Back in 1996, the GSPS held a weekend long event in a Bournemouth hotel which was known as ‘A Weekend Called Fred’. Lots happened over that weekend (see here), but a highlight was the sit down session on the Saturday with three guests .
The following is a transcript of the two hour long question and answer session with those three guests. They were spot-effects operator John P Hamilton (JH), producer Dennis Main Wilson (DMW) and principally, Sir Harry Secombe (HS).
HS: All I can say is… it’s lovely to be here, sorry I haven’t been here before, I’ve always been doing something else, but today I’m doing nothing, so here I am! [cheers and applause!]
I always read the magazines, because there are things I’ve never heard before – sort of winkle out little bits of information about us: medical reports, inside leg measurements…..it is a frightening thought you understand!
Q: A COI leaflet states that Michael Bentine left the show because the entire cast were stoned on whiskey every week – would you deny that please?
HS: I’ve never drunk whiskey in my life! Inhaled brandy, yes… but never whiskey… Lies I tell you! [someone yelps in the subsequent laughter] Keep that dog quiet!
When Ray Ellington and Max Geldray did the musical interludes we used to go round the back for the old brandy because we were not allowed to bring it into the theatre of the Camden Tower. We used to disguise it in milk, we had a bottle of brown milk with us in the studio! It had a great effect on us! The only trouble was that the last part of the show became incoherent! We had to listen to the repeats to find out what we were talking about!
Q: How long did the warm-ups last?
HS: Depended upon how long the band were hysterical, sometimes they were the best part of the show! If the script wasn’t all that funny, we used to muck about. One of the things we used to do was that I’d be singing Falling In Love With Love and Sellers would come on and say “My name is races, and I’ll remove Seagoon’s braces without his knowledge”. I used to have a pair of braces around my neck not tied to my trousers and Seller’s would get behind me, put his hand up my back and go “TA-RA!!”. Then I’d turn round and pull Milligan’s trousers down! One night I did that and he wasn’t wearing any underpants! There was a stunned silence!
DMW: And that was better than the script…
HS: A standing ovation! It was hell in there I tell you.
DMW: I can remember when they first started, Harry is very, very strong and in those days he was rather bigger than he is now – built like and ox- we used to arm wrestle at Jimmy Grafton’s and you could never beat Harry at arm wrestling. Sometimes in the warm-up, this was during the Crazy People days, I used to go out as the BBC Official Voice and talk rather upmarket, toffee-nosed rubbish and he would walk on, pick me up with one hand, and carry me off over his head, still talking!
HS: I was still talking!
DMW: They were great days, the camaraderie was incredible.
HS: They were great fun, we all knew each other, the thing about it was that we were like kids out of school, Milligan would have the terrible job of writing all week, and Peter and I would be out doing our individual bits and pieces – I’d be at The Palladium perhaps, or doing variety up in Scunthorpe, Peter would be at ? or somewhere, and we’d never see the script until Sunday, and we couldn’t wait to get into the studio, do the warm-up and the first read through. That was hysterical, always, reading the script for the first time, and Milligan would be sitting there watching our reaction to the first read through. Then we would do a run through with the orchestra, and then the actual show. In the beginning we’d be there most of the day, but in the end we used to get there at about 4 o’clock, we had gotten so used to each other.
We used to have three ??? because I was very big in those days, an all round performer! Six foot three when I was twelve years old, and then I was hit by a lift! Nice letter from the lift company: “?? at Otis regret…..” but that is another story!
It was great fun to do, it used to get hysterical, and at one time I was doing Educating Archie as well, which was a different thing altogether. When we were doing The Goon Show nobody counted the lines you had to do, no discussion about who had the most to say. The one thing about Educating Archie was that the dummy had most of the lines to say! There were little feuds going on about who had more lines to say than anybody else, never happened with The Goon Show, all mates together, which we were. It was fun, let’s face it, we weren’t building bridges!
DMW: That is a different story from today. These days, you set out with a new show and do market research to work out what sort of audience you want to appeal to. The whole thing is so technical and heartless, with no soul. So when it comes out on the air the show is heartless, with no soul…. produced and directed by accountants.
