Free The Man Who Invented the Daleks by Alwyn Turner Page A

antagonist of the pair and she was to remain their chief foe in the village, the butt of many of Daisy’s jokes. (Gert would have joined in but she was always a little slower on the uptake.) Beyond her, the series was crammed full of incidental characters played by an impressive cast that included Hugh Paddick, Kenneth Connor, Ron Moody, Anthony Newley and Ronnie Barker, the latter appearing for the first time as Ronnie, rather than Ronald.
    Best of all was Joan Sims, fresh from her role as a nurse nicknamed Rigor Mortis in the 1954 Dirk Bogarde film Doctor in the House. In Floggit’s she played a variety of parts from Ma Butler’s sidekick, Emma Smeed, through to a sickly sweet little girl – in the same lineage as Monica in Educating Archie and Jennifer in Ray’s a Laugh – who lisped her way through soppy stories about her life (‘I’ve been down in the meadows talking to the squirrels and bunny rabbits’), but still managed to con Gert and Daisy out of money at every opportunity. Somewhere in between was an outrageously flirtatious barmaid, Greta, whose banter hinted at an impressive level of sexual promiscuity, and who got many of the best lines. ‘What do men talk about when they’re together?’ she asks a regular customer. When he replies, ‘I don’t know, the same as women, I suppose,’ she is deeply shocked: ‘Well, you should be ashamed of yourselves!’
    Like Hancock’s Half Hour , now the most popular comedy on air, Floggit’s was a continuous thirty-minute programme without benefit of musical interludes (previously the bane of radio comedy shows), and was broadly a situation comedy, though there were some breaks from the storyline: Greta, for example, never meets Gert and Daisy, and plays no part in the plots, her contributions being simply stand-alone sketches. The stories themselves were vanishingly simple – a tree outside the shop becomes unstable and needs to be chopped down, they take in a stray dog who they nickname ’Orrible (played by Peter Hawkins) – but there was a gentleness and charm to the proceedings which has lasted well, even if it was considerably more mainstream than the material that Nation, Junkin and Freeman had wanted to write for The Fixers. And there were some good jokes, often referencing contemporary popular culture (the sisters have a couple of chickens named Marilyn and Sabrina, with the latter jealous of the former), while Daisy is always capable of coming up with epigrams that are slightly more acerbic than they appear at first sight: ‘Bonfire night’s no good without fireworks,’ she observes. ‘It’s like television without Richard Dimbleby.’ There was also – surely one of Nation’s contributions – the story of a Welsh perfumer trying to sell a new range of scents, including Evening in Caerphilly, Moon over Tonypandy and Ashes of Anthracite.
    The series was produced initially by Alastair Scott Johnston and then by Bill Gates, and although it didn’t win any critical plaudits (‘All they have to say is “Nice cupper tea,” or “On your way, Stirling Moss” to a bus driver, and the audience roars like a giant being tickled,’ wrote Paul Ferris disparagingly in the Observer) , it proved a popular success. The first run was followed by a Christmas special and, in 1957, by a second series of eighteen shows, for which Ronnie Barker and Anthony Newley were dropped from the cast, allegedly because the stars felt they were getting too many laughs.
    In between those two series, Dave Freeman had found more lucrative work. The first series of The Benny Hill Show on BBC television in 1955 had been a major hit – Hill was named Personality of the Year in the National Television Awards – and for the second series of six hour-long shows, starting in January 1957, he called in Freeman to act as his official co-writer, a partnership that was to last into the 1960s and produce some of the most inventive visual gags of the early television era. Freeman did