Max Miller, doyen of the double entendre and Britain’s favourite comedian for three decades, used it to devastating effect during his career, which is perhaps why he’s still regarded with such fondness 50 years after his death. Indeed, his most infamous punchline, explaining his predicament at meeting a beautiful blonde while traversing a narrow mountain path (“I didn’t know whether to block her passage or toss myself off”), would have been enough to send current BBC executives reaching for the red pen. It may have made us laugh, but it made BBC executives fade him out back in the 40s; they banned him for five years.  It wasn’t until the rise of Kenneth Horne, (tellingly, a son of a clergyman) and his stable of fabulous fictional creations in the late Fifties that an element of innuendo was allowed on to the airwaves. The trend that found its apogee in Kenneth Williams’s walking single-entendre: the folk singer Rambling Syd Rumpo, whose licentious lyrics would have had Stephen Fry surely squirming with pleasure. By the time I was 10, in 1966, I knew by heart all the words of his legendary songs, including his trademark “Green Grow my Nadgers O”. And while I may have been too young to appreciate just how the near the knuckle the humour was, it didn’t stop me enjoying it on my own level alongside my parents. Which, as a visit to any traditional Christmas pantomime perennially proves, is the underlying strength of all saucy comedy: it’s fit for all the family.  But now it seems we’re back to the prurience of the Forties. The curious thing, though, is that while schedulers are afraid of their own shadow before the watershed, once the little hand has passed 9pm, the pendulum is allowed to swing to the other extreme. When the kids are safely tucked up (and watching TV in their bedrooms), a new breed of “Gross Out” comedies proliferates, in which comedy gold is measured by the quantity of explicit sexual references (and even more explicit sexual encounters) that can be crammed into half an hour. Certainly not fit for all the family. I’ve auditioned for some of them myself (usually, you won’t be surprised to learn, for the role of outraged dads). Laugh? I couldn’t start.  So a plea to the BBC: sauce is nothing to be afraid of. On the contrary, it should be embraced; cherished; clasped to our bosoms. And in the meantime, lovers of the comedic art can take heart in the fact that it will always find a way around the dead hand of bureaucracy. As far back as 1900, John Lloyd’s namesake and grande dame of music hall, the immortal Marie, was once compelled to change the words of her famous ballad, “I sits amongst the cabbages and peas,” following complaints from outraged moralists. For the rest of her career the song became “I sits amongst the cabbages and leaks.” As she said at the time, “I can’t help it if people twist my meanings.”  In his splendid new book about the rules of comedy, the writer of Yes, Prime Minister, Jonathan Lynn, cites the only workable definition of funny he has ever heard: “If you put it up there and they laugh, it’s funny. If they don’t laugh, it’s not funny.” It’s a dictum may come back to haunt the BBC in the coming months.
From Chaucer, through Shakespeare and music hall to the Carry On films,    innuendo has always been an essential ingredient of British comedy.