My Sitcom Odyssey, Episode Two: Whack-O!

I've decided to watch my way through as many old sitcoms as I can. So I went back to pretty much the beginning of British sitcom history (excluding, obviously, the early sitcoms of which no episodes survive). I watched this episode of Whack-O!, a school-themed British sitcom that ran for sixty episodes from 1956 to 1972, and also spawned the dreaded movie adaptation. (There were forty radio episodes, to boot.) I'd never heard of it before I started investigating old sitcoms.

Whack-O! was created by Frank Muir and Denis Norden. I only knew Denis Norden from blooper compliations and I only knew Frank Muir from the humour section of the public library, where his name frequently crops up in various collections of humorous writing-- none of which I ever found startlingly funny.

I have to say that Whack-O! seems to have been pretty good, judging from the single episode I watched. It completely sidesteps the cliché of the strict, buttoned-down headmaster and gives us a shameless hedonist instead. This is Professor James Edwards, played by Jimmy Edwards. (Following the same English comic convention, I suppose, by which most of Sid James's Carry On characters were also named Sid.)

The episode I sampled was called "Pools Win" and was broadcast in 1960. Its plot involves-- you guessed it-- a win on the football pools. (For those who don't know, these were a sort of lottery. There was a guy who collected money door-to-door for the football pools in my own childhood, although even that already seemed like an anachronism. I think they were much more British than Irish.)

The twist of the story is that it isn't the headmaster who's won big on the pools, it's a rather ascetic and otherwordly teacher called Mr. Pettigrew, played by Arthur Howard. (The brother of Leslie Howard, as I've just discovered.) Mr. Pettigrew wants to give the money to charity, but Professor Edwards-- who's an overbearing, blustering kind of fellow-- persuades him to have a taste of the high life before he does so. This involves booking a room in the Ritz and inviting a lot of "girls" (who seem to be hotel staff, but why are they so scantily-clad and eager to please?), consuming vast amounts of champagne and fine foods, and dancing the conga. Sure enough, Mr. Pettigrew begins to rethink his charitable intentions, ahead of the impending arrival of a clergyman to collect the money (even though it's going to an animal charity).

I'd give this episode six out of ten. There weren't really any surprises (other than the fact that Pettigrew does become corrupted), nor were there any hilarious lines of dialogue. The main source of humour was the comic acting of Jimmy Edwards and Arthur Howard. Professor Edwards seems like a wonderful character-- a headmaster who isn't just a bit disreputable, but is more or less a scoundrel and hardly bothers to hide it. I enjoyed the light-hearted cynicism of the show.

There were some surprisingly risqué moments. At one point Professor Edwards ogles a young woman's bottom when she bends over. It's not done subtly, either. I think TV was eroding sexual morals from the start.