Musical breaks in old radio programs

[Rumford]

If you listen to reruns of, for example, the Goon Show or 'Round the Horne' for no apparent reason they stick in one or two musical breaks by such great artists as the 'Fraser Hayes Four' or 'Nat Geldray'. Does anyone know why. Was it required by the BBC or the Musician' Union or something?

[Mortartube]

Firstly, it's Max Geldray. AFAIK there was no requirement by the BBC to have music in the middle of these programmes, but it does break things up a bit and it also means that there is less comedy to write. I write comedy and it's extremely hard to get 30mins of funny stuff for one episode of something so think how poor old Spike Milligan went on with numerous episodes. No wonder the poor sod suffered nervous breakdowns. The pressure to be funny must have been immense.

[Mortartube]

Further to my first post, I just wanted to add that one A4 sheet of radio script runs for about one minute when broadcast and you would very likely need two to three jokes on each page, hence the need to shorten comedy writing time when working on a weekly broadcast programme.

[Hippy]

Have a listen to "Garrison Keillor's Radio Show". Very dry humour, unusual in an American, recorde live theatre preformances interspersed with musical and often very funny pieces. Musical breaks are not confined to ye olde wireless.

[Pinotage]

As the others have said - but also when they had done the rehearsal of the scripted material they knew how much time they had left to fill and could call for a 3 minute song this week, a 3m20s song the following.