Part 10: Fred & Co.
This is the tenth and final part of a series by John Repsch, telling some of the stories from the history of the Goon Show. This article first appeared in Newsletter 133 in May 2011.
January 1956 was hanging over Peter Sellers like one of Henry Crun’s shrouds. Although the year had seen him get his big film break playing a teddy boy in the Ealing Studios’ menacingly funny comedy, the role had not shot him out of the cannon into the dramatis personae of straight acting that he now craved. True, it had given him the chance to scrutinize Alec Guinness at magnifying glass range, and had got him a rich commendation by the great man himself to a film critic: “If you want a tip for the future, put your money on Peter Sellers.” What’s more, the film had received strong notices and was now doing nicely at the box office.
But Peter was still riddled with self-doubt. At the audition, he had failed to get the part of the ex-boxer that he had been after, and had only landed the ted on the strength of his mimicry. Throughout the film’s shooting, he had kept looking for reassurance from the director: “Is it all right? Am I any good?” And when he found that a speech of his had been specially selected for the cutting room floor, he lost all faith in the production. Down the pan went his sky-scraping hopes of matching Guinness, the man he described as his idol,
the multi-faceted star of Kind Hearts and Coronets, the type of film he himself wanted to make. He felt doomed to carry on churning out more of those instantly forgettable (if one tried hard enough), low budget, career-stagnating films such as Down Among the Z Men, Penny Points to Paradise, Let’s Go Crazy, Orders are Orders and the hubbub of disembodied voice-overs for parts he himself should have been playing. He was 30 and Major Bloodnok was drowning in the lake and wanted someone to start building him a boat.
Then suddenly out of his television set exploded a raspberry of multi-curried egg pro-portions. It was the first and last episode of an ad-libbed variety series called The Dick Lester Show. As Lester recalled in The Life and Times of Peter Sellers (Radio 4, 24.7.01), the show was dreadful and none of the jokes worked but, besides the teeth-gnashing of the critics, it earned him one particularly positive response: “The next morning I came into the office feeling awful and I had a phone call and a voice said, ‘You don’t know me but I saw your show last night, and either that was the worst show that British television has so far produced, or I think you’re onto something.’ I said, ‘Well, do I have a choice?’ He said, ‘Yeah, would you like to come to lunch?’ And that man was Peter Sellers. So we met, had a great lunch, kicked around some ideas, had a lot to drink and it was wonderful. So we decided that we would do the TV version of the Goon Shows. We couldn’t use the word ‘Goon’ because the BBC had copyright on it, so we had to call it something else.”
There was a touch of irony in the fact that Sellers, still Gooning about in the weekly radio show and desperate to land a serious, meaty role, should be looking to more Goonery to help him get it.
Sellers told Dick that he and others had been nagging the BBC for a TV answer to The Goon Show since the end of the first series of Crazy People. In his 1976 interview for the GSPS, Goon Show producer Peter Eton recalled simply offering the show to the head of BBC TV, Ronnie Waldman: “I remember bringing him down to The Goon Show and I had marked where I’d put the cameras in the Camden Theatre. I said, ‘Look, Ronnie, this is what we’d do,’ and he said, ‘No, we don’t want to start putting radio shows on television; we want to start our own shows'”.
Some three years earlier, the Goon quartet had appeared on television in a comedy special called Goonreel. Written by Bentine, Grafton and Milligan, it had spoofed a BBC TV news-reel, and featured Andrew Timothy as the commentator, and a cast that included Graham Stark. It would be the only small screen performance to star all four Goons.
For his book ‘The Life and Death of Peter Sellers’, Roger Lewis dug up a quote to illustrate why. Roy Speer, the radio producer who Sellers had duped all those years ago, was spouting forth on what he thought was Sellers’ lack of visual appeal: “Isn’t it wonderful that there is such a thing as radio because otherwise people like Peter wouldn’t have anywhere to work? He could never make a living as an actor with a face like that!”
Now, hopefully, the new-born Independent Television of 1955 would offer more scope and less disapproval of Peter’s face, and Dick’s links with Associated-Rediffusion should get it in.
Since the 24-year-old Dick Lester had moved to England from America, he had been getting steady work with A-R as a director and teaching others how to do the job. In time he would be enjoying plaudits raining down on him in buckets when he captured the spirit of the age with such films as A Hard Day’s Night, Help and The Knack, and he would later be hailed as one of the most inventive directors in the history of cinema.
