Tony Hendra was born in London in an air raid during the German blitz, and his first toy was a piece of shrapnel that landed in his cradle. Nic Ullett, also born in London, was soon evacuated to the countryside, where he was given the privileges of living in a corrugated-iron hut and attending school with six other boys and 65 girls. By the time the two of them met a couple of decades later at Cambridge, their thoughts had somehow acquired a satirical hue. Written down, polished, and delivered onstage with maniacal precision, their reflections on the state of the world have fetched Hendra and Ullett all the way to the colonies, to three guest shots so far on Ed Sullivan's TV show, and currently to an imposing seven-month run at the Manhattan cabaret PLaza 9-.
Their act, honed to within an inch of everybody's life, is among other things a pigeonholer's nightmare, swooping from low burlesque to high camp, from keen wit to Raggedy Ann clowning, from one-line gags to intricately orchestrated sketches. W.illiam Wordsworth's The Daffodils is revived, lyrics faithfully intact, as a rock-'n'-roll song, with Ullett wreaking vengeance on a mangy guitar and Hendra doing a Cambridge version of Teresa Brewer. The BBC news coolly reports that an H-bomb has been dropped on Ireland and asks public-spiritedly: "Would anyone who saw this accident report to the local authorities?" Hendra reminisces about one of his ancestors, a 16th century poet known as "the Scarlet Pimp,"" who composed the immortal ballad beginning, "Foftly, foftly, blowf the gale,/ Upon my miftreff bofom."
Who's Flown Before? Much of their madness is visual, relying on Hen-dra's cucurbitaceous shape and Dolly Sister face and on Ullett's saturnine suavity. Put them both in riff-R.A.F. hats and let them pose as World War II briefing officers, and things quickly get out of hand. Announcing that tonight's mission will be over Frankfurt, Ullett pauses to inquire: "Who's flown before? I see. Can anyone drive? Oh good. Stand up so they can see you. You'll be flight leader. The rest of you divide up in groups of three and decide among yourselves who'll be pilot and navigator and all that sort of thing. You'll be flying our new steam-powered jobs. Your maps, I'm afraid, are a little out-of-date, but you'll have no trouble. You'll fly out over Gaul and drop your bombs just north of the Holy Roman Empire —but don't fly too far or you'll fall off. When you're shot down, pretend to be a tourist. We have provided you with a manual containing such typical German phrases as 'Get out of my way before I kick you in the groin.' "