This is from one of Peter Cook’s 1965 EL Wisty monologues, in which EL is describing the electoral campaign of his political party, the World Domination League:
I’ve got some extremely subtle advertising slogans that should gett the public behind us. Things like ‘vote for EL Wisty and lovely nude ladies will come and dance with you.’ It’s a complete lie, of course, but you can’t afford to be too scrupulous if you’re going to dominate the world. Then there’s another good one, which says ‘if you don’t vote for EL Wisty, horrible black spiders with hairy legs will creep into your room in the middle of the night and bite your ears off.’ That should get the women’s vote. If there is one thing they can’t bear it’s black spiders grabbing hold of them in the night.
Another way I’m going to get people’s votes is to start shouting off about all the filth on television. As far as I’m concerned I could to with a great deal more of it. All the samie I formed an EL Wisty Clean Up TV campaign, pointing out some of the suggestive things that get on the air. The first thing I say they should ban is that Invisible Man show. Have you seen it? It’s absolutely disgusting. It’s all about this man who’s turned invisible because he fell into a vat of HBLO5. That was an experimental magic ingredient in a detergent. Anyway, poor devil falls in this rubbish and he turns invisible, and the programme is all about his amazing adventures. As he’s invisible, the only way you can tell where he is is if he’s smoking. You can see his cigarette moving about in the air. Or else you can see a telephone waving about the place. It’s all very ingenious, but the thing that amazes me is that he does it all in the nude. You don’t actually see him of course because he’s invisible but you can easily tell he’s got nothing on because otherwise you’d see his clothes. Sometimes he dresses up in bandages, poor devil, and dark glasses, and you can see his outline, but you never see any trousers or jackets moving about the place, so it stands to reason he’s wandering about the place with nothing on. A ghastly invisible nudist, there for everyone to see — or, rather, not to see. And, for all we know, there may be millions of other invisible nudists in the other programmes. I might be able to use them in the World Domination League. It’d be a very good slogan. ’Vote for EL Wisty or else invisible nudists will come along and smash you round the face.’
1 March '09 at 3:14 am
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