Fabulosa! by Paul Baker

Author:Paul Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

5

‘I’m Julian and this is my friend Sandy’

In 1996, a few months before I’d settled on Polari as a PhD topic, a very arch friend called Julian had produced a cassette released by the BBC of an ancient radio series called Round the Horne. ‘Listen to this, you!’ he said, slipping the cassette in as we sat in his student bedroom, eating his famous tuna fish cheese bake. It was very silly and old-fashioned, a kind of Gang Show that made me recall my time in the Cub Scouts. There was no swearing but a lot of slyly rude jokes and punning. I only recognized one of the voices, that of Kenneth Williams, who seemed to be the star of the show and appeared to be having the time of his life. He’d been in dozens of Carry On films that were a staple of British Bank Holiday television in the 1970s and ’80s, and I also knew him from his voicework on a children’s animation show called Willo the Wisp. He often played snooty, camp, sexually repressed characters and had an unmistakable voice – a kind of strangulated Cockney with a very affected drawl laid over the top, like one of those knitted dolls you put over a toilet roll that my nanna had in her bathroom.

He’d died a few years earlier and his diaries had been published soon afterwards. I’d bought them because he was gay and in those days we were all so starved of anything culturally relevant to our sexuality that we’d lap up anything we could get. They were a long, sometimes miserable read. He came across as unfulfilled and increasingly bitter in his later years – a tremendously talented man who entertained so many people but never really found happiness.

In the Round the Horne sketches Julian and Sandy usually appeared at the end of each episode. Years later, when I was studying the language that tabloid newspapers used about gay people, I identified a set of stereotyping adverbs that journalists often employed: screamingly, outrageously, shamelessly and flamboyantly. They may as well have been describing Jules and Sand. A pair of out-of-work actors, in each sketch they had wound up in some new occupation and would shriek and exclaim, with Sandy encouraging Julian to ‘unburden’ himself of some secret shame while bits of Polari were seamlessly incorporated into the dialogue. Considering that the BBC was the subject of Mary Whitehouse’s puritanical scrutiny at the time, it is amazing that Julian and Sandy got away with it. This chapter describes how they did.

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