Our own Richard Usher will be performing rare Goon Show-inspired scripts in York on the 8th of June. He’ll be bringing back to life sketches written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson for Peter Sellers to perform in Midday Music Hall in 1954. Midday Music Hall was a Saturday lunchtime show on the BBC Home Service, and Sellers was the ‘Resident Top of the Bill’ in October of that year.
The evening is part of the York Festival of Ideas, and it’s titled Innit Marvellous? The World of Hancock and Steptoe. The main feature will be Gary Brannan, the Keeper of Archives and Research Collections at the University of York, presenting an illustrated talk on the Galton and Simpson collection which was acquired by the University of York in 2024. The Sellers scripts were found in the collection.
The Borthwick Institute has ambitious plans for the Galton and Simpson archive. They’re fundraising to ensure that they can secure all of the material. If that’s something you can support, click here for more information
Another stage version of the Goon Show appeared in mid-April, down south (well, it was for me). In deepest Cumbria, Penrith Players staged their versions of three classic episodes in one show, The Canal, The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler and The Treasure of Loch Lomond.
Why were Penrith Players performing Goon Shows? The director, Tash Binder, explained that she had the power to choose something for this slot in their programme, and she went with the comedy she’d loved since childhood.
This show wasn’t an attempt to recreate the radio studio. The cast had the freedom of the stage, and beyond, to play out the action. There were a couple of microphones on show, but it was only the announcer who used one as part of his act. The set centred on an old sofa, with props placed strategically around, including telephones and a hostess trolley fashioned into a portable gas stove. There was a special effects station with equipment and a laptop for grams on a table to the side. Each character also had a hat, surely helping audience members less familiar with the Goons.
And what of the cast? Ian Baker played Greenslade and Grytpype-Thynne, while sharing the FX duties with director Tash. The penny dropped in a mug effect, for one, was used a lot. For Neddie Seagoon, they had a high-energy little Welsh bubble called Vic Brunetti. You’ll guess which one he is in the photos. Neil Gander played Henry Crun, Bloodnok, Willium, and was a particularly good (though taller than you’ve ever imagined) Bluebottle.
The final member of the cast was (gasp, splutter) a female-type lady actor. Jess Crumback-Nyahoe was Minnie Bannister of course, but also played Eccles, Moriarty and Throat. She took the extra parts of Laird McGool and Valentine Dyall too. Let’s face it, a genuine Man in Black voice was always going to be a step too far. With both those characters having exchanges with Eccles, Jess had a lot of hat stacking and quick swapping to do.
The production boasted live music too. Links and the Bloodnok theme came from the cast playing kazoos. Musical interludes were included, just as in the original broadcasts. A young lady called Raven Kitching sang classics such as Stormy Weather and Paper Moon, accompanied by Mark Stewart on piano. The show finished on a song too, the cast performed I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas.
Was it all worthwhile? Absolutely. The production stayed true to the original scripts, I even caught a couple of lines which are missing from the commonly available versions. There was occasionally a fluffed line or corpse, but that just added to the authenticity. The cast had fun, the audience had fun, my non-Goon Show following companion laughed all the way through. It was great to see these scripts getting an outing, let’s have more of the same.
The Penrith Players production runs until Saturday 19th April. Go seek tickets at penrithplayers.org.uk.
Six Charlies in Search of an Author a review by Richard Usher
There have been four professional UK stage productions of The Goon Show since 2014, and it is rare for amateur dramatic groups to gain permission to perform these classic shows, so it must have been a delightful surprise for the members of the Stockton Heath Methodist Dramatic Society when they got the green light to stage Six Charlies in Search of an Author.
The production was part of a double bill of classic radio shows adapted to stage performance, the first half being Orson Welles’ legendary War of the Worlds. These two shows might seem strange bedfellows at first glance, but as it turned out, they complemented each other rather well.
