The Larks Ascending

The Larks Ascending is a complete guide to comedy, humour and downright oddness on BBC Radio 3, from Kenneth Williams’ archival documentaries about strolling players who never existed, through Rowan Atkinson’s academic profiles of public figures who never existed, right up to Armando Iannucci’s interval talks about composers who did exist, but they’re fitting around him and his using his ears whether they like it or not. There’s Chris Morris interviewing Peter Cook (and getting in trouble), BBC Radiophonic Workshop hi-jinks, the first ever proper staging of Joe Orton’s unused film script for The Beatles, some sitcoms that definitely wouldn’t appeal to viewers waiting for Coronation Street, satire, silliness, and a couple of plays about cricket. And if that’s just not highbrow enough for you, then you could always enrol at The Half-Open University…

Featuring in-depth looks at little-known and little-heard works by Peter Cook, Sue Townsend, Ivor Cutler, Kenneth Williams, N.F. Simpson, Peter Tinniswood, Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, Malcolm Bradbury, John Sessions, Joe Orton, David Renwick And Andrew Marshall, Rowan Atkinson, Toby Hadoke, The National Theatre Of Brent, The BBC Radiophonic Workshop and more, The Larks Ascending is the full history of silliness and satire on the channel that Dr. Hans Keller called a 'daytime music station'. Priced at just a few pence*!


(*Please direct all complaints about actual price to Peter Weevil and John Throgmorton, Polyphonica Neasdeniensis)

Paperback - Kindle

You can hear me talking about the book and some of the shows featured in it here:

Twelve Radio Programmes That Need To Be Given A Proper Release

Amazingly, there are still some well-known - or at least well-regarded - radio programmes that are not available to buy either on CD or as downloads. Here are twelve that I think deserve a wider audience...

The Psychedelic Spy (BBC Radio 4, 1990)

Writer Andrew Rissik was responsible for this witty, action-packed pastiche of every last military-jacketed secret agent from lurid late sixties pulp paperbacks and equally lurid mind-hurting lava lamp-drenched late sixties post-Bond cinematic knock-offs, following reluctant globetrotting spy Billy Hindle as he wrestles with the end of the sixties - Rissik deliberately set it in 1968 as "by then the whole thing had turned sour" - and the constant demands of his superiors to take on 'just one last job'. The impressive cast includes such pop art-hued espionage drama veterans as James Aubrey, Joanna Lumley, Gerald Harper and Ed Bishop. The Psychedelic Spy occasionally shows up on Radio 4 Extra, but really is crying out for a proper release in suitable pastiche packaging.


Black Cinderella Two Goes East, Or Confessions Of A Glass Slipper Tryer-Onner (BBC Radio 2, 1978)

A decidedly non-family friendly pantomime as the comedy stars of the sixties - Peter Cook, John Cleese, David Hatch, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Jo Kendall - join forces with their late seventies counterparts Douglas Adams, John Lloyd, Clive Anderson and Rory McGrath for a half-satirical half-silly sendup of standard issue oh-no-he-isn't clichés with a side order of sarcastic comment about rampant strike-mania. Also making slightly more incongruous appearances are wartime radio laughtermaker Richard Murdoch, Ragtime presenter Maggie Henderson, and self-mocking real-life Lib Dem MP - for about another five minutes - John Pardoe. The overall effect is essentially an I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again sketch run nightmarishly beyond control, which is every bit as fantastic as that sounds. Black Cinderella Two Goes East is widely circulated amongst collectors, but otherwise is a noticeable omission from the available works of certain performers whose every last other recorded moment has been repackaged again and again and again.


The Chris Morris Music Show (BBC Radio 1, 1994)

Still seeing himself as very much a pop radio DJ rather than a television comedian, Chris Morris followed the success of The Day Today with a high-profile, much-coveted and long-promised slot on Radio 1. What followed can best be described as barely controlled mayhem, with a suspension partway through the run and the show pulled off air shortly before broadcast on more than one occasion; and yet every single second of it was achingly, genuinely side-splittingly funny. And of course you can find the full story of that in my book Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy At BBC Radio 1. From caustic tearing apart of the mechanics of journalism and surreally humiliating celebrity interviews to simply making fun of records he actually liked, Chris Morris hit Radio 1 like nothing before and arguably nothing after it. Inevitably his reign of terror (or, as he preferred, 'playing records and shouting') didn't last very long - as much because of fresh television offers as any nervousness over the content - but it disappeared as quietly as it arrived loudly; a sole promised BBC Radio Collection compilation, Newshound From Hell, ran into clearance problems and was never released. Possibly the single most important and influential radio comedy show of the nineties, and you can't buy a single second of it.


