An extract from Fun At One looking at Viv Stanshall and Keith Moon's somewhat off-kilter detective serial parody...
![]( "Keith Moon and John Walters in a Radio 1 promo pic.")
The centrepiece of Viv Stanshall’s Radio Flashes was Breath From The Pit, a running serial that featured Stanshall as intrepid Colonel Knut and Keith Moon as his cheeky cockney assistant Lemmy, a loyal and relentlessly optimistic individual who spoke in an impenetrable wash of rhyming slang.
Introduced by Devil’s Gallop, the real-life theme music from popular radio detective serial Dick Barton – Special Agent, the serial was very much in the style of the episodic cliffhanging sagas of square-jawed heroes that Stanshall and Moon had grown up listening to. Yet it was not actually a parody of the genre as such; more a gentle and affectionate pastiche, with the humour arising from Stanshall’s outlandish scenarios and witty wordplay (“when Knut regains his senses, he is one short”) rather than any direct mockery of the old-fashioned serials.
A presentation of the 'British Brainwashing Controller', the serial followed the Colonel and Lemmy as they investigated a stately house that had become overrun by gorillas that have been sighted driving cars, filling out crosswords and applying for work in the prison service; as Knut points out, “if they had access to the correct paperwork then it could be the end of civilisation as we know it”. It soon transpires that their old adversary The Scorpion is behind the fiendish plot, but with the Colonel stripped of his trusty Magic Trousers and reduced to eating his own sock, it takes all of their ingenuity and square-jawed Britishness to foil the Scorpion’s plans. Flying away victorious on the regained Magic Trousers, the duo reflect on the fact that the people on the ground look like ants:
“They may look tiny and insignificant from up here, but you ought to see them when there’s a scrap on… or when some foreign bounder gives our pigmented friends a hard time, or when some blasted bureaucratic bounder or demoniacal demagogue posing as a Prime Minister imposes his perverted politics on the poor impressionable proletariat. What do those people do then? Those ‘ants’?”
“They have a bevy, don’t they guvnor?”
“Right on Lemmy, they drink. Drink themselves insensible, slump in front of their tellies, and don’t take a blind bit of notice”.
As finely tuned as Viv Stanshall’s Radio Flashes may have sounded on air, getting the shows into a broadcastable state was not without its problems. Stanshall initially threw himself into the shows with great enthusiasm, but by the third week a pattern of heavy drinking had set in again. Work became slower and more arduous, with even the formidable Walters finding it difficult to persuade Stanshall to have scripts ready in time for recording. Matters came to a head when Stanshall turned up two hours late for the session that had been set aside for the recording of the final instalment of Breath From The Pit, and when Walters and Moon politely asked him for the script, he announced with no little irritation and incredulity that he had to write it first.
Fun At One, the story of comedy at BBC Radio 1, is available as a paperback here or as an eBook here.
![]( "Radio Flashes in Radio Times.")
The centrepiece of Viv Stanshall’s Radio Flashes was Breath From The Pit, a running serial that featured Stanshall as intrepid Colonel Knut and Keith Moon as his cheeky cockney assistant Lemmy, a loyal and relentlessly optimistic individual who spoke in an impenetrable wash of rhyming slang.
Introduced by Devil’s Gallop, the real-life theme music from popular radio detective serial Dick Barton – Special Agent, the serial was very much in the style of the episodic cliffhanging sagas of square-jawed heroes that Stanshall and Moon had grown up listening to. Yet it was not actually a parody of the genre as such; more a gentle and affectionate pastiche, with the humour arising from Stanshall’s outlandish scenarios and witty wordplay (“when Knut regains his senses, he is one short”) rather than any direct mockery of the old-fashioned serials.
A presentation of the 'British Brainwashing Controller', the serial followed the Colonel and Lemmy as they investigated a stately house that had become overrun by gorillas that have been sighted driving cars, filling out crosswords and applying for work in the prison service; as Knut points out, “if they had access to the correct paperwork then it could be the end of civilisation as we know it”. It soon transpires that their old adversary The Scorpion is behind the fiendish plot, but with the Colonel stripped of his trusty Magic Trousers and reduced to eating his own sock, it takes all of their ingenuity and square-jawed Britishness to foil the Scorpion’s plans. Flying away victorious on the regained Magic Trousers, the duo reflect on the fact that the people on the ground look like ants:
“They may look tiny and insignificant from up here, but you ought to see them when there’s a scrap on… or when some foreign bounder gives our pigmented friends a hard time, or when some blasted bureaucratic bounder or demoniacal demagogue posing as a Prime Minister imposes his perverted politics on the poor impressionable proletariat. What do those people do then? Those ‘ants’?”
“They have a bevy, don’t they guvnor?”
“Right on Lemmy, they drink. Drink themselves insensible, slump in front of their tellies, and don’t take a blind bit of notice”.
As finely tuned as Viv Stanshall’s Radio Flashes may have sounded on air, getting the shows into a broadcastable state was not without its problems. Stanshall initially threw himself into the shows with great enthusiasm, but by the third week a pattern of heavy drinking had set in again. Work became slower and more arduous, with even the formidable Walters finding it difficult to persuade Stanshall to have scripts ready in time for recording. Matters came to a head when Stanshall turned up two hours late for the session that had been set aside for the recording of the final instalment of Breath From The Pit, and when Walters and Moon politely asked him for the script, he announced with no little irritation and incredulity that he had to write it first.
Fun At One, the story of comedy at BBC Radio 1, is available as a paperback here or as an eBook here.
