The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town: Part 5

In the fifth weekly instalment of the Two Ronnies' Victorian penny-dreadful spoof, word reaches the authorities that the Phantom Raspberry Blower will not rest until he has struck at Queen Victoria herself. The bumbling Home Secretary, Sir Doddington Diddle, inspects a squad of burly, whiskered special constables dressed as the Queen and assigns them to impersonate Her Majesty around London as decoys, while the real monarch is safely out of the way. The narrator then recounts how each decoy came to grief at the Phantom's hands, until his calling card turns up beneath the Queen's own bed, found by her loyal Scottish servant John Brown. A shaken Prime Minister summons an emergency meeting of the Commonwealth's sultans, maharajas and dignitaries at Number 10 Downing Street, only for the Phantom to blast the room apart in mid-speech and then silence a constable's whistle on the doorstep outside, leaving the authorities as powerless as ever.

The Home Secretary's promise that the real Queen will be off playing the lead in Charley's Aunt is a nod to Brandon Thomas's 1892 farce, whose plot turns on an Oxford undergraduate disguising himself as an elderly aunt, much like this episode's platoon of policemen dressed as Queen Victoria.