Part 1 – Collision Course
This is the first of a ten part series by John Repsch, telling some of the stories from the history of the Goon Show. This article first appeared in Newsletter no.119, in July 2007
I have a confession to make. I don’t recall ever having borrowed anything from the Audio Library, and that’s having been officially certified into our institution since 1978! And before anyone throws up in horror at this incredible fact of truth and sends round the old men in white coats, may I, in my manliest squawk, protest that I am not the only one. No siree, there’s many a loyal lug-hole out there that’s being deprived of earfuls of non-Goon Show goonery.
Yes, non-Goon Show goonery. Whilst recordings of the shows themselves have always been top of my list of Goon requisitions, I have also taken an interest in how they were put together. While written information offers the luxury of delving deeply into the detail, it is the sound of the voices of the very people who were there in the thick of it – or who knew the ones who were – that brings an immediacy and poignancy to the account which the printed page cannot match. Hearing personal reflections about the show, and of the influences for the characters and storylines, decked out with all the nuances and unedited ums, ahs and repetitions, brings it all magically home.
Given my own personal hotch-potch of radio oddities – which dates back to 1973 and covers subjects as disturbingly diverse as the ‘Roger Shepherd’s Tone’ sound illusion, Al Capone’s pianist Hilary Agremont, episodes of The Lives Of Harry Lime and cemetery exhumations – it might seem strange that I haven’t long since let myself loose at our highly steamed Library service, growling and howling in a horribly wild-eyed, gleaming-toothed assault. Well, that’s all about to change. As you can see, there is nothing like this GSPS chairman lark for focusing attention on the things that really matter, and my horribly wild-eyed tooth is beginning to gleam.
It wouldn’t surprise me if our Goon-related Library is second to none. Even the BBC is probably bereft of much of what we are sitting on, bearing in mind their legendary lack of appreciation for their past productions. I remember the late Barry Hill, Old Time Radio Collectors’ Association supremo, knocking me senseless fifteen years ago with the news that BBC Radio was still preserving no more than 10-20% of its entire spoken output. Hopefully the digital revolution has now rewarded the Beeb with more space under its floorboards to preserve product
In fact, I possess Goon goodies that our Library HASN’T got. No, I don’t mean some long-lost footage that even a bishop would spill blood for. I’m talking about those documentaries which BBC Radios 2 & 4 do so well. To give you a bird’s-eye picture of what these tapes sound like, most of the quotes that pop up from here onwards were seized in the raid I made on them. A Repsch abreption you could call it (which is probably the first time those two words have ever sat together).
To put The Goon Show in some sort of context, a good place to start is at the start. Get hold of The Archive Hour’s episode titled Broadcasting House – The Home Of Radio (Radio 4, 18.3.06). It runs through BH’s history from when it was built in 1932, taking over from the previous centre of operations at Savoy Hill. While praised at the time for its ultra-modern art deco design, Auntie was also scorned for installing the “obscenity” of Ariel and Prospero above the entrance. The statue was described as “objectionable to public morals and decency”, but it saw off its critics as well as the Luftwaffe eight years later. In 1940, future Goon Show producer Charles Chilton was doing his bit on high-rise fire-watching duty when the building received a direct hit: “The whole of Great Portland Street on the other side of Broadcasting House – that seemed to be on fire. Suddenly we heard what sounded like an express train coming, and then something hit Broadcasting House and it shook like hell. The fellow in charge of defence was a retired admiral, and he looked at me and said, ‘We’ve been hit. Right, come with me. We’ll find this bomb.’ So we got down to the fifth floor and it had come through the front of the building, through an office, through the corridor, through a door in the centre of what was called The Tower, into the Music Library, and there was this long bomb lying on the floor with its fins all crumpled. He said, ‘You go round and tell all the people on every floor to go downwards and clear out and get to the basement.’ I got down to the second floor, to the Gramophone Library, when this bomb went off. And all the dust that had ever accumulated in the air ducts in Broadcasting House all came out. It was blown out like a London fog. And I think it was seven people they dug out dead while I was there. And then I went into the Air Force – I was glad to get out of the War!”
After the Blitz, 10,000 tons of concrete was poured into its bowels. In the event that the building was flattened, The Bunker, a little bomb-proof radio station, would be on standby with four cubicle studios protected by walls 22 inches thick. Fortunately, Auntie carried on sufficiently intact beaming out announcements to the nation: news bulletins, Churchill’s broadcasts and de Gaulle’s rallying calls to the French Resistance. Covered in grey gunge (no, not de Gaulle), the camouflaged BH kept up morale with Music While You Work, Workers’ Playtime, ITMA and programmes about cooking and gardening.
