Radio: That Man

“Don’t forget, boys, we attack right after ITMA.” An English Guards division paused, gathered around its portable receivers to listen, then resumed the advance.

King George persuaded the BBC to change ITMA’s broadcast time to a later hour so as not to upset the palace dinner routine. Princess Elizabeth, on her sixteenth birthday, had the cast invited to Windsor Castle for Britain’s first and only command radio performance.

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. Only BBC’s famed newscast has more listeners.

Although Americans may wonder why (Bob Hope, who was born in England, confesses: “It’s too fast for me”), ITMA doubles up its British listeners. Puns like “Farewell to the night shifts of Dover” or “the lease lend the soonest mended” are a Handley trademark. So are topical quips like “I haven’t laughed so much since Errol Flynn captured Burma.” ITMA’s rapid-fire cacophony of explosions, whistles, popguns, yawps, quacks and trambells draws enthusiastic letters from Continental listeners, who can’t understand English, but find the sound effects screamingly funny.

Can I Do You Now? The timing, intonation and repetition which made Jerry Colonna’s “Who’s Yehudi?” funny to U.S. audiences is a rough U.S. equivalent of ITMA’s appeal. Like Fred Allen, Jack Benny and Bob Hope, Handley has a stock set of characters who repeat nonsense lines which English listeners love to wrap into their own conversation at apt moments. A visitor to England would probably need to know ITMA to understand ordinary street, pub and Army humor. Examples:

¶ Mrs. Mop the charlady repeatedly interrupts Handley to ask: “Can I do you now?” During the bombings, people crushed under the rubble sometimes called to rescue diggers: “Can you do me now?”

¶ Two polite gentlemen on ITMA are always saying to each other: “After you, Claude”; “After you, Cecil”—phrases which bomber pilots frequently use when circling an aerodrome.

¶ A feeble old character on ITMA answers any question with the line: “I’ll have to ask me Dad,” which is now a stock retort of anyone evading a question.

¶ A diver who bubbles up to the microphone signs off by saying: “I’m going down now, sir.” Chaplains and fellow Tommies often heard the same line, said with a brave try at lightheartedness, from the wounded or dying.

Tommy Handley, who usually wears horn-rimmed glasses and looks like a well-domesticated business man, in starched collar, conservative tie, double-breasted suit, has been a music-hall entertainer since World War I, but did not go on the air with ITMA until July 1939. During the war, he kidded home-front nuisances by embroiling himself with the Office of Twerps and the Ministry of Irritation. On last week’s program he found England at peace so unbearable that he set out for the mythical island of Tomtopia, where he intends to devote his time to making things worse.