Many Years ago, the esteemed Secretary and acting chairman of the GSPS, Richard Usher, wrote this essay for his university course.
WITH REFERENCE TO THE GOON SHOW, DISCUSS THE WAYS IN WHICH IT MAY BE TERMED POPULAR CULTURE
In discussing the way in which The Goon Show can be termed Popular Culture, one must first analyse aspects of the programme’ s history, and the society in which it appeared. The programme proper materialized on radio through a whole range of pressures, both from the performers and creators of the programme using newspaper publicity:
“LATEST COMIC ERUPTION in the Variety world is the blast caused by a highly intelligent bunch of synthetic crackpots who call themselves “Goons“.”
(Sidney Vauncez, Round and About Goonland, Vol. 9, No. 5, Bandwagon Magazine, November 1949)
and their existing celebrity status in Music Hall, and the pressures of a “tremendous appetite for change” (Edward Blishen, Carry On Up The Zeitgeist, BBC Radio 4, 1 April 1992) that existed at the end of the Second World War and the 1945 general election. Up until the start of the programme in 1951, the standard of BBC Radio comedy had been set by traditionally accepted formats from other mediums:
“Until the late 1930’s the BBC’s comedy output was drawn entirely from the outside world of music hall and variety. Well known comedians like Harry Tate, Billy Bennett, Will Hay and Max Miller did versions of their act suitably modified for radio.”
(Roger Wilmut, The Goon Show Companion, Robson Books, 1976)
This then, was the state of things prior to the Second World War. Radio comedy was still in its infancy, and one of the earliest developments came in 1939 with the first broadcast of ITMA (It’s That Man Again):
“The format was a highly successful one, with each show having a vague plot, interrupted by two musical items. (Tommy) Handley remained “on-stage” as the central character around whom all the chaos revolved; the other characters came on in ones and twos. Mrs Mopp, Colonel Chinstrap…all these characters entered the listener’s imaginations and people quoted the show’s catch phrases at each other in the most unlikely situations.”
(Roger Wilmut, The Goon Show Companion, Robson Books, 1976)
The series sustained a listenership throughout the War years, proving to be both a success, and a foreshadow of The Goon Show to come. Post War, things in society were changing. As Edward Blishen put it in his radio documentary series, studying Post War society:
“The old world was falling apart, and new combinations of ideas and of people were occurring fast.”
A cultural change was developing due to situations that had arisen during the War years:
“It crazily mixed together in shell holes, behind guns, in barracks and billets, men who would never normally have met, and who changed each other’s lives forever.”
(Edward Blishen, Carry On Up The Zeitgeist)
As writer Johnny Speight pointed out in Blishen’s programme the War educated him:
“I met a lot of people there who I would never have met in Camden Town. So, when I came back out of the army, I was dissatisfied with the whole thing that had led to the war, like all the rest were.”
(Johnny Speight, Carry On Up The Zeitgeist)
In his Notes on Deconstructing the Popular, Stuart Hall points out that Popular Culture has a habit of changing in such a way that something that as popular as ITMA may not remain satisfying after great social upheaval created by such events as war:
“some cultural forms and practices are driven out of the centre of popular life, actively marginalised. Rather than simply “falling into disuse” through the Long March to modernisation, things are actively pushed aside, so that something else can take their place.”
(Stuart Hall, Notes on Deconstructing the Popular, from Cultural Theory and Popular Culture)
The Goon Show was the culmination of the ideas of four ex-servicemen, Spike Milligan, Michael Bentine, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. None of them could believe, as Bentine put it in one interview:
“we’d survived the war, and all that ebullience – and it was always against authority, but it was never hate filled, it was filled with affection and love, and it was quite ridiculous.”