HS: There were so many shows about at the time, but none of them had the sort of surreal atmosphere that we had. There is the story of the planner’s meeting: after we had been going about 18 months one senior producer got up and said “This ‘Go-On show’, what is it all about? Who are these Go-Ons?” and we had been going for 18 months by that time!! He never found out! Thought we were Harry Pepper’s Coons!
JH: What about the sexual innuendoes – banned in 1947…..?
HS: Because you couldn’t say ‘knickers’ or things like that we used to pay off some rather naughty Army jokes, and the pay offs themselves were rather innocuous, like ‘the last turkey in the shop’. We would get letters from old ladies complaining about the filth, but if they didn’t know the joke in the first place……
When Pat Dixon was producing, a rather naive gentleman in some respects, although a very nice man, we had a character called Hugh Jampton (you’ve probably heard of him) and that went on for about four weeks until an engineer told him what it was all about. When he asked us who was Hugh Jampton we used to say he was in the Army with Milligan and I, he was absolutely apoplectic when he found out it referred to something below the waist!….. Great days!
I remember doing a birthday show at Coventry Theatre when we all did our individual turns. I’d be singing Falling In Love With Love and Milligan would come on with the effects door on casters, move to where I was singing, open the door, put an empty milk bottle out and then walk off!
Getting near Christmas time Seller’s would get fired up with doing the routine he’d started the show with. He came on one night with a chair, sat down and said “I’ve been shopping today, and I’ve bought this little EP of Christmas songs with Wally Stott’s Orchestra, and I was so entranced by it I thought I’d share it with you. I’ve got the engineer here who has put the record on the turntable”. With that the engineer put the record on and Peter sat there singing Jingle Bells and so on, nothing more than that. At the end of the first side there was bewildered applause and he said “I knew you’d like it! Let’s have the other side!”. They played the other side and he is still singing along and at the end of it said “Thank you very much”, got up and walked off. I was next (singing) ‘Bless this house’….. GET OFF! I suffered I can tell you!
I remember one of the Goon Show records we made had a raspberry chorus – Milligan did it all – he played a raspberry like a trumpet. He couldn’t talk afterwards! He did that thing with Ronnie Barker The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Olde London Town, he did all the raspberries for that: Raspberries courtesy of Spike Milligan!
DMW: If you listen carefully you’ll find a raspberry in the signature tune of ”til death do us part’, that was me doing it, copying you lot!
HS: ‘Cos you had teeth at the time! You have to have teeth I tell you! The power The Goon Show had, it was quite frightening, to have a catchphrase which within a couple of days the whole country would be repeating…. Ying Tong Iddle I Po. In the end Milligan would make anything up and throw it in, I think that was quite frightening, that worried me. Didn’t worry him but it worried me!
I went to see Spike in hospital after he had his triple bypass, and apparently he’d been okay the first couple of days. The day I went to see him he had a relapse, so the Doctor said “don’t keep him too long”. So I went in and he had a transparent oxygen mask on his face, muttering away, couldn’t hear a word he was saying. So I held his hand, a dangerous thing to do at the best of times!, and he was still muttering away with his eyes fixed beyond me so I thought he was preparing to meet his maker, or shuffle off the old mortal coil. So after about 10 minutes of holding his hand and saying “don’t worry Spike” I turned around, as my neck was getting sore, and he was watching the bloody television! Watching the television with the sound off! I dropped his hand like a hot brick!
I think you have to realise that Spike ruined his health and his marriage by writing the shows, I remember once he was in a home for three weeks while we did the show between us…
JH: That was at the beginning of Series 3, when I first joined with Peter Eton….
HS: I had to take over Eccles, there was one show The McReekie Rising, that was just Peter and myself.
DMW: Incredible, when you realise that Spike’s big worry was having to write 26 of these thing at a time, it was silly of the BBC to force that..
JH: And we were still on disc then…. Not too many repeats in those days.
HS: Not many people know that Eric Sykes wrote quite a few of The Goon Shows, he did the Lurgi one..
JH: Lurgi strikes Britain!
