part 6 – Raspberry assault ‘n’ vinegar
This is the sixth 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 125 in December 2008.
GENERALLY, read-throughs started at around 4 o’clock, followed by 6 o’clock practice with Geldray, Ellington and orchestral links. 7.25pm was tightening up timing time with a complete run-through, taking in sound effects, more alterations and ad libbing. It was also the time to get the positioning with mikes right. Peter Eton had brought all his microphone tricks with him from the Drama department, and taught the cast how to move in on a mike when bringing in a new character. This was especially important for Sellers when electrically switching roles. And subtly adjusting the acoustics would make the situations easier to imagine, in spite of the script often alluding to the whole thing being studiobound.
Then, after getting tanked-up at the nearest hostelry, our heroes would be back again at 9 o’clock for the audience warm-up, smuggling in some milk and brandy sustenance in case Max and Ray’s musical interludes made them thirsty. There followed fifteen minutes horsing about: maybe a Harry aria complete with interruptions; maybe an orchestra jam session with Peter on drums and Spike on trumpet; head-stands. cartwheels, mike stands transforming into scooters; and a sure-fire panto pleaser when, say, Peter would snatch off Harry’s braces, causing his own trousers to drop.
At 9.15pm all such trifling nonsense ceased, and on would go the red light to kick off the serious nonsense: “This is the BBC. Hold it up to the light. No, not a brain in sight.”
Many people attending recordings found them funnier ‘live’ than broadcast. They liked the tension, the excitement of witnessing it happening before their very eyes. The comic antics, which helped the actors play their roles, had audiences in stitches. These visuals also helped the audience, for without them – unless they sat there with their eyes shut – they might have missed out on the sound pictures.
Gales of confusing laughter, where audiences were apparently laughing at nothing, were not the only clips usually edited out. Ad libs which provoked the laughter often had to go as well, and sometimes caused a right how-do-you-do when they didn’t. [See ‘Ouch! Harm can come to a Goon Show like That‘, NL No.117.] Any sniff of smut brought the Corporation’s hierarchy out in cold sweats, made plain in this quote from Michael Standing, the BBC’s Head of Variety, dated 1948: “There is an absolute ban on the following: Jokes about Lavatories, Pre-natal influences, Marital infidelity, Effeminacy in men, immorality of any kind [as well as] suggestive references to Honeymoon couples, Chambermaids, fig-leaves, Prostitution, Ladies’ Underwear eg. winter draws on, Animal habits, eg. rabbits, Lodgers [and] Commercial Travellers.”
With many of these forbidden fruits finding their way onto Goon Show airwaves, it’s no wonder that Peter Eton said the show was under constant threat. The producer for whom the slightest mention of dustbins or lavatories held a special enchantment, and who introduced Spike to the bawdy, lavatorial Works of Rabelais, logged thirty attempts by ‘Bumbling Bureaucrats’ to shut the show down – and nearly shut him down too – and, but for the interventions of the BBC’s revered Head announcer John Snagge, those BBs might well have succeeded.
The taboo that infuriated Spike the most is actually missing from the list, though it’s not hard to imagine Spike diving into Auntie’s drawers in search of other lists of rules and memoranda with which to make merry. The missing subject is ‘political satire’. Sellers’ deliciously ripe impersonations of the Queen (Duchess Boil de Spudswell), Churchill and Montgomery were considered heresy when they slipped through the net, and Spike voiced his annoyance in an interview with Mark Powell in 1987: “We were rocking the boat and we were starting to put satire in, and they would stop it. No political comments, no racial jokes and, if you come to think of it, they suppressed us. We could have gone into satire. Anyhow, we got one or two things through, but the important, significant things they pre-closed upon. And we could have gone ahead because Pete Sellers could do literally any voice. He could do the Queen, Prince Philip, the lot. We did it once or twice – we managed to get away with the Queen’s voice. In the main, they screwed us down and kept us locked in a compartment. Whereas what That Was The Week That Was did [since the BBC wouldn’t allow satire on comedy programmes], they said, ‘All right, we’ll do it on talks’ where you’re allowed to be political. Such a simple move, a brilliant move on how to overcome bureaucratic stupidity.”