Lee & Herring (BBC Radio 1, 1994-95)

While not quite as problematic as their old comedy cohort Chris Morris, Stewart Lee and Richard Herring also enjoyed a significantly longer stint as 'proper' Radio 1 DJs, their popularity underlined by their briefly joining the roster of Top Of The Pops presenters. In addition to playing weird and wonderful records that may well have never been heard on any other radio show ever, they also spent their time trying out new comic ideas and encouraging the audience to indulge in situationist pranks such as paying to advertise their show in newsagents' windows; indeed, many of their most famous characters and routines including the lists of ridiculous pun sitcom titles, Ian News, Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Harris and The Fake Rod Hull made their first appearances here. Yet despite the rabidly obsessive nature of their still considerable fanbase, little of the Radio 1 shows has been heard from that day to this. A couple of sketches escaped as extras on the Fist Of Fun DVDs, but apart from that, nothing. There's a couple of good compilations in them at least. And I said good compilations, not those rubbish ones Radio 1 did after they left. Incidentally, those compilations are covered along with the actual proper shows in Fun At One...


Room 101 (BBC Radio 5, 1992-94)

Room 101 was much better in the early Nick Hancock-presented days, but even better still in its original Nick Hancock-presented radio incarnation. With no audience and on the whole a more interesting selection of guests, they had to rely more on actual reasons and often hilarious anecdotage to get their choices in - and Hancock in turn had to argue harder to keep them out - and it was a far more esoteric and cerebral show than you might understandably expect. A handful of editions were repeated on Radio 1 and later on Radio 4 Extra, but most remain unheard from that day to this; the impressive roster of guests included Paul Merton, Jo Brand, Danny Baker, David Baddiel, Steve Punt, John Walters, Frank Skinner, Trevor And Simon and Donna McPhail. Clip clearance and the sheer number of choices that would prove 'problematic' post-Yewtree probably mean that compilations are the best we'll get, but if you've never heard of O! Punchinello, 'This Train Has Failed' or Golfiana, or indeed heard Danny Baker explaining why he hates Pete Sinfield of King Crimson's solo album so much, you'll probably agree that we need some.


Orbiter X (BBC Light Programme, 1959)

You can read a lot more about this fantastic Cold War-allegorising tale of space station subterfuge here; what's surprising is that despite the enduring popularity of the long-running Journey Into Space, the BBC have never really done very much with the various serials that followed in its wake, such as Orbiter X, Orbit One Zero, The Lost Planet and Nicholas Quinn - Anonymous. They have all spent far too long gathering cosmic dust and it would be nice to see them given the exposure and recognition they deserve. Preferably with booklets featuring rare photos and archive material.


Patterson (BBC Radio 3, 1981)

Radio 3 went through a very odd phase of trying to score a hit highbrow sitcom in the eighties, including such angular and intellectual takes on the genre as Such Rotten Luck and Blood And Bruises; the closest they came to scoring an actual success with audiences and critics alike was with the genuinely brilliant Patterson. Written by Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Bigsby - not exactly your average sitcom scriptwriter pairing - the series was a loose thematic follow-on from the former's celebrated novel The History Man, and followed hapless University lecturer Andrew Patterson through a chain of absurdist happenings on campus; as you are probably imagining, it does bear some strong - though apparently genuinely coincidental - similarities to A Very Peculiar Practice. Repeated once by Radio 2 in a new Radio 2-friendly re-edit, it still inspires a significant online following, which makes its failure to resurface all the more like Prof. Misty has been put in charge of remembering it.


The Mary Whitehouse Experience (BBC Radio 1, 1989-90)

Staggeringly, apart from The Mary Whitehouse Experience Encyclopedia and a couple of bits on individual live videos (oh, and Minutes Of The Parish Council Meeting, if you insist), nothing from any incarnation of The Mary Whitehouse Experience has ever been made commercially available. This is astonishing when you consider both how popular and influential it was; rumours have long flown around that this was in fact down to one of the team blocking it, but while I was researching Fun At One all four confirmed to me that this wasn't the case (as, for that matter, did Mark Thomas, Jo Brand and one of Skint Video) so we can discount that right now. A couple of people associated with the show indicated that the issue had been raised with BBC Worldwide who felt that it was 'too topical', which if true indicates that nobody working there had ever actually heard any of it. Newman, Baddiel, Punt and Dennis are all still hugely successful - more so than ever in some cases - and enough time has elapsed for the original long-sleeve-t-shirt-sporting listeners to become genuinely nostalgic for it, so why isn't any of it available to buy? Conclusion: Ken Dodd Is Innocent.


