Radio Review: 5 July

I’m a sucker for innuendo. No, missus, I am. Any alternative meanings you choose to extract from those opening words are entirely in your mind, and that’s the beauty of it. Innuendo allows an innocent phrase to carry all manner of connotations, but always with an air of plausible deniability. Without double entendre, the Carry On films would be the length of public information films about stepladders. Without what legendary writer David Croft called self-cleaning pornography, Max Miller would have been a Sunday-school teacher.

Combine that with my love for entertainment history, and I’m pretty much the ideal audience for broadcasts by the ageing starlet Dora Dale. I have regularly howled with laughter at the preposterous anecdotes, name-dropping and coded filth she imparts to Martin Kelner in her BBC7/Radio 4 Extra series Pleased To Meet You. So, it was a delight to find that Dora was to be the guest on Kelner’s rather good BBC Radio Leeds show last week.

Ms Dale, aided by her interpreter Jake Yapp, did not disappoint. She alleged that Jimmy Young was being kept alive by two car batteries in a shopping trolley, that she once administered an emergency enema to John Wayne and that Ken Dodd has been phoning with proposals of marriage every Sunday since 1962. Kelner is a funny man in his own right, but he’s just as good playing it straight, egging Dora on very subtly and maintaining the artifice at all times.

The whole hour can be heard at https://soundcloud.com/martinkelner/dora-one-on-one and I recommend it thoroughly.

Martin Kelner, BBC Radio Leeds, Monday to Friday, at noon.
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