Having the Horn and Wanking

I said ‘don’t call it ‘masturbation”, I said. ‘Call it ‘wanking’. Call it ‘having the horn and wanking’’, I said. But they insisted on calling it ‘masturbation’, you know. Because it’s BBC2 and they have to use long fucking words.

I’ve done a bit of preamble about Derek and Clive and what they stand for elsewhere, so I’ll try not to double up on that too much. Yes. it’s still offensive, yes it’s still of it’s time and the whole magnus opus of ‘The Horn‘ from 1978’s Ad Nauseum is no different. Unlike a lot of their sketches, this one is a bit multi-layered. Ordinarily they’re riffing off one thing, but this one sees us going to myriad of different areas, touching on the Pope’s funeral, Lord Longford visiting Myra Hindley in prison and whether Derek’s wife is actually Jesus Christ (because she has a penis). Topped with a radical reworking of the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

For now, though, we’re focusing on a bit where a BBC production crew visit Clive’s home. They attempt to film him masturbating for their expermental documentary on the subject. He diligently performs but they mess up, leading to a failed second attempt. Because of this, they don’t pay him and apparently drink all his Guinness. Annoyed, he sends his aquintance Ephraim around to Television Centre in order to destroy it and he also fails. It is, as you might surmise even from this brief write-up, utterly fucking insane.

So a lot of the design is self-evident with that in mind. The fonts and colours are overbearingly 1970s and the double-striped BBC2 logo is an iconic symbol of the time (running from 1978 to 1986). Xavier Cugat? Honestly, no idea. When we listened to this as kids back in the 90s, we just assumed that the name had something to do with the inner workings of the BBC. Verity Lambert is mentioned earlier in the sketch, and she *was* a TV producer – Xavier Cugat was a Spanish bandleader who grew up in Cuba. So yeah… fuck knows.

In amongst the obvious scatology, there are still some genuinely standalone funny elements – the embalming of the late Pope being performed by ‘Mrs. Fish’ because ‘she does a lot of things’ and Jesus responding to questions ‘in Hebrew, which is difficult’ being particular favourites.