The Ministry of Silly Names

All good comedy writers have a voice – an idiolect – a way of expressing themselves which is uniquely theirs. For scriptwriters, as opposed to stand-ups, this can potentially be a problem. You ideally want each character to sound like themselves, and not all sound like the writer. (Neat test for new scriptwriters – if you cover up the character names, can you identify who is speaking by how they express themselves?)

But a writer’s idiolect is also revealed in the names they give their characters as well as how those characters talk.

I remember reading about Douglas Adams having to have an endless series of baths before he came up with the name Zaphod Beeblebrox who joined a gallery of characters with names like Gag Halfrunt, Zarniwoop and Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. I can’t tell you how or why, but I can tell you that those are all definitely, distinctively Adams silly names and not anyone else’s.

We don’t generally know how he arrived at them – and very likely nor did he. But we do know how he came up with Slartibartfast, the designer of Norway for the Magrathean planet-builders. He wanted a character with a deep inner sadness, and thought maybe he would be sad about his ridiculous sounding name. So he began with a name that was clearly unbroadcastable – Phartiphuckborlz – and just kept massaging the syllables until he got something which sounded rude but wouldn’t actually get them taken off the air.

Reading this account, I was immediately reminded of Round the Horne and Barry Took and Marty Feldman’s near the knuckle J Peasemould Gruntfuttock. While clearly playing the same game, Took and Feldman’s silly name idiolect is totally different from Douglas Adams’s. Just as Dinsdale Piranha could only be Michael Palin and Terry Jones, or Pongo Twisleton could only be PG Wodehouse. And these aren’t joke names, like Kenny Everett’s censor-baiting Cupid Stunt, where you have to unpack something to appreciate the gag. It’s just the visceral pleasure of an odd collection of vowels and consonants colliding with the inner ear.

Maybe the pinnacle of silly names for comedy characters is Chris Morris and Armando Ianucci’s extraordinary The Day Today, which began life on Radio 4 as On The Hour. As well as fairly tame soubriquets like Alan Partridge, Rosie May or Sylvester Stuart, we have extraordinary monikers such as Collaterlie Sisters, Spartacus Mills and of course Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan.

You can’t fake this stuff. It’s such a deep expression of who someone is and it makes me deeply pleased that it’s so difficult for me to come up with a silly name in the Douglas Adams or Chris Morris or Took/Feldman style.

Don’t believe me? You try it.

And then come and listen first to our conversation about The Day Today and how it looks now to someone who’s never seen it before – and then our conversation with television director Andrew Gillman who brought it from radio to TV, and who doesn’t often agree to interviews.