In an age of great radio comedies, Round the Horne was arguably the greatest and best-loved. Its inventive innuendo and cheerfully British twist on surrealism proved a brilliant showcase for the talents of Kenneth Williams, Betty Marsden, Hugh Paddick and Douglas Smith.

Now the one surviving member of the original writing team, Brian Cooke, has developed the scripts into this hit stage show.

Interview: Brian Cooke

BBC Four: How did you go about adapting the old scripts for the stage?
Brian Cooke: There were 66 episodes altogether, so that's 33 hours and I went through most of them again. I had some favourites myself that I utilised and simply removed references to things like Harold Wilson that don't really mean much any more.

Comedy of course has changed a little. It's faster now, but I've been able to adapt it readily. As well as tightening up the old material I also wrote some new bits. There's a brand-new Julian and Sandy called the Bona School of Cookery. It's the first new Round the Horne piece for 40 years. I did a brand-new music hall song, but by and large, the majority of the show is the original material.

BBC Four: What are your memories of writing the original scripts?
BC: I must have been 22 or 24. Barry Took and Marty Feldman were about 10 years older. Johnnie Mortimer and I were the new kids on the block so we brought a degree of enthusiasm and freshness to their craftiness in creating the characters in the first place. It felt so good. We were all self-educated in many ways. None of us had been to university. We read voraciously, and were fairly street smart, whereas the censors, the Reithian people who ran the BBC, weren't. We were able to slide in all sorts of references that they didn't understand. We could be rude, and they didn't realise we were being rude.

BBC Four: Do you have a favourite Round the Horne character?
BC: I think I have to say J Peasmold Gruntfuttock. He is such a smelly, dirty old man but you can't help but feel his bravado, his independent Peasmoldia. Ignoring the fact that his breath could take the flock off an Indian restaurant's wallpaper, he just ploughs on in his strange way, lusting after Judith Chalmers after 40 years.

And of course Julian and Sandy, perhaps the first gay people that most listeners had ever met, albeit on the radio. They didn't quite know why they were laughing but they were. Here were two quite outrageously camp gay people who were using their own language, polari. They opened the way to comedians like Frankie Howerd and later Julian Clary and Graham Norton to be accepted by mass audiences.

BBC Four: It's fair to say that Round the Horne influenced a lot of subsequent comedy shows too...
BC: Along with The Goons it kind of bridged the gap between old-fashioned vaudeville comedy to things like Monty Python. We allowed the audience to use their imagination more. The Pythons accept the fact that Round the Horne influenced them enormously and you can see connections there. According to John Cleese, at one point Monty Python was called Barry Took's Flying Circus.

BBC Four: What was it like seeing actors play people you'd worked with and knew very well?
BC: It was very strange. It was quite moving in many ways. If I closed my eyes I could imagine myself back in time. It was also quite saddening. In most cases I'd written these scripts with Barry and Johnnie. Working on the scripts again I can remember which lines Johnnie wrote or the lines that I'd changed 40 years ago. That was an unusual experience. Not without enormous pleasure, but sweet and sad in its own way.