The stage set was extremely well-made and was a convincing backdrop for a vintage radio theatre, complete with CBS logo. The Goon Show offering made up the second half of the bill and was introduced by director Paul Thompson in a style that slightly echoed the John Browell and Dirk Maggs openings to The Last Goon Show of All and Goon Again. The entrance of a sound operator in a white coat and the request to take us from 1930’s America to Britain in 1956 added a lovely touch of the surreal to the proceedings, especially when he nodded and swapped the CBS logo for a plaque displaying a vintage BBC logo.
If you went along expecting to see a group of actors channel Sellers, Secombe and Milligan you would have been disappointed. What we got instead was the cast taking on the various roles the original Goons played in the show, and it worked a treat! Hazel Bradley bravely took on the Wallace Greenslade role and delivered her lines with true BBC announcer aplomb. Nonagenarian thesp, Bert Rigby, took on the roles of Jim Spriggs, the famous Eccles and Henry Crun and clearly had a lot of fun with the characters. The same can be said of Gill Murphy who gave us her best Grytpype Thynne and Bluebottle, and Alex Clarke erupting on stage as Major Bloodnok and doing his best to convey Moriarty. While Kevin Mottershead may not have had the well built and diminutive stature of Neddy Seagoon, he left you in no doubt that he was an equally energetic Charlie.
Musical contributions were few, and this production definitely owed a lot to the director’s love of the EMI Goon But Not Forgotten album version, and none the worse for it. The big plus was the array of spot FX, brilliantly performed live on stage and ably assisted by some terrific sound design from Mike Rigby.
This show was not a tribute act, nor was it trying to re-imagine the Goon Show of old. It was an enthusiastic, very well directed and energetically performed piece of theatre that proved beyond doubt that the script writing of Spike Milligan and Larry Stephens can transcend its original context and still get the laughs and applause.
Recreating Goon Shows on stage seems to be in fashion these days. News has reached us that there will be a performance of Six Charlies in Search of an Author in Stockton Heath, Warrington on Thursday and Friday of next week (3rd & 4th April).
Stockton Heath Methodist Dramatic Society are re-staging the broadcasts of two classic radio shows, the aforementioned Goon Show, and the Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds which frightened Americans in 1938.
The weekly Goon Show on BBC Radio 4 Extra on Tuesday 25th March 2025 is an episode which the BBC hasn’t aired since its original broadcast on the Light Programme in December 1956. It’s episode 11 from series 7, The Telephone, the one where GPO engineer Neddie is sent to Africa to install a phone for Henry Crun. It will be available to stream after the broadcast here. The episode has, of course, been available since 2010 on the commercial release, The Goon Show Compendium, vol 5, as well as on commercial streaming services such as Spotify. Three weeks earlier, 4Extra played a recording of Personal Narrative which had only been repeated by the BBC once, on Radio 4 in 1983. here
Earlier this year, the series 6 recording of The Man Who Never Was had its first rebroadcast. For the obsessives among us, other regular series episodes which are waiting for their Radio 4 Extra debuts are: 05/12 – Dishonoured, or the Fall of Neddie Seagoon 05/13 – Forog * 05/26 – The End * 06/12 – The Terrible Revenge of Fred Fu-Manchu * 06/13 – The Lost Year * 06/15 – The Hastings Flyer–Robbed * 07/18 – The Moon Show 07/21 – ’Round the World in Eighty Days 07/23 – Africa Ship Canal 07/25 – The Missing Boa Constrictor * 08/09 – The Policy 08/11 – The Stolen Postman * 08/15 – The Thing on the Mountain * 08/26 – The Great Statue Debate * 10/03 – The Chinese Legs * 10/04 – Robin’s Post * * The ones with asterisks have never been repeated on any BBC channel.
Meantime, we still expect that the long-term availability to stream many Goon Show episodes on BBC Sounds will end on 30th March. Furthermore, the BBC intends to make BBC Sounds unavailable outside the UK at a currently unspecified date in Spring 2025. It will be replaced by more restricted content on BBC.com/audio. The available shows are listed here on BBC Sounds, and our reference chart is here.