HS: Yes, that’s right, and Larry Stevens was very good, he was a core writer with Spike on a lot of shows, until he died. Jimmy Grafton was the editor in the early days, “KOGVOS – King of Goons, Voice of Sanity” don’t know what it meant, but that is what he was. We used to meet at the Grafton Arms.
You’ve probably heard this story before… I met Spike during the war, when I was demobbed I went to the Windmill – Spike stayed on in Italy as a civilian employed by the Army – Combined Services Entertainment – meantime I auditioned at the Windmill and got the job. Whilst doing my stint there I met Michael Bentine as he was in the show that followed the show I was in, in an act called ‘Sherwood and Forest‘…..Tony Sherwood on the piano and old Bentine on the drums – a very funny act.
After I had seen the dress rehearsal I said to Bentine “Hey, you must meet this mate of mine, Milligan”. He said “I know a pub where you can drink after hours” which was, of course, Jimmy Grafton’s pub in Strutton Ground, where all those pictures were, and that is where it all started. Jimmy was writing scripts for Derek Roy then. When Spike came back from Italy I introduced him to Mike and we all used to meet in Jimmy’s pub.
I met Peter on a radio show called Listen My Children, a very avante garde radio programme, way ahead of the time. That is where Balham, Gateway To The South came from, and the Victor Lewis Band and Ken Thorne arrangements. We used to muck around after hours in the bar, with wire recorders. I remember they had a Rubinstein pianist, and a record of him playing, and a record of him playing. We overlaid things as if we were in the front line:
“Gawd blimey, listen to ‘im playin’ that fing. Go on Arfur, give it up nah! Gawd, he can make that thing talk – what’d he say to you this mornin’ Arfur?”
DMW: Larry Stevens, who was writing for Tony Hancock, met Mike or Peter, I can’t remember, and bought Tony down and slowly the whole family expanded – Robert Morton, who committed suicide, and it was a meeting of like-thinking chaps.
HS: It was a great time, very exciting. There was a café opposite the Windmill and you could go up there and have a meal ‘on the slate’, they used to give you a big slate with your name on it and if you didn’t have any money, you could pay at the end of the week, but your name was up there until you paid! So many names used to be up there, Jimmy Edwards, Jimmy and I were at the Windmill together, Max Bygraves, Frankie Howerd, Benny Hill, Tony Hancock, Arthur English, Tommy Cooper…
We used to go to the ??? run by Mary Cook, and you’d do your turn there in exchange for a meal – always used to go down there when you were short on grub, a service audience, just behind St. Martin’s-in-the-field…. That was a great breeding ground, it was a place to go to try new material out.
DMW: At the very back, in the dark, would be the agents with notebooks, in a little seating area waiting like vultures to get in…..
JH:…and Monkhouse writing down the jokes!
Q: ???
HS: I don’t know… ‘cos we were three fellas – we weren’t transvestites, you know I was a stringvestite! Servicemen together, that’s how it started. We did use the odd lady…no, she wasn’t really odd, she was very nice actually! Charlotte Mitchell played Maid Marion in a Robin Hood thing we did, Dennis Price was in it, and Valentine Dyall; ‘Cheques in the post’ we always called him, always borrowing money!
DMW: We did one pantomime, ‘Goonderella’ with Liz Webb, that was after the first series.
HS: Oh yes, that’s right, Terrible title… We had Dennis Price, Val Dyall, Graham Stark came in now and again, Dick Emery…we always felt that Graham Stark was waiting to pounce: we had a theory that he had a caravan behind the Camden Theatre, with all the x-rays of us, to see if there was any chance of him being on next week!
Q: What about ‘The last Goon Show of All’?
HS: That was strange because we hadn’t been together for a long time, 10 years….1972….and we weren’t quite sure when we had the run-through in the little studio at the back, ‘The Green Room’. Seller’s couldn’t find the voice of Bluebottle…”It’s gone!” he said…”It’s gone, I can’t get it mate…” – there was Milligan “Dum-de-dum-de-dum” and me “I don’t bother me” and gradually it became hysterical, just like the old times, telling jokes we had heard. Herbie Kretzmer was in the room at the time and Tony Snowdon was taking photographs, strange thing that we had started out all iconoclastic and with rebel tags and by the time we did this Last Goon Show, royalty were taking photographs!
