In regards to Tunbridge Wells, the town has sort of become a synonym for “Middle England”, a sort of mindset traditionally found in the right-wing white urban lower middle class that form the Conservative Party’s most reliable constituency. So reference to Tunbridge Wells in British comedy is usually just shorthand for a particular type of person, who presumably holds small-minded and right-wing views.
Swindon is very much like Slough in that it happens to be a large-ish town in a prosperous area, that is actually slightly less prosperous than its neighbours, of less historically significance and has a reputation for being dull place without many reasons to visit.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Swindon, actually (business). It’s an old railroad town. You didn’t miss much, although staying there you can pop over to some interesting places not far away (Stonehenge, Avebury…)
I thought Swindon was noteworthy for the magic roundabout! At least that’s why I one day would like to visit.
Apologies you’re right it is Swindon (shows how nondescript the two towns are, given that a live only a few miles from both!)
I should’ve said that one of Slough’s major landmarks is the Brunel Bridge Roundabout, which is just a fairly large roundabout.
Yeah… Well, my ancestors apparently backed the wrong side in the Civil War (English and US, actually)… 
I wonder if that woman’s son is still living in that house. He worked nights at the nearby truck stop on the M1A, and we had a great time there watching Night Gallery on a little TV and making prank phone calls to other gas stations. 
The joke references I used to hear about it always seemed to concern someone’s maiden aunt in Tunbridge Wells. So I take it that Auntie is small-minded and right-wing?
The one time I was there–which was how we got into that conversation I mentioned above–it was pouring rain and all I can remember is that there was a shopping center called The Pantiles. I know that the town used to be an old spa town, like Bath but less impressive and closer to London.
Nope: the exact equivalent of New Jersey is the County of Essex.
Next to one of the greatest cities in the world.
The northern part is very rural: the southern part is above London, full of Light Industry and barns where villains have buried bodies.
Essex Girl vs Jersey Girl.
And dead common.
Of course the original Jersey is an island in the English Channel. Wigan has it’s own rep from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier — the joke being there was no pier.
Other towns which could provoke hilarity from the names in a more simple-minded age were Birkenhead in the 1930s ( particularly in the Boy Scout movement, although it’s doubtful if Lord Baden-Powell, the industrious founder of that organisation cracked a wintry smile ) and always the Scots town of Auchtermuchty.
The usual trope would be someone writing in to a TV station or newspaper outraged about something and signing off as “[such-and-such], Tunbridge Wells”. Obviously it depends on the context, so it could be used to just suggest that someone lives a fairly-insulated middle class suburban existence or it could mean nothing at all.
The US show Jersey Shore, inspired two UK shows: The Only Way is Essex and Geordie Shore (based in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne).
I swear I learned most of my British geography from M. Python or Beyond The Fringe. Very first trip to the UK, I couldn’t wait to find Bromsgrove and Dorking.
And didn’t that dead bishop look a bit Bath and Wells-ish?
I think I had a stunted view of the world, learning only through comedy routines. My Los Angeles was all due to Firesign Theatre. Went there on a high school band trip, and couldn’t get over being at the intersection of Pico & Alvarado (two characters’ names).
There was also a spinoff from the “Housewives” concept and based in Liverpool, which they called Desperate Scousewives.
Dingley Dell isn’t a real place. It’s the manor in Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers which the Pickwickians visit and where the nefarious Alfred Jingle elopes with the spinster Rachael Wardle.
Regardless, in the Python sketch, Dingly Dell is a place in a children’s fairy tale- not a real English village.
But to get back to a concrete example: in the Nudge Nudge sketch, Eric Idle keeps making sexual insinuations about stiff, staid Terry Jones’ wife. He asks is she’s a"goer." The baffled Jones says, “She sometimes goes, yes. She’s from Purley.”
That alone got a big laugh. And Idle started chuckling, “Oh ho, Purley? Say no more!”
Again, knowing the answer won’t make the joke any funnier. But what is there about Purley that made people laugh at the idea that a Purley girl might be naughty?
I always like the obscure (to me) British towns sprinkled throughout Monty Python sketches - they’re funny simply by being so prosaic.
Towns mentioned in the various versions of the 1970 “Election Night Special” include Leicester, West Byfleet, Luton, Harpenden, Barrow-in-Furness, Wolverhampton, Bristol (again with the breasts joke), Oldham, Dunbar and Blackpool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJVROcKFnBQ
“…on a last-chance power drive.” My sister once had a college teacher who, straight-faced, apologized for being late for that very reason. Only about half the class got the Springsteen joke.
In their tabloid-blasting satirical 1985 play Pravda, David Hare and Howard Brenton have the lead character, a Rupert Murdochesque media mogul, say something to the effect that every letters page needs “an outraged missive from someone in Kent.” Tunbridge Wells is in Kent.
Maybe he considers Purley a racy place, compared to the staid town he’s from? (I’ve never been there, but I can’t imagine it is.)
There are a couple books by Dominic Greyer, Far from Dull and Lesser Spotted Britain that document weird and wonderful town and place names in Great Britain. The town of Dull in Scotland is twinned with Boring, Oregon. You can find Twatt in the Orkney Islands. Then there is Scunthorpe, Cockermouth, and Peniston.
and Six Mile Bottom (said to translate into Latin as Ars Longa)
The classic is “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”.