The Goon Show series 5: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 07:05, 27 October 2022
The Goon Show, series 5 was a series of 26 shows aired between 28 September 1954 and 22 March 1955. Spike Milligan wrote the first six of the shows on his own, then Eric Sykes came in to help with the remainder. Peter Eton produced all the shows in the series. All the shows were recorded on a Sunday and transmitted on the following Tuesday evenings, with the exception of shows 14 (which was a Christmas special) and show 20 (which was was a parody of the novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Andrew Pixley's summation of series 5
'My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen. Back from the dead. We present half an hour of continuous radio fighting. In both corners - the Goons! 'With his usual gusto, Harry Secombe introduced the new series of The Goon Show in which he starred alongside Peter Sellers and the show's creator Spike Milligan.
How the year started
By Summer 1954, The Goon Show was riding high as one of BBC radio's ground-breaking comedy shows. In the four series, the programme had evolved from disparate sketches into a single narrative - broken into three by music numbers - which featured a recurring set of highly identifiable characters acting out a surreal or strange adventure. The three stars were now well established in the entertainment landscape and continued to work on other shows. Sellers continued his weekly appearances in Ray's A Laugh, Secombe featured in series like The Forces Show, You're Only Young Once, Show Band Show and I Hear Music as well as being considered for his own show, and Milligan made a few appearances in early editions of Paradise Street starring Max Bygraves and written by Eric Sykes. Towards the end of the fourth series, writers Larry Stephens and Spike Milligan had gone their separate ways. Stephens wrote The Forces Show with Jimmy Grafton while Spike was left in control of the comic landscape he had created.
Recording of the new series for Autumn 1954 had to be scheduled in accordance with the cast's other commitments. Harry Secombe was in variety from September to December, after which he was due to do the pantomime Cinderella at the Coventry Hippodrome, and this meant that the shows had to be recorded on a Sunday as usual. As producer Peter Eton observed on Friday 11 June, 'Harry is the most popular member of the trio - it would be suicide to attempt the show without him.'
In late July, the cast were contracted for thirteen new editions of The Goon Show which would be recorded at the Paris Cinema (a prestigious venue which The Goon Show had only used for a few shows in 1952) at 9pm on Sundays from 26 September (amended from a planned start date of 19 September) and broadcast the following Tuesday at 8.30pm on the Home Service. The scheduling was a blow to the team since they felt the show was successful enough to merit broadcast on the more popular Light Programme. On Wednesday 25 August, Eton expressed surprise to H. Rooney Pelletier, noting that on its last run The Goon Show ratings were comparable to other series like Life With The Lyons and Take It From Here. Years later, Spike met Pelletier and asked why his series didn't make it on the Light Programme, as he recalled in Pauline Scudamore's biography of him. "Well, actually, we didn't like the programme much… In fact, my wife couldn't stand it. We always had to turn it off. said Pelletier. Spike was livid: 'So that explains it! All I knew that there must be some reason but it makes me wild to know that It was as personal as that — and that I was in the hands of a little tin-pot bureaucrat!'
The new BBC contracts also carried an option for thirteen more shows which the BBC could exercise by Thursday 25 November. To keep the show to an average budget of £136, Eton had to reduce the orchestra to just twelve musicians. Eton's memo to Pelletier also met with a response on Wednesday 8 September suggesting that The Goon Show would be repeated on the Light Programme at 6.30pm on Sundays for seven weeks from mid-October to mid-December, and then continue, depending on performance.
The writers
In September, Milligan joined a new agency, Associated London Scripts, a writers' co-operative which he had set up with Eric Sykes and Frankie Howerd, and was later joined by the writing duo of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson who wrote Hancock's Half Hour.
Although he had problems in meeting the punishing deadlines of a script for The Goon Show every week for six months, by Thursday 23 September, Spike was ahead in production and had managed to deliver three of the new scripts. However, he was concerned about writing an entire run of thirteen on his own and so it was agreed that Spike's friend Eric Sykes, who had collaborated with the writer on Archie in Goonland — a one-off crossover between The Goon Show and Educating Archie broadcast in June — would handle alternating episodes from shows seven to thirteen.
