FORTY years ago, 15 million people sat around their radios to tune in to a show that is an acknowledged forerunner to that other comedy benchmark Monty Python's Flying Circus.
If you wanted to find out about finger-boggling and massed goat pandering, thrill to the passion (many times, many many times) of Dame Celia Molestrangler and Binky Huckaback and share Rambling Sid Rumpo's adventures with his cordwangler, then Round the Horne was the show to hear.
The cast - Kenneth Horne, Hugh Paddick, Kenneth Williams, Betty Marsden and Douglas Smith - are, sadly, long since gone - but their legacy lives on in this stage version, a performance of choice bits from the original radio scripts.
Adapted by Brian Cooke, the only survivor of a team of four writers that also included Marty Feldman, Barry Took and Johnnie Mortimer, it's a thundering endorsement of the timelessness of this screamingly funny programme.
And my how bona it was to vada their dolly old eeks again.
In a stage set that harked back to a 1960s radio studio, the cast of five, scripts in hand, stepped back and forth to the mics to give superb and uncannily accurate portrayals of the original characters/actors we knew so well.
Because they were so good, they underlined that, if anything, the show was the star. It's as hilarious, wicked and silly in 2005 as it was in the 1960s.
JK
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