Up until recently, some members of staff would say they could actually feel the building’s illustrious history and could sense the dour, domineering presence of Lord Reith still pacing the corridors. But BH is currently undergoing a massive redevelopment and Reith may now have taken to spinning in his grave instead.
In The Archive Hour’s The Career Of Radio Producer Charles Chilton (Radio 4, 5.2.05), Chilton recounted what has been rarely, if ever, documented in the many Milligan history books: that soon after the War he booked Spike to write a new light entertainment series: “He contacted me, desperately looking for someone who would put him on the radio because a lot of people avoided him. They thought he was crazy and they didn’t understand the stuff he was trying to do. And I was writing a show called The Bowery Bar, which featured a rather hefty singer called Len Young, and I think this was the first show Spike ever wrote… He did do odd voices in the show – rather Goonish voices – although as yet there were no Goons.” (For more on this programme, see our interview with Charles in this newsletter.)
It was late in ’48/early ’49 – and this is where the story really starts – that four rebellious ex-servicemen joined forces, with a common contempt for authority and convention, and a common desire to set them up for ridicule. They were a mixed bag of Welshman, Protestant-Jew, Watford-born half-Peruvian and India-born Irishman, all sharing a joyously unhealthy sense of the absurd. All were comedians scrabbling around for work in the arid job desert of post-war London.
Gunner Milligan had first set eyes on Lance Bombardier Secombe when fighting in North Africa. In a Goon-worthy scenario, the howitzer he was manning hadn’t been dug in and it recoiled down an escarpment. “Anybody seen a gun?” asked Spike of the cowering occupants of a wireless truck at the bottom of the escarpment. “What colour?” came back Harry’s reply. By chance the two met again in Italy, in a rehabilitation camp, before being drawn onto the troops’ entertainment circuit. Harry continues the story: “We met in North Africa. We were mates. We laughed at the same things. And when I came out of the Army, it was a dodgy business trying to get work. I was determined not to go back to the office I’d been in before the War as a pay clerk in Swansea. So I came up to London, did an audition at The Windmill Theatre and got in, and Mike Bentine followed me in, and I realized this fellow’s got the same sort of thing as Spike and I’ve got. So I went down to see him in the dressing room.” Harry, with the smoothest man’s face ever to show itself in London’s theatreland, had a shaving act, then a solo duet as a tenor and soprano, with a raspberry blown in for good measure. Mike, a former RAF Intelligence officer, was half of a duo of Russian undertakers, called Sherwood & Forrest, playing bongos and reciting a fairy tale. He picks up after Harry: “And we had 3/6d between us. So instead of eating anything, we went, to keep out of the rain, to the nearest Cameo cartoon theatre and stayed round about five times, falling about screaming with laughter, and from then on we’ve been mates completely. And then I was working with Harry doing Variety Bandbox, and I was writing weird things. And the star of the show was Derek Roy, for whom Jimmy Grafton was writing. So he wrote us a letter and he said, ‘Our styles are clashing. Would you like to come down and talk it over with me?’ Then we saw the address: Grafton Arms, Strutton Ground, near Victoria Street, and we thought, ‘It’s a pub – he owns a pub.’ So of course we’d go anywhere for a beer in those days.”
They would be in good company. Anyone who had played The Windmill went upstairs at Grafton’s, including Larry Stephens, Tony Hancock, Alfred Marks, Graham Stark and many of those who would be showbiz stars in the next fifteen years. Evidently, dying the death six times a day, six days a week was a memory worth living again and again amongst other souls departed from that uncaring temple of the flesh.
Peter Sellers’s road to The Windmill had been a rocky one. After the War, he had taken his act – playing the drums and doing impressions – to small theatres and holiday camps around the country, and at Peterborough had been booed off the stage. Thinking that show business couldn’t get much worse, he moved to London and found that it could. Pushed on relentlessly by his beloved mother Peg, he roamed for months around agents’ and producers’ offices, becoming highly adept at failing auditions. Getting himself into the striptease sleaze of The Windmill was little better, with its raincoat brigade sitting through the shows in silence, waiting for the next nude girl to appear.
In Best Sellers – The Life And Times Of Peter Sellers (Radio 4, 24.7.01), we hear Peter’s early memories of a lonely childhood. His parents had also been travelling players, touring around from theatre to theatre, raising him in a world of adults, much of it spent sitting in dressing rooms amidst the reek of greasepaint. At 14 he felt even more of an outsider because, as the film critic and Sellers biographer Alexander Walker recalled, at school he was as tall as a boy of 16 or 17 and stuck out like a sore thumb: “Whenever you’re prominent in that unacceptable kind of way in class, you do all kinds of things to make sure that the rest of the class likes you, and one of the ways that Peter got the attention of the class and got them laughing was to imitate the people that he heard about him. Peter was a compulsive imitator. The girl whom he was dating was a great fan of Cary Grant and Robert Donat, and Peter could imitate their voices in order to get the girl to be much more affectionate.”
