Goon Pod

Coming soon! A new monthly podcast where we examine the ninth episode of classic – and not-so-classic – British sitcoms to see what it represents and tells us about the series as a whole. https://open.spotify.com/show/6XUWFZTUFZTrxGZZ9buOp3 By the ninth episode most sitcoms have got into their stride and the audience at home have got to know the different characters; the sit is well-enough establi...

The Queen in America, Eurovision, Elvis, knitting a Spon, a Russian Love Song, Harry Rocking the Town! - it's all here this week! Plus: how much do we love Moriarty, a glaring goof and Watch That Tiger! Ted Webb joins Tyler to discuss this beloved series 8 show.

Jet Storm , also known as Jet Stream or Killing Urge , is a British thriller directed and co-written by Cy Endfield and starring Richard Attenborough, Stanley Baker, Patrick Allen and Virginia Maskell. It is an early example of what would become the aviation disaster-film genre, preceding films such as Airport by more than a decade. Released in October 1959, it centres almost entirely on a transat...

“You’re worth more dead than alive!” We’ve talked a lot about Steptoe & Son – and its principle artistes – recently on Goon Pod and the sister show so it feels appropriate this week to air this interesting chat. It is July 1973 and the second feature film based on the hit BBCTV sitcom about a pair of rag-and-bone-men has just come out. Unfortunately its release coincides with a much more popul...

Broadcast on Channel 4 on 2nd December 1985, The Last Laugh Before TV-am was Spike Milligan’s attempt to bring his particular vein of humour to a new generation... although very little about it suggested that Milligan had changed his approach since the early Q series. The show assembled a familiar Milligan blend of sketches,visual jokes, corpsing, unfinished ideas and rehearsed improvisation. The...

Field Marshals are queuing up to draw their pensions – it’s the first time they ever really wanted to go to the front. But Gunner Ned Seagoon, former Ablutions Orderly at Alamein, has other ways of making a mint. He’s writing his memoirs and reckons they’ll earn him a fortune. For – shock horror – they reveal the truth about the hygiene of the General Staff and the secrets of the military laundry....

An annual tradition dating back to the year the Titanic went down – a useful metaphor to describe some of the subsequent acts who sank without trace – the Royal Variety Performance brings together entertainers from around the world to perform in front of faintly bored members of the Royal Family for charity. Arguably the most memorable and significant show was in 1963, when a group from Liverpool...

The first half of the 1970s was not a particularly fruitful period for Peter Sellers, at least in terms of critical and commercial success. He made a slew of films which failed to take off or, in some cases, weren't even released. Some of his worst films date from this period, chiefly the execrable Where Does It Hurt? , which we previously covered on Goon Pod with Paul Litchfield and Jeremy Li...

This week, special guest Richard Moore joins Tyler for what we're going to call Sellers & Milligan Mixtape . Richard has pulled together a number of rarities and curios from the recording careers of the two ex-Goons and created a couple of fantasy compilations: Sellers From The Cellars and Miscellaneous Milligan . To try and describe some of these tracks would rather give the game away, so...

The Silent Bugler is a good example of Spike Milligan revisiting earlier material, with the later Vintage Goons remake refining rather than reinventing the original. The original story from Series 4 opens with a Cold War setting and digs at Senator McCarthy, Winston Churchill and the world of secret agents before introducing Seagoon as MI5's Agent X2. The Vintage Goons remake necessarily tweak...

The wan Don who thinks he’s Don Juan – a Welsh librarian gets the seven-year-itch. This week writer Paul Whitelaw makes his first faltering steps into Goon Pod territory to talk about a favourite film: Only Two Can Play , directed by Sidney Gilliat and starring Peter Sellers, Virginia Maskell and Mai Zetterling. Released barely a year before Sellers breasted the tape of international stardom with...

“Caw!” said the crow. “Balls!” said the Milligan. This week, we look at a book that Spike Milligan claimed took either five years - or ten years and fifteen secretaries - to write, and which “damn nearly drove me mad.” But just how much of Spike himself and his life bled into the narrative? And how did a marriage proposal expedite its completion? Puckoon was, for a long time, Spike’s only novel, a...

Following on from last week’s conversation with Samira Ahmed about A Hard Day’s Night we continue the Richard Lester theme with a look at his 1967 anti-war satire How I Won the War - a film often lazily regarded as a John Lennon vehicle, but in reality a far stranger, darker, and more ensemble-drivenpiece of cinema. The film stars Michael Crawford as Lieutenant Ernest Goodbody, a hapless officer l...

Writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed joins Tyler this week to talk about her new book on A Hard Day’s Night and its roots in the world of the Goons, from the Fred shows to The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film. Also: Richard Lester’s creative vision and Alun Owen’s pitch-perfect script Why Beatlemania was distinctly black and white and how the film mirrors this Wilfrid Brambell – and why t...

Join us as we march off to war wearing squeaky socks and woolly underpants, before surrendering to the twisted logic of Spike Milligan (“better looking than Peter Sellers”). This show, one of the highlights of the Goon Show’s eighth series and released on BBC LP in 1981, has a plot of sorts: 1917 and England is at war, France is at war, while Eccles is at lunch. Grytpype and Moriarty sell German a...

"He's only got to lift his leg and he'll drown 50 kids!" This week: Digby, The Biggest Dog in the World , a 1973 British family comedy in which an Old English Sheepdog accidentally drinks an experimental growth formula and raises the woof! Leading the cast is Jim Dale as Jeff Eldon, an animal psychologist at a NATO research facility; when Spike Milligan (playing a shameless Germa...

"Round the back for the old cherry brandy!" Recorded in New York on 6 August 1963, this satirical comedy album brought together Peter Sellers, Anthony Newley, Joan Collins, Leslie Bricusse, Daniel Massey and Michael Lipton at the height of the Profumo Affair. The midnight session accommodated Newley and Massey, whose Broadway shows had only just finished. The idea had been conceived less...

This week we look at Invasion Quartet (1961), one of the most significant, if forgotten, films in Spike Milligan's career. Set in a military convalescent hospital on the English south coast during 1942, the story follows three disabled service officers and an ageing military veteran who decide to launch their own private invasion of occupied France to destroy a German super-gun known as "...

“I don’t find myself funny… it came as a surprise to me that I didn’t really learn anything by watching myself.” In June 1969 BBC2 broadcast a documentary in which comedian and writer Marty Feldman tried to discover the essence of comedy by speaking with some of its leading lights such as Eric Morecambe, Dudley Moore, Denis Norden and... Peter Sellers. According to a critic on The Daily Mirror: “G...

It's 75 years since the first Goon Show (billed as Crazy People) was broadcast and to mark the occasion Tyler welcomes listeners from all over the world - Ian Richards, Colleen Dawson, Martin Eggleston, Fred Velez, Colin Fee and Ted Webb - to share their Goon Show stories and memories in a special episode. Topics include where they first discovered the show, the importance of Harry Secombe, th...

"Now, Neddie… what experience have you had in translating ancient scripts? " - "Three years with Ray’s A Laugh." What do the Piltdown Man, a calculating canine, Norwich Castle Museum and a one-eyed cat peeping in a sea food store all have to do with this week's show? Listen as we discuss The Missing Scroll from Series 5 and offer a fascinating and in-depth behind-the-scenes...

It’s 1972 and Dick Emery - once described as "a fugitive from The Goon Show" - is one of the most popular comedians on television. His show is a regular ratings-topper, featuring a cast of comic grotesques – toothy vicars, leering jezebels, cats-bum-mouthed frumps and camp as Christmas extroverts. With the success in the early seventies of the On The Buses films and other sitcom-to-big-s...

This week we're discussing Peter Sellers' only directorial feature, Mr Topaze from 1961. Sellers plays Albert Topaze, an earnest, impoverished schoolteacher in provincial France whose rigid honesty ultimately proves his undoing. He teaches under the status-obsessed headmaster Muche (Leo McKern) and is in love with Muche’s daughter Ernestine (Billie Whitelaw). Living modestly with his colle...

“Their gags are paralysing. Sometimes the director has to let everybody have five minutes’ rest, so that we can laugh the laughs out.” (Pamela Thomas, supporting cast) In 1956 a short film was released which with hindsight was probably the most successful Goon Show celluloid transfer, despite only featuring two-thirds of the team. Ironically, it wasn't even intended for theatre release but a l...

This week the great Neil Brand visits the show to share his love of the Goons and in particular the music. Neil of course is a well-respected writer, composer and broadcaster and the country's leading silent film accompanist. A self-taught musician, Neil describes the instinctive feel of the music in the Goon Show from people like Max Geldray and Ray Ellington and admires the sheer musical chu...