A Special Note from the Author
"The mid nineteen sixties to the early seventies was influenced
by a number of things... The Stones were Rolling, the Beatles were Beatling:
Jimmy Hendrix, Gannex raincoats, miniskirts and the Carry On movies, which were surprisingly subversive for their time, taking the
mickey out of Royalty, the Indian Army, the National Health Service,
et al.
Most of them featured Kenneth Williams, usually with Joan Sims and this
combination of comic talents moved over to radio in 1970 with Stop
Messing About, a catch phrase Williams used in his cabaret act. An
alternative title to the show was It’s Bold! but the powers
that be decided it looked like we were plugging a well known washing powder
and rejected it.
Stop Messing About was the first radio show in which Kenneth Williams
actually starred, instead of playing second or third fiddle to Tony Hancock
and Kenneth Horne. His chosen compatriots in this venture were his Carry
On partner Joan Sims, his lifelong colleague and friend Hugh Paddick
and Douglas Smith, a talented BBC announcer. His writers were myself and
my longtime writing partner, Johnnie Mortimer.
These were the days when you could park anywhere and smoke in restaurants,
pubs and the cinema... and society, as we knew it, was undergoing a sea
of change. Everything was available to satirise and Stop Messing About gave us the chance to do just that. From short-sighted lady drivers to
parodies of Gone With The Wind – from British Salesmen selling
Japanese Union-Jacks to reluctant Germans to Spaghetti Westerns. From
black Bishops to the stupidity of ancient, long serving Judges... all
was grist to our mill.
This was our very last radio series before we moved over to television,
which paid twenty times the money and we revelled in the freedom we had
to write Interior Albert Hell, put the Sound on a distort microphone arid
we were there!
The show you are about to see today/tonight is the very best of our writing
from Stop Messing About, a joyful farewell to our radio career,
carefully edited to produce more laughs per minute than most stage shows.
It's also a tribute to four outstanding talents, Kenneth, Joan, Hugh
and Douglas... and a fifth, Johnnie Mortimer, the finest writing partner
one could wish for."
Brian Cooke
About Brian Cook and Johnnie Mortimer
Brian Cooke and Johnnie Mortimer wrote many television
shows, including such well loved and award winning sitcoms as Man
About The House, Father, Dear Father, George and
Mildred and Robin’s Nest. Together they wrote shows
and series for such comedy legends as Bernard Cribbins; Frankie Howerd,
Ronnie Barker, Marty Feldman and Tommy Cooper.
Brian’s theatre version of Round The Home... Revisited received rave reviews and ran in the West End for a year and a half,
prior to three nationwide No.1 tours.
Stop Messing About (a Kenneth Williams extravaganza) is the
follow up to that show, directed by Michael Kingsbury (Ying Tong, Round The Home... Revisited). It’s a guaranteed laugh a
minute evening of nostalgia, when comedy meant being funny, with scarcely
a swear word in sight.
"It's not until Robin Sebastian's Kenneth Williams steps up to the microphone that the hairs stand up on the back of your neck... he's so good, it's as though he was born to play the much missed wag" - Daily Telegraph
"The cast are a joy to watch... the magic works... it's a joy to enter this golden age of innuendo" - Sunday Telegraph about Round the Horne... Revisited
"Nigel Harrison captures Hugh Paddick's alter ego with a sensitively underpitched performance" - Mail on Sunday
"Charles Armstrong lovingly brings to life the honey voiced BBC announcer Douglas Smith" - Mail on Sunday
