The Burkiss Way
The Burkiss Way was a BBC Radio 4 sketch comedy series that ran from August 1976 to November 1980. It was written by Andrew Marshall and David Renwick, with some additional material in early episodes by John Mason, Colin Bostock-Smith, Douglas Adams, John Lloyd and others. The show starred Denise Coffey (series 1 only), Jo Kendall (series 2 onward), Chris Emmett, Nigel Rees and Fred Harris. The series had three producers over the years, announced as "Simon Brett of Stepney", "John Lloyd of Europe", and "David Hatch of the BBC hatch".
Jo Kendall had previously appeared in I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, and thus has the distinction of having appeared in not one but two acclaimed cult radio comedy shows.
The series was a follow-up to a pair of half-hour sketch shows entitled Half-Open University which Marshall and Renwick had written with Mason for Radio 3 as a parody of the real life Open University programmes. The first of these shows, broadcast in August 1975, spoofed science, while the second, in December, lampooned history.
In a similar vein, The Burkiss Way was originally based around a fictional series of parodies, liberally sprinkled with bad puns. In the first series Chris Emmett made several appearances as a nondescript dirty old man; in episode 2, for instance, his character becomes Prime Minister thanks to the Burkiss Way. From series 2 onward this voice became known as "Eric Pode of Croydon", the show's only recurring character. Pode is a dirty old man with unsavoury habits, probably inspired by Round the Horne's "J. Peasemold Gruntfuttock".
Each week Pode is interviewed by Fred Harris's character, who calls him "Mister Croydon", is disgusted by his habits and his terrible puns, and always remarks, "isn't he a panic". This was one of the show's only two catchphrases, the other being "there will now be a short intermission". There was usually a series of linked sketches running through each episode, with the "intermission" sketches providing a break.
The fact that Douglas Adams had written for the show did not prevent him from becoming a favourite target for satire in later episodes. He is frequently parodied as "Mister Different Adams" whose catchphrase is "I see comedy as a kind of..." Naturally Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was also a frequent target.
Another target was Radio 4 itself, whose continuity style was often spoofed. Many later episodes had false endings, sometimes cunningly disguised as genuine continuity announcements.
As time went on the show became increasingly surreal, and in several sketches the writers seem to be trying to see just how many strange ideas they can cram into a single sketch. For example, one of the later episodes contains a sketch about an amoeba that has been employed by a company as a token Desmond Dekker and the Aces but who keeps reproducing asexually by mitosis while singing a Lee Dorsey song instead.
The Burkiss Way ran to 47 episodes in six series, but the episode and series numbering are derailed by "Lesson 31" and "Lesson 32" which are actually a single episode masquerading as two separate half-episodes, the first of which ends series 3 and the second of which begins series 4. Just as confusingly, there are two "Lesson 39"s, both entitled "Repeat Yourself the Burkiss Way".
The show has gained a cult following over the years and has recently gone into continuous reruns on BBC 7. Listeners have complained about some omissions, which may indicate that episodes have been lost or wiped - most notably Lesson 1 - and some episodes have been broadcast in mono, suggesting that the original stereo masters were wiped. Given the show's enduring popularity, it is almost certain that off-air recordings of the entire run survive in collectors' hands.
