Part 3 And this is where the story really starts . . .
This is the third 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 121 in December 2007.
FROM THE outset, Dennis Main Wilson decided to take some weight off Spike’s shoulders. Dissatisfied with Spike’s script quality, he felt that the job was too much for one man. Spike agreed, despite half the show being taken up by musical interludes, and his jokes and ideas being augmented by those of the other Goons.
So, after editing the first show himself, Dennis accepted Spike’s suggestion of Larry Stephens – an ex-Commando captain who was also writing for Tony Hancock – as co-writer and Jimmy Grafton as editor. Amongst Stephens’s gifts was a similar sense of the ridiculous and the ability to construct plots.
Each show consisted of four or five unconnected sketches. The music separating them was provided by Max Geldray, Ray Ellington’s Quartet and the Stargazers harmony group with Stanley Black & the BBC Dance Orchestra.
Ivory cows and sacred towers all fell victim to the rotten egg custard pie treatment. With an invitation to “pull your chair up to the ceiling; fill up your glass with potassium cyanide and let the Goons do the rest.” first into the air was a fanciful sketch on how the show got started.
That was followed by a satire on motor racing, where a racing car disintegrates when dashed by a bottle of champagne; then an explosive spoof of the current thriller radio series Dick Barton – Special Agent, where the characters are suspended by their feet in a gas-filled sewer beneath a haddock-stretching factory and blown up by an atom bomb; next in an expedition to find King Tutankhamun, they arrive too late – he’s dead; and finally our patriotic pride in 1951’s Festival of Britain is celebrated with raspberry flavoured exultation.
The first series drew an audience of nearly two million, earning a follow-up in January 1952 and a better title: The Goon Show “featuring those crazy people . . . “. The writing was improving and the voices getting fruitier.
But things were no bed of milk and honey. By now there was a mess of strife amongst cast and writers, aggravated by the actors taking on other projects, all of which was undermining Spike’s tricky health, and Dennis Main Wilson was losing control of the asylum. “There is no unity in the ranks of the Goons.” he complained in a memo. On top of that, the turbo-charged mop-haired Bentine, cunningly disguised as the turbo-charged, mop-haired Captain Pureheart, had built the Suez Canal, the Trans-Siberian Express, the Crystal Palace, Croydon Airport, the Atlantic Cable, the Channel Tunnel and a Time Machine, and was demanding of Spike an ever larger slice of the sausage.
Dennis summed it up in At Last The Go On Show: “The scripts got better and better and more and more adventurous, and it was still very much a documentary format, and Spike, I suspect, felt confined. The script was being almost personality led by Bentine. Mike Bentine wanted to go into reality documentary and take the mickey out of the present state of the nation quite technically. Spike wanted to take off and just disappear into jet-propelled secret NAAFIs and things like this, and something had to give.”
Harry saw it from another viewpoint: “Mike Bentine throws out ideas like sparks from a catherine wheel, and Spike – his mind flies away. Between them, they get together and expand on an idea, and perhaps at the end of the day they’d both go home thinking the idea was theirs, which sometimes led to a little bit of friction because Spike would think it was his and Mike would think it belonged to him.”
As for Bentine, he viewed it from yet another angle: “Having been brought up as the son of a pioneer and a natural heretic and a natural radical, having seen a thing was becoming a success, I then wanted to get on with something else, which I then did.” And with less lucid elucidation: “I was always a breakaway Goon with an urge to apply my logical nonsense as opposed to their nonsensical logic.”
So Mike, an integral component in the birth of the Goons, went off to introduce his characters The Bumbles for children’s television, and would later translate his own version of Goonish humour into the visuals of Potty Time and the award-winning It’s A Square World. He would remain the best of friends with those he had left, and would be invited back for The Great Bombardon as proof of no bared teeth.
With Bentine’s destabilizing creative input out, they found themselves in at whole new situation, as Harry recalled: “Strangely enough, it was pretty unwieldy with four. When it was stripped down to three it seemed to work better. I’m not demeaning Mike’s contribution, of course. But that’s how it seemed to happen and work out eventually.”
For Spike, Michael’s departure had the bonus effect of suddenly dropping at huge lump of empty airspace into his lap. He had been used to giving himself odd lines here and there, but that was all to change: “When Michael left, there was only two of them. There was room for at third voice. And I didn’t have much confidence in myself because I was pretty overwhelmed by the talents of Peter Sellers. But one thing he couldn’t do was two voices at once, so consequently this third voice came into being.”
Crun: Ah. now who was that knocking?
Moriarty: lt was my friend. Grytpype-Thynne.
Crun: I can’t see him.
Moriarty: That’s because you are playing him.
Crun: What?
Moriarty: He’s never here when you are here.
Crun: I don’t understand
Moriarty: Neither do the audience. That’s why it isn’t getting a laugh.
Spike continues: “And so I used to just drop in voices. I think I invented Minnie Bannister because Henry Crun had no love life, so I tried to create a demonic sex goddess for him.” Minnie might have twittered a bit about that. No, not denying she was a sex goddess, but claiming she had first burst into the ears of an unsuspecting public as Captain Pureheart’s Auntie Bannister, eight episodes earlier, though perhaps she had had an ulterior motive. After all, Minnie is the spinster of a thousand surprises.
She sounds like any other deaf and daft 120-year-old fossil, till we discover to our amazement that she was once the toast of the Indian Army and enjoyed a passionate affair with that old rogue, Major Bloodnok.
Now a little past her prime, she shares with Henry Crun certain difficulties with doors, especially locked ones, but is still capable of playing a mean, modem rhythm-type saxophone and running down thirty flights of stairs when required.
