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 9 October 1955
First Broadcast : Tuesday 11 October 1955 on the BBC Home Service
Follow along with what’s happening with this transcription of the show.
With the aid of a telescope, Neddie watches breakfast being served at Beaulieu manor and reads an advertisement in the paper on the breakfast table. Hercules Grytpype-Thynne and Count Moriarty are offering five pounds to move a piano from one room to the other. Neddie accepts the offer and signs a contract. Then he finds out that the piano is in the Louvre Museum in Paris. He’s been trapped into bringing a piano back from Paris for only five pounds! After Neddie leaves, the two villains gloat—the piano is the very one Napoleon played at Waterloo. The piano is worth at least £10,000. Meanwhile, Neddie visits Henry and Minnie at the Foreign Office, to arrange passports and visas. They mistake him for the Prime Minister, and assume he’s leaving the country to go to Russia. They try to stop him, but he escapes. Neddie stows away on a Channel steamer to reach France. Eccles is also on the voyage. Neddie’s gorillas being too strong, they smoke Eccles’s monkeys, which are milder. Seagoon checks into a French hotel, where Bloodnok tries to spear his kipper using a fork on a pole. Neddie’s attempt to have Bloodnok thrown out results in his being thrown out instead. Neddie enlists the aid of Justin Eidelburger, a specialist in piano robberies from the Louvre. They rendezvous at midnight in the museum, where they find Eccles trying to lift the piano on his own – it seems he has been tricked into carrying it back to England. Bloodnok shows up; he’s also been tricked. Together they hurl the piano into the Channel in order to float it back to England. After two weeks adrift in the Channel without food or water, a helicopter appears and lowers Bluebottle, who claims the piano for England. Bluebottle insists that it is not Napoleon’s piano, but Rockall, which is a British rocket testing range. Indeed, a rocket lands and blows them all up. Greenslade presents an alternative, happy ending, in which John informs Gwendolyn that he’s finally found a job – moving a piano from one room to another.
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