Part 2 – ‘Who are these Go Ons?’
This is the second 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.120, in November 2007
SPIKE WAS currently eking out the highest standard of utter impoverishment as a gag-writing guitar and piano playing bartender, and he spoke about it on Carry On Up The Zeitgeist (Radio 4. 1992):
“I didn’t know what I was looking for. I really went in a sort of limbo, where in that limbo I met Harry Secombe again and Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine.
“And I just became like a tramp, I used to sleep on their floors at night, and they would supply me with food. I led the life of a layabout. I didn’t know where I wanted to go. All I knew was I wanted to be with these boys as much as possible – to laugh with them.”
When he wasn’t on tour with a funereally funny jazz group, the Bill Hall Trio, he was more than likely collaborating on radio scripts and helping out at The Grafton Arms in Westminster.
The writing was for the comedian Derek Roy on Variety Bandbox and the collaborating was with Major Jimmy Grafton, an ex-infantry officer, who owned the premises and whose attic there Spike was often inhabiting.
Unfortunately, but very fortunately, although Spike was being paid, most of his work was being rejected because Roy didn’t understand it.
Nor, according to Spike in At Last The Go On Show, did hardly anyone else: “Sometimes I’d read this to people at the pub, seeking out some sort of acceptance of the joke. And I thought, ‘Why am I laughing at this and no one else is?’ Apparently because they weren’t funny and I was. And of course, they were all as thick as planks. They were just boozers. They’d never laughed at anything. So some little light in me said. ‘Ignore these stupid bastards. It is funny; you are funny. Enjoy it yourself.’ That was a driving energy behind me. And I’ve been like that ever since. That’s why I’m now totally unemployed.”
Another driving energy behind him was Jimmy Grafton, who did understand Spike’s jokes.
Amongst what Jimmy described as Spike’s “bad spelling, nonsensical padding and non-existent punctuation”, he saw the promise of a great comic talent and showed him how to exploit it. He was also providing an oasis for hard-up actors and writers: a room upstairs to try out ideas, often with free beer thrown in.
With Mike, Spike, Harry and Peter making the hostelry their regular haunt, Jimmy encouraged them to improvise new material and record it for later scripting.
Harry recalled: “We had these get-togethers, ad-libbed bits and pieces of comedy that we all chipped in with, and recorded them on this old wire recorder. We used to start by doing the old parlour game of writing a sentence, folding it and passing it to the next person there. And we had such marvellous results that we began to build on a show.”
For Peter, whose talents were by now in ravenous demand, this was the big opportunity to stretch himself and, like his co-conspirators, be a part of something completely different:
“We all of us — Mike Bentine, Harry, Spike and I – had this feeling that we had to do something. We had this thing inside us. We wanted to express ourselves in a surrealistic form. We thought in cartoons: we thought in black-outs; we thought in sketches: we thought of mad characters. We’d take a situation and instead of letting it end normally, let it end the other way.”
Jimmy also got them to give impromptu performances for the customers. Besides the armada of jokes that were flying around, Spike had access to his growing stock of Derek Roy rejects.
The characters being played were christened ‘Goons’, a Spike invention inspired by the inarticulate, bald-headed, long-conked freaks in the Daily Mirror’s Popeye cartoon strip.
Such was the new Goons’ popularity, that more writers and comedians were drawn to this fresh venue, and a Goon Club developed. Grafton found himself renamed KOGVOS – Keeper Of Goons and Voice Of Sanity.
In spring 1949 a serious attempt was made at conjuring up something to offer the BBC. Called Sellers’ Castle, script contributions came from all concerned. Jimmy editing out the excesses from ideas and characters gleaned from the past few months, and then taking the cast to record excerpts from it in a commercial studio. The result earned a full trial recording at the BBC, but alas, without an audience. It just fell flat, and that was that.
Undaunted, the angel Grafton arranged for Spike to churn out material for other comedians, such as Alfred Marks, Bill Kerr, Graham Stark and Dick Emery. He also got him into music hall stand-up comedy and a part in a new radio show for Derek Roy, excitingly called Hip Hip Hoo Roy, which they co-wrote. At the same time, he took Secombe under his wing, becoming his manager and scriptwriter.
Early in 1951, some two years after their first assault on the Beeb, it was high time to get the toilet plungers out ready for another one. Spike and Sellers made up a tape of Goonish dialogues, which Sellers played to the BBC’s enfant terrible, Pat Dixon, a radically minded producer he had worked with on Third Division.
Goons producer Dennis Main Wilson summed it up: “Patrick McNeil Dixon, towering individualist who wouldn’t be put down by anybody, and he fought it through and eventually got it on.” Yes, Dixon loved it and – the saints be praised – he managed to persuade his straighter-laced colleagues to give the Goons another go.
In February, he produced a second trial recording, this time with an audience, prompting Auntie uncharacteristically to fling her corsets in the air. The Goons had got their commission for a short series.
