by Chris Smith
Our GSPS founder Mike Coveney has quietly passed away at the end of May in Ramsgate/Broadstairs, at the ripe highly preserved age of 92.
He set things going with adverts in national newspapers and Private Eye following The Last Goon Show of All in 1972. This got him, and the nascent Society, noticed by BBC Radio and TV, leading to interviews on the Today programme as well as Nationwide, the BBC1 6:30pm magazine-news programme of the day. No pressure!!
Mike knew that he/we were the unusual-item-of-the-day featurette on the programme, so took it in his stride. Spike was invited as part of the same feature, so Mike met him in the BBC’s Green Room (pre TV hospitality room) but found him on that occasion somewhat tight lipped – as reported in a NL of the time. It was, after all, very early in our getting to know him – and of him knowing us.
Mike was fortunate to get friendly letters from the Goons in the very early days, which dutifully appeared in the NLs, but it was harder to get access or interviews. He managed one friendly telegram from Peter, as well as one grumpy, following the (not harsh) NL review of a recent Pink Panther film.
The Coveney family were based in Ramsgate for a very, very long time… they’d already been there a long time before I got to know them in the late 1970s and early 1980s. If Graftons deserved the epitaph “Goonery was Brewed Here” then Frances Gardens in Ramsgate deserved the blue plaque “GSPS was built here” and, indeed for many years the letterbox did have the small plaque The Goon Show Preservation Society in order to reassure confused postmen.
Mike was the Goon Show Preservation Society for a while. Goodness knows what the postman made of the correspondence that Mike received – for odd shaped tape packages, for subscriptions, for magazines, for enquiries and just good old fashioned letter writing from Goon buffs, for information about off-air recordings… for a while he was the “go-to” person for everything, although it soon became clear that this could not be sustained endlessly. Mike obviously loved the fun and the adventure of it but did begin to encourage a group of idiots around him to share the load – hence, names that are now synonymous with early GSPS lore made their first appearances: Linton Culver, Bob Bray, George Brown, Tony Broughton, Bill Nunn, Mark Cousins, Bill Horsman….
Mike travelled from Ramsgate to Hartlepool for the very first NE Branch Steam-Up in 1978 that I organised, and stayed in the Smiff dustbin on that occasion. He cheerfully appeared on BBC Radio Cleveland the following Sunday morning with a highly inexperienced Chris Smiff… but somehow we still got away with it.
Mike returned the favour when I set out to visit Canterbury, seeking refuge from hard work at University. When a blizzard threatened to wreck my plans, I travelled early instead, staying with Mike, three children (= unpaid GSPS office staff) and wife Jean – a lady with a lovely cheeky sense of humour, so you could see how the household crackled along.
There were many visits to Ramsgate during my three years at University, along with much preparing and typing of the early A4 size, typed Newsletters – which were all singlehandedly duplicated by Mike in his attic (before 1978 Mike had been typing and duplicating)… at its peak, 800 copies!
The next GSPS “upgrade” came with the Newsletter relaunch into A5 format through Andrew Clayden Printing in 1982, which took the pressure of printing the NL away from Mike, which was just as well. This marked ten years of being close to, if not the actual, centre of gravity for GSPS and it was wearying. Around that time he took a gentle but firm break from active leadership in the Society, letting the next group of idiots have a turn in the barrel.
Mike never let his interest in or enthusiasm for GSPS or the Goon Show fade but once he had made the decision to step aside he stuck with it. He had, after all, organised the first two GSPS residential weekends down in Kent in 1977 and 1979. That takes a lot of energy as well (I know, folks!!), so he had already organised a lot for us.
Mike was able to enjoy being a contributor to the magazines without needing to produce the entire thing, and in the process we enjoyed his appreciation of quite a few individual Goon Shows in Newsletters over the course of the next several years. They became part of our Goon Show News -Fifty Years of Newsletters compilation book, a copy of which was sent to Mike shortly after publication. He continued to enjoy chosen Society events, including the 1990s Weekends Called Fred, sharing a memoir of “the early days” at the 1997 Goonvention.
In more recent years, as health issues began to loom for the senior Coveneys, the “iconic” Frances Gardens HQ was sold to enable a bigger combined purchase in nearby Broadstairs with Mike’s daughter, whose family became in effect their designated carers. This was where I met up with Mike again (by which time he had survived Jean) around his 90th birthday when he was still alert to what was going on but for shorter lengths of time. Putting up with idiots at 90 will do that to you…
Although I wanted to touch base with Mike again, it’s a long way from York to Ramsgate. Looking after Mike left his family with less time to keep in touch with people as their energy was focussed on him, so I didn’t get to hear news about him. So, I only just found out about his quiet and peaceful passing away on 26th May, looked after by his own, with – I sincerely hope – a gentle smile on his face after all those years of comedic (and liquid) Preservation, Laughter and Fun that a quixotic bunch of Goon lovers enjoyed through meeting each other because of what he set out to do in 1972.
Thank you very much, Mike Coveney. We idiots wouldn’t have been the same without you.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 