Starring Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, with John Snagge
Announcer: Wallace Greenslade
Music by Max Geldray and The Ray Ellington Quartet
The Orchestra was conducted by Wally Stott
Script: Spike Milligan
Producer: Charles Chilton
Recorded: Sunday 9 March 1958
First Broadcast: Monday 10 March on the BBC Home Service
In the first third of the show, Peter Sellers Is Cured of Cars. Peter is infatuated with cars, cameras, and tape recorders. Ned sends him to a rest-home to be cured. There Peter, thinking he’s a motor car, encounters Eccles, who also thinks he’s a motor car. Dr. Grytpype-Thynne cures the tape recorders by purging, but the cars are more deeply rooted. Dr. Jim ‘Drop-em’ Moriarty is called in and suggests the only way to make Peter believe he’s not a car is to make him believe he’s a horse. But Moriarty and Grytpype are really after Neddie. They give him an injection that turns him into a chicken. The sketch ends with Moriarty commanding Neddie to lay.
The remaining two-thirds of the show is the title sketch, Tiddlywinks. Ned Seagoon is bemoaning the Goons’ loss to the Cambridge Tiddlywinks team. Grytpype and Moriarty have a plan of revenge. Ned challenges Cambridge to a leaping contest. Grytpype provides Seagoon with rocket-propelled boots. Ned tries the rocket boots and takes off. Bloodnok mistakes him for a huge pheasant and shoots him down. Bloodnok thus learns about the rocket-propelled boots. Meanwhile, Lalkaka and Banerjee are putting up a concrete lamp-post outside the house of A. E. Matthews (Sellers impression). Bloodnok reveals Seagoon’s treachery to the Cambridge Leaping Team. Seagoon flees to Wales and becomes an outlaw, holding up travellers for their tiddlywinks. He plans to attack Trinity College, Cambridge, to steal the Cambridge team’s supply of tiddlywinks. After luring out the Cambridge students by yelling ‘fag!’, Ned cracks open the safe holding Cambridge’s secret hoard of tiddlywinks. But inside is Jim Spriggs, captain of the Cambridge Tiddlywinks Team. John Snagge, the Umpire, shows up, declares Seagoon’s conduct unbecoming of a Royal Champion, and demands that he hand back his tiddlies. As a penalty, Seagoon must raise his right leg, face east, and sing the tiddlywinks anthem.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 