Our favourite Podcast, Tyler Adams’ Goon Pod, featured an interview this week with the GSPS member and luminary of time almost immemorial, Chris Smith.
Chris described at length how the Goon Show Preservation Society developed from humble beginnings and told stories of some highlights of GSPS meetings, including appearances by Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine. It’s a great listen, especially for whipper-snapper, Johnny-come-lately members like your humble Website Charlie here.
Goon Pod is available from all the usual podcast sources, including the feed below.
This Is Your Life: Spike Milligan – Goon Pod
“You call this a life?”This week we dip into the big red book and examine Spike Milligan’s two famously chaotic appearances on This Is Your Life — first in 1973 at an army reunion in Bexhill and again in 1995 in the wake of Spike’s infamous crack at Prince Charles at the British Comedy Awards. From bungled surveillance operations and surprise reunions to war memories, old squeezes, secret sons and unresolved tensions, these programmes offer an occasionally revealing — and sometimes unsettling — portrait of Spike at two very different points in his life.Joining Tyler this week is co-host of World Of Telly John Williams and the pair try to navigate the uneasy compression of a vast, contradictory life into television-friendly fare.Along the way we encounter Peter Sellers in Nazi garb, Robert Graves refusing retakes because “the milkman is part of life”, Harry Secombe on VT, Eric Sykes restoring some semblance of order to proceedings, Michael Bentine getting a warm reception, Roger McGough falling a bit flat and a surprise appearance from a reclusive billionaire. We also examine the differing styles of Eamonn Andrews and Michael Aspel – the former being all awkward and lacking spontaneity; the latter oozing affable charm and keeping the show on the rails. These two programmes, separated by 22 years, chart not just Spike Milligan’s public career but his private fractures — family divisions, emotional debts, and the limits of nostalgia. They also expose the clumsy mechanics of This Is Your Life itself: a format built for uplift struggling to contain a life defined by contradiction, pain, brilliance and refusal to behave.
If the weeks have moved on and the episode with Chris has moved down the list, you can get to it directly through this link.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 