It is a tribute to the show’s impact and longevity that even eighty years after its original broadcast on the BBC Home Service on March the 4th 1946, fans of ‘Why Indeed Not Try It Madam!’ (WINTIM) still gather every year in Great Yarmouth (birthplace of its star Charlie ‘The Major’ Haverstock) to recreate some of the show’s classic characters and catchphrases.
But what are the origins of WINTIM? How did it evolve into the genre defining show it became and why are people still obsessed with it eight decades later?
Following in the wake of ITMA, WINTIM pandered to an audience that loved meaningless catchphrases and mildly offensive caricatures. Its writers, Julian Clench and James ‘Dewy’ Forrest, met in a German Prisoner of War camp in Dusseldorf – they’d both been captured trying to smuggle excessive eggs into the diet of the Nazi high command. It was hoped that persistent constipation would stop them concentrating fully on their military strategies and would lead to slip-ups. Interestingly enough the two egg-bound plots were created, developed and implemented entirely separately without knowledge of the other by two different elements of the British Military. Clench was part of the Catering Corps, and Forrest was an agent for 2nd Regiment of Surrealists who were also simultaneously mounting a major offensive against the Nazis in Dieppe by dressing pilchards up as cancan dancers and forcing them through the letterboxes of Nazi Party officials.
Whilst in the POW camp, Clench and Forrest starting penning little sketches based on their fellow prisoners and some of the more whimsical guards. In fact, their character Camp Commandant Heinreich ‘Oooh get you die Ente’ was to feature in the first two series of WINTIM before the BBC executives caught on. When they returned to Britain at the end of the war, Clench and Forrest started writing for Music Hall comedian, Bert ‘Two Lumps’ Trotter, who gave the lads free rein to develop and expand their own material. That material caught the eye of BBC Comedy Producer Lancival Promptly-Goitre who immediately brought in the two young writers to support Ted Kavanagh in his writing of ITMA. They were an instant success, creating the character of ‘Orrible ‘Orace’ for Horace Percival to play. He was a peeping Tom and fishmonger: “I was ‘aving a peep at me pollock, before I ‘ad a shuftee at me shellfish.“ and also singing troubadour, Guiraudo de Caterwaul, (also played by Percival), who would recite appalling ballads each week such as: “Love is like a great inflammation! It’s red and its sore and causes great consternation!“, “My love for you is a-greater than a blimp, is cheekier than a chimp, is firm and never limp.“
On the back of their ITMA success, Promptly-Goitre commissioned them to write their own half an hour variety show. In order to help the two young writers succeed with such a daunting task, Promptly-Goitre set them up with experienced radio-producer and fellow ex-Etonian, Reginald Ghastly-Premise. Ghastly-Premise was pivotal in attracting top music hall comedy talent and the cream of the crop for the military gang shows.
Clarence ‘Rubber-Faced’ O’Hare was a tremendously successful Music Hall act. He was a professional gurner. He had won the World Gurning Championships at the Egremont Crab Fair eight years in a row between 1937 and 1944 and decided to take his face-pulling skills to the West End. Ghastly-Premise hired O’Hare for WINTIM’s first series. During the first episode, for his slot, the studio audience were in hysterics, but for the audience at home it essentially amounted to a minute and half’s worth of silence interspersed with audience laughter. In the second episode, whilst O’Hare gurneyed, Ghastly-Premise had the sound engineer squeeze and twist tripe in front of the microphone to give an aural impression of the act. It worked perfectly and O’Hare become a regular for all eight series of WINTIM with fans frequently sending him tripe in the mail. When he went on holiday for a month in the Summer of ’52, the resultant festering maggot plague on his doorstep that he came home to provided his local fishing club with bait for the rest of the year.
Of course women weren’t officially recognised as being funny until 1987 when scientists discovered the ulnar nerve in women during an autopsy on a Mrs Gladys Mildew. Wendy Didcot, the token woman in the cast of WIMTIM therefore played the straight role, acting as a stooge or feed for the funny lines of the men in the cast. Any funny lines that were to be delivered by a female character were invariably given to one of the male cast members who then put on one of two hysterical ‘female’ voices – alluring, ditsy goddess or screeching harridan. When Didcot left the show at the end of the fifth series she was replaced by Marjorie Flump and nobody noticed. Didcot went on to become Governor of Toronto and eventually Prime Minister of Canada. But nobody noticed.
