BBC Radio 4 - Twice Ken is Plenty
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Reviews are below, but for more information there are a number of sites that covered Twice Ken is Plenty:
Radio 4 online
Wes's Radio 4 blog
Chortle
Lisa Martland: The Stage
1966 was the same year that a comedy script called Twice Ken is Plenty was submitted to, and rejected by, the BBC. Hugely popular radio personality Kenneth Horne, along with his ghost writer at the time Mollie Millest, had envisaged the project as a vehicle for himself and Kenneth Williams, but the powers that be at the Beeb were not sure there was any room in the schedule for the piece and believed there was a risk of over-exposure. Horne and Williams were, of course, already regularly heard in the incredibly successful series Round the Horne. Lucky for us then that the discarded script was recently discovered among Williams’ possessions, bought by writer and broadcaster Wes Butters on eBay and then adapted and performed in front of a BBC Radio Theatre audience earlier this year.
For aficionados of radio comedy, Twice Ken is Plenty - The Lost Script of Kenneth Williams must have been quite an event, and the pressure was on Butters, producer Stephen Garner and actors Robin Sebastian (Williams) and Jonathan Rigby (Horne) to re-create the on-air magic of these two great personalities. Happily, the result of their efforts was a joy, with Sebastian and Rigby perfectly delivering both the witty repartee and so bad that they’re good gags with quick-fire timing (even if they got close to corpsing on several occasions).
Chris Maume: The Independent
Selling your entire life on eBay is becoming quite the thing these days, but Kenneth Williams wasn't around when a great chunk of his went up for sale. The writer and broadcaster Wes Butters was surfing the internet one night when he washed up on the auction website – where, to his astonishment, a man called Robert Chidell was flogging a Williams treasure trove. It was the stash of scripts, notes and photographs the famously tortured soul had accumulated throughout his life and left to Chidell, his godson, when he died. Chidell's wife was expecting a baby, apparently, so it was time to cash in. Among the scripts was Twice Ken Is Plenty, which Butters realised had never been performed. Williams treasured the script, intended as a two-hander for himself and Kenneth Horne, something of a father figure for him.
It was an exercise worth undertaking, and I don't think the esteemed Controller is right about its unoriginality: it was pure Pirandello, if you want to be poncy about it, mostly involving Horne and Williams trying to get a show together. While looking for an office at the Beeb to work in, they interrupt various programmes, which are then spoofed in a blizzard of puns and reveals – what they think is Steptoe and Son turns out to be Today in Parliament; a wink-wink conversation about sharing beds turns out to be on Gardeners' Question Time. The wordplay was sometimes feeble (a ballet dress is "tutu wonderful"), sometimes completely outrageous.
In a Swan Lake spoof, the swan wants to sing but can't.
"Why don't you try humming through your beak?" Prince Siegfried suggests.
"Good idea. What should I hum?"
"How about 'Moonlight beak-hums you'?"
The best lines were just weird. A squire discovers his daughter with her arms round the neck of her young lover.
"I was just measuring him up for an antimacassar," she says.
Why's that funny? I don't know. It just is.
