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“Laid off? I said, I’ve hardly been laid *on*!”

Of all the guest hosts to stand in for Wogan during his thrice-weekly residency on the verdant Shepherd’s Bush Green, one of the most unlikely – and most entertaining – must surely be Kenneth Williams.

Someone has had the foresight to not only keep on video but also repost online an almost complete edition from his stint, hailing from 23rd April 1986. It’s prefaced here with a monologue from a different episode that same week, but one that still finds Kenny on typically imperial bawling form (“Running buffet?…I almost caught up with it twice”), and which then dovetails into the outro from his last bash replete with Ramping Sid Rumpo and an audience singalong:

Note how the audience appear to be entirely over the age of 55.

Anyway, the episode proper begins with a rather stilted exchange with Stephen Fry:

It continues via predictably hysterical banter with Barbara Windsor:

Finally, the famous (if you’ve read the Williams diaries) Michael Palin chat which ends too early and forces Ken to ask Mike (bedecked in a typically over-stylised 80s suit) to rustle up some last-minute limericks:

1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. David Pascoe

    June 13, 2007 at 8:34 pm

    I’d forgotten how “busy” the Wogan music would be whenever a guess was introduced.

    “Go away son, I’m being directed.”
    “Oh, are you lost then?”

    Classic!

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