It was written by and starred Richard Murdoch and Kenneth Horne as officers in a fictional RAF station coping with red tape and the inconveniences and incongruities of life in the Second World War.

Among the supporting cast were Sam Costa as the officers' batman, Maurice Denham in a multitude of roles, Diana Morrison, Dora Bryan and Nicholas Parsons.

Singers in the show's musical interludes included Gwen Catley, Maudie Edwards, Binnie Hale and Doris Hare.

Among those appearing as guest stars were Phyllis Calvert, Richard Dimbleby, Glynis Johns, Alan Ladd and Jean Simmons.

From early 1940 the BBC's General Forces Programme broadcast Merry-go-Round,[a] originally a musical show to which comedy interludes were introduced.

[11] His work with ORBS brought him into contact with Flight Lieutenant Richard Murdoch; with a great deal in common in their backgrounds and a similar sense of humour, the pair quickly formed a friendship.

[13] Murdoch, a professional actor and entertainer for twelve years before the war, was well known to listeners from his pre-war role as co-star with the comedian Arthur Askey in the show Band Waggon.

[19] "Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh" drew on the name of a real RAF station at Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, along with the word "binding", Air Force slang for grumbling or complaining.

[20] Bridgmont pictured it as "a desolate, decrepit aerodrome with its one hangar, the solitary aeroplane, 'Cabbage White Mark II', that never got off the ground and the crude outdoor 'ablutions'".

[22] By September 1945 the programme was being praised in the national popular press: Perhaps it is that Dickie Murdoch and Kenneth Horne can not only write a good script, but one which fits their own personalities like a glove.

[31] In the early shows, under the Merry-go-Round banner, the first half, with comic dialogue and narrative, was set in Murdoch's office at Much-Binding, after which the scene moved to the canteen for a concert—a spoof of typical NAAFI entertainments.

Murdoch would perform one of his nonsense lyrics to well-known classical tunes, Horne would play the saxophone, and the show would conclude with a lively piece from the orchestra.

[34] By the end of the war, Much-Binding, sharing the Merry-go-Round slot with other shows, had appeared for just over twenty episodes, but was on its way to overtaking ITMA as the most popular British radio comedy.

[7] Between January and June 1948 Murdoch wrote six instalments of The Chronicles of Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh, a spin-off series, published monthly, in The Strand Magazine.

[52][47] Much-Binding ran for one series of thirty-four shows on Radio Luxembourg between October 1950 and June 1951, recorded in studios off Baker Street, London, and broadcast at 3 pm on Sundays.

[58] Morrison had left at the end of the previous series and was replaced by Dora Bryan, who joined the cast as Miss Gladys Plum, the newspaper's fashion expert.

Costa played Prudence Gush, the radio critic, and Denham added more roles to his repertoire, including Mr Bubul the printer, Mulch the gardener and "the strip man—the chap who draws those thrilling adventures on the back page".

Johnson described Denham's performance as "an incredible tour de force, switching from one voice to the other, until the play ended with all the characters being shot by a revolver".

[61] By the mid-1950s tastes in comedy had changed and many of the wartime favourites—including ITMA, Stand Easy and Waterlogged Spa—were no longer on air, replaced by programmes featuring a new generation of performers and writers.

The other characters appearing in the scripts were mainly handled by Maurice Denham and Diana Morrison, with assistance from some of the singers in small speaking roles.

[66] In a history of British radio comedy Barry Took comments that Horne's "naïve, boring and foolish Senior Officer" was "the opposite of what he was in real life".

[26] Johnston takes a different view of Costa's character, calling him "the amiable chump who always got things wrong, driving his superiors mad".

[72] Denham also played some 60 more characters, including Mr Blake, the sexton, who spoke rustic nonsense in an impenetrable accent; Mr Bubul, the bumbling compositor of The Weekly Bind; Ivy Plackett, the exuberant proprietress of the village shop at Little Binding; Fred, another obliging person, whose genteel mangling of vowels turned "yes" into "yays"; and Nigel, an ill-mannered silkworm, given to burping after munching his mulberry leaves.

[73] Denham's other roles included Luigi the Italian, Winston the dog, Gregory the sparrow, Group Captain Funnybone, Lieutenant-General Sir Harold Tansley-Parkinson and the receptionist at Much-Binding, Ivy Clingbine ("Oh, what have I sayed!").

); the landlady, Mrs Wimpole; the effusive Miss Gibbs (Gladys), whose amorous clutches Murdoch was anxious to avoid; and Annie Potter, a cheerful cockney with an extreme and contagious glottal stop that infected the pronunciation of those around her.

[76] The Hon Babs du Croix Fotheringham, known as Queenie for short, played by the singer Dorothy Carless, was one of the WAAFs stationed at Much-Binding.

[80][e] In the ten years of its run Much-Binding featured occasional appearances by many guest stars, including Jean Simmons, Glynis Johns, Richard Dimbleby, Alan Ladd,[82] Joyce Grenfell,[83] Maudie Edwards[84] and Phyllis Calvert.

[86] He suggested to Murdoch that it would be a good idea if they had a song that began: They worked out the shape of the rest of the tune and got their accompanist, Sidney Torch, to polish it and write it down in musical score.

Among them were Marilyn Williams, Maudie Edwards, Joan Winters, Dorothy Carless,[90] Binnie Hale, Vivienne Chatterton and Gwen Catley.

[4] The conductors of the various orchestras included Stanley Black,[94] Billy Ternent,[95][96] Harry Rabinowitz,[97] Frank Cantell,[98][99] Paul Fenoulhet,[97] Robert Busby[100] and Charles Shadwell.