Part 4 – I trust you will not fail
This is the fourth 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 122 in April 2008.
MARGINALLY less gormless is Ned of Wales. Ever since playing Handsome Harry Secombe in the first series, the world’s loudest lunatic has been one of the show’s leading characters.
As our hero Neddie Seagoon, he has the entire cosmos revolving around him. But never more than a sound effects distance away are those scheming scoundrels Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty – “Moriarty. I think we’ve found it Charlie” – hungrily waiting to send him on some moneymaking fool’s errand for them, wherein the bewildered bureaucracy of those Victorian relics Crun and Banister will frustrate his every effort – “You can’t get the wood, you know” – Bloodnok will relieve him of his wallet – “This pound note – what colour was it?” — “Green” – “It’s mine! Mine was green” – before those innocent twits Bluebottle and Eccles help him fail in his mission and – “You dirty, rotten swine!” – go down with the exploding camel.
Neddie, that well known danger to shipping, is the one with whom the listener identifies. We recognize the grotesque characters and situations he encounters, and would have to face the same sea of troubles were we in his waterlogged shoes.
Taking patriotic flag-waving to unheard of heights and depths, the ball of fat with duck’s disease is the one who risks life, limb and monkeys on the knee to climb Mount Everest from the inside; who insures the English Channel against catching fire; who exports British snow to Sudan; who tracks down the last tram of London to the Kingsway tunnel where it has been waiting for its closing ceremony for two years; who ends up in at German prison while investigating the cause of mysterious shirt explosions; and who, in a skit on George Orwell’s 1984, is taken into the ‘Listening Room’ where he is subjected to a brain-washing fate far worse than rats: exposure to the theme music to Life with the Lyons, Have a Go! and Mrs Dale’s Diary.
Tracing the join separating Harry from Neddie would require a 3D telescopic microscope. And, as Harry recalled in 6 Characters in Search of an Author (Radio 4. 25.6.02), in the same way that he saw Spike as Eccles, “Spike always saw me as a little idiot in ragged underpants, running around: ‘Hello. Folks!’ He [Seagoon] always carried a rolled-up copy of The Times and the Union Jack in his knapsack. I suppose it was to spread the word of British patriotism. He was a happy, optimistic soul. He thought he was doing it for the good of his country and his bank balance.
“In the beginning The Goon Show was a series of unrelated sketches. Eventually they decided – or Spike decided – that it would be a good idea to have a central figure around which these strange, bizarre incidents occurred. So, my voice being the most distinctive, inasmuch as I couldn’t disguise it when I did any other voice, I became Neddie Seagoon, which is really only an extension of my own self, I suppose.”
Secombe’s son Andy takes it back a bit further: “The first time Spike Milligan met my father, he thought he was Polish: he had so much energy and such a fast delivery that he didn’t understand a word of what he was saying. And I think a lot of that ebullience my father had went into the character: the fast-talking ‘idiot’.”
Charles Chilton’s summing-up helpfully leads us on to someone else: “Harry was always the one, like in the cartoon films, the character that was always getting hit on the head, knocked out, flattened by a steamroller, always getting into trouble for no reason at all, and always suffering the arrows of misfortune through no fault of his own. He was a scapegoat, I suppose; the scapegoat of the Goons.”
Scapegoat he may have been, but at least he wasn’t “deaded” in almost every episode. That inglorious distinction befell someone described as a cardboard cut-out liquorice & string boy scout from East Finchley, unflatteringly named after a housefly.
Bluebottle had metamorphosed from Captain Pureheart’s technical adviser, Ernie Splutmuscle, who entered proceedings in the very first show. Three series later the captain is long gone but “my Capitain” is still alive and well when Bluebottle addresses his leader, Neddie Seagoon.
Most weeks Bluebottle ends up blown to smithereens, but with just enough smithereens retrievable to read the stage directions which guide his life – “Replaces kneecap, puts back lug in lug-hole” – and bounces back the following week none the wiser for the experience. “I don’t like this game,” he quivers, but the lure of maybe getting his photograph printed in the East Finchley Chronicle with which to impassion Muriel Bates, the object of his affections, is always too hard to resist.
In common with Eccles and Seagoon, his spirit is indestructible, as are his schoolboyish dreams of glory and naughty thoughts of Sabrina. He is also an extrovert, thrilled when his entrances are greeted with applause, and precociously shaming audiences into giving it when they don’t: “Enter Bluebottle; pauses for audience applause; not a sausage.”
Bluebottle’s inspiration has two sources. There is the oft-told tale of Ruxton Hayward, a tall, bushy-bearded scoutmaster in shorts, asking Bentine in a high voice if he would do the honours and open a scout fete for him. A bewitched Bentine instead recommended that Ruxton call on his ex-colleagues at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and introduce himself as “a genius”. This he duly did, unwittingly supplying them with the naive boy scout look and falsetto.
