ITMA was an important contributor to British morale during the Second World War, with its cheerful take on the day-to-day preoccupations of the public, but its detailed topicality—one of its greatest attractions at the time—has prevented it from wearing well on repeated hearing.

[4][5] The former, which ran for three series in 1938 and 1939, was a particular success;[6] John Watt, the BBC's director of variety, wanted a successor and decided that Handley would be the right person to present it.

[7] In June 1939 Handley, Kavanagh and the producer Francis Worsley met at the Langham Hotel, London, to discuss ideas for a sketch show to meet Watt's criteria.

[15] The writer and producer John Fisher, in his examination of 20th-century comedians and comedy, highlights ITMA's "speed of delivery, its quick-fire succession of short scenes and verbal non-sequiturs, all breaking away from the traditional music hall sketch orientation of Band Waggon".

Kavanagh visited army camps and factories to listen to the patois and slang, the current jokes doing the rounds, as well as complaints and frustration, and used the material in the show.

[27][d] The relocation meant some of the original performers were not available; a new cast was assembled from those who had moved to Bristol and who had received the requisite security clearance from the Ministry of Information.

[15] With the idea of a broadcasting ship now too improbable during wartime, the premise of the programme changed to have Handley as the head of the fictional Ministry of Aggravation and Mysteries, where he worked in the Office of Twerps.

[15][45] While ITMA was absent from the airwaves, the German bombing campaign had included Bristol, which triggered a move of the Variety Department to Bangor, northwest Wales, in April 1941.

[46][47] When series three began broadcasting in June 1941, Kavanagh had introduced more characters, and set the show in the fictional seaside town of Foaming-at-the-Mouth with Handley as its mayor, renaming the programme, briefly, It's That Sand Again, before it reverted to ITMA.

Denham and Costa had both joined the armed forces since the previous series; new actors were brought in, including Horace Percival, Dorothy Summers, Clarence Wright and Fred Yule.

[50] During programme five, listeners heard the explosion of two naval mines that had been dropped on Bangor, landing half a mile (0.8 km) from the studio, instead of in the River Mersey.

[50][51] In April 1942 ITMA provided a command performance at Windsor Castle in the presence of George VI and his queen on the occasion of the 16th birthday of Princess Elizabeth.

[59] The scenario of the programme changed again for series six, when, following a decision to move the munitions factory underground, a sulphur spring was tapped and Foaming-in-the-Mouth became a spa.

[60] The show restarted without Train, whose health, which had been worsening for some time, broke down completely; he spent a year in a sanatorium in North Wales recovering.

He faced questions from, among others, Dilys Powell—the film critic from The Sunday Times—the medical spokesman Dr Charles Hill and the author A. G. Street; the programme was chaired by Sir William Darling, MP.

[88] He would telephone Handley to make dark threats, in a sinister, hollow voice, which Train produced by speaking across the top of an empty glass held next to the microphone.

Funf, described by the media historian Denis Gifford as "the greatest of all war-time characters",[89] became what Worsley called "a national craze"[86] and helped to make the German propaganda machine a source of public ridicule in Britain.

[97] The Commercial Traveller, like the Diver, was a "crossing" character, distracting Handley from the business at hand with his irrelevant sales patter: Signor So-SoPlayed by Dino GalvaniSeries 4–8Catchphrase: Notting at all!

[111] His verbal infelicities became infectious and regularly caused Handley's character to trip over his words: Colonel ChinstrapPlayed by Jack TrainSeries 5–6 and 8–12Catchphrase: I don't mind if I do.

Among other catastrophes recounted by Mona were her brother-in-law, a champion runner, walking in his sleep and getting half-way to Brighton before anyone could catch him,[133] and, when on a train journey, "I put me head out of the window to look at the view, and the mail-bag catcher caught me.

There were spoofs of national and regional types, including Johann Bull, a conspicuously Teutonic German agent trying to pass himself off as English;[55] Chief Bigga Banga of Tomtopia, who spoke no English and Wamba M'Boojah who spoke with the grandest of Oxford accents, having been a BBC announcer;[140] the American publicity agent, Luke Slippy;[97] Hari Kari, a Japanese caller whose gibberish only Handley could understand,[141] and his compatriots Bowing and Scraping.

"[70] Military figures in addition to Colonel Chinstrap included his puritanical nephew Brigadier Dear, mortified by his uncle's excesses;[149] and Major Mundy, a British expatriate on Tomtopia with an unreconstructed 19th-century mindset.

[147] Among the mock authority figures were Sir Short Supply, a strangulated-voiced bureaucrat;[149] the Town Clerk, a north-country official who would offer "have a cher, Mr Mer", later Mer himself;[150] Fusspot, an official whose name was self-explanatory;[151] two characters with a habit of repeating the ends of their sentences: the Man from the Ministry[55] and Inspector Squirt: "I'm Inspector Squirt—I said Squirt";[152] and Percy Palaver, appointed governor of Tomtopia in Handley's absence, and notable for his generally unintelligible speech punctuated with "oomyahs" and "harrumphs".

[97] Professions and occupations were represented by, among others, the announcer at Radio Fakenburg;[37] Atlas, the hypochondriac strongman;[145] Bookham, a variety agent;[55] Curly Kale, a chef who hated food and loved dreadful old jokes;[153] Dan Dungeon, the jocose tour guide at Castle Weehouse;[149] Farmer Jollop;[40] Lemuel the office boy;[37] Norman the Doorman;[55] and Vodkin and Vladivostooge, two mad scientists.

[161][162] There were recurring characters who were mentioned frequently but were never heard, such as Peter Geekie,[163] or appeared regularly but were not given a name, such as Carleton Hobbs's man whose banal weekly tales began and ended "Ain't it a shame, eh?

[210] A 2002 history of Britain in the first half of the 20th century called the show "the most celebrated wartime radio programme ... praised by intellectuals for its surrealism and wordplay, but loved by the mass listening public for its delirious silliness".

[211] The size of the audience was unprecedented; one historian records that more than sixteen million people listened to ITMA every week",[42] and another that "a staggering 40 per cent of the population" regularly tuned in.

The radio critic of The Manchester Guardian wrote in December 1939 that amusing as the show could be, "it is beginning to pall by its regularity and its attachment to the same style of humour".

[215][x] By the end of the last series, in 1949, writers in the same paper were comparing ITMA to the comedies of Aristophanes[216] and Ben Jonson,[217] as "a brilliant, penetrating commentary on our times ... enlightening millions of people—a cunningly dispensed and cleverly administered medicine for the lesser ills of society".

[15] In a 2013 study of British comedy, John Fisher emphasises the influence of ITMA on later comedy shows by virtue of "its speed of delivery, its quick-fire succession of short scenes and verbal non-sequiturs, its surrealist overtones, all breaking away from the traditional music hall sketch orientation of Band Waggon, and anticipating Take It From Here, and even more so The Goon Show and Round the Horne".