Editing Beyond Our Ken (section)

==Characters==
''Beyond Our Ken'' featured regular characters. As panellists in a parody of ''[[Any Questions?]]'' the cast gently burlesqued real broadcasting celebrities. Marsden's hoarse-voiced Fanny Haddock, Pertwee's camp Hanky Flowerd, Paddick's gormless Ricky Livid and Williams's suggestive rustic Arthur Fallowfield parodied, respectively, the cook [[Fanny Cradock]], the comedian [[Frankie Howerd]], the pop star [[Marty Wilde]] and the [[West country]] farmer and pundit [[Ralph Wightman]].<ref>Gifford, p. 23</ref> Some of these characters had their own [[catch-phrase]]s: Ricky Livid's was "I like the backing", and Fallowfield's response to every question began "The answer lies in the soil".<ref name=t138>Took, p. 138</ref> Elsewhere in the programmes the regular characters included Ambrose and Felicity (described by Took as "a pair of doddering old idiots"),<ref name=t138/> played by Williams and Marsden.<ref name=t138/> Another – unnamed – ancient personage, played by Williams, had been doing whatever he was doing on each programme for "thirty-five years";<ref name=t138/> Stanley Birkinshaw (Paddick) was a man with ill-fitting false teeth speaking with distorted sibilants and spraying saliva in all directions.<ref name=t138/><ref>Johnston, p. 218</ref> Another regular was the supposed BBC commentator Cecil Snaith, played by Paddick and written not by Merriman or Took but by Horne; Snaith's commentaries were invariably struck by disaster and ended, "And with that, I return you to the studio".<ref name=t138/> Two regulars who always appeared together were the men-about-town Rodney (Williams) and Charles (Paddick), variously described as "jolly decent public school chaps",<ref>Hackforth, p. 102</ref> "frightfully correct",<ref name=t138/> "a pair of effete young men",<ref>Johnston, pp. 228–229</ref> and "two frightfully, frightfully Mayfair types, doing ridiculous things together like dressing up as red Indians when they took a canoeing holiday".<ref>Freedland, p. 93</ref>