Starring Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan
Announcer: Wallace Greenslade
Music by Max Geldray and The Ray Ellington Quartet
The Orchestra was conducted by Wally Stott
Script: Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes
Producer: Peter Eton
Recorded: Sunday 30 January 1955
First Broadcast : Tuesday 1 February 1955 on the BBC Home Service
Neddie Seagoon works as a translator at the Norwich Museum, under the supervision of the aged Roger Fudgeknuckle. Moriarty calls on the phone on behalf of the London antique dealer, Hercules Grytpype-Thynne. He offers Seagoon X pounds to become Grytpype’s assistant. Seagoon resigns from the museum. The BBC Home Service are offering fifty pounds or a life subscription to the Radio Times for the recovery of the manuscript in which Purdom wrote the lost music of Babylon 4000 years ago. Seagoon sets off to Mesopotamia in search of the lost papyrus. He meets Willium, who, under orders from Yakamoto and Eidelburger, abandons him in the desert. He is rescued by Eccles, who lives in a nearby pyramid. After a conversation between two rustics on a bus from Oldham to Cleethorpes (inserted to show listeners what a couple of real idiots sound like), Seagoon visits a little antique shop in Aleppo, run by Minnie and Henry, with Ellinga as an assistant. An attempt to answer the phone and the door at the same time ends in total chaos. Henry had the scroll, but threw it out. He directs Seagoon to the Arab dust-heap at Sidi Rosaic. While Neddie and Eccles search for the manuscript, the scene shifts to a BBC interview with Norris Lurker, the warden of Churdstone Prison, a new social reform prison where the prisoners are kept on their honour, with no bars. But when the interviewer asks to speak with one of the honour prisoners, it turns out that they have all escaped. Meanwhile, back at the dust-heap, Neddie and Eccles empty a dustbin and find Bluebottle, who was sleeping inside it. Eccles finds the ancient manuscript and sings the lost music of Purdom: “Per-dum, per-dum, perdum perdum perdum . . . .”
The Goon Show Preservation Society 