Telling jokes
Michael Vestey
Craig Brown's sometimes surrealistic ..._.humour in the Telegraph and Private Eye has been brought to Radio Four in a six-part series, This Is Craig Brown (Wednesdays). Everything we're familiar with is there: pastiche, parody, farce and some telling satire. The cast is strong and includes Rory Bremner, Edward Fox, Felicity Montague and Harry Enfield with John Humphrys, Charlotte Green and Barry Norman playing themselves.
Humptuys interviews a government minister about a storm in a teacup in a satire of his Today programme style and the content, It came off though not everything does, such is the nature of satire. An EastEnders sketch featuring Churchill and Hitler didn't work for me. An impression of the Queen was excellent, capturing both her voice and pronunciation beautifully, and Tony Benn's interminable diaries on radio cassettes are funny. Future subjects are first-hand accounts by the five most distinguished people never to have had sex with Marilyn Monroe, and Barry Norman's interview with Daffy Duck. We will also hear from Brown's columnist characters. Bel Littlejohn and Wallace Arnold.
Charles Chilton is one of those remarkable pioneering radio producers and writers that the 1940s and 1950s created. Now 87, he talked engagingly about his career to Russell Davies in the Archive Hour on Radio Four (Saturday). Chilton wrote and produced many shows including Journey Into Space, an immensely popular sciencefiction series. He grew up in poverty in London, and one day walked into the then new Broadcasting House to ask for a job as a messenger boy. He was told to write a letter. When he was interviewed and explained that his father had died in the first world war he was given a job. The director-general, Lord Reith, had been injured in the war and favoured maimed exsoldiers or those who had suffered in consequence, a policy that lasted until the 1980s.
As a messenger, he came to know producers who discovered his interest and knowledge of popular music and jazz. He was soon promoted to work in the gramophone library and was allowed to present music programmes, though he was taken off the air because of his cockney accent. He was later reinstated when troops in the second world war told the B13C they liked his shows. As a producer in the Variety department he worked on the Goon Show, acting as a diplomat between Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan who had stopped speaking to each other.
After being asked to write a science-fiction drama be researched astronomy, buying a telescope and building an observatory. As he recalled, he read only facts not fiction, coming up with Journey Into Space with its hero Jet Morgan. It was set in the future, 1965, so his projected moon landings weren't far out. He regarded the sound-effects as just as important as the script, and the series is said to have become the highest-rated ever. He also wrote parts of the play Oh! What a Lovely War, though Joan Littlewood, the director, kept removing his name from the credits. He had to consult lawyers to have it restored. Davies wondered if a Charles Chilton would prosper in today's BBC. I doubt that the opportunities he was able to seize would come his way now.
When A.A. Milne created Winnie-thePooh I don't suppose he imagined that 80 years later there would be litigation over the merchandising rights that has lasted 13 years and which costs, in pre-trial hearings in Los Angeles. $1 million a month. After all, he sold the American and Canadian rights to a New York agent, Stephen Slesinger, for only $1,000 in 1930. Slesinger's widow and daughter claim that the Walt Disney Corporation, which has the film rights, has cheated them out of merchandising royalties, possibly by as much as $6 billion. Anyway, the case gave Phi11 Jupitus the excuse to present a programme on Radio Four this week about his much-loved bear, Winnie-the-Pooh: Lost and Found (Monday), visiting the house in Chelsea where the Milnes lived and the stairs up which Christopher Robin dragged Edward Bear to the bathroom, and the Ashdown Forest in Sussex, another setting for the stories.
He even went to Harrods, where in 1921 Daphne Milne bought a toy bear for Christopher Robin, and to London Zoo where the original Canadian bear called Winnie — after Winnipeg — was first seen by the family. It transpires that the bear was female. Pooh, it seems, comes from the name of a swan that the Milnes encountered on holiday somewhere. Whatever the reason, the Pooh stories maintain their grip on the imagination. For Milne, the theory has it, writing the stories was a retreat into childhood from the horrors of the first world war, after which he had a breakdown. Perhaps today's grown-up enthusiasts are escaping the realities of modern life.
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