last night I was listening to the Julian and Sandy sketches from Round The Horne. I was in stitches at them. Despite the fact they were recorded in the 1960s and at a time when a lot of people probably didn't really get it, or fully understand it. They are very brave, it just must have went over peoples heads and sounded just like a lot of silly nonsense.
It's funny too that with all the time that's past and me belonging to a totally different and freer generation that this reminded me so much of how it is when a group of gay men get together. Polari may be practically dead now, and the reason for it's use is not really necessary but I think that elements of it carry on in different ways. Among certain subgroups language can be twisted and changed and come to mean other things. I know with my close friends this happens. Certainly with gay men, wonderful things are done with manipulation or distortion of language. A lot of what's being said in those sketches is still being done today, in a way. I don't know why but gay men seem to really get a kick out of playing with words and language in that way.
Oh - Jule and Sand are just hilarious. And you're right about it going over people's heads. There's some really rude stuff in them that the censors would have listened to and passed because they simply had no idea what the words meant in this context. Barry Took and Marty Feldman, as well as Kenneth and Hugh Paddick, must have thought it was hilarious that they could get away with murder because things were just too innocent.
I don't think they could get away with it now, what with Google and all, but back then polari really was very hidden. If you weren't in the club you wouldn't have known anything about it. And I guess RTH uncovering some of the mystery around it - as well as having two characters like this - was a sign of how times were moving forward (the 1967 Sexual Offences Act was passed before the final series of the show).
I only learnt much about polari from discovering RTH in the Nineties, and my knowledge of words and phrases doesn't go much beyond that. But it has an incredible history and I'm sure it would have kept some men out of prison.
Julian and Sandy are hysterical, I bought the CDs for my dad in the 90s and after he had them for a month, would ask if I could borrow them.
I did return them, and have since replaced with CDs
They are real LOL stuff, I love Kenneth Horne's fruity voice on Round the Horne and some of the sketches are funny then and now.
They're wonderful, aren't they? Funnily enough another thread earlier today reminded me of something in
Round The Horne, so they're definitely a frame of reference for me.
I started on the
Jule & Sand audiobooks, then the tapes of
Round The Horne and ended up buying the whole series. Great fun, but I haven't listened to it all in a while. In recent years
Just A Minute has become a bit of a go-to for me, and Kenneth had some wonderful moments in that too.
@Alexis, if you haven't listened to
RTH in full I can highly recommend it. It's packed with wild and wacky characters and bucketloads of innuendo.
I'm not a morning person either.