Despite Minnie’s somewhat indelicate “sex goddess” attribute, Crun never seems to appreciate these charms, especially when it comes to her “sinful” dancing. Like Minnie, Henry first hobbles into the mind’s ear in the second series. According to Spike, the character of Crun was inspired by a solicitor he had known, though Crun has also been likened to the inventor-magician who appeared in the Children’s Hour serial Toytown.
As a Goon, he had originally been half of the firm Wacklow & Crun, with Wacklow played by Spike, but Wacklow soon disappeared, making way for the dynamic decaying duo.
The pair had inherited their disjointed conversations from Spike’s parents, who he’d hear talking at each other from different rooms on different topics – on one memorable occasion mixing the subject of eggs and chips with the eruption of Mount Stromboli.
In tune with Sellers, Spike agreed that all this grotesque gallery of villains and mental defectives was culled from real life: “I was born in India, son of the Indian Army. And among the Indian Army were all the despotic majors and colonels that weren’t allowed in England for feeling little girls’ bicycle saddles. They’d been deported to India for this. They sold the regimental silver, they plundered the funds, screwed all the officers’ wives, played polo and were flushed with whisky every day by 4 o’clock. That was Bloodnok, who I loved.”
Major Denis Bloodnok, late of the 3rd Disgusting Fusiliers, was one of the first characters to be let loose, emerging as early as Series 1, though without the curried eggs. Besides excelling as a coward and a womaniser, the Major’s other notable trait was his eagerness to do anything for money, unless the risk was too great, in which case he’d find another fool to do it.
But the man who clearly symbolized the worst of the British Raj in India still succeeded in earning admiration even if, as Sellers recalled, for the wrong reasons: “He’s still the one that survived. He’s a very strong character, Bloodnok. A dreadful man who’ll stop at nothing. It doesn’t matter, if they knock at the door: (Bloodnok voice) ‘don’t come in.’ just in case. You never know, it might be somebody, ‘My dear, sit over there. This is my daughter, you know. Ahem.’ He’s always worried in case he’s caught out at something.”
Besides Bloodnok, further examples of the type of people Spike loved to loathe were Hercules Grytpype-Thynne and Count Jim Moriarty, and The Goon Show placed them on a plate for him to expose for what they were. Grytpype makes his entrance at the end of Series 2, but remains nameless till the start of the fifth.
He is the public school cad with a dastardly dash of The Third Man’s Harry Lime about him. He is the bootlegging racketeer with a bloodhound’s nose for a fast buck and the oiled-velvet tonsils to charm his victims out of it.
Who knows, maybe it was something in Sellers’ love of deceptive mimicry that made these two characters appeal to him: “Moriarty and Grytpype-Thynne were two of my favourites. Grytpype-Thynne we based on George Sanders because we wanted that, you know, (Grytpype voice) soft, drawling sound. He was the ultimate in con men. And this poor Moriarty: the ace French entrepreneur and confidence trickster.”
Yes, poor Moriarty. His is the spectacular fall from grace from master criminal ‘dreaded batter pudding hurler’ and enjoying with Grytpype a fiendishly long partnership of fraud and villainy – of which his Sherlock Holmes namesake would have been proud – down to a level of wretched starving degradation in which Grytpype has to enquire of him: “Now, which of all these fishbones is you?”
Needless to say, both characters were based on people Spike had met: “Grytpype-Thynne was 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 of somebody else’s trousers.
“And they were always talking in big terms of money. I remember seeing them in my journeys through the world. I was sitting next to a man in a first-class seat on a British Airways plane, and he was talking in millions of pounds to me. But I noticed that all his cuffs were heavily frayed and that one of his cuffinks was a piece of string knotted to hold the shirt together. And then when he crossed his legs, there was an enormous hole in his sock, with blackened skin underneath, which proclaimed he hadn’t had a bath for a long time. But he still talked in millions until we landed. I think he left money owing to the cabin crew!”
“I think all the failures, all the characters that really had no hope, like Moriarty, really had no hope at all. His teeth were kept in a locked tin by Grytpype-Thynne. Wasn’t allowed to eat until he went out and got money.”
As for the character who Spike felt closest to, Eccles was based on Walt Disney’s buck-toothed halfwit, Goofy. His voice is also said to be traceable to Mortimer Snerd, a village idiot dummy on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s American radio show from the 1930s.
Eccles, “The Original Goon”, was described as such because he was the longest-serving, making his debut at least as early as 1949 in the aforementioned Hip Hip Hoo Roy. Though under the name of ‘spike’ he may have got an even earlier airing in The Bowery Bar for Charles Chilton soon after the War.
Breezing in and out of the first series of The Goon Show, it’s not until the seventh show that he gets his name, so it’s little wonder that Harry actually saw Spike as Eccles!
Spike explained: “I think Eccles was haunted by Goofy. The childhood love of my life was Goofy. I slightly refined him and made him more into Homo sapiens, in very low key. He represented the loser in life who always came off smiling out of every occasion, and could not be defeated by logic; he could always overcome it.
“Like, you ask him for the time, and he’d say, ‘I’ve got it written down on a piece of paper here’ – things like that. And if you say. ‘It’s not like that.’ he says, ‘then your bit of paper must be faster than mine.’ It’s strange. It’s a child’s logic.”
The somewhat cerebrally-challenged Eccles knows just enough to be aware that he is a dimwit and how to hold protracted discussions with his best friend Bluebottle about what the time is and how to open a door. Never mind that it holds up the storyline and perhaps costs us some of the plot as a result, Eccles’s logical twaddle renders us spellbound.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 