(Michael Bentine, When I Get To Heaven, in conversation with Bishop Richard Holloway)
Bentine had been one of the first RAF officers to witness the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp, Milligan had been blown up whilst on active service, and these two men were the driving force behind the creation of the programme and the Goon concepts. This is an indication of a counter culture beginning to develop, challenging the ideology of a society that was still vulnerable to cultural change. A hegemonic clash created out of humour emerged with the return of servicemen who saw at one and the same time the value of, and need for, a disciplined society, and the absurdity of these same values. As another contributor to Edward Blishen’s study points out, this juxtaposition of values created the essence of Goon humour, and assisted in it gaining popularity:
” I first encountered that kind of humour amongst other servicemen…we were being kept busy, and kept from rioting, or kept from being drunk all the time by, erm, bullshit, and bullshit is wonderfully absurd. I can actually remember painting the coal in the bucket black for an inspection, because we had concluded that the coal we had wasn’t black enough.”
The dissatisfaction with the general ideology of military life was heightened by such things:
“The comedy of absurd military personalities, the comedy of organisation gone mad, the comedy of boredom that came close to sending you mad.”
Very much a society with military overhangs, and a patriarchal one as well. A hegemonic situation where women were concerned in this society also gave rise to more absurdity, with their needs being considered in the 1945 General Election:
“I went to an election meeting…the candidate was a Brigadier…and he attempted to prove his sympathy for the housewife by claiming that his party would ensure kitchen sinks were of reasonable height, and the response from his audience was an immense gust of laughter.”
(Edward Blishen, Carry On Up The Zeitgeist)
The Goon Show arrived as a kind of illustration, or expression of the absurdity of the society which gave birth to it. The programme stirred up controversy and entered straight into a battle with authority – the first of many such battles that Milligan and Bentine were to have with the BBC. The team of comedians, their producers, and backers were granted their airtime, but the BBC hierarchy held the final decisions, even to the extent of title choice of Crazy People. The very first script gave warning of what was to come in its closing lines:
MICHAEL: And so Britain has struggled valiantly on through the post-war years, fighting for a better standard of life for the pursuit of happiness for freedom…Fighting for her very existence! Until today the Mother-Land can still raise her proud face to the skies and say….
HARRY: HEELLLLPPPPPP!!!
(Michael Bentine and Spike Milligan, Crazy People – Programme One, from a facsimile script owned by Spike Milligan)
The BBC regarded the show as iconoclastic, with a leaning towards “disestablishmentarianism in its worst form” (Michael Bentine). Initial audience reaction was favourable, however, with no complaints recorded in the popular press of the time. By the time the second series aired in January 1952 listening figures were reaching three million. According to Raymond Williams in Keywords one definition of Popular Culture is that it is:
“Well liked by many people”
(Raymond Williams, Keywords, London, Fontana, 1983)
Stuart Hall points out that there is a Market or commercial definition of the term Popular Culture, that:
“the things which are said to be “popular” because masses of people listen to them…”
(Stuart Hall, Notes on Deconstructing the Popular, from Cultural Theory and Popular Culture)
When looking at the evidence put forward so far, The Goon Show would indeed appear to be fitting some of the criteria for being classed as Popular Culture. The Goon Show has always been a part of a strange contradiction where the BBC are concerned. As a concept the BBC were always very wary of its power to influence the mass audience, even to the extent of trying to ban Peter Sellers from impersonating Winston Churchill, which was so convincing that he repeated his performance as a straight voice-acting role in the film The Man Who Never Was. They were also embarrassed by Sellers’ impersonation of the Queen in the guise of the Duchess Boil De Spudswell in The Starlings (a specially recorded Goon Show from August 1, 1954), and by the use of a character by the name of Hugh Jampton, which they didn’t realise was rhyming slang:
“Hugh Jampton – Huge Hampton : Hampton Wick – work it out for yourself”
(Roger Wilmut, The Goon Show Companion)
Despite these problems and embarrassment’s the BBC saw the commercial draw of the show and its popularity, and The Goon Show survived for ten series. This is further evidence that backs up the case of the programmes place as an example of Popular Culture. Tony Bennett makes the case that Gramsci:
“argues that the bourgeoisie can become a hegemonic, leading class only to the degree that bourgeois ideology is able to accomodate, to find space for, opposing class cultures and values. A bourgeois hegemony is secured not via the obliteration of working-class culture, but via its’ articulation to “ bourgeois culture and ideology so that in being associated with and expressed in the forms of the latter, its political affiliations are altered in the process.”
