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The Goon Show was a hugely popular and extremely influential British radio comedy programme, originally airing from 1951 to 1960 on the BBC Home Service. The scripts mixed ludicrous plots with surreality, puns, catchphrases and an array of silly sound effects. Some of the later episodes feature electronic effects by the fledgling BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
The series was devised and written by Spike Milligan with occasional assistance from others such as Eric Sykes and Larry Stephens under the watchful eye of Jimmy Grafton (KOGVOS-Keeper Of The Goons and Voice Of Sanity). The principal parts were performed by Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, and the first two seasons also featured Michael Bentine. Sellers and Secombe shared the same birthday, 8 September.
Possibly the most famous Goon Show sequence ever, from "The Mysterious Punch-Up-The-Conk-er", begins with Bluebottle (Sellers) asking Eccles (Milligan) what the time is. Eccles consults a piece of paper, on which is written "Eight o'clock" - the answer he received the last time he asked somebody what the time was. The implications of this method of telling the time are then explored at some length.
Regular cast members
- Harry Secombe as
- Neddie Seagoon, affable but gullible idiot, around whom the plot usually revolves. The patriotic Neddie is always willing to lay down his life for the Crown, and this often gets him into difficult situations. Neddie is often unemployed, and some episodes begin with him accepting a new job. Some jokes are made about his enormous girth, especially when contrasted to his lack of height.
- Fred Nurke, a Cockney.
- Spike Milligan as
- (The Famous) "Mad Dan" Eccles, idiot supreme. Eccles is a man with no more wits than a small child. Occasionally he will be performing some absurd task, and when questioned why, it will come out that he misinterpreted instructions. Eccles is often paired with Bluebottle as a friend, and sometimes is an underling or lackey for Neddie. When people around him tell him to shut up, he often joins in, and has been known to go on telling himself to shut up long after everyone else has given up. Another catchphrase is his distinctive rising-and-falling "Ooooooooh..." when comprehension dawns on him.
- Miss Minnie Bannister, elderly spinster with an interesting past. Minnie is as flirtatious as a girl a third her age.
- Count Moriarty, impecunious French idiot and Grytpype-Thynne's sidekick. He often utters meaningless foreign-sounding curses like "Zapristi!"
- Throat or Miss Throat, with the very gravelly voice.
- Little Jim, with the single line "He's fallen in the wa-ater".
- Peter Sellers as
- Major Dennis Bloodnok, military cad, lecher and idiot. Seagoon's former officer and in love with Minnie Bannister, to Henry Crun's disgust. In contrast to most military officers in fiction, Bloodnok is a world-class coward who'll betray his country for £5.
- Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, a suave, well-educated impecunious homosexual cad. He often collaborates with Count Moriarty to swindle Neddie. His homosexuality was never mentioned openly in the show, but "came out" in a biographical note in the book The Goon Show Scripts (1972).
- Henry Crun, aged idiot inventor and beau of Minnie Bannister. Both characters first appeared in the episode "London's Last Tram" based on the Kingsway tramway subway.
- Bluebottle, young lecherous Boy Scout and idiot - often "deaded", pre-dating Kenny of South Park. He is usually a playmate and companion of Eccles. Bluebottle is always willing to help anyone, but normally is as bad at interpreting instructions as Eccles is.
- Willium "Mate" Cobblers, working-class cockney idiot.
- Sinjiz Thing, an Indian idiot.
- Michael Bentine was part of the regular cast for the first two seasons, often playing Prof. Osric Pureheart. As a tribute of sorts, unheard characters called Bentine are sometimes referred to in later episodes.
Other members
- Andrew Timothy - the show's original announcer, who left the show after the first few episodes of season 4, claiming that he feared for his sanity. He did however return in 1972 for The Last Goon Show of All.
- Wallace Greenslade - announcer, he opened and closed each show (often parodying the traditional BBC announcing style), and occasionally played himself in an episode, as well as other small parts.
- Ray Ellington (not related to the Duke) and his Quartet - singer and drummer. The Quartet acted as rhythm section for the show's orchestra. Ellington, whose father was African-American, also occasionally played brief roles, mostly black characters.
- Max Geldray - jazz harmonica player (but no actor).
- Wally Stott and his Orchestra - the house band.
- George Chisholm - one of the show's regular musicians, sometimes called upon to play Scottish characters.
Guest appearances
- John Snagge - doyen of BBC newsreaders, who like Wallace also played himself, a great supporter of the show.
- Valentine Dyall - radio's "Man in Black", often called upon to play sinister characters.
- Charlotte Mitchell - stepped into the breach on the rare occasions when the script called for an authentic female.
- Jack Train - made two appearances reprising his role as Colonel Chinstrap from ITMA, who fits into the Goon framework surprisingly well.
