The Fox and the Gander A Comedy of Errors

The year is 1961 and Roddy Matthews, chief sub-editor with a small town newspaper, the Muddley Chronicle, is press-ganged by his editor into participating in a week of survival and initiative exercises. The event, sponsored by Madison Neoplastics, a local company, is to take place in a remote Scottish location provided by a department of the Royal Navy whose function is to look after the leisure interests of junior ratings.An early misunderstanding by naval personnel as to the true nature of the event is initiated by Able Seaman Parsons, a cryptographer posted to the department by a typing error but retained by expert paper manipulator and empire builder Captain Maurice "Goosey" Gander, the department head. Parsons convinces Gander's junior, Sub-Lieutenant Jack Flagg, that the message received from the office of Vice-Admiral Sir Henry Royston Hornby requesting the department's assistance is really a subterfuge designed to disguise the true reason for the trip, namely the arrival of a party of American VIPs which includes senior military personnel and Vice President Richard Nixon to inspect the site with a view to establishing a military base. In making contact via a rapidly failing telephone connection with Dooncraigie House, a newly-established boys' academy on the outskirts of the small fishing village of Dooncraigie and adjacent to the navy site, to arrange accommodation for the Captain and his party, the error is passed on and amplified by school staff. The outcome is that the school's deputy headmaster anticipates the imminent arrival of the Duke of Edinburgh whose purpose, in a visit believed to have been arranged by the absent headmaster, is to inspect the school as a possible contender for the education of his eldest son.While the school staff and the denizens of Dooncraigie plan for the momentous visitation, members of the party from Muddley are preparing to travel north. Among their number is arch busybody, annoying know-it-all and serial organiser Geoffrey Fox.To the mixture are added a number of diverse characters including Madison's American Vice President Raph N. Milhouse, members of a steam railway preservation society, a pair of bootlegging brothers and the fiscally-circumspect citizens of a nearby town who, with the newly-arrived southern factory workers and a team of naval personnel despatched by the Admiral, are drawn deeper into circumstances none has any control over resulting in a series of increasingly bizarre situations all rushing headlong towards an equally bizarre and explosive climax.