The proposed programme would, they decided, attempt to recreate the anarchic lunacy of the radio show, and would star Sellers with an extended cast list that had never been necessary in Goonland. Spike would be writing it. As Dick remembers in Humphrey Carpenter’s ‘Spike Milligan: the Biography’, he and Peter called round to see Spike, and when they offered it to him, Spike was so excited that he almost burst with apathy: “He was lying on the floor. He didn’t get up and the first thing he said to me was, ‘You can’t do comedy on TV – there’s no point in talking about it.’ Lester comes up with a bit more in a quote on www.spikemilligan.com (now defunct): “He told me, ‘Comedy will never work on TV. If I write that two Eskimos go down in a lift and come up in Trafalgar Square, I can do it but you can’t. So it will never work.’ So we did the first show without Spike.”
For the fresh-faced Independent Television to steal a march on the BBC and show them how televising such humour should be done, it would be nothing short of spectacular, and they flew at the opportunity like a bat out of hell. A very late night slot of 10pm (given that the station closed down at 11pm) was con-firmed and the air was theirs for half an hour. As for the Beeb, they probably shared Spike’s doubts, and the prospective cheek of the coming shenanigans would not have embarrassed them a bean.
Emulating the intergalactic imagination of The Goon Show in a coffin-sized TV studio in Wembley looked out of reach, but they found their arms could stretch. “They” – according to that week’s TV Times – were Associated London Scripts (major contributors being John Antrobus and Johnny Speight, with Eric Sykes editing) and performers Kenneth Con-nor, Eric Sykes, June Whitfield, singer Patti Lewis, Goon Show guests Graham Stark and Valentine Dyall and, curiously, a certain Spike Milligan, both acting and writing. Did he or didn’t he? Music was supplied by the Reg Owen Orchestra. Of Harry there was no word.
Suddenly it was 24 February 1956 and televised Goonery was here! British TV comedy would never be the same again. Naturally for the star of the show, it was a fraught time, as writer John Antrobus’s vivid memories bear witness: “Peter was feeling nervous, and he said, ‘Could you go out and buy a bottle of brandy?’ So I went out and bought the brandy, and he had a noggin and I finished the bottle, and then he and David Lodge took me home, staggering.” Sellers and Lester had come up with the idea of centring the action on a trashy tuppenny Victorian magazine, The Idiot Weekly. Sellers was the editor introducing various news item sketches, as well as appearing in them.
The fact that Idiot Weekly, Price 2d was live, with zero time for set changes, stoked up the frenzy, with never-before-seen camera antics to match the lunacy they were performing. The show’s dog-eared edges added to its screwball charm.
Connoisseurs of the name ‘Fred’ will be quick to list the references it gets in the Fred-infested Goon Show. There’s ‘Fred of the Islands’, ‘Foiled by President Fred’ and ‘The Terrible Revenge of Fred Fu-Manchu’ for a start. Not forgetting Fred Nurk. But how come Fred? Peter explained why in the Sunday Times Magazine, 21 January 1962: “We all used this name Fred: we absolutely revered it – that’s why we had all the Fred shows. You can ruin anything with Fred. Suppose somebody shows you a painting. Oh, you say, that’s beautiful, really beautiful. Yes, he says, isn’t it beautiful: it’s a Rembrandt. Beautiful, you say. Then you look a bit closer and see it’s signed Fred Rembrandt. It’s no good, you can’t take it seriously if it’s Fred Rembrandt from East Acton. Fred – it’s the epitome of working class names: Fred and Bert. Frank, now that’s higher up the social scale.”
Written mainly by Spike, sometimes with John Antrobus, A Show called Fred was apparently even more deranged than its Idiot predecessor. Some of the sketches are a hoot, with Spike hotly pursuing non sequiturs and taking apart cliches and traditional formats with all the subtlety of a flying mallet.
Dick Lester who, in his own words, “created some order out of much chaos”, later delved into his director’s memory of it, as recounted in Ed Sikov’s ‘Mr Strangelove’: “The one thing we tried to do was to push the rather narrow bounds of television comedy. Spike and Peter were anxious not to fall into those traps.” Instead they wanted to “produce material which was as visually anarchic and stimulating as their verbal work had been.” Peter he described as “the performer” and Spike was “the creative force”: “I think Peter envied – in the best sense – Spike’s need to create. Peter was a wonderful adapter of other people’s ideas. He honed them and made them into something infinitely better than what they could have been. But in terms of raw creation, certainly, Spike was the creator of almost all the ideas that came up.”
