The run
- Network
- BBC
- Years active
- 1940–1949
- Surviving broadcasts
- 55
- Genre
- comedy
ITMA : It's That Man Again Wartime radio comedy from the 1940s starring Tommy Handley . With Jack Train as Colonel Chinstrap. And featuring Mrs Mopp, Mona Lott, Sophie Tuckshop, Tess Tickle, and Funf the Nazi Spy. A collection of 53 editions of the show: the largest online collection anywhere. In the 1930s the British newspapers, tired of the constant repetition of news items featuring Hitler, took to referring to him obliquely as That Man . A catchphrase quickly caught on, supposedly begun by the Daily Express , whereby Hitler's activities were refered to sarcastically using the newspaper headline It's that man again! With the then-current craze for reducing everything to an acronym, that h Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive.
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
14 dated broadcasts across 87 years on the air, with 85 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2025, in original transmission order.
- 1. Night Broadcast · 22 Jul 2025
- 2. The Case of the Missing Hour · 29 Jul 2025
- 3. Sign Off · 5 Aug 2025
Signal at Midnight
4 Aug 2026 · 17 min
Recorded on location, with the room left in.
A Room Above the Street
28 Jul 2026 · 32 min
New tape, a reluctant witness, and a timeline that finally stops making sense.
The Long Silence
21 Jul 2026 · 47 min
We go back to the beginning and read everything again.
Dead Air
14 Jul 2026 · 1h 2m
Three interviews, one archive reel, and a question nobody wanted asked.
Sign Off
7 Jul 2026 · 25 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
The Case of the Missing Hour
30 Jun 2026 · 40 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
Night Broadcast
23 Jun 2026 · 55 min
The one everybody argues about.
The Last Train Out
16 Jun 2026 · 18 min
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
Also on BBC
BBC in 1940–1949
Other series the network carried while ITMA: It's That Man Again was on the air.
Same seasons
comedy on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
Friends in front of a microphone
Jack Benny and Fibber McGee sold intimacy: recurring characters, in-jokes, a house style. The modern hang-out show is the same trick without the script.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of ITMA: It's That Man Again
Modern series carrying this form forward.
If you liked this
More to explore
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