Tommy Handley

Jimmy Cricket recalling the comedy of Tommy Handley

"I don't know if you heard or not readers but they found a group of pigeons on the roof of Downing Street recently. Apparently they were planning a coo!" That was the latest joke I put on Twitter because I feel people like to have a chuckle during challenging times. A lockdown is a bit like wartime. We need to keep our spirits up. One comedian who certainly did that was Tommy Handley, writes Jimmy Cricket.

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It's That Man Again - Tommy Handley and ITMA

On Sunday 9 January 1949, just after the 5pm repeat broadcast of the latest episode of ITMA, the nation's favourite comedy show, there was a shock newsflash: Tommy Handley, the star of the programme, had died from a cerebral haemorrhage.

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Well, not entirely a complete history, but one that stretches from the Second World War to the early Sixties, as told by comedian David Mitchell and as captured, of course, by BBC radio. In wartime the variety theatres were, for a short time, closed and radio, from then on, became the nation's prime entertainment. Mitchell considers the birth of the catchphrase (some from Tommy Handley's ITMA are still uttered today) and how the Windmill Theatre, postwar, educated a new generation of comedians, including those who, in The Goon Show, changed radio comedy forever.

Another Case of Milton Jones makes the studio audience whoop with delight. Jones is, as Radio 4's trailers so often tell us, a Perrier Award-winning comedian.

He does not swear. He is not rude. He is a word play man, more Dandy than Punch. He has adventures, as in very old radio comedy shows like ITMA with Tommy Handley or Up the Pole with Jewell and Warris.

Last night he was a photographer. Every time he mentioned a lens, a lens case or a lens cap up would pop Len, who'd say: I've been looking for that. There are running gags, as with Len, or a repeated line, Give me that sexy look, perhaps undo a few buttons on your blouse... and an unexpected voice, that of a man or the Queen, will reply.

He was snapping a calendar, of unusual sights. An Italian driving carefully, that's January... A laughing German, that's November.

Maybe you have to be there to roar with mirth. Or maybe someone is pumping laughing gas into that studio.

Comics should be more switched on about radio

There was a national day of mourning when Winston Churchill died in 1965. There was also national mourning, of course, when King George VI died in 1952. But can you name another post-war death that has triggered national grief? The answer is Tommy Handley, the star of the wartime radio show ITMA.

Radio: That Man

ITMA, Britain's most popular radio comedy show, stands for "It's That Man Again." That Man is Tommy Handley, a middle-aged British radio comedian whose unabashed puns, silly syllogisms and noisy sound effects have given him a weekly radio audience that reportedly numbers 18,000,000.