New features and popular characters
The new series was introduced in the Radio Times (24 September 1954) with a feature in Both Sides of the Microphone which showed a photo of the dinner-jacketed Goons and explained about their origins at Jimmy Grafton's pub in 1947 as 'a collection of lunatia'. The first show, Episode 100: The Whistling Spy Enigma - a script based on the 7-1 defeat of England's football team in Budapest by Hungary on 23 May 1954 - was promoted in the listings with a cartoon by Bruce Angrave of three footballers with exploding boots. From now on, the programme billings carried episode titles, cast lists (which often bore little resemblance to the finished programme), and a version of the synopsis which appeared on the front of each script. The Whistling Spy Enigma kicked off recordings at the Paris on Sunday 26 September, with Milligan, Sellers and Secombe reunited with announcer Wallace Greenslade, harmonica player Max Geldray and the Ray Ellington Quartet, the latter then in variety at the Empire Theatre in Glasgow. Generally, the cast and effects rehearsals would take place from 4pm with the orchestra arriving at 5.45pm and the recording at 9pm. A separate recording of each show was now also made by BBC Transcription Services as, for the first time, The Goon Show was to be sold overseas after appropriate timing, topical and cultural edits had been made. The new series started on Tuesday 28, replacing Henry Hall's Guest Night on the Home Service, with a Home Service repeat at 12.25pm on Fridays (or 12.30pm for listeners in Scotland).
A character previously referred to as 'Sanders', and based on the suave tones of actor George Sanders, now emerged as a more important caddish character called Hercules Grytpype-thynne ('You silly twisted boy you') while Secombe became more firmly established as key character Ned Seagoon still sometimes referred to as 'Secombe'), along with the nonsense catchphrase 'ying-tong-iddle-i-po'. The idiotic 'Mad Dan' Eccles ('How's yer old dad?), unreliable army officer Major Denis Bloodnok, criminal Count Moriarty ('Sapristi bompet!), East Finchley schoolboy, Bluebottle ("You rotten swine, you"), and the geriatric duo of Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister were also now well established. From The Lost Gold Mine (of Charlotte), many of the shows saw Seagoon having to pit his wits against Moriarty and Grytpype, a situation cemented by the arrival of Eric Sykes with Lurgi Strikes Britain! The show's signature tune - Goons Gallop - composed by Wally Stott (latterly Angela Morley) was retained for the end of the programmes, generally followed by a playout of Crazy Rhythm composed in 1928 by Irving Caesar, Roger Wolfe Kahn and Joseph Meyer.
Light Programme repeat dropped
Unfortunately, the proposed Light Programme repeat had been dropped, much to the irritation of Eton who, on Monday 11 October, wrote that he was 'discouraged at a conglomeration of unfortunate circumstances'. For the first time, Spike had provided scripts well in advance and, 'each one has been written and re-written until it is, in my opinion, first-rate radio.' Furthermore, Spike had been encouraged by the Light Programme repeat, and 'now all this goodwill has been replaced by frustration and despondency'. Further blows for morale had been the poor scheduling of the Friday lunchtime repeat, and Eton had now been told that Take It from Here was to oust them from the Paris to 'the funereal atmosphere of Aeolian I'. Eton was assured that the channel controllers were looking to schedule a repeat run and that the Home Service would find a better repeat slot. However, on Friday 29 October, Kenneth Adam, the Light Programme Controller, commented 'with the best will in the world I can see no hope of the Goon repeat in the first quarter (of 19S5).' Thankfully, the transferral of recording to Aeolian Hall was abandoned, but the Light Programe bitterness crept into the scripts; during The Last Tram (from Clapham), when Seagoon urged Wallace Greenslade to keep a secret, the BBC announcer replies, "Don't worry, no one will hear it sir. It's on the Home Service."
During October, Harry met W.M. Marshall, the publicity manager at the Lancashire resort of Morecambe, and the notion of the Goons turning on the illuminations in August 1955 was discussed. Eton was keen on this publicity idea, even proposed that maybe a special edition of the radio series could be made around it. In the meantime, the closing comments of The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill-on-Sea) — an episode which Spike had set partially at the army unit where he did his basic training in 1940 — had elicited some strange fan mail as outlined in Both Sides of the Microphone in the Radio Times (29 October 1954). 'More than two dozen cold batter puddings of all shapes and sizes to The Goons. 'Tell them to save the evidence and eat my pie; said most of the kindly correspondents. Faced with mound of fast-decaying batter pudding, Spike Milligan is grateful but apprehensive. 'Helppppp!' he says in a plaintive letter, 'I beg you to ask listeners to send no more.'"
