The Goon Show 2

I agree about the surrealism of the Goons although it has to be said that other shows like Eric Barker's Just Fancy and Peters Jones and Ustinov's In All Directions were also breaking boundaries - and even Take It From Here, in its sendup cosy of radio families in the Glums, was important.

The sheer number of Goon repeats on 7 has rather taken the shine off the programme and - like ITMA, as discussed in another thread - it's also of its time: people reacting to coming out the other end of the army experience. But its importance and influence cannot be denied. And not simply on the surrealism of the Pythons. Private Eye person John Wells said of himself and Richard Ingrams: "The Goon Show was what we all knew by heart." And Jonathan Miller has said the Goons "did an enormous amount to subvert the social order" in its "sendup of British Imperialism", paving the way for Beyond the Fringe (quotes from Humphrey Carpenter's That Was Satire That Was).

All the above doesn't necessarily make it essential listening now but from time to time I'm happy to hear it, though it doesn't seem right at eight in the morning.

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I really enjoyed the part I heard of this week's Goon Show episode. But one unexpected (by me) consequence of BBC7 has been that repeats of vintage comedy shows which would have been an occasional treat in recent decades, dependent on the scheduling whims of Radio 2 or Radio 4, have now become so readily available that it's hard not to become more critical as a listener; as with the opportunities now afforded by DVD box sets the memories of a series can sometimes be better than the actuality.

But maybe the test of a good series is that it can still reach out and surprise you from time to time even if it can never be the intense, listening-in-a-darkened-bedroom, pleasure it once was. Maybe there ought to be a moratorium on broadcasting the Goons for a few years with hand-in points for tapes and CDs ...

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CBeebies - now that really is surreal ... the kids' voices sound strangely disembodied and you can't quite believe they're in the same room (or universe) as the presenter - a bit like Michael Bentine's Potty Time, of seventies telly fame, where you'd see footsteps in the sand or guns firing but no little people would be there ... or would they?

And of course as Bentine was one of the original Goons you could say it's all come full circle. For a non-Goon fan, Kate, you show remarkable powers of Goonish observation.

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And Dick Emery is in the short film The Case of the Mukkinese Battlehorn, one of the few successful Goonish films.

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Re other Goonish films, Down Among the Z Men may be worth seeking out. It is not a great movie but it does preserve Michael Bentine's chair routine (and poss Harry Secombe's shaving routine - can't remember). But The Case of ... is a delight all through. I saw it on the big screen in the seventies - much better than the restrictions of Youtube.

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Probably, yes; I'm pretty sure I saw it as support to a comedy feature though can't remember which one for certain. Roger Wilmut's The Goon Show Companion would probably confirm.

Not absolutely certain because around the same time (early seventies) Milligan's film The Great McGonagall (complete with Peter Sellers as a jazz piano-playing Queen Victoria) was a big student favourite in my neck of the woods (to the bemusement and annoyance of the distributor, apparently) and it may have been conjoined with that. Quite a tribute when you remember the twenty-odd (very odd) minute support film and not the big picture.

Oh, and either way the Great McGonagall was truly dire.

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There's a gentle film from the early 60s, not really Goonish, called Postman's Knock which I remember, or seem to remember, or recall that I may perhaps in the mists of, etc etc. Milligan plays a postman and it has great charm.

Also recommended (not available on DVD) is Sellers' The Optimists of Nine Elms in which he plays a music hall reduced to busking who is befriended (and redeemed) by two kids. c 1970. According to the writer/director Anthony Simmons Sellers "gave a great gut performance". And as a guarantee of quality I can even remember where I was when I first saw that: the Museum of London, which used to have twice weekly screenings of films with a London connection.

It was the later Being There which Sellers described as the Goon film he and Spike wanted to make. Meaning, I suppose, that the central character was a wholly innocent idiot like Stan Laurel or Eccles, although it's not a film I like much.

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Harry Secombe fulfils a similar function to Kenneth Horne in their respective shows: a still centre (admittedly a comparative term in the case of any Goon character) around which the grotesques revolve. Neddie Seagoon may not be three-dimensional exactly but he is the gullible everyman you're (sort of) rooting for as the story unfolds, insofar as story matters in a Goon episode.

Maybe the problem is that that level of gullibility is less credible five decades on except in a period context - like Hugh Laurie's character in the WW1 Blackadder.

Kenneth Horne's persona is more complex and reflects the liberation of the sixties: on the one hand an establishment figure who sounds it with that rich voice; a businessman in real life; a person with a long pedigree on the Beeb in respectable quizzes as well as comedies.

But on the other he's - if not welcoming, exactly, then certainly tolerant of the TRH characters: "Come in before the neighbours see you" he says to Julian and Sandy in one episode. And he takes obvious relish in the script's sexual innuendoes. The impression is he's taking a wry amusement, at the very least, in the social and sexual revolutions of the sixties.

