Options
How Did They Get Away With It? Delving Into Radio History
AtlanticFlyer
Posts: 172 Forum Member
✭
Does anyone remember the BBC radio programme "Educating Archie"? It may not seem particularly notable except for the fact that it was a ventriloquist show - on the radio!! What next, a juggling act on the radio or maybe a closeup magic act?
1
Comments
Looking online, it seems it was very popular, with 15millions listeners and over 250,000 in the show's fan club. It also had a fantastic cast, with Tony Hancock, Benny Hill, Harry Secombe, Dick Emery, Hattie Jacques, Bruce Forsyth, Julie Andrews.
Considering it hasn't been on for 62 years now, I guess it could argued life was very different and radio was still the primary form of home entertainment as ITV was only a couple of years old when the show ended, so maybe you could get away with more back then. Simpler and less cynical time.
People would listen to these shows and their imagination would be put into use and they would picture in their head what was going on.
A similar situation with radio dramas and serials like "The Archers" A good example of this was a friend of mine was an avid listener to "The Archers" for many years. One particular Bank Holiday in the 1980s, the girl that played the part of Shula Archer was the guest at a local fête. I asked my friend if he wanted to go and meet her, but he refused, saying that he had pictured in his mind what she looked like for a very long time and didn't want to change that image of her.
I saw him live very many years ago in Great Yarmouth. He covered his mouth with a large cigar, in a theatre the fact that he couldn't do ventriloquism was not so obvious.
I don't remember the original broadcasts but it's been repeated on Radio 4 Extra (or its predecessors) a few times. Very popular in its day.
Best place for it! Peter Brough was a terrible ventriloquist by all accounts - he had to do radio because he couldn't manage TV (as others have said).
Ventriloquism on the radio isn't completely dead. Here's a one-off show by Nina Conti that was broadcast on R4 in 2013. Very funny it was too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sm78h
You think that doesn't happen now? Thanks a Lot, Milton Jones is coming up shortly on Radio 4...
Funnily enough I didn't say I thought it doesn't happen now. Unless you can see something in my post that I can't?
All right, you said it existed a lot more than it does now. Which it probably did. I was just trying to plug one of my favourite programmes
precisely up to the minute and absolutely dead pan (of course!), and absolutely no-one batted an eyelid and the audio wasn't
removed from the (tea-time) broadcast.
(For anyone that doesn't "get it", the audio will still be "out there" somewhere, and the "radio paints a picture in the mind" of
the gag, i.e. HMQ being advised by Prince Charles in their "plummy" accents is priceless radio.)
Somewhere maybe, but not on the BBC. The BBC has done its best to obliterate any trace of Clement Freud, as it did with Jimmy Savile and others of that ilk.
When they put together a special compilation celebrating 50 years of Just a Minute they managed to delete Freud's contributions from the record entirely and made no reference to him whatsoever. Which is quite remarkable for someone who was a mainstay of the programme for around 40 years.
That's the ventriloquist in you. Didn't see your lips move.