And they were being well paid for it, with Sellers’ fee up from £100 per Idiot episode to £500 per Fred: “ITV pay Spike and I fabulous money for Fred – more than we dreamed. They gave us co-directing status too. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t have done it. The money wasn’t all that important.”
Picking over Fred’s remains reveals some stunning sights. The Rank Organisation’s famous gong-banging film intro attracts a nice bit of rank stupidity when Sellers in swimming trunks attempts to bang a similar gong. To his astonishment the gong bongs before he bangs it, and out from behind steps the king of anti-climaxes: Spike – Eccles-like in voice and smock. The credits roll, serenaded by another version of the ‘Ying Tong Song’: “Peter Sellers in ‘A Show Called Fred’ by Spike Milligan. With a cast of well known Thespian Actors including Valentine Dyall, Graham Stark, Kenneth Connor. Directed by Dick Lester and a cast of thousands.
Spike’s Eccles speciality crops up again and again pulling faces and sounding the same. In a less funny scene, he ushers indoors the comical musical duo the Alberts, a.k.a. Peter and Hugh Jampton. Carrying in large sousaphones, they look like they’re struggling to look like they’re struggling, and then they struggle some more to fall over without hurting themselves. It’s all a bit contrived, both the act and the script. Slightly less unfunny is their interview for an off-screen Sellers. But just as they are about to show off their sousaphones, Sellers stops the sketch. Is that as far as it is written or is the show over-running? The Alberts look convincingly surprised.
One Albert has his moment though. In between scenes he suddenly finds himself in shot and realizes he may be in the way of the camera. His dithering is priceless. Backstage Kenny Everett Video Show-type laughter punctuates it here and there, sometimes sounding forced, with some antics not meriting such hilarity. But maybe that’s a foolish criticism and the novelty of the gags made them funny for their day. When Sellers felt that a scene wasn’t funny enough, he would sometimes suggest back-projecting film footage that had nothing to do with the subject in hand, such as blazing flames or a moving train.
Upper class toffs feature purely to be brought down a peg or three. The more posh they are, the more likely they are to be seen in their underwear. While the deep dulcet-toned Valentine Dyall swings upside down in his long-johns he assures us, “No, I’m not mad really. I just help the others out when they’re busy.” He is later seen brandishing a box of Muc wonder deterrent as he walks, head held high, in suit, tie and shirtless, along backstage corridors to the studio canteen, where he proceeds to do the washing-up.
Similarly the aristocratic glamour girl Katie Boyle presents a TV ad miracle gadget:
KB: Ten seconds is all you need to remove ugly stains from your linen. Let me show you how. [Steps behind a bedsheet hanging nearby and cuts out large stain.] So simple, there – and it’s gone in a flash. Thanks to – scissors.
[But she has inadvertently disturbed another long-johned toff, Peter Sellers, who was sleeping behind it.]
PS: It’s very quiet up there. There are people down here trying to sleep.
KB: Silence, bighead, or I’ll clout your steaming nut!
PS: [Standing] Careful what you say, Miss Boyle, or I’ll show the world what really lies beneath it all.
[Clasps bedsheet around himself, exposing KB who is now down to her underwear.]
KB: Oh, I’m undone!
PS: [Grabbing her] Oh, you little beauty!
KB: This never happens on I’ve Got A Secret.
PS: Silence, little Palladian chick.
JV: [Micro-sized Johnny Vyvian in long-johns pops up between them. To PS:] Desist or I’ll close with you.
PS: I’m sorry, Garth. It’s the heat in the war, you know.
It actually looks a lot better than it reads!
Ying Tong Tonight’, a parody of the never-ending London series, In Town Tonight, gives them the chance to dish up some chit-chat with people in the news. The one with Austrian underwater photographic team Hans and Lotte Hass is one of the best. Played by Spike and pretty Pat Driscoll in her pre-Maid Marian The Adventures of Robin Hood days, the couple are being questioned by a smarmy off-camera Peter about deep-sea diving in the Caribbean. Their problem is in understanding what he is saying, and they are relieved when it’s time to get up and go. To be more specific, it’s get up and go down, because we discover that they have been sitting in a water tank and, with a “Come dear, let’s go home”, they get off their chairs and submerge.
