Part 7 – Larry was a strong man
This is the seventh 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 126 in March 2009.
THE 4TH SERIES began in October ’53, and was to mark some more milestones. Exit stage left went guardian angel Grafton, who had provided the all-important catalyst that brought The Goon Show into being, but whose editing services were no longer needed. Exit stage right went the staid announcer Andrew ‘Tim’ Timothy.
Surprisingly, with that staid persona and self-confessed disdain for Goon humour, he had been the show’s warm-up man! He told the GSPS Midlands group about it in 1986: “That’s a most unenviable task – to walk out onto the stage of the Aeolian Hall, and there were ranks of people sitting and wiggling their noses and their ears, and you’d have to stir them up to some kind of life to start with. And to some kind of laughter! So I had to do this job, and that was really the hardest job I had to do, by a long way. I noticed, as time went past, that this damned show was becoming a sort of addiction, and I saw that gradually the rows in front of me – the fifth row and the sixth row and the seventh and the eighth – all contained exactly the same people, sitting in exactly the same seats as had attended the previous week, and the week before that! So you couldn’t sell the old tripish stories indefinitely. And I think that really was what got me out of The Goon Show, because I really couldn’t stand the thought of spending practically every Sunday of the year trying to jig up audiences.”
In breezed jovial, long-suffering Wallace Greenslade. While Timothy’s arrogant, arm’s-length attitude towards the show had been spot-on for portraying a relationship more like a matron with a wardful of misfits, Greenslade’s unruffled, masochistic bliss at being sucked ever more deeply into this den of indignities would effectively label him the fourth member of the cast: “This is the BBC Home Service. It may not be very much – but it’s home to me.”
Harry recalled both men with affection: “Nothing was ever taken seriously – not even the announcements. Tim Timothy – marvellous. He was the epitome of the BBC announcer. He looked it. He wore a monocle and he stood there with this disdainful expression which was perfect for us. And then he left. And then Wally Greenlade who was an ex-Naval man; he was a big, jolly man and he was wonderful, and we used to send him up rotten, especially when he was doing the straight announcements – pinch his bottom and things. I think Spike took a liking to him and to the character.” Indeed he did: “It was quite wonderful. They had a duel between John Snagge and Greenslade, and I stood at the side in the wings and laughed very much at these two straight men carrying out this conversation.”
By halfway through the series, the shows became permanently one-plot stories, as opposed to occasional ones. Much of this was due to pressure from Peter Eton, which he discussed at the GSPS’s Cliftonville weekend in 1976: “I always tried to get Spike to do complete melodramas. I preferred this. I said, let’s do a whole programme about Moon Over Milton Street. I’d give him a basic idea, and then I could influence the script. But if it was just a sketch show where we wandered about all over the place. I couldn’t exert much influence.”
While Neddie Seagoon had by now emerged as the death-defying hero, it was also at this point that Bluebottle was to make his entrance, though without the Bluebottle voice. He arrives along with ‘Mate’ and an unnamed George Sanders soundalike on his way to metamorphosing into the Hercules Grytpype-Thynne of Series 5. Major Bloodnok sounds younger, perhaps because he does not yet suffer from indigestion.
Two-thirds of the way through the series, Larry Stephens dropped out as co-writer, leaving Spike on his own. It happened when the BBC reprimanded Larry for breaking the terms of his contract with delayed delivery of scripts, pompously declaring that future scripts would only be accepted on their merits. So he quit.
When interviewed by Mark Powell for the GSPS in 1987, Spike was surprisingly dismissive of Larry: “We started struggling with various writers – me and Larry Stephens and Jimmy Grafton – but bit by bit they didn’t have the same oblique insane comedy attitude that I had.”
“I was starting to out-do them and they were becoming an encumberment to me. Larry Stephens died conveniently. It was very nice of him and I went on to write them on my own, sometimes with Eric and one or two times with John Antrobus.”
This niggardly summing-up of a writer with 133 Goon Show credits to his name drew a strong response from comedy writer Ray Galton in Larry Stephens: the Man Who Never Was (Radio 4, 2. 10.07): “Nasty bastard. That’s all I can think of saying about that. I know this sounds nasty. We love Spike as well, you know, it’s terrible.” In the same programme another writer, Brad Ashton, was not surprised: “Spike had the offices below me for twenty years and he never ever mentioned Larry as far as the Goon Shows were concerned – as if Larry never existed.” As John Antrobus, the presenter of the programme said, Larry may not have had the unique comedy genius of Spike, but Spike’s description of him as “the highest paid typist in the business” sounds like a cheap laugh. Maybe his memories were tainted by those less merry co-writing periods when he and Larry were not on speaking terms. Larry’s thirst for rum may have opened the rift, and mixing drinks with manic depression was hardly likely to heal it.
