Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianhoward | Hacker News Reader

More on Polari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari

I grew up listening to recordings of "Round the Horne" in the UK, which included two characters Julian & Sandy that chatted a little in Polari during their sketches. A bunch of Polari words and phrases have migrated into general UK slang — so it's not really a case of dying out… more migrating and changing — as languages & dialects often do.

View on HN

You can listen to Round the Horne and The Navy Lark today on BBC iPlayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00c7q4l/episodes/player

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00bfvkd/episodes/player

Liverpool's Maritime Museum has an insightful exhibit on gay life at sea; the exhibit includes a section on the polari:

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/visit/floor-plan...

...and, co-incidentally, there's also available at the moment a documentary about Julian and Sandy - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jwhr

I'm always astonished as to hows fresh Round the Horne sounds even today, when many of the comedy programmes of that era sound distinctly dated. Still funny, worth a listen.

Incidentally, Morrissey had a single 'Piccadilly Palari' about male prostitution in the Piccadilly circus area in which he included polari cant.

Well, even if much of its content is taken up by regular English, it's still dying.

English took a lot of vocabulary from Norman French, but that doesn't mean Norman French is alive, for example.

Me to now looking back I am surprised the way round the horn got away with so much

There's an excellent Julian and Sandy sketch where they run a web design agency - http://tjathurman.tumblr.com/post/124925252596/information-b...

As I'm sure you know but others might not, that's not a "real" Julian and Sandy sketch.

Edit: The classic Julian and Sandy sketches were recorded between 1965 and 1968. The last one was a reunion in 1987, shortly before Kenneth Williams' death.

It reminded me a lot of Monty Python too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com