ANOTHER new position in The Goon Show went to Wally Stott, latterly Angela Morley after swapping genders. Angela had been with the show since the start, composing and arranging the musical links, and when Stanley Black & the BBC Dance Orchestra left for Educating Archie, Angela replaced them with a band of session players that would eventually become an orchestra. As Harry said, the music played an integral role: “There was a tremendous lift from the orchestra. The Cruel Sea-type music we had. The music was witty – that was the thing about the music.” Spike agreed: “The band was wonderful and the music was exceptionally good. Angela Morley did all the writing for it. Very talented, very talented indeed. The links between were like Hollywood epics.” One of the musicians was the virtuoso trombonist George Chisholm, who felt he was more than just a player in a band: “Obviously when you started playing the scoring by Angela, there was something in it for everybody there. All the band felt as if they really were an important part of the show, which of course they were.”
However, Angela said she was not simply left to get on with it: “Spike made his needs very plainly known. He described in the script every week how he wanted it to be. And then of course, when we got to rehearse, Spike would sometimes say, ‘No, no, no, that sounds too good.’ I know in one show there had to be a national anthem for some Ruritanian sort of country in middle Europe and I composed the national anthem, and when Spike heard it he said, “No, that sounds much too good. I just want to hear one instrument at a time.” So it started with a piccolo, then it went to trombone and then it went to violin or something. And he was absolutely right — it sounded fantastic. I’d like to think I composed it that way!”
One of Angela’s finest moments was in Dishonoured – Again when illustrating Seagoon’s enlisting into the Navy by accompanying it with a rousing minute’s medley of such sea-faring standards as A Life On The Ocean Wave, What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor?, Rule Britannia and The Sailors’ Hornpipe. Having reached its great climax, Seagoon changes his mind: “No, I’ll join the Army. It’s too damn noisy in the Navy!”
The orchestra sounded grander than it was, with only a dozen musicians plus the Ray Ellington Quartet providing the rhythm section. Ray and harmonica player Max Geldray were still the interlude fillers, and there they would hang on, monotonously conventional, eating into good comedy time till the very end, as if the BBC were afraid that the audience would nod off without them. In fact, by 1958 the Beeb probably saw them as an anachronism, an obsolete throwback to old variety shows and, but for Sellers, Geldray would have been put on his bike a lot earlier.
The 4th series got underway in October 1953. This time they could enjoy the luxury of magnetic tape, which had taken over from the Stone Age clumsiness of recording each show onto a 16-inch coarse-groove 33% rpm disc. The big by-product of tape was the freedom it gave the cast to ad lib, safe in the knowledge that any verbal vexations and over-indulgences could be edited out afterwards and the show could be cut to length.
But magnetic tape was not yet a luxury they could wallow in. Sound effects were still being played into the show on disc, using a chinagraph pencil to mark the exact groove required. John Browell later became the show’s producer after serving time as a sound effects technician: “If you had an effects sequence, you were going to have to play the records and very often play them live into the show. That meant you had turntables with about six records on, and you’ve got to play these in sequence and time them to go in cohorts with the cast using what has been recorded and exists in the Library, though very often you are using effects that have been recorded in a totally different context.”
Spike always preached the need to get the sounds dead right, elegantly rhapsodizing that radio is “where the pictures are better because they happen on the other side of your eyes.” But making sounds to laugh at was often no laughing matter. Though he would generally get what he wanted, it was at the cost of shouting matches, undermined health and a reputation for being difficult. From his viewpoint, most of the BBC’s vast sonic kaleidoscope was supplied by a ‘spot effects’ man opening and shutting a door and ringing a door-bell: “We used to have ‘knock-on-door and footsteps-on-gravel’, which was the limit to the BBC Sound Archive, who wanted a Wurlitzer organ playing, changing gear and changing key at the same time, which was a wonderful idea, and sounded very funny how it was actually done. I think it certainly woke them up backstage, like if you wanted the sound of a wall going at speed.” The BBC saw it differently. They felt they knew best because they had been at it for years and had the Library to prove it. Traditionally, the Library was primarily for the use of the ‘serious’ Drama people and not for the ‘frivolous’ Variety lot. But fortunately, this old habit would be gnawed away by Peter Eton himself, whose no-nonsense style was not aimed solely at the show’s cast.
