Comedy Gold

My copy of the whole output of Will Hay has been ordered, £8 the lot compared to an online price of £49 from Tesco's, no I still don't think its legal but what the hell, I'm ordering the Bilko full set of 149 episodes today for £20 too.

The important question is, compared to so-called comedy genius shows like "Catherine Tate" or "Little Britain", neither of which I find funny, in fact I have watched The Catherine Tate Show twice now and in that hour of viewing have not found anything at all to laugh at - why are 50 and 70 year old comedy shows still so fresh and rich in comedy material ?

The picture above is a scene from the film "Convict 99" in which Moore Marriot (left) plays said convict who has spent the last forty years digging an escape tunnel and two weeks before his release finds that the map that he's been following doesn't take into account that the prison was extended twenty years ago and he emerges inside the governors office to find Graham Moffat (middle) and Will Hay (right) who has just arrived as the new governor.

These three were always the central characters in all of the 1930's Will Hay films and Hay alwasy played the same character, a slightly confused, bumbling, sometimes pompous idiot who was always mistaken for someone else - in Convict 99 he plays Mr Twist, a disgraced headteacher who is given a job by nefarious means at a remote boys school, but on the way is mistaken in a drunken pub scene as the new prison governor - the script hardly changes from film to film but its still a classic British comedy genre and is still fresh 70 years later and after many viewings.


Bilko is twenty years younger and was the late saturday evening programme of choice for me, Ned and our dad in the 1970's after we'd all been out with our seperate groups of friends and returned home worse for the drink, we'd pull our comfy seats and watch an episode of Bilko as our mother ran around organising cups of coffee.

It was Bilko who invented a phrase that needs no further explanation to me, it has entered our family language and both Ned and I know exactly what the other means when we say the words "Dobermans Sister".

The episode in question involved the motor pool being invited to a dance with everyone having a date except Bilko - Doberman was the short, fat, dumb and ugly character that you can see standing just behind Bilko's hat in that picture and was the constant target of Bilkos piss taking - in this episode Doberman promised Bilko that his sister would accompany him to the dance and assured him that unlike Doberman, his sister was beautiful.

Of course she wasn't, in fact Dobermans sister was played by the same actor who played Doberman, in drag, and in other episodes Doberman also played his own mother, the whole family were short, fat and ugly.

Fast forward several years and after our mother had passed away our dad moved himself to Benidorm, that Spanish den of failed British variety acts all seeking work in the thousands of showbars in the Spanish Las Vegas populated entirely by British pensioners.

He shared an apartment with his lifelong friend and Northern Club Compere of the year 1969, Brian Hessian and between them they haunted the showbars 24/7, and there were a lot of showbars to haunt, our dads last seven years on this earth were spent in a whirlwind of booze and entertaining, singing songs for beer in bars and never returning to the apartment until the dawn of the next morning - not for nothing were they known as "The Odd Couple" after the Jack Lemmon and Walter Matheau characters.

On the last occasion that I flew to Benidorm to drive our dads car back to the UK for the summer, he picked me up at Alicante airport mid-morning and on the hour long drive back to Benidorm was in tears of laughter as he described one of Brians "ladies" from the night before. Brian had found himself a rich widow and as he was always skint he was always ready to take advantage of a rich widows purse for a night out.

We arrived at the apartment at around noon just as Brian emerged from his bedroom, a glassed-in area of the balcony as it was really only a one bedroomed apartment, and upon questioning, his description of his date from the night before needed only two words ...

"Dobermans sister"


Catherine Tate, Little Britain et all will never hit those heights.