Collins And Maconie's Hit Parade (BBC Radio 1, 1994-97)

Andrew Collins and Stuart Maconie - and resident weekly 'guest' David Quantick - were Radio 1's in-house acerbic music critics with a proper music show during some very interesting times for pop music, which amongst many highlights saw them delivering arguably the definitive take on the Blur/Oasis chart battle, and reacting live to Jarvis Cocker's stage invasion at the Brit Awards. There were plenty of discussions worth revisiting, numerous 'guset critics' who have gone on to enjoy greater prominence, and the weekly 'Quantick's World' rants, which as good as deserve an entire release on their own; not that Morrissey or Paul Weller would be too happy about that, mind. There are tons of contributions to other shows worth considering too, including their 'Eyewitness Reports' for The Evening Session, and the absurd bit of 'walking across the BBC' business they did when guest-hosting the following show. All of which, incidentally, is covered in a certain book...


The Graveyard Shift (BBC Radio 1, 1993-97)

If one show exemplified Radio 1's superb and much-needed early nineties reinvention, it was the late-night shenanigans of Mark Radcliffe, Marc Riley and their various friends, wellwishers and hangers-on. Promising "poetry, comedy, live music and a boy called Lard", it delivered all of this and more, day in day out, with the playlist of promising indie singles - effectively an unofficial testing ground for what might work on daytime radio, and a few major mid-nineties hits got their first play here - interspersed with lengthy and freewheeling chats on any given subject from whether Lady Chatterley's Lover needed 'spicing up' to an argument over what prog rock track was used as the theme music for Weekend World, with interjections from comedians and critics, notably Andrew Collins' diary readings, Stuart Maconie's 'veritable smorgasbord', Mark Kermode's Cult Film Corner and John Shuttleworth's rambling updates on his promising musical career. Oh and not forgetting 'Slippers, Please!'. Just imagine if there was a book covering all of this. A CD compilation of some of the regular sketches was released at the time, but we really could do with something more representative of the shu-, which after all was always full of loads of quality items. And him, Boy Lard.


Kremmen Of The Star Corps (Capital Radio, 1976-80)

One of the few commercial radio shows that would ever warrant a commercial release, Kenny Everett recorded dozens upon dozens of episodes of tongue-in-cheek cliffhanging sci-fi serial adventures of Captain Elvis Brandenburg Kremmen for Capital Radio during the seventies, some of which were later adapted for the animated version in his ITV sketch show. In fact, Captain Kremmen was just one of several ideas Everett developed for a London-only audience that ended up attracting national attention, which just serves to underline what a true one-off genius he was. One full story was released as the The Greatest Adventure Yet From Captain Kremmen LP in 1979, and a couple of others escaped on Capital promo singles and prize giveaways, but surprisingly nobody seems to have thought of stringing the rest of them together in box set form yet. The Thargoids have probably drained the idea from our collective intelligence.


Rawlinson End (BBC Radio 1, 1971-91)

English as tuppence, changing and changeless as canal water, nestling in green nowhere, Viv Stanshall's tales of life - or at least what passed for it - in and around Rawlinson End were one of the most popular features of John Peel's show, and used to provoke a flood of calls and letters asking if they were available to buy. And yet, one single album of rearranged and rerecorded early episodes aside, they never have been. The original unexpurgated exploits of Sir Henry, Aunt Florrie and unwilling company should be held up as a triumph of the language to rank with Dickens, Wodehouse and Adams, but instead they are just sort of sat on a shelf somewhere like disregarded souvenirs from military service in some far flung corner of the Empire. Perfectly in keeping with Rawlinson End itself, maybe, but an entirely ridiculous situation. Mrs. E, we do know what we want and we want it now! And if you want to know more? Now read on, dot dot dot dot dot...