In the same acerbic vein as Spikes on Larry’s writing. Peter Eton dished out some Cliftonville opinions on Spike’s: “Larry was the strong man. Spike used to have these paradoxical ideas and wrote them down in the form of one-line gags. Most of it was rubbish, utter rubbish. It was Larry who used to pull it into shape and make sketches out of it.”
It’s an opinion shared by Roger Wilmut in The Goon Show Companion. He says that Larry was expert at constructing plots. And this was “something Spike was often a little vague about.” Without Larry, Wilmut contends, the show would have been limited to a collection of brilliant one-liners.
On the other hand. Eton also saw it another way. on Larry Stephens: the Man Who Never Was: “Spike used to have the marvellous, lively, extrovert ideas, and Larry” used to bring them down to earth.”
Although we will never know how much each man contributed to the shows they wrote together, in the case of the very quiet, shy Stephens, it was his Commando’s voracity for leaping into the fray at times of crisis, in spite of ill health, that helped the show survive. And although he was to die tragically young, that would be in 1959, and there were plenty more Goon Shows in him yet. Larry Stephens would be back.
SOME storylines were twistings of topical news items. 3rd series examples included the building of the Suez Canal and the ascent of Mount Everest, which bore witness to the indisputable proof (as if proof were needed) that the Goons conquered it a full month before Hillary and Tensing. This second, highly-publicized, ascent was announced on the day of the Queen’s coronation, 3 June 1953, another event of such spoof-attracting proportions that the Goons returned from their mountain conquering expedition in time to broadcast a special Coronation edition that same day.
A less prominent news item was the 5th series ‘The Sinking of Westminster Pier’, a subject recommended by Peter Eton and recalled by Spike in At Last the Go On Show: “Westminster Pier suddenly sank one day. And Harry said to me, ‘I’ve got the phone number of Westminster Pier.’ So we rang it and this phone number was ringing underwater. And then we saw these two men in a rowing boat coming up. And this little mast sticking up out of the Thames, and they put a flag on it, saying: ‘Port of London Authorities’, and they rowed out again, like this. But wasn’t it funny? We got hysterical just phoning up this phone underwater which was ringing. So when we opened the show next week, we said, ‘Right, who did it? Who sunk it? Hands up those who sunk it.’”
The Man Who Never Was harked back to World War II when a freshly drowned corpse had been entrusted with false identity papers and left waiting on a Spanish beach to fool the Germans.
Other episodes made news themselves. The Flying Saucer Mystery (written by Larry Stephens) contains Wallace Greenslade’s serious sounding newsflashes announcing sightings of a UFO heading west across London: “We must apologize for interrupting the programme, but a mysterious light has been seen over East Acton. If anyone can identify the object, will they please phone the Defence Board – Milthorpe 0203.” Naturally, The Flying Saucer Mystery enjoyed a healthy panic-stricken response from herds of moonstruck half-wits. Some were afraid we were being invaded from outer space, while others claimed to have seen the object, setting off a salvo of steaming BBC memos. The show would no doubt have tickled Orson Welles, whose infamous radio hoax of fifteen years earlier, The War of the Worlds, might well have been Larry’s inspiration: “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our programme of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News…”
Early in ‘54, The Goon Show was to attract more hoots of disapproval, this time over “uncouth language”. “You filthy swine” was one of the choicest examples selected by various spotlessly clean swine in the press, evangelically upholding morals in the face of the Goons’ devilishly subversive onslaught.
During Peter Eton’s 3-hour marathon interview at Cliftonville in 1976, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the first show, he explained how Spike had been poking fun at every strata in post-War Britain: “He was saying. ‘the empire is crumbling, don’t pretend it isn’t; everyone is going to pieces, golf club secretaries are stupid idiots, don’t pretend they’re not; the life that we are leading is so artificial.’ He was having a go at all forms of pomposity, having a go at the law and order of the country, which he didn’t like. People like Spike and Larry Stephens tried to cut through this, and Spike with his Irish imagination is able to transplant things from one area to another and make them even more ridiculous than they are. He didn’t like post-War Britain. He thought it was a frightful mess – he thought we were all so artificial. I think this had come from experiences in the War when he didn’t like officers. He didn’t like being ordered around by people he thought were idiots, and this stayed with him. He was quite right in my opinion.”
