Lines From My Grandfather's Forehead
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lines From My Grandfather's Forehead, a sketch comedy show for radio, was first broadcast by the BBC Radio 4 in 1971. There was another series broadcast in 1972 (July and August at least).
It starred Ronnie Barker, Terence Brady, Pauline Yates, with Gordon Lanford at the piano. Some episodes in the 1972 series had a banjo player/guitarist named Dick Abell.
Each episode was a sequence of comedy sketches, monologues and comic songs. The authors were credited at the end of each episode, but the items were not named, so identifying the author of a particular item is difficult. Among the authors is one Gerald Wiley, which is the pseudonym used by Ronnie Barker to see if the producers thought his submitted material was good enough - and many were.
The programme content is difficult to define. The humour was askance/off-the-wall/tangential, but certainly different to most comedy at the time; it was announced as 'a sequential entertainment for radio'. The nearest relatives might be Monty Python, or The Goons.
Items included:
- a 17th century man with two heads
- a couple talking about curtains
- a pianist playing a difficult piece and failing at the last note or two
- a sketch with Barker as an encyclopedia salesman in the Garden of Eden ('one bite and you're a PhD')
- a wistful little poem about the retirement of Mr Babbage (using feminine rhymes in '-idge' throughout)
- a song with the first line "I took my love to Turnpike Lane".
