The run
- Network
- BBC
- Years active
- 1949–1960
- Surviving broadcasts
- 14
- Genre
- comedy
Ray's A Laugh : Radio comedy show starring comedian Ted Ray . Co-starring Kitty Bluett . Featuring Peter Sellers , Kenneth Connor . Broadcast between 1949 and 1961, it ran for 12 years. Included are the only high bitrate editions I currently have. A long-running British radio comedy of the 1950s, the humour is based around the fictitious life of its star, comedian Ted Ray , who is given a wife and a job, then put into humorous situations (domestic situations at home, and business situations in his job). This is an early situation comedy, which means it can't quite make up its mind whether it's a comedy about a situation, or simply a series of loosely connected sketches. Ted Ray was originall Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive.
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
4 dated broadcasts across 78 years on the air, with 77 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2026, in original transmission order.
- 1. The Case of the Missing Hour · 5 May 2026
- 2. Sign Off · 12 May 2026
- 3. Dead Air · 19 May 2026
Signal at Midnight
4 Aug 2026 · 33 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
A Room Above the Street
28 Jul 2026 · 48 min
The one everybody argues about.
The Long Silence
21 Jul 2026 · 1h 3m
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
Dead Air
14 Jul 2026 · 26 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
Sign Off
7 Jul 2026 · 41 min
We go back to the beginning and read everything again.
The Case of the Missing Hour
30 Jun 2026 · 56 min
Three interviews, one archive reel, and a question nobody wanted asked.
Night Broadcast
23 Jun 2026 · 19 min
Recorded on location, with the room left in.
The Last Train Out
16 Jun 2026 · 34 min
New tape, a reluctant witness, and a timeline that finally stops making sense.
Also on BBC
BBC in 1949–1960
Other series the network carried while Ray's a Laugh was on the air.
Same seasons
comedy on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
Friends in front of a microphone
Jack Benny and Fibber McGee sold intimacy: recurring characters, in-jokes, a house style. The modern hang-out show is the same trick without the script.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of Ray's a Laugh
Modern series carrying this form forward.
If you liked this
More to explore
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