(Tony Bennett, Popular Culture and The turn to Gramsci, from Cultural Theory and Popular Culture)
The BBC with its staff of dignified announcers (Andrew Timothy and Wallace Greenslade for The Goon Show) and disciplined producers like Dennis Main Wilson or Peter Eton were able to accommodate the series and thus turned it into a BBC product. Further definitions of Popular Culture include Raymond Williams’ view that examples are:
“Inferior kinds of work.”
(Raymond Williams, Keywords)
A view certainly supported by some members of the BBC hierarchy according to Michael Bentine:
“The BBC hated us. One chap said to me “I don’t like this Go On Show at all.”
(Michael Bentine, When I Get To Heaven, in conversation with Bishop Richard Holloway)
The Goon Show also seems to straddle that chasm between being regarded as High Culture as well as Popular Culture. It was a programme that was enjoyed by the masses – series five ratings reached 4½ Million – but which had an elitist core following, due to the bizarre nature of Milligan’s scripts. The shows poured with emotion but had an intelligent and intellectual heart. They called for active imaginations on the part of the listeners, especially when one special sound effects sequence involved the protagonists Neddy Seagoon (Secombe) and Eccles (Milligan) driving around on a brick wall! The shows were always of high quality, another indication of High Culture, but they also appealed to many, which is an indication of Popular Culture. The intellectual side of the programme often stemmed from the scripts and the subsequent performances. The show content and action, as far as characters were concerned, worked on three levels:
“The Goon Show has actors who play characters; these characters then play the roles in the plot…In this way, characters frequently meet as if for the first time, because the plot demands it – but asides made in character, make it clear that they really know each other, and are indeed only acting.”
(Roger Wilmut, The Goon Show Companion)
Wilmut also points out that the programme contained elements of high culture due to its background nonsense in the writings of Lewis Carroll or Stephen Leacock, or the comedy of the Marx Brothers. So in a sense, The Goon Show also fits Raymond Williams’ other definition of Popular Culture in that the shows are:
“The works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity.”
(Raymond Williams, Keywords)
One crucial way in which people can relate to a Media text is through the use of stereotyping and representation. The Goon Show is filled with very colourful stereotypes in the way its characters are portrayed. Peter Sellers played the largest number of major and peripheral characters in the shows, and his gift for mimicry meant that many of these creations lived clearly in the imagination, due entirely to the fact that somebody somewhere knew a character just like them. The most striking example is the character of Major Dennis Bloodnok (of the Heavy Underwater Artillery), with whom a large number of ex-servicemen could identify because he was an amalgam of all the most eccentric officers they came across during the Second World War, and many of the contributors to Edward Blishen’s documentary Carry On Up The Zeitgeist make mention of this. Another form of recognition appeared in the form of a racial stereotype with the Indian gentlemen characters of Singhiz Thingz, Singhiz Lalkaka and Babu Banerjee. These beautifully portrayed caricatures were given life by Sellers and Milligan, who both knew and admired the Indian sound and culture very well (Sellers having served there for three years in the RAF, and Milligan having been born and brought up there). They were the first comedians to bring this Indian sound to the ears of the British public, and as Peter Sellers pointed out in an interview, the Indian community leaders in England felt that:
“It was entirely thanks to Spike and myself that members of the Indian community were able to get past the garden fence with their carpets”
(Peter Sellers – Peter Sellers – The Parkinson Interview)
A representation through stereotype that allegedly helped a different culture gain acceptance. Stereotypes very often resist change, and in the decades since The Goon Show finished the sounds and traits of the Sellers/Milligan characters have been repeated by other performers, but without that in-depth cultural knowledge of the originators as a basis. The representation of women and sexuality in The Goon Show was also based on stereotype, again based in the characterisations of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. From the “breathy” voice of a seductive femme fatale or the Queen (Sellers) to the doddering quavering voice of Minnie Bannister (Milligan – based upon his own mother), these were the sum total of female characters in the show, so even the world of the Goons, usually so adventurous and forward looking, was subject to a Patriarchal control. Sexuality, especially homosexuality was portrayed always in a strongly humourous way, usually with Sellers adopting a camp voice to play a sailor, put down by Neddy Seagoon (Secombe) with lines like:
“Yes, but you’re a sailor, and sailors don’t care.”
