The weekly Goon Show on BBC Radio 4 Extra on Tuesday 25th March 2025 is an episode which the BBC hasn’t aired since its original broadcast on the Light Programme in December 1956. It’s episode 11 from series 7, The Telephone, the one where GPO engineer Neddie is sent to Africa to install a phone for Henry Crun. It will be available to stream after the broadcast here. The episode has, of course, been available since 2010 on the commercial release, The Goon Show Compendium, vol 5, as well as on commercial streaming services such as Spotify.
Three weeks earlier, 4Extra played a recording of Personal Narrative which had only been repeated by the BBC once, on Radio 4 in 1983. here
Earlier this year, the series 6 recording of The Man Who Never Was had its first rebroadcast. For the obsessives among us, other regular series episodes which are waiting for their Radio 4 Extra debuts are:
05/12 – Dishonoured, or the Fall of Neddie Seagoon
05/13 – Forog *
05/26 – The End *
06/12 – The Terrible Revenge of Fred Fu-Manchu *
06/13 – The Lost Year *
06/15 – The Hastings Flyer–Robbed *
07/18 – The Moon Show
07/21 – ’Round the World in Eighty Days
07/23 – Africa Ship Canal
07/25 – The Missing Boa Constrictor *
08/09 – The Policy
08/11 – The Stolen Postman *
08/15 – The Thing on the Mountain *
08/26 – The Great Statue Debate *
10/03 – The Chinese Legs *
10/04 – Robin’s Post *
* The ones with asterisks have never been repeated on any BBC channel.
Meantime, we still expect that the long-term availability to stream many Goon Show episodes on BBC Sounds will end on 30th March. Furthermore, the BBC intends to make BBC Sounds unavailable outside the UK at a currently unspecified date in Spring 2025. It will be replaced by more restricted content on BBC.com/audio.
The available shows are listed here on BBC Sounds,
and our reference chart is here.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 