Miss Driscoll says she found it difficult not laughing: “I remember having to dig my nails into my palms because people were practically corpsing. Peter and Spike went chattering away, with Peter asking questions that had nothing to do with the script whatever. When Spike and Peter got together, there was no holding them.” And the water ducking, with no waterproofs? “It was all rather fun and amusing.”
In a similar send-up, the French actor Fernandel is exquisitely underplayed by Graham Stark. Speaking and understanding not a jot of English, Stark squirms ever more uncomfortably in his seat while an ever more effusive off-camera Sellers asks him to recount some inane anecdote. Mistaking Stark’s reticence for coyness, Sellers flies higher and higher in his verbosity, telling the anecdote himself, barely noticing till the end that Stark is now reading a newspaper, Le Figaro of course.
Kenneth Connor plays an oh-so-cool London Times correspondent just back from a long spell in Malayan bandit territory, and now being interviewed face-to-face by Peter. It’s a satire on the bland, deferential interviewer/interviewee format of the day, in which probing for hard facts was minimal:
PS: Well, hello Terence. Jolly nice to have you back.
KC: Thank you very, very much indeed, and it’s jolly nice to be back with you again, John.
PS: Jolly good, Terence, jolly good. You’ve been in bandit territory for six years, isn’t it?
KC: That is quite correct. Yes John, I have been in six years now, and of course it’s all part and parcel of the job, of course.
But Connor’s cool cover is abruptly blown when a framed picture falls off the wall behind him, and he leaps up like a scalded cat and exits firing a pistol in the air. Sellers looks on, blandness personified.
Each episode was still including a couple of musical interludes a la Goon Show, anachronisms from the music hall era with the Canadian singer Patti Lewis and the obligatory Max Geldray. Audiences were woken up during one of Max’s recitals when Spike played a brief snatch of a tune on his teeth with a stick. Another number by Max includes Peter as an old man singing along to the tune, and Mexican bandit Graham Stark offering some light relief at the end by shooting Max.
After Patti Lewis has shimmied through her number ‘But Not For Me’, we are treated to some more inspired nonsense when Sellers, complete in underwear, false nose and chin, barely suppressing giggles, steps onstage to greet her:
PS: Well, thank you, Miss Lewis, for that wonderful display of muscular tension.
PL: I’m glad you liked it.
GS: [Enter Graham Stark in cloak and trilby. To PS:] You devilish imposter! You’re not Whistler’s mother. I challenge you to a duel.
PS: fiend incarnate! [Seizes pistol off GS, who capitulates.]
Part 1 flows immediately into Part 2, via Spike swimming against a back-projected churning wake (and a missing commercial break). The Fred episode on view on the internet has Peter introducing a Colditz spoof called ‘Escapers Club’. But this in turn cuts to Valentine Dyall introducing another historical sketch, with its young writer standing obediently next to him: “And now, dear viewers, a tale of adventure so old it cannot fail to bore you all. Ladies and gentlemen, ‘The Count of Monte Carlo, part 1’, by John Antrobus.” “Me! Me!” exclaims Antrobus, pointing at himself as he hurries after Dyall off the set. A sublimely absurd moment follows as Spike, in billowing smock, hurtles across the set after them.
The scene opens at The Chateau de Sastrous, 1882. We see the King of France, played by Kenneth Connor, looking woefully out through the bars of his prison cell, and the arrival of the Count of Monte Carlo to rescue him – Peter disguised as a tree. Graham Stark arrives to transform him back into a French fop like himself. Together, with French accents thick enough to guillotine, they devise a hammy plan and gallop off with their coconut shells, beating Monty Python & the Holy Grail’s coconuts to the finishing line by a clear eighteen years. Then back they gallop and enter the prison by lifting up its canvas walls. However, this plays into the hands of dastardly Cavalier cameramen wearing plumed hats, who storm in aboard a television camera, marked – horror of horrors – BBC TV. They intend to film the show on the cheap. Courageously our heroes render the camera out of action by throwing a sheet over it. Then, having reached the king, it’s a matter of ripping out the ‘iron-barred’ window frame which has been incarcerating him, and each stepping into it and pulling it up over their heads to freedom. In case we have now forgotten that what we are watching is only a sketch and not real life, on comes John Antrobus to remind us that, “I wrote this. It’s going rather well, don’t you think?” So far, so mad. Then the sketch is rounded off by a cringingly conventional Gang Show chorus of ‘Riding Along On The Crest Of A Wave’. Or is this the bit that’s really mad and all the rest is sane?