Dodgy Digby, the cockney spiv, played by former Etonian Winstanley Catflap-Smith, announced his arrival each week with the hysterical catchphrase ‘I can get ya one for half the price!’ and would leave on the equally rib-tickling ‘Me granny could knit ya a cosy for it! Ta-rah!“ In the one-off television adaptation of WINTIM in March ’51, Catflap-Smith was replaced with a real Cockney actor, as producers feared his pronounced Adam’s apple would out him as not being working class.
Music was provided by the popular close harmony singing quartet, Sally and the Swingers – made up of siblings and cousins, Randy and Davy Hickson, and the married couple Donald and Daphne Hickson (nee Hickson). They provided musical interludes each week with four-part harmony renditions of such popular 40s hits as ‘Sweetheart, Sweetheart’, ‘Dancing with my Baby’ and ‘Uncle Brian’s a Warlock’. Outside of the show, Sally and the Swingers had regular gigs at various nightclubs, and in 1967 supported ‘The Who’ on tour.
Majestic Todger and His Ragtime Orchestra would play the theme tune and the incidental music for routines. On occasions Majestic was given lines and the cast got to play with Todger whilst the live studio audience got to watch and enjoy the spectacle. Todger went on to write the music for ‘The Sweeney’ and all but one episode of ‘Mr Benn’.
Arthur ‘Chopper’ Hatchet played a couple of recurring characters: Clumpo the Arthritic Clown and Hortense Badgerly ‘spinster of this parish’. Clumpo would offer his services to the ‘The Major’ each week before inevitably proving unable to because of his cripplingly cruel arthritis. “I can’t grip me tool, sir!“ he said every week before honking. The Major would reply: “Let me grip it for you, Clumpo.“ and Clumpo would say: “That’s why I got thrown out of the Big Top, sir.“
His Hortense Badgerly ‘spinster of this parish’ would try in vain each week, as a libidinous octogenarian, to get the Major to marry her. “Let me polish your shiny danglers for you, young man.“ was her catchphrase. The belief at the time was that such lines got past the BBC censors as they were all retired colonels who wouldn’t know an innuendo if it leapt up and tickled their peculiar. However, most modern experts now feel it was actually a case of them using that preconception as a mask for their lascivious lust for smut.
Hatchet, of course, went on to feature in several of the earlier ‘Carry on Films’, playing Arthritic Bobby in ‘Carry on Constable’, and Bollard 3 in ‘Carry on Sergeant’, and also had a recurring role as Ennui the Destroyer during Jon Pertwee’s duration as the Third Doctor. Ennui was a creature from Pluto who tried to defeat the Doctor by insisting that nothing was really worth it and everyone may as well just give up and have a bit of a lie-down.
At the heart of the show and its lingering success was its host and star, Charlie ‘The Major’ Haverstock. Haverstock had spent the whole war entertaining the troops on the frontline with his ventriloquist act involving his dummy, Raymond le Fromage (a forty year-old French avant-garde poet). Understandably, Ghastly-Premise decided that the ventriloquist element of his act wouldn’t translate well to radio (a fact sadly ignored in ten years of ‘Educating Archie’). Instead, Haverstock played the role of the manager of a bread factory with a penchant for the double entendre, like the following extract demonstrates:
Didcot: I’ve got terrible problems with me baps.
Haverstock: Not from where I’m standing.
Didcot: They’re not rising.
Haverstock: If they rose any further, you’d need a periscope to see.
Simultaneously, whilst staring in WINTIM, Haverstock also ran Cadburys, and it was this level of high-pressure jobs and lack of spare time that many attribute as the major factors in the massive coronary event that Haverstock had in ’53 that killed him. That and the bacon-heavy diet and womanising. So, as was the tradition in radio comedy in the 50s and 60s, it was the death of its lead star that brought the curtain down on WINTIM’s time.
Clench and Forrest went on to write the classic TV sitcom, ‘Wetherby & Nephew’ set in a garage in Tottenham, where two mismatched relatives drove each other to distraction in a mutually destructive co-dependent relationship. In his later years, Clench wrote a series of children’s books about a scruffy cat that thinks it’s the ruler of Namibia, whilst Forrest was the host of a hysterical outtakes/bloopers show, ‘It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Fella’ that ran for eighteen series too many on ITV in the 80s and 90s.
The producer, Ghastly-Premise, became the Chairman of BBC2 before committing a series of atrocities that got him banned from his golf club. WINTIM’s enduring appeal is down to the British public’s love of filth-ridden innuendo masked in unconvincing naivety, coupled with comfort of having the same phrases repeated to you week after week without ever having the fear of having to react to something new. So next time you are in Great Yarmouth, raise a bap in the memory of Charlie ‘The Major’ Haverstock and the whole WINTIM team!
Treatises of Gloria 