Google+ A Tangled Rope: Hedgefund and Codpiece

Friday, November 13, 2009

Hedgefund and Codpiece

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My reader of a certain age will no doubt have a brief smile of recognition when I mention the names of Hedgefund and Codpiece, probably the most famous double act to make the transition from the dying days of the music halls and into the early years of television.

They were – of course – the leading Accountancy double act in the music halls in the immediate post-war years. They took the traditional roles of auditor (Hedgefund) and straight man (Codpiece) and enthralled the huge audiences in the music halls with their tales, skits and routines about the hilarious world of double-entry bookkeeping and cash book reconciliation, before taking the - then nascent - world of TV by storm.

In a recent poll their ‘Invoices’ sketch - where Codpiece reorders Hedgefund’s meticulously arranged invoices into reverse order – was recently voted all-time greatest comedy moment by the Comedy Auditors of Great Britain Society.

Their Christmas TV shows became the stuff of legend, recording audience levels that – it seems – will never be equalled now in this multi-channelled age. In fact, for their Christmas 1976 spectacular more people watched the Hedgefund and Codpiece show than there were people living in the country at the time, an occurrence that would have taxed even Hedgefund’s remarkable accounting powers.

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