All this Gooning about must have been working wonders for Goon Show listening figures, especially with the ghostly sounds of Goon characters wafting in from backstage.
In ‘Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde’, the set is laid out with test tubes. Peter is assisted in swigging a perilous potion by his assistant, played by Spike and voiced by Throat. Under cover of fog, created courtesy of a flatulent Fred the Oyster, Peter is transformed into Mr Hyde. Then from behind his hideous mask comes the voice of Bluebottle – “I like this game” – and off he goes to commit atrocities on women, earning him hundreds of proposals. Detective Kenneth Connor apprehends him, is persuaded to try the potion himself, turns into Patti Lewis and is immediately befriended by PC Valentine Dyall.
Milligan and Sellers have been issued with a piano and their very own dustbins, while Messrs Albert and Albert have got trumpets. What can they possibly do? It has to be ‘Dancing in Dustbins’, arguably the most brain-numbing sketch of the lot. Peter and Spike get into their dustbins and, with Peter on piano and Spike on vocals, they jump their dustbins around in a circle between each verse. With skits such as this one, Dick Lester is credited as having introduced the world to the prototype music video: When you’re feeling low now, And you can’t find romance, Leap into a dustbin, and dance. When you’ve got no trousers And ragged underpants, Jump into a dustbin, and dance.
A Show Called Fred contains so many other goodies worth more than a mention, but Newsletter space means rationing them. There’s Peter as an old ‘Mate’ police officer visiting an employment agency in the hope of finding a villain to police force hire to carry out murders to give them something to do; then there is Peter driving a four-poster bed as if it were a car; and as a doctor about to amputate his own nose.
The series was also steaming along with the luxury of filmed inserts, no doubt providing the cast with brief moments on broad-cast nights to catch their breath. One clip shows a birdman in a field trying to fly. In another clip, about the building of a power station in Scotland, we see Spike dressed as Stone Age Man, sitting in an armchair being interviewed by Valentine Dyall about the benefits of the new power station. In spite of birdsong being audible, all is related in sub-titles. arrest, and criminule Dyall who the police force hire to carry out murders to give them something to do; then there is Peter driving a four-poster bed as if it were a car; and as a doctor about to amputate his own nose.
The series was also steaming along with the luxury of filmed inserts, no doubt providing the cast with brief moments on broadcast nights to catch their breath. One clip shows a birdman in a field trying to fly. In another clip, about the building of a power station in Scotland, we see Spike dressed as Stone Age Man, sitting in an armchair being interviewed by Valentine Dyall about the benefits of the new power station. In spite of birdsong being audible, all is related in sub-titles.
Some of these sketches have already been written in microscopic detail by the dextrous hand of Saint Christopher Smith in his earlier incarnation of Newsletter editor. Nos 69, 89, 92 and 94 are well worth climbing into the dustbin for. In one, John P. Hamilton, the sound effects specialist, recalls Peter’s genius at work: “The signs of greatness in Sellers were well evident in 1956, which is why he was usually involved in the more memorable bits. Another one was an interview he did with himself as a door-to-door salesman and the householder. Dick shot this on two cameras in close-up and it was quite uncanny the way Peter changed his voice and appearance at the precise moment of the cut between cameras. Eerie to watch and listen to.”
In his book, ‘Remembering Peter Sellers’, Graham Stark recalls Spike’s and Peter’s hell-bent-for-leather approach towards the TV medium: “From the start [Spike] was never content to let the camera be an impersonal piece of glass, merely a porthole for the viewer to look through. His visual inventiveness never seemed to slacken and, in Peter, he had the perfect performer to work with. No attitude of ‘Well, I’ve got to put in my funny voice here,’ or ‘I don’t think I ought to be seen doing that.’ There were no reservations, and Peter and Spike had assembled a cast that went along with them all the way. But how could we object? Here was the show that every comedy actor had dreamt of, but never thought would come to fruition. We broke all the rules but we were also a palpable hit. To re-create in words visual comedy is a dreadful risk but a risk one has to take if only to stress the extraordinary chances that Peter, as a performer, took on those shows. And it was infectious. Ken Connor, Valentine Dyall, Patti Lewis, myself, all of us accepted whatever we were asked to do.”
In a Milligan sketch at London Zoo, they play out-of-work actors standing in for holidaying animals. Kenneth Connor steps into a cage with monkeys and Valentine Dyall joins a vulture. Graham Stark remembers watching the playback afterwards and seeing Peter crying with laughter at the sight of the vulture, nervously edging away along its branch as Dyall – the sinister ‘Man in Black’ – climbs in with it.