However, Bluebottle’s earlier manifestation as Splutmuscle was already treading the boards. From a previously unbroadcast Sellers interview recorded in 1971, found in his private collection, a clip was included in Best Sellers – the Life and Times of Peter Sellers, offering a much earlier stimulus: “Bluebottle was a reflection of a boy I knew once when I was at kindergarten. I was seven years old and I’d bought a model in lead of Malcolm Campbell’s record-breaking car ‘the Bluebird’, and it was the first of the models. And it was expensive – where you could lift the body up and you could see all the engine in lead. And the wheels weren’t properly shaped; they were pressed over at the end so they wouldn’t come off. This was my pride and joy. I took it to school and all the kids were round it, looking at it, running it on desks. And a little spotty Herbert came up to me, he came out of the crowd, jockeying for power, and he said to me: ‘[Bluebottle voice] Can I be the man that sees no one touches it for you?’ I never forgot that. Because he’d be a manager then: stand back. I will tell you if you’re allowed to touch that. Is he? Yes, you can. He’s then one-up and got nearer to it himself, so he could touch it whenever he wanted. But the others . . . And that was the basic idea behind Bluebottle. He was a very simple, young lad.”
Between the two of them – Ruxton and the Herbert — they sealed Bluebottle’s fate. He would ever more be a simple, cardboard cut-out genius.
The 3rd Series was to undergo seismic tremors. Dennis Main Wilson had left for calmer pastures at the end of the 2nd, and would soon be producing Hancock’s Half Hour and moving to television. He had been unable to exert control over the cast or to achieve the one-story format he had hoped for, but he had fuelled the show with a ton of enthusiasm and gradually managed to reduce the number of sketches and characters, and make the cast cut out their joke-obscuring gabbling.
He recalled the changeover: “Spike in the studio lacks confidence in himself. He said to me once. “What I need, Den, is a strong producer” – and it wasn’t going to be me. I’d tried it before! And there was a great drama producer, Peter Eton. And he took over the 3rd series onwards and whacked discipline in, and the show took off.”
Harry agreed that a weekly dose of Peter Eton was exactly what the doctor ordered: “He was firm with the lads. Because sometimes we were a bit boisterous and over the top, and he’d tell us in no uncertain terms – servicemen’s terms – to pack it in, and we would, because he had that kind of authority.” – “He had a dramatic background,” said Spike laughing, “I think it was the Somme!”
Eton had been in BBC Drama and Features, and immediately lined the cast up into drama group formation, whilst bringing more structure to the sketches. He reduced the tally to three per show, cutting the interludes down to two. The ex-Naval officer was described as a hard man to make laugh, a trait he was probably sharing with a stressed-out Spike at this time.
Spike’s domestic life was in crisis, his wife June being ill, leaving him holding baby Laura. Meanwhile, as if writing Goon Shows and standing his ground against BBC officialdom wasn’t enough, he was actually accepting scriptwriting offers from other comedians. So, keeping deadlines was becoming impossible.
In December 1952, Eton’s verbal requests that he supply scripts on time turned into an official demand via the Assistant Head of Variety. Still filed away in the Corporation’s archive, it was narrated on Vivat Milligna (Radio 4, 2004):
Dear Spike Milligan,
THE GOON SHOW
It has been reported to me by Mr Peter Eton that despite his constant requests for early delivery of your scripts for the above production continue to arrive late, in some cases not until the morning of the pre-recording.
You will appreciate that this late arrival does not give the producer sufficient time to edit and arrange for the necessary effects, etc. etc, and further, it causes considerable work for the producer’s secretary.
In the circumstances, I must ask you to deliver scripts to the producer not later than Thursday of each week, and I trust you will not fail . . .
This Eton letter seems to have been the final straw that tipped the camel over the edge. Furious with what he saw as Eton’s increasingly militant manner, Spike decided to sort the matter out his own way, grabbed a potato knife and, with apparently homicidal resolve and almost comic reasoning, he went after… Peter Sellers! “I was so mad,” Spike was reported as saying, “I thought that if I killed Peter it would come right.” The fact that Sellers’ flat was handily located next door to his own might have influenced his choice of victim, and thus June was there to scream out at Peter to keep his door shut.
How serious Spike was, we can only surmise. Given that he alerted his target by shouting. “I have come to kill Peter Sellers.” and that his selection of weapon was not the first that springs to mind for such a job, perhaps he wasn’t. But then, this wasn’t your normal, standard, birthday treat stabbing. What we do know is that it earned him the change of pace he craved and a lengthy booking at St Luke’s Hospital in Highgate. In all, he would have a dozen episodes off.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 