[Bernard] listened for a moment, then replaced the receiver.
``He's coming round now''
``Why?" I was feeling malicious ``Did he faint?"
We looked at each other in silence. And we both tried very hard not to laugh

[snip]

``The identity of this official whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of recent speculation is not shrouded in such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume, and, in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question was, it may surprise you to learn, the one whom your present interlocutor is in the habit of defining by means of the perpendicular pronoun''

I love Humphrey's speech, and i bet Nigel Hawthorne did too. Ludicrous (tho' perhaps Gilbertian is a better word) tho' it is, it's a speech worthy of a tragic hero, and Sir Humphrey (yes, really) is a tragic hero. Hawthorne probably had no difficulty memorising it: it's a treat. The perpendicular pronoun indeed. Humphrey had a first in Greats from The Other Place, didn't he...?

But perhaps the best thing about this little scene — which is probably the reason why the programme-makers allowed the ad lib. to stand — is that of course it's not just Paul Eddington and Derek Fowles who corpse, it's also Hacker and Bernard. If it were just Eddington and Fowles then the take would have been snipped and we would only have seen it — if at all — on one of those ghastly programmes about film out-takes.
Notice that it's not supposed to make the audience crack up. The Importance of Being Sir Humphrey is Gilbertian comedy, not farce, and it has to be played absolutely straight.

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