- Dick Emery - stood in for Secombe as "Emery-type Seagoon" in such shows as "The £50 Cure", "Spon", and a few others. Emery went on to provide voices for the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, and was popular in his own television sketch show in the 1970s.
Later revivals
The future members of Monty Python were fans, but ironically at the time their efforts over-shadowed Milligan's later TV efforts. However now the Circus seems to be more quoted. It is fair to say that British alternative comedy based its modern form on the model created for the Goon Show by Spike Milligan.
The Telegoons (1963-4) was a 15-minute BBC puppet show featuring the voices of Milligan, Secombe and Sellers and adapted from the radio scripts.
In 1964 Milligan, Secombe and Sellers lent their voices to a comedy LP, How to Win an Election (or Not Lose by Much), which was written by Leslie Bricusse. It was not exactly a Goons reunion because Sellers was in Hollywood and had to record his lines separately. The album was reissued on CD in 1997.
They made a number of records including "I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas" (originally sung by Milligan in the show to fill in during a musicians' strike), "Bloodnok's Rock and Roll Call" (the first British record with the word "rock" in its title) and its B-side "The Ying Tong Song", which was reissued as an A-side in the mid-1970s and became a surprise novelty hit.
In the movies the following were a product of Goon activity:
- Let's Go Crazy (1951)
- Penny Points to Paradise (1951)
- Down Among the Z Men (1952) (with Bentine)
- The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn (1956) (a two-reeler starring Milligan, Sellers and Dick Emery)
- The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film (1959) (a one-reeler starring Milligan and Sellers, directed by Dick Lester)
In 1972 the Goons reunited to perform The Last Goon Show of All for radio and television, before an invited audience that didn't, however, include long-time fan Prince Charles (who was out of the country on duty with the Royal Navy at the time).
The last time all three Goons worked together was in 1978 when they recorded two new songs, "The Raspberry Song" and "Rhymes".
In 2001 the BBC recorded a "new" The Goon Show, Goon Again, featuring Andrew Secombe (son of Harry), Jon Glover and Jeffrey Holland, with Christopher Timothy (son of Andrew Timothy) announcing, based on two unpreserved series 3 episodes from 1953, "The Story of Civilisation" and "The Plymouth Ho Armada", both written by Milligan and Stephens.
Archiving
Many of the earliest radio episodes no longer exist. Only one episode from series 4 (1953-4) survives, and only selected episodes from later series were selected for preservation in the BBC Sound Archive. However, commencing with the start of series 5 (1954), BBC Transcription Services began making copies for overseas sales, and even commissioned re-recordings of some key series 4 episodes.
The Transcription Services versions were cut to remove topical and parochial material and anything that might be potentially offensive (and the Goon Show did feature quite a lot of politically incorrect humour, much of it sneaked past the noses of BBC censors). For many years these abridged versions were the only surviving copies of many episodes, but in recent years the BBC has done a huge amount of research work to find and restore the missing footage, often literally from the cutting room floor.
To date, the BBC has released more than 20 CD sets of these remastered episodes, containing over 80 shows, plus The Last Goon Show of All and Goon Again. Another 12 shows had been previously issued by EMI, but for contractual reasons these were all heavily cut to remove musical interludes and other music cues, and to this day they are the only commercially available versions of those particular episodes.
Episodes of the Goon Show are still regularly broadcast in New Zealand and are still occasionally repeated on BBC Radio 2 or Radio 4 in the UK.
More recently the show has become a regular feature on the digital radio station BBC 7, which features both new material (much of it recognisably in a Goonish tradition) and archives from several decades of BBC comedy and drama.
ABC Radio National in Australia has also regularly broadcast the Goon Show for decades. The network attempted to retire the series in January 2004, feeling that it may have at last worn out its welcome. Listener response proved them wrong, and broadcasts of the show resumed in June of the same year.
Resources
- The Goon Show Depository (http://www.thegoonshow.co.uk/)
- The Goon Show Archive (http://minnie.tuhs.org/Goons/index2.html)
- The Goon Show YAQ (http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2pkt9s%24m3j%40ccu2.auckland.ac.nz&output=gplain): Google Usenet archive
- the alt.fan.goons (news:alt.fan.goons) newsgroup exists to discuss the Goon show and Goon-related things
- BBC On-line Shop (http://www.bbcshop.com/bbc_shop/dept.asp?shop=bbc&dept_id=39)
- The Goon Show Companion: A History and Goonography by Roger Wilmut and Jimmy Grafton (1976) remains the definitive book on the series, but has never been updated.
- The Goonlog (http://homepage.mac.com/waynestewart/iblog/) - a Goonish weblog by Wayne Stewart. Contains polls, guess this sound clip competitions and find links to shows.
- The Spike Milligan Tribute Site (http://www.spikemilligan.co.uk/)
- The Official GSPS Telegoons website (http://www.telegoons.org/) The Official Goon Show Preservation Society tribute to The Telegoons
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