Starring: Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, with Andrew Timothy
Announcer: Wallace Greenslade
Music by Max Geldray and The Ray Ellington Quartet
The Orchestra was conducted by Wally Stott
Script: Spike Milligan
Producer: John Browell
Recorded: Sunday 1 February 1959
First Broadcast : Monday 2 February 1959 on the BBC Home Service
This show is a parody of the highly successful BBC TV serial of the time, Quatermass and the Pit. When workmen uncover an ancient skull, archaeologists Crun and Bannister are summoned, as is Professor Ned Quatermass. They find a scarlet thing buried in the mud – twenty feet long, large as an engine boiler, with an entrance on the side and a sealed compartment at the front. Min announces that from the ancient bones she’s reconstructed an Irish Stew. Willium reports that, while inside the thing, he heard a voice say ‘minardor’. Ned and Eccles succeed in opening the front compartment and there they find the skeletons of three blue serge suits and the bones of a bowler hat. The press, in the form of Bluebottle, arrives. Inside the scarlet capsule, something is throwing Irish Stew at people. They are all set to dynamite the thing, but Moriarty is still inside. Grytpype, who has an insurance policy on Moriarty, bribes Ned to blow up the thing anyway. The plan fails when it turns out Eccles hasn’t connected up the TNT. As Eccles goes into the thing to connect up the charge, Grytpype phones the insurance company, takes out a policy on him, and bribes Ned again to detonate the TNT. Andrew Timothy ends the show with a report from London Transport experts on what the thing was. The blue serge suits were the remains of three sit-down tube strikers. The capsule was a tube train that had been shunted into a siding and forgotten. The mystic word ‘minardor’ was in fact “mind the doors”.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 