"Hungh!!!"

"Hungh!!!"

I was pleased with the sudden gear-change achieved in Episode Six when we cut from the piece on Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' to the LWT jingle and the theme tune to 'Mind Your Language'. This hopefully showed that we were fairly eclectic in the range of shows we intended to cover and for Episode Nine we did something similar by featuring both 'The Sweeney' and those 'Dear Ladies' Hinge and Bracket.

The creation of George Logan and Patrick Fyffe, I remember listening to their seminal radio series 'The Random Jottings Of Hinge And Bracket' and when 'Dear Ladies' popped up on BBC Two, it was quite exciting.

Their characters have a great deal of depth to them and it's remarkable how much material they actually recorded. As a kid, the one thing you remember is the unladylike noise Dame Hilda makes when - HUNGH!!! - cleaning her glasses, but returning to them in later life you see how carefully crafted it all is.

It's a lovely balance of old-fashioned English gentility, pure silliness and the odd bit of innuendo. For example, when Dr Hinge is cleaning the living-room chimney...

DAME HILDA: Evadne, I do wish you wouldn't go poking around yourself... That is a job for a man, you know!

and moments later...

DAME HILDA: Well, if we screw together, then we'll get there at the same time, won't we...?

Set in the wonderfully-named village of Stackton Tressel, 'Dear Ladies' is thankfully available on DVD, though you have to do a bit more digging to track down the radio broadcasts. The 'Dear Ladies' account on YouTube has some additional material, including a fascinating studio tape from an early appeance at Pebble Mill.

It was a lovely series to cover and watching the episodes as research was a pleasure. We even got to do our own impression of the Dame and the Doctor, but you'll have to listen to our podcast to - HUNGH!!! - experience that.

(By Andrew Trowbridge)