Graham, who describes the Zoo sketch as “the most hysterical scene in the whole series”, had to perform with the sea-lions: “I was only in a pair of shorts with these f—– great things – and the stink of them with the oil! I said to the keeper – he was Polish – “Is it all right?” He said [in a thick Polish accent], ‘It’s all right so long as they don’t think you’re after the fish. If you’re after the fish, God help you!'”
Another one he loved was ‘Richard III’. Peter donned Laurence Olivier’s actual Richard III wig and played the part in an uncanny send-up of Olivier’s punctuated portrayal. He and Graham, playing the Duke of Buckingham, were later booked to re-play the scene for a CBC TV show in Toronto. Later still it would reach our Top 20 in the guise of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
The popularity of A Show Called Fred was to beget it a Son, assigned a 16-week series in September. This time curious folk from the Midlands and the North were permitted to tune in, besides Londoners. And apart from the pre-recorded bits, Son of Fred was all still live.
Meanwhile Spike’s impatience to throw out the old, regular sketch show format had him grasping for more surreal concepts. Besides his continued use of inappropriate back-projection and his insistence on focusing cameras on things they were not supposed to focus on, he began experimenting on the actual structure of the scenes. Some sketches would finish without a punch-line. Others would be linked by animated sequences or would end up running into the start of the next one. Scenes from Mel Brooks’s similarly unorthodox Blazing Saddles spring to mind, albeit from eighteen years later.
According to http://www.thegoonshow.net (now defunct), Spike was now limiting himself to walk-on parts. If so, the following sketch is an exception. John Antrobus included it in his book Surviving Spike Milligan: “Spike’s favourite sketch in the series was one I wrote for him and he performed it with Pinteresque relish.”
[He is at home with his wife when two anonymous men call round and take his measurements on the doorstep, telling him that they will let him know. Spike returns to his wife in the lounge.]
Spike: He’s going to let me know then.
Wife: Who is?
Spike: The man wot took my measurements.
Wife: Wot?
Spike: Yeah, there was a man wot called round like – and he took me measurements.
Wife: Where’s he from?
Spike: Oh, he didn’t say – no he didn’t mention it – I didn’t fink to ask him…
Wife: And you let him take your measurements?
Spike: Yeah – wot’s wrong with that then?
Wife: A man wot calls round – you don’t know where he’s from – you don’t know who he is – and you let him take your measurements…
Spike: Wot’s wrong wiv that then? There’s nothing wrong with my measurements – I got nothink to hide… Wife: You don’t know wot you got, do you? Mr Jones down the road – they come and took his measurements, didn’t they?
Spike: Did they?
Wife: Yes, they come and took his measurements… And look wot happened to him.
Spike: Well, we don’t know what happened to him, do we? He disappeared, didn’t he? On the way home from work.
Wife: Yes, the day after they took his measurements…
Spike: …You never complained the day we got married, when the vicar said to you – Do you take this man, head 18, chest 42, inside leg 28, to be your lawfully wedded husband… [He happens to look out of the window and sees Mr Jones walking down the street. There is a moment of relief, followed by renewed anxiety.]
Spike: It’s Mr Jones! They’ve changed his measurements…
It’s odd describing the stuff as Pinteresque when Harold Pinter had still another year-long pause left before he arrived on the literary scene with his first production, The Room. But much of this Fred series does have a whiff of Pinter about it – or perhaps we should say, how much of Pinter’s stuff has a whiff of Fred about it?
There is, for example, another Antrobus sketch in which Sellers, as ‘Mate’, has lost his mate – also called Mate! – on the Underground and goes looking for him at the Lost Property office. The office attendant, a demonic Valentine Dyall, appears:
VD: Have you lost something?
PS: Yeah, my mate I lost. Had him 67 years. Now he’s gone.
VD: You want to look after your things more carefully.
[Mate explains that he had got off the train to check where it was going but was left on the platform when the doors closed. Dyall takes him inside to view the missing persons in his charge, but there is no sign of Mate’s mate. Dyall queries whether his mate actually is lost.]
PS: He’s lost all right, mate. He went off in the Tube in the hole with all the tools.
VD: I think perhaps you’ve got it the wrong way round. He went off and completed his journey. It’s you who were lost.
PS: Who’s lost me then?
