Rawlinson End

Vivian Stanshall's first foray into radio as a solo artist began in 1970, with sessions for BBC radio DJ John Peel by his groups biG GRunt and Freaks. Afterward, John Peel's producer John Walters recruited Stanshall to substitute for Peel when the latter went on a month's "alcoholiday" in August 1971.[1]

Each of Stanshall's four allotted two-hour slots, which he called "Radio Flashes", consisted of him acting as DJ, playing his own favourite records as well as Peel's usual playlist. He punctuated the records with semi-parodic DJ patter and flights of wistful and/or surreal fancy. Each episode included pre-recorded comedy sketches starring himself and actress Chris Bowler, and other absurdist interludes such as mock advertisements for large animal repellents such as "Rilla-Go!", "Repellephant" and "Rhi-No!". He also created a four-part radio serial, complete with cliffhanger ending, for each episode, depicting the bizarre exploits of Dick Barton-style gentleman adventurer Colonel Knutt and 'his cheeky cockney sidekick' Lemmy, starring himself as Colonel Knutt, The Who's drummer Keith Moon as Lemmy, and Traffic's drummer Jim Capaldi. It was this last feature of "Radio Flashes" that helped to sow the seeds for the "Sir Henry At Rawlinson End" radio broadcasts later in the decade.

Stanshall had already experimented with spoken-word performance on stage and record during his Bonzo Dog Band days, and by this point he had also created a lengthy spoken-word piece conceived and honed through live performances throughout 1970 and 1971, entitled "Rawlinson End". This piece was a reading of an apparently randomly-selected installment of a nonexistent 'continuing serial' that told the story of an eccentric, dysfunctional semi-aristocratic British family (the Rawlinsons) fallen on hard times at the dilapidated country estate of the title. Bearing some superficial resemblance to Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse but with added surrealistic imagery, obscure literary allusion, and a slightly scatological aftertaste, a version of the piece was broadcast on radio DJ John Peel's Top Gear on 20 March 1971, as part of a session by Stanshall's touring band Freaks.

According to Stanshall the format of Rawlinson End was originally inspired by the continuing weekly serials in vintage women's interest magazines that he would occasionally read one installment of, at random, while killing time in various waiting rooms (hence the 'Story So Far' prologue section ending with 'Now, read on..'). As a consequence of reading only a single isolated episode in a long serial, Stanshall never got any real sense of the complete story. Fortunately, being Vivian Stanshall, he was far more fascinated by this absence of beginning or end to a narrative than by the narrative itself, and so naturally he decided to explore this idea further. Creating the original Rawlinson End as an alleged installment of a longer multi-part serial - which did not actually exist beyond this single episode - Stanshall had no plans to expand upon it at that point. A different, more-polished version of the original piece (labeled "Part 14"), appears (possibly somewhat of necessity) on the Bonzo Dog Band's post-breakup contractual obligation album, Let's Make Up and Be Friendly (1972). This track marks the first official appearance of the Rawlinson family saga, although the name Rawlinson had already been attributed to various minor characters in Stanshall's lyrics throughout his Bonzo Dog Band days, including "The Intro and the Outro" from The Bonzo's first LP (1967). The Rawlinson family were now about to take centre stage in Stanshall's recording career, and would remain there until his untimely death in 1995.

At this point however, Rawlinson End was still merely a single orphaned episode of an otherwise entirely nonexistent serial. Stanshall had become a regular presence on BBC radio during the early 1970s, and his lugubrious tones and easy mastery of regional accents and vocal stylings seemed ideally-suited to create and perform in such a serial for radio, with him serving as both an omniscient narrator and performer of all the characters. However, the idea of expanding Rawlinson End into any kind of genuine continuing broadcast serial had seemingly still not occurred to him yet.

It was John Peel's producer John Walters who realised the piece's real potential as an ongoing broadcast radio serial, and suggested to Stanshall that the Rawlinson End concept could be expanded for regular episodic broadcast on Peel's show. Stanshall readily agreed.

Beginning in earnest with 'Christmas At Rawlinson End' in 1975, thirteen short episodes were produced over the next sixteen years.[2] Each episode, or 'part,' was roughly 15–20 minutes long, and featured a variety of guest musicians alongside Stanshall's own vividly-drawn characterisations.[3]

Stanshall's expanded Rawlinson End radio series (see below) was a more openly absurd dadaist parody of classic English radio drama serials, with a smattering of P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle thrown in, as it now focused on the characters of Sir Henry Rawlinson and his family, who only briefly appeared or were mentioned only in passing in the original, embryonic versions of the saga.

Each episode of Rawlinson End (including even the very first show, "Part 21") opened with a musical prelude and The Narrator's announcement: "The Story So Far...", which is a common introductory device used in episodic serials of all kinds. In the case of Rawlinson End however, the details of this introduction were often unrelated to any previous events that had occurred in the narrative, and indeed each episode rarely continued in any logical order from the preceding one. Accordingly, the episodes, or 'Parts', were not always numbered in a strictly linear sequence.

By late 1978 the Rawlinson End radio broadcasts had spawned an LP record Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, which was a re-recorded distillation of material from the 1977-78 BBC sessions. This was followed in 1980 by the movie Sir Henry at Rawlinson End which by its very nature is a different beast to either radio broadcast or LP record, and expanded the concept further but arguably lost some of the original's imaginative charm and singularity of vision.

A somewhat lacklustre sequel LP, Sir Henry at N'didi’s Kraal, followed in 1984, released against Stanshall's wishes. Meanwhile the Rawlinson End radio broadcasts continued, sporadically, until 1991. At the time of Stanshall's death in 1995, he was said to be preparing and recording material for a new LP detailing Sir Henry's wartime exploits, provisionally entitled Plastered in Paris. The sessions for this project never got as far as finished vocal tracks though, so it remains unreleased.

At present the original radio series remains officially unreleased, but all the episodes exist as off air recordings made by listeners at home. The quality ranges from good to excellent.