26th March is the start date for the new series of Goon Pod, the weekly podcast hosted by Tyler Adams which looks at all things Goon connected.
The first episode will be a deep dive into the 1959 Oscar-nominated short The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film, directed by Dick Lester, and featuring Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan.
If you haven’t listened to Goon Pod before, it’s available to download everywhere you usually find podcasts, or you can stream the latest episode through this page.
There’s a spin-off podcast too, GoonPod Film Club. It looks at British comedy movies which don’t feature and Goon Show connection. The next episode will be covering Shaun of the Dead with special guest comedy writer Jon Canter.
GoonPod Film Club is available to Goon Pod supporters on Patreon. For more info, visit patreon.com.
This year is Peter Sellers centenary, he was born on 8 September 1925.
Our newsletter editor, Peter, is planning to include lots of content to mark the occasion and has made the following plea:
Please can I have your writings, feelings and dealings with, Mr Peter Sellers, the well known centenarian of the late variety. I’m looking for articles of interest relating to him.
Original writings please, from any member / reader who has something to write. Maybe about the time you met him, the time you spoke on the phone to him, or the time you didn’t. Possibly just an exploration of an aspect of his work as a Goon or film actor, musician, RAF man, photographer or megaphone speaker. Thank you: contact link here.
Deadline 3rd May please. For use in June or September issues.
News has reached us from deepest Cumbria that The Penrith Players calendar of performances lined up for 2025 includes re-enactments of three Goon Shows!
Having gained the ‘go ahead’ from Spike Milligan Productions Ltd, the shows will take place at the Penrith Playhouse Theatre in Penrith, on Wednesday to Saturday, 16th to 19th April, 2025.
The three episodes awaiting their transformation to the stage are: The Canal The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill-on-Sea The Treasure of Loch Lomond, aka The Treasure in the Lake
It will be a ‘musically interluded Radio-Show-on-Stage with live sound effects.’ But it does beg the question: ‘What does a man who tied concrete blocks to his feet and jumped into a canal sound like?’
The publicity continues: ‘… and all your favourite characters brought to life, this hilariously madcap show is for young and old alike. ‘Whether you remember when The Goon Shows were live on your wireless, or whether your parents or grandparents fired up their cassette players in the car on road trips – this nostalgic, surrealist nod to post-war Britain is sure to leave you with a smile on your face, but hopefully no batter puddings!’ And it ends: ‘Warning: may cause uncontrollable laughter.’
Grams: fanfare The March 2025 issue of Goon Show News has been to the Post Office, and it’s now on its way to member’s letterboxes.
Along with lots of news items, there’s an article looking back to the day Spike visited the GSPS, features on the Q TV series’, the (almost) mythical Lyme Bay Goons Books, a 70-year-old article on the future of TV by Eric Sykes and an even older profile of Harry Secombe. There’s more too, see the list of contents below.
The newsletter is published quarterly and sent to all of our members. If you’re not getting it, why not join the GSPS. You won’t be disappointed.
We reported previously that long term availability of Goon Shows to stream from the BBC Sounds app and website appears to be coming to an end. The countdown is continuing, and it looks like the 30th of March will be the last day many episodes will be available. After that, there will only be the shows which have been played on the three-times-on-Tuesday slot on Radio 4 Extra during the previous thirty days. (except, see below)
My count is that a total of 124 of the at least 149 episodes for which there are recordings available have been aired on Radio 4 Extra, and then been available to stream. At the beginning of February, 103 of these episodes were still live.
What will be left after 30th March? There’s a little bit of good news. A batch of shows, from episode 8 of series 5 (The Marie Celeste) to the first of series 6 (The Man Who Won the War) have escaped this cull. Their expiry date is set for 15 February 2026. So it will be those sixteen meantime, plus whichever four have been on 4 Extra during the past thirty days.
At least that’s my reading of the situation. Check back at the end of March to see if anything’s changed. The available shows are listed here on BBC Sounds, and our reference chart is here
The Goon Show Preservation Society 