Q: Do you listen to the shows now?
HS: I’m still trying to work out the plots! They’re good fun….specific shows you forget and when you heard them again you remember all they hysteria that went on at the time… mind you, sometimes Spike and Peter would have a row, and when Peter Eton was directing, he wouldn’t stand any nonsense: he would phone me up and say “come in early on Sunday mate, they have had a bit of a row” – ‘cos they lived in the same block of flats in Shepherd’s Hill and I’d get there early to separate them – I was a big lad in those days – to prevent trouble, not that there was any real trouble.
There was a bit of friction between Mike Bentine and Spike in the early days, we’d all sit around throwing ideas in and both of them would go away….. Bentine throws off ideas like sparks off a catherine wheel, brilliant mind, Spike is the same,… they would go off and both would think that the idea was all his whilst really it was an amalgam of people getting together. Mike Bentine got on better than the rest of us, he was in a big show at the London Hippodrome with Vic Oliver – he had a very funny routine with the back of chair and a sink… he got away before us, and then he decided to leave as he wanted to spend Sundays with his family. Strangely enough it got better after that, not because Mike had left, but with three settled characters it was easier to get away with!
I was the one carry the story line, with all the other things going on around it, which was the way ITMA worked. One show we did, which was away from London up in Newcastle, was called “The Starlings“, and it was the only one that had an audience. We were meant to have done more of those, we had to do it in Newcastle because the [straight part of the] BBC wouldn’t let us have a studio! Did you know that, John?
JH: You and Peter were both working in the North anyway, weren’t you? Wasn’t Peter at the Sunderland Empire?
HS: Mike Bentine was playing the Newcastle Empire, we all stayed at the same hotel together. He had some great stories, he was a great fencer, a great shot, and great with the foils and Peter had a mate who was an Olympic foil champion- foiled again! – and got him to come up one night whilst we were doing the recording and confronted Michael after dinner with a couple of foils and Bentine was great!
Mike Bentine was an Old Etonian, he was the aristocratic one amongst us. We were all Grammar School Boys, in fact I don’t think Spike had any kind of education at all because he was born in India and brought up by the nuns. His father was an NCO in the Indian Army so his kids were not allowed to play with the officer’s kids, which became a bit of a chip on old Spike’s shoulders. I was raised in the middle of a council estate, Peter lived in Finchley, but Michael went to the Elysee, his father was a physicist….he was the only Peruvian born on the Watford by-pass!
So Mike was highly educated whilst Spike wasn’t, although he was very intelligent. There was some resentment from Spike that Mike could talk ‘proper’ and Spike had trouble putting words together sometimes. He occasionally used the wrong word and say things like “That is my penultimate remark!”. Nobody cared but Mike would always put him right.
Spike would say, once we had done the first read through, “Not so good this week lads!” so we’d have a muck about with it: a lot of “Needle nardle nooing”, grabbing crutches, and God knows what just to get a laugh! The tendency was to always play to the audience, to generate the atmosphere you wanted, you needed an audience – apart from when we did “The Starlings”, that was a story and stood up in it’s own right, almost like a play. But generally you needed the reciprocal thing from the audience, and if we didn’t get that the show just fell flat, which did sometime happen. You’d find that it was funny to start with, before Geldray and Ellington came on, and then it would start to go down hill because Spike had lost it somewhere. ?????? would say “That’s enough folks”, there would be footsteps off the stage, and that would be it.
Q: Why does Spike have the attitude he does to being an ex-Goon?
