio comedies: Band Waggon starring Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch; ITMA (It's That Man Again) starring Tommy Handley; Much Binding in the Marsh starring Richard Murdoch and Kenneth Horne; HMS Waterlogged starring Eric Barker, with Jon Pertwee; Studio Stand Easy starring Charlie Chester; Up The Pole starring Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warriss, with Jon Pertwee; Life with the Lyons starring Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels; and The Will Hay Programme starring Will Hay.

Little of the BBC's radio output of the 1940s has survived, as most shows were broadcast live and were not recorded. The 78 rpm disk recording technology, which was all that was available prior to the development of tape recording, resulted in sound quality that was significantly worse than a live broadcast, so it was better not to fill the air-time with recordings, and being a non-commercial broadcaster the BBC had no financial incentive to preserve its output.

Those factors have made BBC recordings from this period rare. Here are some of the few which were preserved in their archives.

Band Waggon was groundbreaking in that it was the first BBC comedy series to be broadcast on the same day each week and at the same time of day. Previous comedy shows had been aired on an ad hoc basis; but here, for the first time, was a series which would be on the air in the same timeslot each week, which helped to build a big audience for each broadcast.

The series starred popular stage comedian Arthur Askey. He was its "resident comic", in that he appeared in every broadcast, rather than using a different comedian each week as had been usual up until then. Askey, however, suggested the term be taken literally, and in the sketches pretended he was literally resident at the BBC, living in a (fictitious) apartment on the roof of Broadcasting House in London. This gimmick caught the public's imagination, and Band Waggon quickly became the BBC's most popular pre-war radio comedy.

On-air the show's stars referred to each other informally as 'Big' (Big-hearted Arthur) and 'Stinker' (Richard 'Stinker' Murdoch). Hitler, who was usually the target of a string of jokes each week, was known informally on the show as 'Old Nasty'. Arthur was known to complain that Hitler was getting so much newspaper coverage each week that he was stealing the show's publicity!

This one is not actually a BBC recording. This is a commercial recording, made in 1939 on standard 78 rpm discs by the record company EMI, for a commercial release to the general public on records. This was most unusual, and was done because of the enormous popularity of Band Waggon, which, when the final radio series finished, immediately began a sell-out tour of the music-halls as a stage show.

The radio show actually finished because the cast were simply too busy to continue writing and recording a weekly show: not only were they making far more money than the BBC could pay, by touring the music-halls, but they were also busy filming a feature film for the cinema based on the show.

ITMA, short for It's That Man Again, was a wartime comedy which began in 1939, starring popular stage comedian Tommy Handley. It derived its name from newspaper headlines of the time, in which the phrase "It's That Man Again" was used as an ironic reference to Hitler.

Indeed, sending-up Hitler (and the German war effort generally) was a mainstay of the series. For the first time on the BBC a comedian was allowed to poke fun at a foreign leader. The BBC, usually terribly polite, generally frowned upon such goings on; but once war was declared they changed their policy pretty quickly. The result was a very topical show. The humour in the scripts tended to date very quickly, and the point of a joke might be lost just a fortnight later.

The wartime show for the Services, Merry Go Round, comprised three seperate series: one for the Army, one for the Navy, and one for the Airforce. These rotated, so that each was heard once every three weeks.

The Air Force show, Much Binding in the Marsh, was the most successful of these, to judge by how long it lasted. Beginning in 1944, the series starred Richard Murdoch, who had previously appeared alongside Arthur Askey in the pre-war Band Waggon, who now teamed up with Kenneth Horne, best remembered today for his 1960s heyday in the two satirical successes Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne.

During the war, Much Binding in the Marsh was set in the fictitious RAF station of Much Binding. But the show was so popular it continued until 1953. In the immediate post-war period the RAF base became a country club run by Murdoch and Horne, while the 1950s saw them running their own newspaper, 'The Weekly Bind'.

The Army show was Studio Stand Easy, starring comedian Charlie Chester. He was actually an Army Sergeant when the show was conceived, having been called-up following the outbreak of war. Unbelieveably, he was actually ordered by his commanding officer to write a smash-hit radio show! This, he later remarked wryly, was easier said than done. But he was a first rate comedian, who, like Kenneth Horne, continued to be very successful on radio into the 1960s.

The Navy's contribution to Merry Go Round, initially entitled H.M.S. Waterlogged, stars light comedian Eric Barker, supported by Jon Pertwee (who was later to have big successes in the BBC radio comedy The Navy Lark and on television as the third Doctor Who). After the war H.M.S. Waterlogged evolved into the show Waterlogged Spa, with the Naval Base becoming a health spa as the show continued in the post-war period. Many of the characters who Pertwee plays in this show would later reappear in The Navy Lark in the 1960s!

After Waterlogged Spa, though, Jon Pertwee's next success came in the 1948 radio comedy Up The Pole, starring variety comedians Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warriss (who already had a well known double act on the music-hall stage, as Jewel and Warriss). Pertwee plays a variety of crooked characters in this show, always 'on the make', and those characters later formed the basis of the humorously dishonest Chief Petty Officer he played in The Navy Lark, when it began in 1959.

Life With The Lyons stars American husband-and-wife team Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels, film stars of the day. Along with their real life children, they literally form a family show, in this long running radio series. Starting in the early 1950s, it was so popular it was still on the air at the end of that decade.

Finally in this collection, a rare surviving edition of The Will Hay Programme, starring film comedian Will Hay. This ran for three series during 1944 and 1945, with Will Hay playing Dr Muffin, the inept schoolmaster character for whom he was best known in his cinema films, who was Headmaster of St Michael's School for Boys.

If the in-page media player can't play an episode, you can listen to it by downloading it and playing it in your favourite mp3 player. They will all play okay in Windows Media Player, or in the free audio players Winamp or VLC Media Player.

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