However, the producer of the series would not be Pat Dixon, nor would its title be The Goon Show. Rising star of the BBC’s Variety Department Dennis Main Wilson was to take it on. Wilson’s tragic army experience of losing half his regiment in the Normandy landings and his regular patronage of Grafton’s thereafter, would well prepare him for the explosive goonscape he would be helping create:
“When I produced the 1st series of The Goon Show, we weren’t allowed to call it The Goon Show. We had to call it Crazy People because the BBC thought nobody would know who the Goons were, to which I think Spike or Peter Sellers said, ‘Well, who are Take It From Here then?’ No response.”
The BBC saw the four as a kind of fifties version of The Crazy Gang, an anarchic, slapstick music hall bunch from the Forties, who had avoided radio shows for fear of cramping their style, and it tried calling them ‘the Junior Crazy Gang’. The Goons refused but compromised with “Crazy People, featuring Radio’s own Crazy Gang – The Goons”.
The first show was recorded at the BBC’s Aeolian Hall Variety studios in Bond Street on 27 May 1951. But, as Harry recalled. They were still far from home and dry: “There’s a story which Peter Eton said was true, was that at a planning meeting, one of the senior producers got up and said. ‘this Go On Show – what’s it all about? Who are these Go Ons?'”
“Now that was typical of a certain echelon of the BBC when they weren’t fully aware of what we were doing.” Maybe the BBC was more aware than some people thought, and simply didn’t like this anti-establishment humour, where these young up-starts were cocking a snook at anyone and everyone, including the Corporation’s hierarchy itself. Charles Chilton certainly smelt a whiff of it: “Had it not been for Pat Dixon, who more or less got the show on by stealth, by a bit of cunning, by persuading various people to put it on for a short run. I don’t think it would ever have taken off at all.
“And it was only when the public demanded it that the Goons really were allowed to continue. I honestly don’t think that if the programme planners, as they were known in those days, had had their way, that the Goons would ever have got on.”
But it wasn’t quite as clean-cut as that. From the start, there was also anti-Goon feeling amongst the listenership who, in a survey, described the show as “silly, noisy, childish, infantile rubbish”.
Perhaps they had a point, and it had something to do with what Spike admitted was the poor standard of those early episodes: “The first shows were appallingly unfunny but absolutely highly charged with the promise of more electricity to come.”
The shortage of laughs might have been in direct proportion to the glut of characters, and Wilson’s strategy to win more listeners was to reduce it from its 70+ (of which Harry was credited under no less than 26 names such as Fred Bog, Philip Strong and the Red Bladder) to a few principal ones.
Handsome Harry Secombe, for example, is presumed to be an amalgam of Superman, Dan Dare, Flash Gordon and Dick Barton but, of course, turns out to be “the most death-defying comedy coward of all time.”
In the same way that Harry’s Neddy Seagoon would later become his alter ego, Michael Bentine played Captain Osric Pureheart, a character he felt was close to his own: “Osric was a favourite of Spike’s. He always loved it. They always used to give me the posh voices. You know – ‘Hello, this is Hugh Lampton here, speaking to you from Kempton Park, and . . .’ You know, one of those.”
As for Sellers, it was a lot more than putting on funny voices. These were characters based on real people for him to breathe life into and, as Harry remembered in At Last The Go On Show, in spite of all the laughter, Sellers took it very seriously: “The marvellous thing was to stand next to Peter when he was doing Grytpype. Because when he did the voice of Grytpype, he became Grytpype. And he blew himself up for Bloodnok, and he shrank for Henry Crun, and he became tiny for Bluebottle. Physically he changed. Remarkable.”
Years later, Sellers provided an unexpected explanation for his transformations. ln a 1963 interview for In Town Tonight (an excerpt of which was included in I Was Peter Sellers’ Personal Assistant (Radio 4. 11.11.07) he claimed psychic inspiration: ” . . . I think there is, as far as acting goes, certainly as far as people who really delve into characters, because I think that when they’re searching for the character, they leave themselves open, as does a medium. And I think that sometimes you can be inhabited by the spirit of perhaps someone who lived at some time or was a bit like the person you are doing, and maybe they come in and use you as a chance to relive again.“
Let’s hope that theory doesn’t frighten people off Goon Show script readings!
In a more down-to-earth moment, he spoke of the combined input that made the programme what it was: “We used to pack so much energy into the show. And all our ideas and thoughts went into the show – everything we had. We were just so keen to get it to let people hear what was going on in our minds. This crazy, strange fantasy that used to take place in our minds.”
How the fantasy got there in the first place was via the most Heath Robinson-fangled Technicolor, black and white, nightmare dream machine. ln their interview for Associated London Scripts (Radio 4. 1.3.05), Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, writers of Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son, said that Spike was influenced by American shows, and that every writer picks up stuff from previous writers, and that eventually you fashion your own voice.