Deeply insecure, he had sought refuge inside other people’s personalities, and the realization that doing this could get him what he wanted was to set him on the road to stardom. In 1943 he joined the RAF, though poor eyesight re-directed him into the Gang Shows, entertaining the troops as an 18-year-old drummer in bands. Offstage his impressions ran rampant, as we can hear in Funny That Way (Radio 2, 1992): “I used to impersonate anybody and anything I could find – mainly officers. That’s where Bloodnok came from originally. Well, Spike was born in India, and I spent about three years out there during the War and I met a lot of people of this sort. [Bloodnok voice] ‘He’ll do anything to anyone, and they don’t care, you see.’ And I thought, ‘I’m a twit to sit here and do this when I could be in the Officers’ Mess. What am I doing here?’ So I found some officers’ insignia – air commodores’ – put some blanco on, wandered into the Officers’ Mess. It would be about 3 in the morning now. There was only one lone old twit in there sitting in the corner, and he looked at me, and as far as I can recall he said [Bloodnok voice], ‘What are you doing here?’ – they all sounded like Bloodnok! I said, ‘Air Ministry, sir, Welfare…'”
Meanwhile, fast-forwarding back to 1948, he passed an audition during his six-week Windmill stint, and was invited onto a TV show for unknown talent, called New To You. It led to nothing. But that didn’t matter, because the thousands of proud possessors of television sets were chicken feed compared with the millions owning radios. He duly passed a radio audition and then waited and waited and… In desperation, he tried another ploy: “I was getting nowhere fast and I noticed that Roy Speer was doing a show at the time called Show Time. And I’d written in I don’t know how many times to try and get on the show – no reply. I’ve got nothing to lose. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll phone up.’ And one of the big shows on the air was Much Binding In The Marsh with Kenneth Horne and Dickie Murdoch. I thought, ‘If I click with the secretary, I’ll get through,’ – right? So I said [Horne voice], ‘Oh hello, this is Ken Horne here. Is Roy there?’ Now, once she said, ‘Oh yes, he is, Kenneth.’, I thought, ‘Right. Got on there.’, Roy said, ‘Hello Ken, how are you?’ I said, ‘Listen, Roy, I’m phoning up because I know that new show you’ve got on. What is it – Show Time or something? Dickie and I were at a cabaret the other night. Saw an amazing young man – what was his name? [Murdoch voice] Peter Sellers. [Horne voice] And I think he would be very good if you probably had him in the show, you know.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s very nice of you.’ And then it came to the crunch. I said, ‘Er, it’s me.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘It’s me, Peter Sellers talking, and it’s the only way I could get to you, and would you give me a date on your show?’ And he said, ‘You cheeky young sod! What do you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I obviously do impersonations!'”
He got the booking and the reviews were sensational. Over the next two years he was to appear on over 250 radio programmes. Thanks to a disc-cutter he had bought, he was able to capture for posterity much of what the BBC didn’t. The birth of his broadcasting career on New To You, with his athletically convoluted vocals, was also included in the documentary, along with a selection of home-recorded highlights from programmes broadcast between 1948 and 1950, previously thought to have been lost: Starlight Hour, The Golden Slipper Club, Ignorance Is Bliss and Variety Bandbox.
It seems that it was at the end of 1948 that Sellers first crossed paths with fellow Windmill boys Secombe and Bentine. They were all appearing in Pat Dixon’s sketch series, Third Division, written for the Third Programme by Frank Muir and Dennis Norden of Take It From Here fame. And soon Secombe was another one bursting with praise: “Peter was obviously going to be a star – that was from the off. He was so brilliant at things. I mean, he could do ANYTHING. I said to him one day, ‘You could even do a murder and get away with it!’ He had that tremendous charisma about him.”
It was around this time that Harry introduced Mike to Spike at Allen’s Bar, another Windmill entertainers’ watering hole. As for when Messrs Milligan, Bentine, Secombe and Sellers all eventually came together, this is where you revert to a pile of book sources and end up wishing you hadn’t. Wading through the miasma of contradictory quotes and texts, you weigh it all up, vacuum out the false teeth, add a sockful of custard, multiply it by the first number you thought of, and you’re left with something that smells suspiciously like a revue that Harry was appearing in called Forces Showboat, or maybe it was Soldiers In Skirts. Whichever it was, it was showing either at the Hackney Empire or in Harrow – you can take your choice – and Mike introduced Spike to Peter in the bar. If none of that butters your parsnip, you might prefer the version where Mike and Harry take Peter along to meet Spike at Grafton’s. Whatever and however, the four converged.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 