Word processing

‘Comedy is like music,’ said Edwin Apps, one of the characters in Wednesday afternoon’s Radio 4 play, All Mouth and Trousers (directed by David Blount). ‘The words are the notes and they have to be in exactly the right place. And every line has to pull its weight, add something to the situation.’ Apps was one half of the writing partnership who created that most unlikely of TV hits in the supposedly swinging Sixties, All Gas and Gaiters, set in the cathedral close of St Oggs and featuring a laughably inept quartet of Anglican clerics. Mark Burgess’s engaging drama told the story of how the series (which ran for 33 episodes) got made, and featured Apps and his co-writer and wife Pauline Devaney playing themselves as a now divorced couple looking back on their younger selves.

Apps learnt his craft acting on the West End stage and he knew that behind every great farce there lies a tight structure and a keen understanding of timing. You might think it’s all froth, but even a single word out of place will destroy the concoction, pierce the bubble. The plotlines for All Gas and Gaiters were incredibly silly (a crumbling tower, an ancient story about virgins and white stockings) but they still required 59 pages of carefully crafted script for a single half-hour episode. What turned the series into a comedy classic was the timing and interplay between the characters, Derek Nimmo’s chaplain taking the pregnant pause and making it almost another character. Zeb Soanes did a brilliant job of convincing us he was Nimmo and not about to break into reading the news (his more usual role on Radio 4), while John Sessions starred as Frank Muir, who ensured the stuffy bosses at BBC Entertainment accepted a comedy script half written by a woman, no small feat back in 1966 when women were still expected to be seen on TV, not to make it.

Over on 3, Nick Warburton’s specially commissioned drama (directed by Marion Nancarrow) as part of the Shakespeare celebrations took us to Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April 1616 and to the playwright’s last day.