They could have been referring to the shows and films in which the hilariously non-conformist Marx Brothers and W.C. fields appeared, both of whom Spike eulogized over. When, for example, Spike eventually met Groucho, he was so ecstatically long-winded in his praise of the great man’s genius, That Groucho asked him if he would do the next twenty minutes on his own.
“It attempts to reproduce in sound something of the Marx Brothers’ madness. This is done by the use of extravagant situations, completely divorced from reality, and sheer lunatic characterisation. Gas-filled women float like blimps along the ceiling, men bounce back ten storeys from the ground, and such-like absurdities.”
No, not a review of the Marx-incited Goon Show, but of another demented delight called Danger – Men at Work, which ran before and after the War. The description appeared in Good Listening, a book by Elkan & Dorothean Allen, and was later committed to the pages of Newsletter 22 in 1979.
In a quote included in Humphrey Carpenter’s Spike Milligan: The Biography, Spike admitted its importance to him: “Men At Work was one that grabbed me. It’s forgotten now, but it’s what put The Goon Show on the road. Men at Work were ignoring logic and for me it worked, but nobody seemed to notice it.” And it had musical interludes too.
Curiously, the show’s producer was Jacques Brown, the oddball who was later put in charge of producing the Goons’ abortive first pilot show, ‘Sellers’ Castle’. Having agreed to record two versions of the pilot – one with an audience and one without – Brown had changed his mind. Doing just the one without scuppered its chances, and livid Jimmy Grafton never spoke to him again. But life is short, and Brown would bounce back later as the producer of a couple of Goon Shows.
In the same documentary, the writer John Antrobus summed up Spike’s humour as a mixture of music hall gags and absurdist comedy, all being a reaction to his military upbringing.
Laughter in the Air: The Goons (1979) was another one to mention the puns-a-plenty that fuel The Goon Show, harking back to pre-War double-acts: “Me eyes ain’t what they used to be. No. they used to be me ears.”
Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll were other favourite influences Spike acknowledged for their nonsensical stories and verses and the colourful words they invented. Bentine (in At Last The Go On Show) thought it was all simply down to banana skins: “Essentially the basis of the pricking of the balloon of pomposity was the thing that made us laugh.
The humour that used to prostrate Spike and Harry also prostrated Pete and me: McGonagall, the Nonsense Novels of Stephen Leacock.” From Leacock’s works, Secombe picked a typically poignant line: “Something in the lad’s upturned face appealed to him – he threw a brick at it.”
Another one having its share of influence on the Goons must have been the long-running ITMA. With its ripe accents and voices, catch-phrases, verbal non-sequiturs and bizarre, atmospheric sound effects all wrapped up in surreal imagery, the show was a big step forward from the music hall style of its predecessor, Band Waggon.
As if to pay a debt of gratitude. Spike wrote Jack Train’s ITMA character Colonel Chinstrap – an illegitimate half-uncle, thrice removed, of Major Bloodnok – into the shows Shifting Sands and Who is Pink Oboe?
However, his greatest influence of all was the War. The grotesque savagery of battle which had nearly killed him, instead left him shellshocked and suffering from the first of the many mental breakdowns that would torment him for the rest of his days. The Goon Shaw’s explosive storylines may well have helped him come to terms with the noise and horrors of the real thing.
Original Godfathers (Radio 4, 27.3.07) assessed the prodigious legacy of Frank Muir and Dennis Norden. Take It From Here ran from 1948 for eleven years and had its effect on The Two Ronnies and Monty Python to modern hits like Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Muir and Norden’s love of language, wordplay and parodying of other productions in radio, television and films, was credited with influencing comedy for the next seven decades.
Although The Goon Show was not mentioned, the writers’ challenging of authority would have rubbed off on Spike and his co-writing partners.
Incidentally. Muir and Norden were also the ones responsible for one of the best known of all Peter Sellers’ album tracks, Balham, Gateway to the South on Songs for Swinging Sellers in 1958.
In fact, the famous travel spoof got its first airing on Third Division in 1948. The sketch represents another link between the orthodox variety that Sellers had been performing and the manically imaginative humour he was helping produce with the Goons.
Unfortunately, the broadcast no longer exists, but on Original Godfathers the script was exhumed from the BBC’s Written Archives in Caversham.
Featuring Sellers as the narrator, it starts with actors Robert Beatty and Benny Hill talking about culture: “There is no limit to the amount of knowledge you can acquire from a comfortable seat in a cinema. Take those instruction travelogues, for example. Cue Music: Balham 1. ‘Balham, gateway to the south. We enter Balham through the verdant grasslands of Battersea Park . .’”
Parlophone’s George Martin was credited as producer but, as he announced to the world on Peter Sellers Sings (Radio 2. 1.6.97), he was actually on it too: “I was ordering the food: ‘Honey’s off’, wasn’t it‘? But I’d also undertaken ‘Funerals conducted with decorum and taste.’ Oh, terribly versatile.”
And what a claim to fame – the rest of his illustrious career is knocked into a cocked hat!
The Goon Show Preservation Society 