London: N.p. [BBC], 1956

34 mimeographed pp., 5 typed inserts, all secured with split pin to top left. A little edgeworn and dusty, but a well preserved copy.

First edition. TERRY NATION'S EXTENSIVELY REVISED WORKING COPY, WITH HIS SIGNATURE, AND WITH A SIGNED HANDWRITTEN NOTE TO PRODUCER ALASTAIR SCOTT JOHNSON TO TITLE PAGE. NO RECORDING OF THIS EPISODE EXISTS.

Floggit's, starring Elsie and Doris Waters, ran for three series on BBC Radio between 1956 and 1959. Transplanting their Workers' Playtime characters to a family-run general store, this unexceptional and now very dated show featured a phenomenal supporting cast: Anthony Newley, Joan Sims (whose name is misspelt 'SIMMS' on the title page of this script), Hugh Paddick -- and Ronnie Barker, whose first radio appearance this was. It's writing team was equally stellar. At the same time (1956) as providing scripts for this middle-of-the-road radio comedy, Freeman, Junkin and Nation were also working on Idiot's Weekly Price 2d, the first attempt to present Goon Show humour to a television audience.

The script offered here is for Series One, Episode Three of Floggit's, first transmitted on 31 August 1956. No recording is known to exist of this episode, but if the writers' extensive rewrites are any guide, the show was still very much in the process of bedding down. The script as first presented clearly found no favour with its stars: extensive deletions and rewrites cover almost every page, and newly typed pages (themselves heavily revised) have been inserted at intervals. The whole was then re-submitted to the producer, Alastair Scott Johnson, with a handwritten note on the title page from Nation: 'Dear Alastair, The amendments and cuts which we hope you can read and with which Elsie and Doris seem happy. Sincerely, Terry'.

So. Only the third episode, now lost, of a show which gave a radio debut to Ronnie Barker and featured very early appearances by Joan Sims and Anthony Newley, and which is co-written, signed twice, and extensively revised by the man who, seven years later, would go on to invent the Daleks.

Any takers?