Polari on BBC's Round the Horne

Round the Horne was a BBC Radio comedy program starring Kenneth Horne. The format was an old fashioned revue, mixing music and comedy. The BBC aired weekly episodes over 4 seasons from 1965 into 1968. Counting specials there were a total of 68 episodes. (Some sources list 71 inexplicably)  The series was created by Barry Took and Marty Feldman. The cast consisted of Kenneth Horne, Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, Betty Marsden and Bill Pertwee with writer Feldman alternately writing and/or performing in some seasons. [You may recognize Marty as Igor) The show's announcer Douglas Smith also appeared in some skits. More here.

Music was provided by the singing group the Fraser Hayes Four, backed by the BBC Radio Orchestra, but was billed as Edwin Braden and the Hornblowers. In the final season the Max Harris Group managed those duties. Round the Horne hit the air at the BBC at a time when television had already become the dominant broadcasting media. Nonetheless it pulled in a very respectable audience of 15 million listeners. Even in a 2019 poll in radio times, Round the Horne was voted the BBC's best radio comedy series ever.  Despite that, the series is totally unknown in the U.S. More here.

SERIES	EPISODES	START	YEAR
Series 1	16	March 7	1965
Series 2	13	March 13	1966
Series3	20	February 12	1967
Series4	16	February 25	1968
Special	1*	July 22	1966
Christmas	2**
TOTAL	68

*The special episode is a re-recording of The Man with the Golden Thunderball, with a slightly modified script. 

**Christmas episodes were aired on Dec 25th 1966 and Dec. 24th of 1967.

It's worth pointing out that the cast wasn't a group of randomly selected auteurs.  Kenneth Horne had previously been the host of a Saturday evening comedy and music radio show Variety Playhouse starting in January of 1957. Beyond that notoriety, there was a lot of continuity in the writers pool. Horne's next project Beyond our Ken, began with a pilot co-written with Variety Playhouse writers Eric Merriman and Barry Took. It's cast included Kenneth Williams, Ron Moody, Hugh Paddick and Betty Marsden. You might already recognize some names there. The music even included the Fraser Hayes Four. That was first broadcast in October of 1957. That troupe stayed together for 7 seasons even before starting Round the Horne.

SERIES	EPISODES	START	YEAR
Series 1	21	July 1	1958
Series 2	20	March 19	1959
Series 3	14	April 19	1960
Series 4	20	October 20	1960
Series 5	20	October 12	1961
Series 6	13	December 27	1962
Series 7	13	November 24	1963
Christmas	2**	1958 & 59
Pilot	1*	October 2	1957
TOTAL	124

 *The Pilot episode was recorded Oct. 1957

**Christmas episodes aired only with Series 1 & 2

But the writing for Round the Horne in the 1960s was different than Variety Playhouse  or Beyond our Ken. It's an over-used phrase, but it really pushed boundaries. The show endured regular scrutiny from BBC censors for its very naughty double entendres, but in 1965, having LGBT characters was genuinely risque. Homosexuality was not decriminalized in the UK until 1967. Gay and queer people obviously existed before then, but on the BBC, the closet door had to remain at least ostensibly shut. The series of skits with the characters Julian and Sandy, played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, but written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman broke ground.

The characters Julian and Sandy were two cheerful but campy homosexual men. Their first appearance was in episode four of the first series, and they proved so popular that they appeared in every episode thereafter. The gag was that straight man (in both senses of the term) Kenneth Horne was oblivious to their increasingly gay innuendos. But interestingly he did sometimes pick up some of their Polari... More on Polari in a bit.

Their Julian & Sandy routine ultimately outlived Horne and his eponymous program. They published a book The Bona Book of Julian & Sandy: Leaves from their Round the Horne Journal, and an LP/Cassette released in 1976 The Bona Album of Julian and Sandy. The BBC repackaged that in multiple formats often with the title The Bona World of Julian and Sandy. In 1987 they revived the bit for an appearance on the Wogan program. Then in 2003 then Round the Horne... revisited aired on  BBC Four, the characters were revived by actors Nigel Harrison and Robin Sebastian. More here.

But a little more on Polari. It was quite literally a secret language (more property a creole) used by the gay community in the UK from at least 1890 into the 1970s. It was mostly a mixture of  Italian, Romani, and British slang. Julian & Sandy took that underground language of gay subculture, simplified it and exposed it to the mainstream. While they did provide relatively positive role models, and an archetype for innumerable other camp characters, they also inadvertently helped to kill off Polari through that very same exposure. (You can read more about the language in the book Fabulosa! The Story of Polari by Paul Baker.)  So how did all that "secret" Polari terminology make it into the scripts?  I don't think it was the writers. Some of the content was ad libbed, and both of the actors, Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams were gay. Sadly Williams killed himself in 1988 with an overdose of barbiturates. More here.

Kenneth Horne died in 1969 of a heart and the BBC decided that Round the Horne could not continue without him. A faith healer had convinced him to stop taking his blood thinners. He had already survived a similar to a brush with death in 1958. Horne had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed with a slight limp. His long recuperation from that stroke led to the BBC putting Beyond our Ken on hold. So in some ways Around the Horne was his swan song. He was 61. More here.