Chesham 101

l wonder, if they have horses in jail, do they raise up on their Heinz legs?!

The ‘shams’. Evesham. Horsham. Chesham. There are others. The types of English market town you only ever hear about when one member of a posh elderly couple finally breaks and stabs their partner of 50 years 200 times with a bread knife. Well, Chesham is slightly different, because Alex Horne’s wife is sticking with him thus far.

This, then. This is a sketch from Big Train back in the 90s featuring a pre-Mission Impossible Simon Pegg and – albeit very briefly – the eternal comedy legend Julia Davis. Pegg is doing a fantastic job of portraying a fuck-awful regional disc jockey, vomiting diabolical bean puns into his mic due to a shitty, shitty non-story about a shopkeeper selling tins of old baked beans. He fucks the next part of his link, stumbling over the new Batman film and then launches into a violent tirade against a room full of grubby sweatshop children, demanding they come up with 20 new Batman puns or else they go without food.

The sketch isn’t even about Chesham 101. It’s actually about Langley & Allchurch, who are either a charity or law firm offering help children be free from having to write shit wordplay against their will. BUT, the radio bit is the focal point and I used to work for the radio, so Chesham 101 got the nod. And Langley & Allchurch feature a logo anyway, so nuts to that.

This should be fairly recognisable as a fittingly inoffensive and homogenised radio-esque ‘funtime’ branding situation. The one it’s loosely based on is owned by Global and used to be Jazz FM. Who are now something else, owned by Bauer. So the complete opposite. Like the whole AFC Wimbledon / MK Dons thing.

Speaking of football – the colours used are directly lifted from Chesham United. Which are presumably directly lifted from either Aston Villa or West Ham United.

Easy to get the two mixed up, mind.