HS: It’s a reaction, I suppose – he was very keen to read his own poetry on Sundays, because he felt he deserved greater recognition as a writer, and his own mind, because he has written so many books now, he feels that “The Goon Show” is a part of his past and shouldn’t overshadow what he has done since. It has been years since we finished, and yet I’m still called an ex-Goon. It is a label you should wear with pride, really – I do! It is great that people remember, and it is a mark of affection as far as I am concerned. If Spike really thought about it he’d feel the same way. Peter was such a megastar, and we all thought he felt the same and yet, in an interview at the time, he said they were the happiest days of his life. The circumstances around his death may interest you: he rang up Milligna and said “I think it is time we had dinner together before one of us is walking behind the other’s coffin saying ‘We should’ve had dinner together’ – ring up old Hersch (Peter always called me Hersch) and let’s fix it”. So we fixed a date, Peter came over – he was in Gstaadt at the time, expressly for this dinner. He came a day early, stayed at the Dorchester and collapsed that night. He died the following day, the day we should have had the dinner – that was very sad.
I remember Spike telling me that he went to see Peter when he was married to Miranda Quarry. He arrived at the flat, knocked on the door and was greeted by Peter wearing a loin cloth and holding a bowl of honey. Peter made Spike have a spoonful of the honey before he did anything, little did Spike know that it was impregnated with cannabis! Spike told me “after about twenty minutes I found myself saying hysterical things, like ‘Hello!'” Peter had no fear of anything or anybody, he was a good actor: people dismissed him at first as just a superficial actor and a comic underneath, saying the acting had no substance – but he proved them wrong! “Heaven’s Above” – what a great film – he played this Brummie vicar, wonderful portrayal….he could never do his own voice, he had to have a character to hide behind… “Being there” another great film in which he used the character of Stan Laurel.
As a child I used to do impressions of a vicar and Stan Laurel, as well as radio personalities, so when the war came along and we used to have a bit of a get together in a church hall I’d be able to do impressions, play the piano. That is how it all starts, initially you are the funny man in the family, put on a lampshade in the parlour, wear your mother’s shoes…it’s dangerous! But it would go on from there, in my case I became a regimental idiot, a divisional berk in concert parties in the Army.
I remember in Sicily they would take you out to the front line as a fighting soldier, do your concert, and then put you back. We performed on the back of a lorry and were called the Sicillibillies. We did one performance for a brigade of Gurkhas during which they sat round in the open air and there was nothing, no reaction, not a murmur. The only bloke who got a laugh was our Lieutenant Bush who came on at the end to do a dramatic monologue, and they fell about! They peed themselves laughing at him! He was furious! I think you need that, you need that kind of experience, the raw material of an audience to work on over the years. That is the trouble today, for a lot of comics there are no places to learn your craft. When they go to the clubs people are eating and drinking so, to get their attention, they use four-letter words – that is a bad thing, the lowest common denominator – you’ve got to rise above that.
I remember playing the Garrick, in Southport, with the Ted Heath Band and I did so badly on the first night the manager said he was going to replace me. However, he couldn’t get a replacement so he was stuck with me for the whole week! Every time he passed me he went “Aaaarrrgghhhh!”. I’ll never forget that. He got hoarse through growling! But that was the way of it, you knew where you stood with an audience in those days: you got out there, if they didn’t like you, that was it! Especially in Blackpool out of season, all the landladies in the front- “Go on, make us laugh”!!!
I remember being with Hancock out of season at the Palace, Blackpool, we both died a death – we used to get drunk on Tizer – we couldn’t afford booze! You have got to go through that, you’ve got to be fired at the crucible of the music hall, variety theatre and come out of the other end. It’s a funny business comedy, you have got to be sensitive enough to know what the audience wants and go with them, but when the criticism comes you’ve got to be able to stand it, and not be too oversensitive about that.
There was a time when I got a bad notice I’d go to bed for a week – you can’t afford to do that! Once you learn to accept the slings and arrows with the bouquets you are starting to become a proper “turn”. It’s a difficult business, and I don’t think it’s always easy to explain why you do it – a number of times I have stood in the wings and thought “what am I doing this for? I shouldn’t be here, I should be at home in bed! I should be on castors, a sheltered home, anything!” But then you go and do it, because you want to do it – it’s inside you. I think the time to pack it in is when the audience says pack it in… due any minute I reckon!
