Goons

Century Baby

Utter Goonacy

Radio comedy is wonderful and often surreal, perhaps because radio is a non-visual medium. It's always been far easier to make someone imagine something bizarre than it is to show them that thing. And possibly the bizarrest situations of all came up in that all-time great radio programme, The Goon Show. Although I was born well after the programme's heyday, my father loves radio comedy and so I grew up listening to some of the best, funniest shows ever to stream across the airwaves, including the creme de la comedy creme, The Goon Show. Monty Python's Flying Circus is often cited as the Goons' most obvious successor, but I see The Goodies, The Young Ones and even The League of Gentlemen as being truer heirs, with their grotesquely funny characters and genuinely strange happenings. However, none of those ever really touch the hilarious oddity of the Goon shows, perhaps because their humour has to be conveyed visually.

The Goon Show developed out of an earlier BBC radio programme called Crazy People, and initially starred Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe and the writer of most of the programmes, Spike Milligan. Michael Bentine left at the end of the second series, but continued to produce his own bizarre comedies, as anyone who remembers seeing Michael Bentine's Potty Time as a child can testify. BBC Radio announcers, most frequently Wallace Greenslade, also participated. Musical interludes were provided by Max Geldray and the Ray Ellington Quartet. All this sounds innocuous enough, but the anarchy has yet to begin.

Secombe only ever played one character, gullible innocent Neddie Seagoon, but the other members of the cast performed a range of roles. Quiver-voiced pensioners Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister, military rogue Major Dennis Bloodnok, smooth cad Grytpype-Thynne and his cohort the raffish Moriarty were just a few. Then, of course, there was the overgrown schoolboy Bluebottle and his dimwitted associate Eccles. Their world changed slightly with each programme, but the characters remained the same. Grytpype and Moriarty could be stealing string or conning the foolish (Neddie!), Neddie could be working as a debt collector or trying to track down the Phantom Headshaver of Brighton. Their personalities remained constant, but the world around them changed, and whatever happened in one episode never carried into another. (This is a good thing, given Eccles' and Bluebottle's habit of dying regularly.)

Seagoon: Oh, grand news. We have managed to send an elephant up the Falls in the atomic-proof dustbin, and it lived.

Bloodnok: What? No other dustbin has ever done it and lived.

Seagoon: Now next, we want a human being to go in it.

Bloodnok: We'll draw lots for it now. Eccles, write your name on fifty pices of paper and put them in a hat...

(From Ned's Atomic Dustbin, broadcast January 1959)

Milligan, Sellers and Secombe, presumably carrying the leeks in honour of Neddie Seagoon.

It was only in the third series that The Goon Show had consistent plots - or as consistent a plot as you can get in a world where houses do a number of bricks to the mile and people will gladly accept a watercolour of a cheque for five pounds. The titles of some of the later shows tell you what to expect the characters to be caught up in: The Great String Robberies; The Dreaded Batter-Pudding Hurler of Bexhill on Sea; 1985; Ill Met By Goonlight. 1985 is, as you'd expect, a pastiche on Orwell's 1984, complete with proletarian Eccles wandering around bellowing "It's good to be alive in 1985!" and Seagoon, reluctant worker for the Big Brother Corporation, being ensnared by Grytpype-Thynne. Another programme, The Scarlet Capsule, is a wonderful send-up of Quatermass. Most of the shows' plots came spinning from Milligan's phenomenal imagination, though. Neddie on the trail of a nefarious thrower of batter puddings, Neddie desperate to invent the aeroplane so he can deliver supplies to the beleaguered garrison at Fort Spon (as Moriarty points out, that meant the end of the horse-drawn zeppelin), or Moriarty and Grytpype stealing string and being pursued for it. More jokes, puns, strange sound effects and completely off-the-wall episodes were thrown into the stories, and coherent, addictive lunacy was the result. The Goons' legacy lives on in the comedians they influenced and, of course, their wonderful radio shows, many of which are avaliable on cassette and CD. There's nothing quite like The Goon Show, and, like Marmite, this peculiarly British production is something you either love or loathe. Sadly, the craziness is too involved for my quotes to convey the fun - you'll just have to buy the shows on BBC cassette or CD.

Crun: Mnk - I suggest that everyone entering Brighton be handed a bald wig, and that he should sleep in that self-same wig.

Minnie: Rubbish - if all the men wear bald wigs, the Phantom will attack the women.

Crun: I fear that the ladies, too, will have to wear bald wigs.

Minnie: Rubbish - why should I wear a wig? I'm already bald.

Crun: Well, wear a bald wig - mnk - with hair on.

(From The Phantom Headshaver (of Brighton), broadcast October 1954)