Not even Milligan, it appeared, would push the limits of his creation so far – or would he? An interesting representation came to light in the 1970’s, with the publication of Milligan’s Goon Show Scripts, in which he stated that one of the show’s most popular characters – arch cad Hercules Grytpype-Thynne – was homosexual. The character biography reads:
“subject of a police investigation on school homosexuality. Eventually left school at 20 – did 2 years at Oxford, subject of a police investigation on homosexuality.”
(Spike Milligan, Goon Show Scripts)
However, according to Roger Wilmut, this was not such a revelation if one looks at the shows:
This is not immediately evident from listening to the shows, because Grytpype succeeds in keeping the matter under wraps – as indeed he would have to, homosexuality being at that time a criminal offence, even between consenting adults in dustbins. There are very occasional slight hints in the tone of voice he employs; and Milligan’s expose of the matter throws into sharper relief this exchange (from ‘The Telephone‘).
Grytpype: You’ll pardon the mess, we can’t help it really, we’re bachelors.
Seagoon: Why don’t you get married?
Grytpype: I would, but Moriarty doesn’t love me.
(Roger Wilmut, The Goon Show Companion)
Milligan’s most recent words on the subject of Grytpype-Thynne emerged in At Last The Go On Show, a documentary for the 40th anniversary of The Goon Show:
“Grytpype-Thynne was (based on) all the very cool Englishmen I’d ever known, who basically had the arse out of their trousers…no they were poorer, they had the arse out somebody else’s trousers…And they’re always talking in big terms of money…Millions of pounds.”
(Spike Milligan, At Last The Go On Show)
Peter Sellers voice selection for this character was interesting, because it was based upon the movie actor George Sanders, a man well known to the cinema-going public, making the stereotype of Grytpype-Thynne as a cad much easier to imagine. What was unknown to Milligan and Sellers at that time was the fact that George Sanders had himself gone through a period of terrible poverty, during which time he would write to his parents in Russia from his school in England, asking for money to patch up his threadbare clothes. The family fortune had been virtually obliterated by the Russian Revolution, and George had to make do with ill-fitting clothes whilst attending an expensive private school. These facts came to light recently in the biography George Sanders: An Exhausted Life by Richard Van Derbeets.
Conclusion
Looking at the many, varied definitions of the concept of Popular Culture (and to some degree High Culture), one can see that The Goon Show does fit the criteria in a whole range of ways. The programme continues to be available on radio, on Compact Discs, cassettes, in book form, and still has a loyal fan-base in The Goon Show Preservation Society. But it is the show’s popularity throughout the 1950’s that ensures that it is a pure example of Popular Culture, despite pockets of resistance to its influence, as Edward Blishen points out when talking about the popularity of the characters at the school in which he worked:
“One of the centres of resistance to the Goons, (was) a Secondary Modern school in Islington. If you could have had people arrested for making a teacher’s life impossible, many of my colleagues would have put the Goons in the dock without hesitation. It was by way of those Goon voices that our boys set about unnerving their masters. I remember the Deputy Head fit to bursting with rage when he heard boys speaking in the tones of Bluebottle or Eccles. And his anger lay in the impossibility of defining the offence involved. But he knew, they knew, that those voices were seditious.”
(Edward Blishen, Carry On Up The Zeitgeist)
rreferences include:
Edward Blishen, Carry On Up The Zeitgeist, BBC Radio 4, 1992
Available on The Goon Show Compendium Volume TEN
Roger Wilmut, The Goon Show Companion, Robson Books, 1976
Available here
Spike Milligan, Goon Show Scripts
Available here
Tony Bennett, Popular Culture and The turn to Gramsci, from Cultural Theory and Popular Culture
Available here
Michael Bentine, When I Get To Heaven, in conversation with Bishop Richard Holloway
At Last The Go On Show – BBC Radio
The Goon Show Preservation Society 