Crackling out of the nation's wirelesses on Sunday afternoons from 1965 to 1969 was a risque, bizarre and chaotic hullabaloo known as Round The Horne.

Ahead of its time and keen to mercilessly send up the establishment with wild word play, innuendo and surreal literary inventiveness, the show gathered an audience of 15 million all choking with laughter on their Sunday lunch.

"One time, Barry (Took, the recently departed founder writer) was telling me about being en route to the coast stuck in a mile-long traffic jam one Sunday afternoon," says Brian Cooke, the only remaining writer from the show.

"He suddenly realised everyone in that traffic jam was listening to Round The Horne - everybody had their windows open, everybody was laughing - a traffic snarl up suddenly turned into a festival."

Much like direct comedy descendants, TV sketch shows such as Monty Python (at one stage, it was called Barry Took's Flying Circus), The Fast Show and Little Britain who all acknowledge their debt to the BBC radio classic, it is difficult to describe what made the randomly ridiculous collection of characters and much-quoted catchphrases so funny.

The prime joke, in as much as there was one, was the contrast between the indubitably straight Kenneth Horne and the manic and crazed bunch of eccentrics who surrounded him, played by Carry On star Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, Betty Marsden and Douglas Smith.

Also distinctive was the language used by them all - a complex symphony of rhythms and made-up words testifying to the surprising flexibility of the English language.

Not that you'd immediately recognise it as English - with such phrases as "How bona to vada your dolly old eek" (How nice to see you) and "Riddle me possetts and griddle me nodes" (sift my invalid food and fry my nodules) being bandied about.

This language was partly based in Polari, a language used by gay men both as a means of expression and a protective code and partly the imaginative putting together of obscure words to sound silly and, at times, downright filthy.

The influence of Polari comes from the fact the show featured gay couple Julian and Sandy (played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams respectively), who regularly camped things up with homosexual double entrendres.

"They were probably the first homosexuals that anybody had ever met, albeit on the radio," remembers Brian, "It was a feat quite daring and taboo-breaking for the time."

The madcap ground-breaking gang also made shrewd social points and regularly put two fingers up to the establishment which, of course, got the likes of Mary Whitehouse all nicely riled.

"It was scatological, there was no respect for authority, it went into all sorts of things people were a bit cautious about which was pretty new," says Brian proudly.

"The BBC governers were presbyterian Scotsmen - very straight faced - and they didn't get the show at all. They would get a copy of the script and think it was alright and then the audience would piddle themselves laughing at all the innuendos they had missed.

"They sort of started to complain and say, 'The actors are putting emphasis on certain words.' Took said 'That's what Laurence Olivier does when he plays Hamlet, I believe it's called acting' and eventually they left us alone."

Nearly 40 years after the show died along with its primary star Kenneth Horne ("We couldn't carry on the show without him. It wasn't the same - you needed that brown voice, that twinkle in his eye, he was the ringmaster of this particular circus"), Brian has recreated it for the stage.

He went through the 66 half-hour scripts and cherry picked the best of them for this now hit West End play which gets just as many laughs as the original cult radio show "One of the reasons that inspired me to do it in theatre was the fact the original studio only held about 100 people. There's an awful lot of people out there who like the show but have never seen it. This was a way of giving them the chance.

"In 40 years of writing comedy, I've been lucky enough to work with some great teams. But nothing compares to the experience of working on Round The Horne. They were great people to work with and the live recordings were pure magic."