Hercules Grytpype-Thynne asks Count Moriarty to “Take a
letter in gargling fluid... To the Postmaster General. Dear General [gargling
noises], according to the shape of my knees [gargling noises], I believe that
an illegal raffle [gargling noises] for the Equator is being held, and for
certain monies I will reveal the organiser [gargling noises]. Let's have that back, please.” The message is spat
out. “You filthy swine! You've watered my peony.”
“What time is it Eccles,” asks Bluebottle. “I’ve got it
written down ‘ere on a piece of paper,” replies Eccles. A nice man wrote the
time down for him that morning. “Supposing when somebody asks you the time, it
isn't eight o'clock?” “Ah, den I don't show it to dem.” “Well how do you know
when it's eight o'clock?” “I've got it written down on a piece of paper!”
Neddie Seagoon is asked to speak to Fred the Oyster, after insisting oysters
can’t talk. He shouts, “Good morning, I see that
it's early closing for oysters!” The oyster creaks open. We hear the hee-haw
sound of a donkey, played backwards, followed by a forceful raspberry, before
closing. Neddie exacts his revenge by eating the oyster. We later hear the
oyster inside Neddie, through bubbling and warbling noises, singing, “I’m only
a strolling vagabond...”
Now why am I telling you
all this?
Comedy often doesn’t
sound like this. Comedy is subjective and risky, and pushing boundaries
requires effort, both from the performer and the listener, and when they meet,
friends will be made for life. “The Goon Show” is like this for me, a radio
comedy that took the more surreal strain of post-war British comedy and turned
it into Surrealist, Dadaist art, full of wordplay, nonsensical plots and deranged
sound effects – no wonder I turned out the way I did.
I worry that I will not
hear anything as good as “The Goon Show,” despite the decades of opportunity for
others to have tried. Perhaps, with the more boundaries that have been pushed,
the perception grows that fewer boundaries are left, both with what you can
say, and what you can make. Nostalgia grows for that misplaced sense of a time when
more risks could be taken.
The show began on 28th
May 1951 as “Crazy People,” a half-half mix of comedy sketches and musical items
starring Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine (for the first two
years) and Spike Milligan, and written mostly by Milligan. The first three
series were not much different from your standard BBC comedy series for the time,
except it took longer to build an audience because the comedy was not as
obvious. But that audience did build, and Milligan’s determination to use radio
to its full extent grew, the show changed.
From the fourth series,
producer Dennis Main Wilson moved to “Hancock’s Half Hour,” and “The Goon Show”
gained Peter Eton, who worked in drama productions – sketches were linked to
make a narrative, musical items were reduced, and Angela Morley, then known as
Wally Stott, became the show’s musical director, providing the kind of
cinematic scope that she would feature on the song “Jackie,” by Scott Walker, and
in the Oscar-nominated soundtrack to the film “Watership Down.” The relentless
push to create sound effects that could define the world within the show,
replacing closing doors and feet on gravel with explosions, foghorns, water
splashes, sped up and slowed down voices, proved the need for the BBC to create
a unit that produces this “concrete music”: the BBC Radiophonic Workshop,
formed in 1958, contributed as much to “The Goon Show” as much as it would to “Quatermass
and the Pit” and “Doctor Who.” Furthermore, the growing success of the show led
to it being specially recorded for broadcast around the world, something not
routinely done in 1954, but something I’m thankful for the BBC deciding they should
do – in fact, some lost episodes were remade in 1957-58 as a result, something
not done with “Hancock’s Half Hour” until over fifty years later.
The last “Goon Show”
aired on the BBC Home Service on 28th January 1960. Other radio comedy
shows have come close to its anarchic nature, or its technical ambition – shows
like “The Burkiss Way” or “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” – but “The
Goon Show” still looms large over it. In 2018, the latest “Hitchhiker’s”
series, based on Eoin Colfer’s novel “And Another Thing,” continued in the same
vein as its previous incarnations, but a part of me still thought that the only
other opportunity I will have that week to listen to a comedy series on that
kind of scale – no panel shows, no stand-up performances, no sketches – will have
been made sixty years earlier. There’s that naughty brown leather nostalgia
again.
One more example: Henry
Crun and Minnie Bannister are at the bank of some water, enveloped with fog.
However, there are so many foghorns playing over them, Spike Milligan is
laughing at them, along with the audience, until Crun tells Minnie to put her saxophone
away.
Just go listen to “The Goon
Show,” you’ll be doing yourself a favour!
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