The Goon Show Preservation Society (GSPS) is a national society based in the UK, with satellite branches across the world.
The society was formed in 1972 by Michael Coveney, just after The Last Goon Show Of All was recorded at the BBC. Some of the other founder members were in that exalted audience with Mike and afterwards (in a pub across the road) they vowed that “this shouldn’t be the End …” and so the GSPS was born. Fifty years later, we’re still here.
One of the aims of the Goon Show Preservation Society is to build as large an archive of material relevant to the Goons as we can. We endeavour to make the material available to our members, principally through the Encyclopædia Goonicus.
If you come across anything which might be of interest to us, while clearing out an attic perhaps, then please get in touch. It doesn’t have to be the holy grail ( long lost recordings of the early shows), We’re interested in any memorabilia connected to the Goon Show or the people involved.
Some thoughts from GSPS Chairman John Repsch:
Unknown multitudes of Goon Show fanatics tune in to repeats on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Although listenership nowadays is a few fathoms below the 6 million it drew in the Fifties, the show attracts a cult following and offers today’s Goon audience a surreal contrast with current mainstream humour, which often depends on vulgarity and embarrassment for its laughs.
Not that the Goons were squeaky clean – far from it. Guess the show whose use of Peter Sellers’s impersonation skills almost cost the producer his job, having been hauled before the BBC toffs some 30 times and threatened with closure. Yes!
Anything that might be described as satirical by writers such as Spike and Larry Stephens would be construed as disrespectful and downright insulting by puzzled fossils like the one who asked, “What is this Go On Show?” Spike later admitted how upsetting it was to have his flights of fancy edited out by the notorious blue pencil, and said that people of the BBC’s intellectual calibre wouldn’t recognize a joke if it sprang up and hit them in the face.
And it still goes on, but more so. The slightest whiff of sexism, ageism, anti-Semitism, homosexuality, rude rhyming slang, physical or mental disability or anyone who might have been described by W.C.Fields as an “Ethiopian in the fuel supply” could have the censor running amok trying to keep up with his editing pen.
Patron: wasHRH Prince Charles, The Prince of Wales.(This may change now he’s King Charles III)
Honorary Presidents: John Antrobus, Jane Milligan and Michael Coveney.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 