Peter would do an impression of Max Bygraves – just do something with his mouth – it was Bygraves! Without saying anything, it was incredible. The three of us would stand at the microphone and he would do Bloodnok – he would physically become Bloodnok – he would blow himself out, and when it came to Bluebottle he would shrink, it was a visual as well as a vocal thing – I’ve never seen anyone as good as that. There was a schizophrenic quality about him – with Spike he would be changing gear: he became Bluebottle, then he became Grytpype, then he’d become Bloodnok – one after the other, talking to himself! The quality of his work, and Spike’s work, is superior to anything today.
Q: What were Peter and Spike like off-stage?
HS: It depended on what the company was like – if it was comfortable Peter would be funny, so would Spike, but any sort of alien atmosphere, being around someone they were unhappy about, or someone wearing the wrong colour, and that would be it! I’ve known Spike to get up in the middle of a meal and walk out – and you had to accept that if you loved the man, that is part of him and you must accept that.
Most comics are impressionists to begin with, and you develop your own style. You gradually become an amalgam of all the people you’ve admired and yet you put your own stamp on it, your own style of comedy.
I’m very fond of people like Sandy Powell, Stainless Stephen, Norman Evans, Jimmy James – great comics – you admire them and subconsciously you take on the same kind of thing. You learn from them, that is what it is all about really. It’s a shame they don’t do ‘Masterclass for Comics’, because then you can help people on how to deliver a line. You need to get back to theatre; you need an audience to mould you, and mould them to your liking. You go out there and get shot at, it’s okay if you are the star of the show, your reputation goes before you and people come to see you. If you are on the second comic spot you are just in the way until the Big Fella comes on. That was the thing about the Windmill, we were there to provide ‘dressing time’ for the girls to get changed, to take another leaf off or something!
Q: What is your favourite episode, or part of episode, from A Goon Show?
I remember the Chinese one… “the street of a thousand households…” , “Knock a thousand times and ask for R. Pong”……. “Are you R. Pong?”… “No, try next door”… all over again!!! That was the brilliance of Milligan’s imagination, or the time we had to tunnel under Bow Street police station to get somewhere and Wallace Greenslade said “will you please bear with us – our lads are tunnelling at this very moment under Bow Street police station – just give them a chance” so there was a silence for about 20 seconds, it’s a long time 20 seconds… and then…..”They’re through! I’ve just heard the news they’re through…thank you” !!
Q: Who played the out of tune piano?
HS: Milligan sometimes played it, Peter sometimes played it didn’t he?
JH: yes
HS: Actually, when you condense it, it was just three fellas getting pleasantly pissed on a Sunday afternoon! Nobody cared about who did what, or how long he went on, how many words you had to say – it was just fun to do, it really was. It was agony for Milligan, that’s the trouble, because he never knew whether, at the end of the week when we saw the script for the first time, we would like it or not. Even if you pretended to like it and didn’t, he knew. Fortunately, most of the time we had nothing to worry about.
Q: Did you get paid very much?
HS: For the first series we got about 10 guineas apiece…
DMW: and then after 5 or 6 series we got….
HS: about 12 guineas apiece! The thing was, even though you got about 10 guineas, the fact was you were on the air and making a reputation for yourself, that was tremendously important for your career in the theatre. I was called ‘The Golden-voiced Goon’ – God Almighty! Milligan was called ‘The Performing Man (late of the human race)’. We could capitalise on the reputation of The Goon Show by going round the halls and earning quite a lot of money in those days. Spike couldn’t do that as he was slaving away over a cold script – that was the reason for some of the resentment, and quite rightly so, from Spike, because the returns he got were not commensurate with the work he put in.
Q: Are there any interesting things named after you?
HS: The kidney ward in a hospital is named after me, you open things, unveil plaques, the important thing is you don’t take it too seriously.
DMW: Is it rude to ask you how your general health is at present?
HS: I’m in good nick for an old chap! I’m diabetic so I have to be careful – I don’t drink anymore, get very thirsty you know, but I don’t…. it is about 15 years since I had a drink when I was recovering in Barbados from this operation, I got a cable from Sellers saying “get a second opinion from a witch doctor” ! We had a tradition of sending wires to each other – when he had his first big heart attack, just after he had married Britt Ekland, we sent him this wire that said “You swine! We had you heavily insured!”. He cabled us back saying “That is what you get for Swede bashing!”.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 