An airborne paperweight through the window
Valentine Dyall, best known as the Man in Black who presented Appointment with Fear, appeared as a guest star in The Canal, having featured on the show the previous year. Following this, the first collaboratlve script for Eric and Spike was Lurgi Strikes Britain!, but as Eric recalled to Norma Farnes in The Goons — The Story, the relationship was short-lived: We argued all day about one word. [SpikeJ said that without the word the line would not work and I said it would work anyway… Eventually he threw a paperweight at me which missed me and went through the window — and we were on the fifth floor.' Subsequently, the writers worked on alternate shows, generating a script on which both would take credit with the main writer named first.
Writing to Milligan on Wednesday 10 November, BBC producer Pat Dixon - who had been instrumental in getting the Goons on the radio and would later take over from Eton - commented I thought that the 'Dreaded Lurgy' [sic] broadcast was excruciatingly funny. Once again, I repeat, it is the only show that is real radio.'The following day, the BBC exercised their option to take a further twelve shows through to the end of March 1955, with the cast contracted on Wednesday 17 November to tape The Goon Show from 2 January to 20 March, with an extra Christmas show to be taped on 19 December after the scheduled show for which contracts were issued on Friday 26 November.
Commenting to the Head of Variety on Tuesday 7 December, Eton protested that 'budget restrictions were 'likely to frighten producers into avoiding new ideas, playing for safety and churning out the same old characters week after week'. He was already conscious of the drop in quality of the music since dispensing with the string section of the orchestra and saw it as a 'false economy' which had dented Wally Stott's morale. A suggestion that The Goon Show should form a bond with Hancock's Half Hour in terms of running gags was dropped, mainly because the budget of The Goon Show would not cover the fee of Tony Hancock. He also noted that, following The Canal, Milligan wanted to write in more guest stars such as Valentine Dyall, Tod Slaughter and Leslie Mitchell. Again, this would strain the budget, with Eton noting that The Canal was 15 guineas over budget, but got the highest listening figure of the series'.
Recording was moved
From Sunday 5 December, recording moved to the Camden Theatre which the team had used for three shows earlier that year. As before, the three stars continued their work elsewhere. Sellers featured on BBC TV's And So to Bentley and appeared in Mother Goose at the London Palladium as well as Radio 3's Ted Ray Time. Secombe turned up on Those Radio Times, Say It With Music and was being sounded out regarding television projects while Milligan featured on Hancock's Half Hour.
Recycling material
Again, Spike found the demand of crafting the absurd adventures of The Goon Show an increasing strain, and started to rely on his back catalogue of material. The script Dishonoured or the Fall of Neddie Seagoon was a reworking of The Adventures of Philip String. A three-part serial which ran through the seventh, eighth and ninth editions of Crazy People (the original title of the first run of what became The Goon Show) back in July 1951. The original hero had been Philip String, a character played by Milligan himself. Before the Christmas break, two shows were recorded at the Camden Theatre on Sunday 19 December, with Forog (a Sykes story inspired by concerns over the corrupting import of 'horror comics' from America) taped at 8.15pm and then the Christmas show, Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest — Milligan's partial rewrite of the 1952 pantomime show Robin Hood - 9.30pm.
Ratings were steady at around two and a half million listeners, an increase on the previous series, and at the end of 1954 The Highly Esteemed Goon Show was an innovative force in the British comedy landscape. The Whistling Spy Enigma had by now been analysed by the BBC's Audience Research Department following a questionnaire completed by 361 listeners. The report, issued on Tuesday 12 October, commented that The Whistling Spy Enigma proved enigmatic to the point of obscurity for a small group of listeners… who strove manfully to find some coherent thread in the midst, as they said, "of all the noise and confusion". These listeners, however, have never thought the Goons funny and fear they never will. Addicts, on the other hand, were eminently satisfied. 'My mother said, "Doesn't this give you a headache?" and my sister said, "Are they talking English?" but I was too helpless with laughter to pay attention', declared an Invalid. 'This show starts the new series with a bang', added a Civil Servant. More specifical1y, a Research Student wrote, 'Their gags are often old but they are always fresh and re-inspired — such as the door opening sequence: All the familiar 'characters' were affectionately welcomed together with one or two promising new arrivals and Goon 'fans' (about 80% of this sample) are eagerly awaiting the further extravagant adventures of young Ned Seagoon.'
Programme notes, episode notes and cast biographies researched and written by Andrew Pixley
The shows
Cast: Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, with Max Geldray and The Ray Ellington Quartet, conducted by Wally Stott.
Announcer: Wallace Greenslade
The shows were all broadcast on Tuesdays.[1] All episodes from this and subsequent series survive.
References
- ^ Wilmut & Grafton 1981, p. 122.