The tight-corseted Auntie attitude had its whalebones firmly fixed in the early days of the Corporation at Savoy Hill. In 1926 an important document had been published, entitled Sound Effects and How They may be Produced; “‘Let noises be too much quiet rather than a little too loud’ is the safe axiom to keep in mind. They should suggest, rather than actually portray. The burden is best left to the imagination of the listener.” However, the document does at least go on to suggest that sound effects should not be regarded as mere noises but as a definite and integral part of the programme itself.
One of the first programmes to experiment with sound effects on radio and to use them for their comedy value was Children’s Hour. Another was the Forties’ fast-paced morale-boosting comedy series ITMA starring Tommy Handley which, like The Goon Show, attached great value to catchphrases (Can I do you now, sir?) and odd supporting characters such as Colonel Chinstrap, Mrs Mopp and Mr What’s-is-name. The former BBC Producer John Ammonds had started his career as a ‘spot effects‘ technician on the programme and, in Two Coconut Shells, a Blowlamp and a Raspberry (Radio 4, 22.12.06), he spoke of the horrendous problems they had had with timing: “Because we hadn’t got tape, you couldn’t time as well on 78 discs, explosions and things, or even any ordinary effects. And on a show like ITMA, which was the forerunner of The Goon Show really, in sound effects, we did more ‘spot’ as opposed to ‘gram’ effects, and you were with the artistes at the microphone. You were performing. You couldn’t go back and do it again, you had to be right first time. And doing all these weird effects at the microphone, it was really frightening, just the thought of it. At £1.35p a week!”
Spike’s crazy collages were becoming ever more complex, taking hours to assemble. Battlefields of bullets and bomb blasts were being added to by other reminders of war inside Major Bloodnok’s innards. Dick Mills was one of the original staff at the Radiophonic Workshop, joining in 1958 as a technical assistant: “We had a gentleman there called Jimmy Burnett. And he and I got together on this Major Bloodnok’s stomach and produced what we thought was just sensational stuff. His entrance into the show was signalled by this terrifying noise.”
The sound effects technicians were beset by all sorts of challenges and, contrary to the impression Spike generally gave, apparently relished the opportunity to put their creativity to the test. That’s how Eric Sykes saw it: “They did some brilliant things, and the sound effects boys were probably the hardest worked sound effects boys that ever were, but they loved it. They really loved it because they had something to do besides open and close the door. The effect of the effects was something that is lacking today. I think in radio what is lacking is that they’re not creating pictures. You are transported; now that is what radio is good at. And The Goon Show did it.”
Harry Morriss provided the sound effects for the 10th series and, in Two Coconuts, a Blowlamp and a Raspberry, said he gave them his best shot: “it’s all a very serious programme and you had to come up with the goods. If it said in the script ‘exploding boots’, they had to explode and to give the feeling that they were boots in the process of disintegration; or extracting people from upright pianos. And then Spike Milligan would say, ‘Are you sure that’s an upright or is it a grand?’ You’d have all these peculiar arguments going on and you’d have almost a committee meeting deciding on ‘Is it a grand or an upright? What do you reckon?’ And exploded batter puddings and all the business. And they really had to sound what they were supposed to be.”
In The Nasty Affair at the Burami Oasis, we hear the sound of 50,000 men pulling corks out of bottles and, to quote Neddy Seagoon: “Let’s see them do that on television!” In China Story, he impatiently knocks at the door of the Teahouse of the August Moon 6,000 times before being told that it’s next door that he wants. Another time, Henry Crun, puzzled at the sound of Minnie Bannister clomping down thirty flights of stairs to answer the front door, thinks, “Funny, we live in a bungalow.” And how would one get the effect of a piano being beaten to death, as in The Dreaded Piano Clubber? Easy. Just wait till no one’s looking and push an upright down the marble staircase at the Aeolian Hall.
“He was marvellous at concocting,” Harry recalled of Spike in At Last the Go On Show. “He’d have Big Ben chiming like a cockerel or like a chicken. And Fred the oyster, which is actually a donkey braying and breaking wind at the end of it.” But, according to Spike, it seems that the Goons’ donkey was just acting the goat: “I remember these mules used to do this to cool their lips in India. They’d blow sandfuls of shrivelled raspberries. They used to collapse me – they still do. They still paralyze me. Whenever that happened I was helpless. The thought that the mule was doing it, not knowing how funny it was.”
The Goon Show Preservation Society 