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And while we're all waiting, you can read more about Rawlinson End, Kenny Everett, Lee And Herring, Chris Morris, The Graveyard Shift and Collins And Maconie in Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy At BBC Radio 1, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

The Memorex Years: Peter Cook & Dudley Moore 'The LS Bumblebee'/'The Bee Side'

One of my earlier attempts at starting a blog was The Memorex Years, an unworkably high-concept venture in which I aimed to review the contents of the various home-taped C60s and C90s that had once recieved such heavy rotation in my Walkman before consigning them to the dustbin, and how antiquated all of those words look already. Especially 'dustbin'. The name, in case you were wondering, came from a long-forgotten Radio 4 comedy series which itself was somewhere on one of said tapes, while the original 'mission statement' read "in the age of podcasts and digital music formats, huge boxes full of cassette tapes are being left forgotten and this is a trawl through the highlights of one such box; albums and singles put on tape for convenience, meticulous and not-so-meticulous recordings of radio shows, wobbly copies of copies of impossibly rare material, distorted recordings made by holding a microphone aloft at a gig... they're all in there and are slowly making their way onto here". Very slowly indeed, as it turned out, as it all proved to involve far too much effort to sustain any sort of regular posting schedule - when you have to write about every song, which the format demanded, it inevitably gets pretty long very quickly - and when some more interesting projects came along it was quietly 'retired'. But I've always had a great deal of affection for the few pieces that did make it onto the blog, and over the next couple of weeks I'll be giving them a welcome re-run on here, with extra updated bits and pieces where appropriate. Additionally, I've also found one completed entry that, for no readily obvious reason, was never actually published... but more about that soon. For now, here's the first ever Memorex Years, covering a psychedelia-spoofing single by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore...

"Freak out baby - The Bee is coming!"

'Comedy is the new rock'n'roll!' was a popular journalistic cliche in the early nineties, but Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had done much to deserve such a tag almost three decades earlier. Although they came to prominence as part of the stage revue Beyond The Fringe along with the hardly degenerate Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, Cook and Moore were a lot more 'hip' than the vast majority of their peers; they hung out with pop stars and trendy actors, were able to parody youth culture and pop music in an incisive and unpatronising fashion, and even managed to score a couple of hit singles of their own. [Plug Time! This later formed part of the opening chapter of my history of comedy on BBC Radio 1, Fun At One]

First heard in the 1966 Christmas Special of their BBC TV sketch show Not Only... But Also..., and released as a single the following January, The L.S. Bumble Bee was one of the few that missed the charts; ironic, as it was by far both their most effective pop parody and best single overall.

Written for an extended sketch lampooning the then-current fervour around the Carnaby Street-centred 'Swinging London' phenomenon, The L.S. Bumblebee was intended as a parody of the exciting new 'psychedelic' sounds that were drifting out of the capital's live music venues on a swirl of paisley-patterned mist. Unlike other attempts at celebrating the scene, most notoriously Roger Miller's England Swings (not only written and sung by an American, but also labouring under the misapprehension that the most noteworthy facet of this technicolour explosion of arts and culture - which, lest we forget, "swings like a pendulum do" - was a preponderance of policemen), Cook and Moore's spoof newsreel feature showed that they had enough of an understanding of what was going on to be simultaneously excited and irritated by the whirl of media attention, and were thereby able to mine some first-rate humour from it.

Lyrically, The L.S. Bumble Bee is essentially a send-up of the decidedly unsubtle 'subtle' references to various non-prescription substances that were beginning to find their way into the lyrics of pop hits such as The Small Faces' My Mind's Eye. The psychedelic 'insect', it is claimed, allows its disciples to "hear with my knees, run with my nose, smell with my feet" and other amazing feats of altered perception, hilariously punctuated by the duo chiming in with gasps of astonishment in 'awestruck idiot' voices (particularly great in response to a mention of top far-out combo "Alf Herbert & His Marijuana Brass, with their hit waxing 'Spanish Bee'"). It's entirely possible that the chart failure of the single was down to nervous radio programmers feeling uncomfortable with its content - even without the words 'psychedelic' and 'druggy' showing up, it's pretty explicit stuff - and deciding that even despite its obvious comic intent it was a little strong to inflict on the average fan of Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers.

If anything, the musical accompaniment is even further 'out'. An odd rumour has grown up over the years that the music for The L.S. Bumblebee was written and recorded by The Beatles, and given to Cook and Moore to use as they saw fit. This seems to have no basis in truth whatsoever; apart from the fact that it doesn't even sound like The Beatles, but does sound like The Dudley Moore Trio, Moore did discuss the recording session in a couple of interviews, revealing that Cook lost his voice halfway through and, more tellingly, that the song was always intended as a parody of the Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys rather than The Beatles. It's certainly possible to detect more than a hint of Brian Wilson's Psychedelic Barbershop Quartet about The L.S. Bumblebee, and given that the Beach Boys were then being hailed by the UK music press (unlike in the US, where Pet Sounds was largely ignored on release) and had a far greater influence on the paisley-shirted bandwagon-jumping hordes than any American adherents of overlong improvised blues jams ever did, it's probably better to take his word for it rather than that of the 'Beatlologists'. [It's worth pointing out here too that there's nothing in Mark Lewisohn's exhaustive history of Beatles recording sessions that could account for this story]

