Chuffer Dandridge was a fictional Shakespearean

actor-manager An actor-manager is a leading actor who sets up their own permanent theatrical company and manages the business, sometimes taking over a theatre to perform select plays in which they usually star. It is a method of theatrical production used co ...

, whose emails were frequently read out by

Terry Wogan Sir Michael Terence Wogan (; 3 August 1938 – 31 January 2016) was an Irish radio and television broadcaster who worked for the BBC in the UK for most of his career. Between 1993 and his semi-retirement in December 2009, his BBC Radio 2 week ...

on his BBC Radio 2 breakfast show ''

Wake Up to Wogan ''Wake Up to Wogan'' (''WUTW'') was the incarnation of '' The Radio 2 Breakfast Show'' that aired each weekday morning from 4 January 1993 to 18 December 2009. It was the most-listened-to radio show in the United Kingdom, and the flagship breakf ...

'', which aired from 1993 until 2009. Dandridge was created by fans of the show, civil servants Roger Byrne and Charles Slane, who described him as a "semi-retired Actor-Manager in search of a big break". Like several other contributors, they chose a humorous pseudonym after many listeners had used

double entendre A double entendre (plural double entendres) is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, of which one is typically obvious, whereas the other often conveys a message that would be too socially ...

s in names to catch Wogan out. The pair emailed new material on a daily basis, which Wogan would then read out on his show, sometimes

corpsing In theatre (especially in the illusionistic Western tradition), breaking character occurs when an actor ceases to maintain the illusion that they are identical with the character they are portraying. This is a more acceptable occurrence while in ...

with laughter along with colleagues Paul Walters,

Alan Dedicoat Alan Dedicoat (born 1 December 1954) is an English announcer for programmes on BBC One. He is known as the "Voice of the Balls" on the National Lottery programmes, providing a voiceover for the draws since 1995. He was a BBC Radio 2 newsreade ...

and John "Boggy" Marsh. The character was retired along with Wogan leaving the Radio 2 breakfast slot in 2009, although the character did return briefly the following year on Wogan's weekend show,

Weekend Wogan ''Weekend Wogan'' was the incarnation of the Sunday morning show on BBC Radio 2 from 14 February 2010 to 8 November 2015. The show was presented by Sir Terry Wogan, which marked his return to the airwaves following his departure as presenter of ...

. Dandridge misreported news and travel stories, interspersing them with a humorous monologue of his acting career. He frequently

name drop Name-dropping (or name-checking or a shout-out) is the practice of naming or alluding to important people and institutions within a conversation,. story, song, online identity, or other communication. The term often connotes an attempt to impress ...

ped colleagues he claimed to meet in the theatre, and a regular in-joke was him complaining about being owed a white fiver (pre-1957 £5 note) he lent a colleague when both were in repertory theatre. Wogan subsequently published some of the email transcripts in his autobiographies; in one, Dandridge compared the Eurovision Song Contest, which Wogan had presented for many years, to "a cabaret in pre-war Berlin, where I was naked, painted in zebra stripes and sitting bareback on a horse". David Sillito, Arts Correspondent for the BBC, suggested Dandridge was created to appeal to Wogan's love of author

P. G. Wodehouse Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, ( ; 15 October 188114 February 1975) was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeve ...

. Wogan thought Dandridge's monologues parodied

Donald Sinden Sir Donald Alfred Sinden (9 October 1923 – 12 September 2014) was a British actor. Sinden featured in the film ''Mogambo'' (1953), and achieved early fame as a Rank Organisation film star in the 1950s in films including ''The Cruel Sea (195 ...

and his character, optimistically hoping to revive his showbusiness career, was based on

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...

Samuel Pickwick Samuel Pickwick is a fictional character and the main protagonist in ''The Pickwick Papers'' (1836), the first novel by author Charles Dickens. One of the author's most famous and loved creations, Pickwick is a retired successful businessman an ...

. Byrne and Slane eventually met Wogan at a bookstore signing in

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...

, surprising the latter who expected the pair to be significantly older.

References

Citations Sources * {{refend

External links

Official website
British radio comedy BBC Radio 2 programmes