Both shows are of their time so there can never be the same impact - a listener today can't experience the quantam leap from Beyond Our Ken to Round the Horne, and the subversiveness in the Goons, now familiar to us from Python et al, can't shock in the same way. Plus the sheer volume of repeats ("Many, many times" in fact) also tends to transform them into something cosily nostalgiac but I don't know whether there's a way round that. I heard the episode of RTH on the Barry Took Comedy Controller show and was reminded of the show's bite - by chance it wasn't one I'd hear half a dozen times - and I enjoyed the Goon Show from a week or two ago, but probably because I'd been avoiding them for a bit.

Perhaps the only real advice to give, in the case of the Goons, is to say that this is what Cleese and co, Peter Cook, Ian Hislop etc etc grew up listening to, so if you like these people try and stick with it to see what they got. But in Humphrey Carpenter's That Was Satire That Was, describing the impact of Beyond the Fringe, what comes up again and again from commentators and later comics like the Pythons is the sudden delighted recognition that others felt the same way about the establishment as they did. Now that particular moment of social change can't be recreated so that listening now is inevitably a different experience: no seismic shock is possible anymore but there may be other pleasures more personal to the listener.

In both cases, at their best you can feel the scripts veering off into unexpected areas - eg Took and Feldman will tire of a sketch and the cast will go into a song - at their worst some section will be a retread without adding anything significant. Have to admit I find Rambling Syd Rumpo tedious now, maybe because the folk revival of the 50s/60s and the pushing forward of traditional singers is no longer the live issue it was (though try to hear a recording of Shropshire singer Fred Jordan - I'm sure his increasingly mannered vibrato was the model for Syd).

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Listening just now to Stop Messing About proved an object lesson in the importance of Kenneth Horne's role - there was a Julian and Sandy sketch in all but name, but with Douglas Smith in the Kenneth Horne part. Not entirely sure whether this was about a sloppy script or Smith's lack of authority but it seemed a largely case of what can only be described as single entendres. Not quite the gap between Pete and Dud and their Derek and Clive incarnation but there didn't seem the fine judgement of Round the Horne. Maybe also about the times - less restrictions necessitating a degree of subtlety in the writing? And I haven't checked the credits but I'm presuming (and hoping) Took and Feldman have jumped ship by now.

Kate, if you don't like it you don't like it; I'd only say that both Beyond Our Ken (puns but little social content) and Stop Messing About (lack of restraint) help to explain why Round the Horne is, to those who like that sort of thing, good.

I'd also make a clear distinction between the Goons and Spike Milligan in general. The Milligan Papers, on 7 a while ago, was painful listening: the faintest echo of past glories. I've had more fun listening to an Alex Riley trail. The idea of Milligan is often preferable to the actuality, although his historical importance cannot be denied.

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FaceoftheMonkeyRace, If you look at the thread entitled Take It From Here, there are quotations from the book The Laughtermakers by David Nathan which include Frank Muir's thoughts on the Goons and other radio comedies in their historical context. His main point is that the Goon Show, with its emphasis on debunking authority, could only have been the huge popular success it was after a war.

It's been interesting to read the strong feelings about comedies I'd assumed were widely accepted. Perhaps it's a generational thing. I was too young to hear the Goons and RTH when first broadcast but there were lots of repeats on R2 and R4 in the seventies and eighties so they were part of the comic landscape - as was Hancock.

But Monty Python was the innovation, the secret language we shared in school, the thing of which my parents actively disapproved. So I'm fond of the Goons in small doses but it's not a secret shared with my peers in the way the first broadcasts of Python seemed. And perhaps as we grow more remote from the fifties those ties are even looser for the next generation.

An analogy with music may be helpful. Paul Simon once said that nothing can be as exciting, musically, as what you grew up with - luckily in his case it was rock'n'roll. So "good" comedy is really just that which makes its impact at the time when the listener is most receptive.

Trouble is, the continuing, generation-striding popularity of Hancock rather blows all the above out the water, doesn't it? Ah well.

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Oh, I also meant to say I feel bad about you listening to the Goons as a sort of nasty medicine which you trust may eventually do you some good ... but then again once every ten years hardly makes it the greatest of ordeals.

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If you don't get the Goons at all but love Python it might be worth seeking out episodes of Spike Milligan's Q television series. Very hit and miss but hugely influential on Cleese and chums for its dispensing with punchlines: at the time they felt Spike had beaten them to it.

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Possibly the reaction of the Goon audience is offputting: they have been in the "club" for years and so are far more inclined to laugh. And catchphrases are always deeply unfuny for those not already acquainted with them - Goons, Python, whoever.

John Cleese used to hate the reactions of the later ISIRTA audiences, willing to cheer just about anything, which then made it difficult to gauge performances. How do you feel about that show?

It was interesting listening to the audience-free Goon episode about Cleopatra's Needle recently - a very different experience.

Might be worth reading some of the Goon Show Scripts so you're not distracted by what one producer called "spurious bonhomie". But again, it's not an obligation. And the effect of the Goons on a postwar audience cannot be replicated so maybe you simply have to take on trust what your comic idols say about Milligan's influence on them. Give it twenty years...

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And in addition to the smacks at Bob Monkhouse and his partner Dennis Goodwin Milligan would deconstruct comic mechanisms - eg I remember Harry Secombe announcing: "Feedline" before some corny and obvious joke.

