My Version of a BBC Radio Comedy

Since the BBC are always nicking my ideas (see http://art-moving-on.blogspot.com/2010/06/bbc-trying-to-steal-my-ideas-again.html ) I've decided to present an idea for a BBC radio comedy (they obviously need all the ideas they can get).

The show is called "Rangoon Half Time Machine" and Episode One introduces us to the two main characters: Major Paradox (Rangoon Heavy Arterials - retired) and his arch-rival Alan (no relation) Ladd.

Paradox and Ladd are rival inventors in the tradition of Heath Robinson.

Whenever Major Paradox makes a breakthrough in modern scientific progresseses Alan Ladd has to somehow make an even greater breakthrough and vice versa.

The series is set in 1955 in Surrey, England and in what was then called Rangoon, Burma, amongst other locations (you can go anywhere you like on radio, there's no budget problems). Major Paradox lives in a ramshackle old house in Rangoon, capital of colonial Burma. In his house there also lives a completely senile man who purports to be Major Paradox's grandfather. Whenever he enters a room he does so with his catchphrase, "In comes I, old Grandfather Paradox." He is as dotty as a dotted line and talks absolute gibberish for three or four minutes, sometimes longer, every time he appears. This gives the writers a break from keeping the plot consistant and enables them to indulge their dadaistic tendencies. There is also the ghost of a boy scout who occasionally wanders in and out of scenes muttering some rubbish about "the knots he knotted were not the knots the seascouts travelled by when they were not bombing the scout hut that he was not in but he was and they were and was not that knot so I'm not here I'm dead now, or not.....?" and stuff like that each episode. He is a tragic character and deserves his own show, as he he often reminds us.

Alan (no relation) Ladd is lying, or perhaps just wishful thinking. He actually has lots of relations and they keep coming round to his house at the corner of St. James Road and Sydney Road by West Sutton Railway Station in Surrey. He is continually visited by aunts, uncles, ex-girlfriends, local wideboys, canvassers, council representatives, gasmen, plumbers, neighbourhood watch members, cousins, brothers and sisters he'd forgotten about, reporters for the West Sutton Gazette and other Hoi Polloi. Alan's attitude is that of the misunderstood genius. He feels under-rated. He once invented a way of delivering all the post in the West Sutton area by collecting all the elastic bands dropped by postmen and combining them together to make a giant elastic band which could then be used to catapult the letters to their destinations in any part of town. The plan was stopped by the postal workers union together with the residents association (who were sick and tired jumping in the air all the time to catch their letters whizzin' by).

The same sort of thing happened with all his brilliant ideas. He was scattering his brilliance on stony ground. Then, one day, Rangoon Football Club came to West Sutton for an away match. Major Paradox came with them. He used his inventions to helm them win the first half of the match, Alan Ladd retaliated, using his inventions to help the West Sutton team even the score.

The bitter rivalry between Paradox and Ladd began from that fateful half-time. From then onwards they only invented in order to top each other's most recent stroke of genius. Eventually, Major Paradox invented a time machine in the hope of going back and changing the result of the football game (it had been a draw). Of course, Ladd had to invent a time machine of his own.

When they attempted to steer their rival time machines through the unpredictable time stream they both kept arriving at unexpected destinations.

Each week the two rivals, accompanied by old Grandfather Paradox, the ghostly boy scout, Alan (no relation) Ladd's relatives and various other characters, including the Glooms (Fred and Ethel) from next door and Ethel's father Sebastian Whack, journey through time and space, mostly into the future. They experience the Swinging Sixties, The Already Swung and Not Sure What to Next Seventies and so on into the unimaginable future of the 1990s. They view the decades of the future through the eyeballs of 1955.

If BBC7 radio doesn't buy this series they just don't know a good thing.