VD: Your mate, I should imagine. After all, he left you… Just climb on this rack with all these other unclaimed gentlemen. I’ve no doubt that your mate will come round to claim you in, er, due course.
[Due course could be quite a while. One of the missing men has been waiting nine years. Eventually another old man (Kenneth Connor) arrives looking for some tools, and explains how he lost them.]
KC: I stepped out to have a look for my old mate, mate, and the train went off with the tools.
VD: Why do you expect to find them here?
KC: ‘Cause I lost them, see?
VD: I think you’re wrong. I think it’s you who are lost. The tools went on with the train to its destination, leaving you behind. You’re lost.
[Dyall takes him inside where he is happily reunited with his mate. But he is not happily reunited with the tools, and neither of them can leave until they are.]
This sketch would receive a second lease of life a few years later when Antrobus adapted it for the film version of The Bed-sitting Room.
Equally angst-ridden is the ‘Sooty’ sketch. A glove puppet, a la Sooty, turns on its Harry Corbett-type puppeteer and keeps hitting him. The puppeteer reprimands him with comments such as, “Stop that, little Sooty, stop it!” But Sooty doesn’t stop. Then the puppeteer smacks him. Sooty goes stiff, topples over and vanishes under the table, while the man is saying, “He is a naughty little Sooty doing that, isn’t he? What a naughty Sooty! Sooty mustn’t do that again.” Then back comes Sooty with a gun and shoots him. The man collapses, and then we see that he too is being hand-operated. This was the sketch Peter remembered a few years later when the film director Stanley Kubrick gave him a black glove to wear. Suddenly thanks to Sooty, Dr Strangelove’s entire arm took on a malevolent life of its own.
In the Son of Fred episode that brings us that immortal line, “Let me take you from the squalor you live in to the squalor I live in”, we have one of the ‘Idiot’s Postbags’. Peter and Spike again give vent to a desire for dressing up in Nazi uniforms, and listen to a letter from someone up a mountain (Graham Stark): “Dear Sir, I have been hanging from this pinnacle for three days. What should I do?” Peter’s reply: “I should do the only thing an experienced mountaineer could do. Fall off.” – “Thank you,” says Stark and falls to his death. Connor asks about the proposed Atlantic tunnel. Yes, it is going ahead, and we are shown filmed inserts of Stark digging a hole in a field.
In his biography of Peter, ‘Mr Strangelove’, Ed Sikov describes a scene where Sellers and Stark are sitting on a park bench. They are talking surreal gibberish and gradually realize they are trapped in a dream. The question is: who’s? The answer is supposed to be asleep under the bench in the shape of a St Bernard. Unfortunately, although the rehearsals had gone well, the broadcast didn’t, and the dog lost interest in sleeping and dragged the scenery down instead. Dick Lester begged the technicians to take the show off the air but they couldn’t. So the actors were told to improvise, which they did. Viewers probably thought it was all part of the act.
After eight weeks, Son was axed. Theories as to why it should be stopped halfway through its run range from the supposed difficulty that audiences were having to enjoy the increasingly anarchic humour, to the pressure that Spike’s mental health was having on himself and those around him. Writing Freds and Goon Shows simultaneously must have been a brainful. Sellers also put it down to the style of writing, as recounted in Adrian Rigelsford’s ‘Peter Sellers: A Life in Character’: “I think Idiot Weekly and A Show Called Fred were the best of the series. But it was a strain for Spike, writing a new show every week. Later on we got a group of young scriptwriters to contribute. They had some good ideas but sometimes there would be a good beginning but no end. In scriptwriting that isn’t enough – the jokes have to be organized. That was when the show began to go downhill.”
The merest mention of the three series still causes men to fall to their knees and glorify their influence on TV comedy, and a lot of the sketches out-Q Q and out-Python Python. Most of those revisited here can be viewed “for research purposes” and via the scent of money at the BFI, and hopefully more will smash their way onto the internet.
In ‘Spike Milligan – the Biography’, Humphrey Carpenter includes a quote from Dick Lester which is a good one to end on and Spike, probably, would have been flattered: “In terms of naked comedy, I’ve been very fortunate to have worked with Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx. But… Spike was the most constantly inventive. An absolute nightmare to work with, especially during live television, but extraordinarily clever, creative, brilliant mind. Quite unique.”
And no matter why the ITV executives cut the Freds’ air supply, what was the winner of Best TV Show of the Year?
The Goon Show Preservation Society 