The backing - which, as noted before, bears some strong similarities to other Dudley Moore Trio efforts (notably the tremendous Love Me from the Bedazzled soundtrack) - is performed in a straightforward 'beat group' style, but embellished with what would soon become recognised as psychedelic hallmarks; droning organ, tons of over-the-top sound effects (including seagulls, a crying baby and a car screeching to a halt), and what sounds like somebody scraping the strings inside a piano. It's also dominated by a downbeat and mysterious melody, reminiscent of The Zombies' She's Not There, Herman's Hermits' No Milk Today, and other similar songs that probably unintentionally predicted the psychedelic sound.

In fact, The L.S. Bumble Bee did a fair amont of predicting itself. It's staggering to think how effectively they managed to nail the sound of British psychedelic pop, given that the song was written and recorded in the Autumn of 1966; before Traffic had even released Paper Sun, let alone the hallucinogenic free-for-all that followed the release of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. While hardly indicating that Cook and Moore were psychedelic cheerleaders themselves - as has been well documented elsewhere, they shared an enthusiasm for more mundane forms of intoxication - it does at least suggest that they were hanging out at the right venues and lending a keen ear to various late-night pirate radio shows.

If there is a downside to The L.S. Bumble Bee, it's that the visuals aren't anywhere near as exciting as the actual song. It's a fair bet that most viewers who weren't lucky enough to see Not Only... But Also... the first time around will have heard The L.S. Bumble Bee long before they ever got to see the Swinging London-satirising sketch that it hailed from, and doubtless will have formed tantalising mental images of Cook and Moore waving their arms around in front of flashing lights and rotating shapes whilst a line of go-go dancing girls in swirly body paint writhed behind them. Instead, in something of an anti-climax, all we get is the two of them politely lip-synching in Nehru jackets whilst pretending to hand things to each other in a factory sequence.

The b-side, punningly entitled The Bee Side, is a four and a half minute Pete & Dud dialogue that sees them "take the opportunity of these few grooves at our disposal to give you a solemn warning against the dangers of the drug traffic - this peril that lurks in teenage haunts where beat music pulses out into the night, keeping vicars awake and old ladies jumping out of their beds continuously". This takes the form of a series of case studies of respectable members of society who fell victim to the illicit thrills of the hallucinogenic experience, including a scientist previously noted for his work in the field of pouring milk on mice, and a critical assessment of artists who have drawn influence from mind-bending substances. Probably largely improvised in the studio, it does lack the structure and wild escalation of the 'proper' dialogues, but as throwaway sketches go The Bee Side is a strong effort, particularly the cautionary tale of a man left so ravaged by his experiences that he ended up believing himself to be a rake ("the only time he moves is when somebody treads on him, and he jumps up and bangs them in the eye"). It's only a pity that this was never extended into a full-blown Pete & Dud item, although how comfortable the BBC would have been with any such sketch is open to question.

Unfortunately, The L.S. Bumble Bee/The Bee Side isn't very easy to get hold of nowadays. For some peculiar reason, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's considerable discography has been not so much shabbily treated as almost completely ignored by the reissue market, with the majority of album tracks and single sides unavailable in any format. The L.S. Bumblebee itself has seen reissue as part of Acid Drops, Spacedust And Flying Saucers, a four-CD box set compilation of UK psychedelia put together by Mojo magazine, but if you already own the more obvious tracks on this admittedly well-thought out compilation and aren't that tempted by the other material - and that's assuming you're interested in the first place - it's a rather expensive way of getting hold of one rare track. Even the episode of Not Only... But Also... that it appears in is rarely glimpsed, on account of the boring legal nonsense surrounding John Lennon's guest appearance in a couple of sketches. [We still don't have a Cook & Moore box set, nor indeed any repeats of the Lennon-featuring Not Only... But Also...; yeah, cheers Yoko]

But if you still want to fly to the land where my hand can see and my eyes can walk and the mountain talks to me, and are happy to risk the dangers of keeping vicars awake and old ladies jumping out of their beds continuously, both tracks can be heard at the brilliant Peter Cook fan site The Establishment. [Or you can watch the YouTube video below...!]