It's That Man Again
![The ''ITMA'' cast at rehearsal during a visit to the Home Fleet at [[Scapa Flow]], January 1944](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/The_British_comedian_Tommy_Handley_rehearses_with_actors_from_his_ITMA_show_%28cropped%29.jpg)
''ITMA'' was a character-driven comedy whose satirical targets included officialdom and the proliferation of minor wartime regulations. Parts of the scripts were rewritten in the hour before the broadcast, to ensure topicality. ''ITMA'' broke away from the conventions of previous radio comedies, and from the humour of the music halls. The shows used sound effects in a novel manner, which, alongside a wide range of voices and accents, created the programme's atmosphere.
The show presented more than seventy regular characters during its twelve seasons, most of them with his or her own catchphrase. Among them were the bibulous Colonel Chinstrap ("I don't mind if I do"), the charlady Mrs Mopp ("Can I do you now, sir?"), the incompetent German agent Funf ("this is Funf speaking"), the courtly odd-job men Cecil and Claude ("After you, Claude—no, after ''you'', Cecil"), the Middle Eastern hawker Ali Oop ("I go—I come back"), and the lugubrious Mona Lott ("It's being so cheerful that keeps me going"). To keep the show fresh, old characters were dropped and new ones introduced over the years.
''ITMA'' was an important contributor to British morale during the Second World War, with its cheerful take on the day-to-day preoccupations of the public, but its detailed topicality—one of its greatest attractions at the time—has prevented it from wearing well on repeated hearing. The show's lasting legacy is its influence on subsequent BBC comedy. ''ITMA''s innovative structure—a fast-moving half-hour show with musical interludes and a cast of regular characters with popular catchphrases—was successfully continued in comedy shows of the 1950s and 1960s, such as ''Take It from Here'', ''The Goon Show'' and ''Round the Horne''.
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