Admittedly with that context - the standard fare of the fifties - taken away it does become harder to understand the initial impact. But bear in mind that Milligan could reasonably say to younger readers of this board: I fought a war for you lot - a war against the cliched and obvious in comedy. We owe him a considerable debt.

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The Beeb wanted to get rid of harmonica player Max Geldray in the Goon Show at some point but Sellers said: if he goes I go. The Goon music is corny now but it feels needed to give us a breathing space from the madness. The songs in RTH seem most dated - maybe because Ray Ellington is vaguely jazzy/bluesy and also the musicians get the occasional small parts. When Kenneth Horne gives an insulting intro to the Fraser Hayes Four there isn't the same sense they're in on the joke as with Ellington and Geldray.

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Part of the pleasure too is that we know and love Sellers, Milligan and Secombe - and the poignancy, too, of this time which was comparatively innocent and fun - as original Goon Bentine said "Smashed out of our heads at the sheer joy of living."

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Roger Wilmut in his book The Goon Show Companion makes the point that different producers allowed the Goons, both as performers and in Milligan's case as writer, different levels of freedom with correspondingly variable results in terms of clarity. I don't have the book to hand but he suggests that certain series are hilarious if you are already up to speed but near-incomprehensible otherwise. Peter Eton was cited but I can't remember whether he was, as it were, a Barrowclough or a Mackay in the studio. There was one producer who would say to the expectant, chattering audience: "Cease this spurious bonhomie at once!" - a great icebreaker.

But anyway this producer business may be a factor in people's reactions: you're not talking about a consistent product (how could you with Milligan - and yes, I know Eric Sykes and Larry Stephens also wrote).

I don't know whether Goon Shows are being played in chronological order on 7 or indeed how many episodes survive from which series. Nor do I know whether there's a conscious quality control in choosing episodes. But Wilmut does say the brandy became more important to the performers as the shows went on, which may indicate that later shows in general could be more offputting to new listeners. And you can't filter out the audience, who have warmed to the show over the years and who feel part of it. And again - the thing I find myself coming back to - it's the times, the newness, which cannot be recreated.

One of the most bizarre moments (of many) in the documentary film Capturing the Friedmans has one of the sons in court accused, along with his father, of child abuse. He and his brothers, waiting to go in, start to repeat Monty Python catchphrases ("My brain hurts!") and you can see that, inappropriate as it is, it's a kind of talisman. It goes beyond reason; it's about comfort and familiarity and reaffirming their bond through this shared experience, trivial as it may be. And I think that one of the troubles with this thread is the difficulty of conveying that sense of a shared experience, vis a vis the Goons, to others who are not part of it. It can't be explained rationally.

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Or like trying to convince somebody that there was an original source for the light which they can only see in refracted form ...

I seem to keep doing this - quoting from other writing - but anyway, there's a novel by Philip Oakes, the guy who worked with Hancock, about a film critic. At one point he is falling off his cinema seat laughing at a screening of Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box, while his new girlfriend sits stoney-faced and uncomprehending. He tries to explain why these two men in the long-ago Californian sunshine are so funny but knows he can't: "Like love, it was not part of her world."

That's a tad extreme, but how to explain the way in which you feel you know Milligan, Sellers and Secombe? That every programme you see about them - like the documentary about Harry Secombe when ill, repeated as as tribute after his death, which included a visit from Spike - is part of the jigsaw and binds them to you more tightly? And the way in which knowing that almost all the participants are now dead is part of the bittersweet experience? And the way in which the Goon Show is also about the friendship between the three principals - that the laughter onstage is not obsequious? And the alternative universe opening up for millions of young listeners?

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"once The Incredible String Band started to make sense"?

Staying in the folk idiom, isn't that the equivalent of saying "When silver bells turn cockle shells"?

But what a bizarre connection - the Goons and the 50s/60s British Folk revival. Perhaps the link is Milligan making others feel anything is possible. And once you get the nonsense syllables in the chorus of most folk songs down pat, then the excesses of the Goon scripts are child's play. Wonder how Pete Bellamy et al (especially Fred Jordan) felt about Rambling Syd Rumpo?

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Is it just me or do other people find Fred Jordan unlistenable? I have the Voice of the People CD series on topic and I have to forward to the next track when I hear his voice. And the vibrato makes it very easy to parody. Maybe it's that I hear Rambling Syd before I heard him.

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Goon mentor Jimmy Grafton "maintained that Eccles was the nearest thing to Milligan's own id - a very simple, uncomplicated creature who doesn't want to be burdened with any responsibility and just wants to be happy and enjoy himself."

[Guardian obit of Milligan; read the full thing here: www.guardian.co.uk/o... ]

Could that be a way in to understanding Bluebottle too?

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Talking of scouting, credit must go to Michael Bentine for giving Bluebottle - or at least his voice - to the world: he it was who sent a scoutmaster with those distinctive tones along to Peter Sellers.

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You deaded Bluebottle - you b*st*rds!

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This may be a US / UK divided-by-a-common-language thing - cute in the sense of clever is perhaps more common in the US. American dictionary definitions here:

www.bartleby.com/61/...