Sensing that the shows were going from strength to strength, it is around this point that Roger Wilmut pronounces in his book that “ahead of them were some of the greatest comedy performances ever broadcast”. He may have been thinking of the 4th series’ final instalment. The Starlings. Spike, now writing alone, homed in on a classic news story where life was again mirroring The Goon Show.
If you had been sitting down to write a Goon Show in the summer of ’54, and looking for inspiration. You could have opened the Manchester Guardian and found it in birds’ mess. Birmingham City Council was going the whole hog to rid its buildings of a vast visitation of starlings and, judging by the schemes being experimented with, it would have been no surprise if someone by the name of Eccles had been conducting operations: “Stuffed owls, rubber snakes, ultra-violet light and high-frequency sound waves are among the dozen or more methods tried unsuccessfully in Birmingham.”
Birds’ mess management wasn’t the only thing being experimented upon. This Goon Show itself would be presented as a radio play, blessedly relieved of the musical interludes, and was getting its first laugh-free performance since the lads’ abortive BBC audition, Tatters Castle, which had been produced by the audience-allergic Jacques Brown. It was also to be recorded north of Watford, as Peter Eton recalled: “I insisted we went up to Newcastle to do this because I wanted to take a week to do it absolutely perfectly; in London I couldn’t get studios, so we all went up to Newcastle. It was only in the ‘regions’ we could get the studios for a week and we really went to town on it.”
The Ministry of Grit, filth and Exportable Heads was designated the task of starling removal at Trafalgar Square. Constant noise, rice puddings fired from catapults and exploding bird-lime which could be detonated by sound waves succeeded in destroying St Martin’s in the Fields but failed to deter the little darlings, which failed to deter the little bureaucrats.
BLADDOCK: Mr Prime Minister – Hon. Mems. I fear that the explodable bird-lime was a mite too powerful – but fear not, St Martin’s will be rebuilt.
TIM: But the starlings will only roost on it again.
BLADDOCK: If they do, we’ll blow it up again. Naturally we would rebuild again – but if the starlings still persist in roosting there – we’ll have no compunction but to blow it up yet again. We’ll see who gets tired first.
Spike loved it: “Very, very, very funny show and exceedingly well done, and I think it should have been put up for the ltalia Grand Prix. But, of course, comedy has no heroes really when it comes to bureaucracy.” Peter Eton disagreed about the comic element: “But because there was no audience, it wasn’t very funny. But it was a good idea – it was worth doing. Spike at that time was bursting with ideas and I thought this idea of the starlings was absolutely topical. They really were experimenting on Trafalgar Square with electric shock machines, mating calls of other starlings and sticky bird-lime to try to stop the starlings in Trafalgar Square… and Spike went down there and I thought. ‘Yes, let’s try and do this as a great drama.’”
Another great drama was to ensue at the BBC, caused by The Starlings broadcast on 31 August. It had nothing to do with cruelty to birds, buildings or bureaucrats. What had offended officials was Peter Sellers’s performance as Duchess Boil de Spudswell – a lady who sounded suspiciously like the Queen. Here she is, introduced by Harry and followed by the reverential tones of Dinglbee, a commentator who Sellers made sound remarkably like another commentator called Richard Dimbleby:
HARRY: Ahem. my Lords. Ladies and Gintlepong. Pray silence for the Duchess Boil de Spudswell, Dame of the Empire and at present appearing in Television’s ‘That’s Your Lot’, ‘Where’s Your Bonce?’,‘What’s Up Now?’, ‘Who’s Your Dad?’, ‘Look What’s Come’ – and other edifying panel games. She appears here this evening by arrangement with the makers of ‘Footo’. the wonder boot exploder.
DINGLEBEE (Hushed): With that great, dignified sound – she steps up to the great microphone.
LADY B (On Tannoy): Ladies and Gentlemen – it is – (Tannoys go dead, except for odd noises).
ENGINEER (Tannoy): PHOO phoooo phoooo hello hello testing one two three four. Yus, that’s alrite, gel.
LADY B (Tannoy): Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my privilege and provelege to name this experiment ‘Operation Explodable Bird Mixture’ and may all who stand on it perish.
In spite of the best efforts of the Beeb’s bureaucrats to portray this as “rank bad taste” and seal the Goons‘ doom, and that of Peter Eton, they might as well have hired Birmingham City Council. Thanks to the worshipful announcer John Snagge and thousands of letters from fans, the Goons would live to light another day – and grab themselves another exceptional scribbler!
The Goon Show Preservation Society 