Goon Pod

A special Christmas bonus edition! As part of Goon Pod Film Club - www.patreon.com/GoonPod - every month Tyler and a special guest discuss a British comedy film and in August this year Tim Worthington came to talk about his favourite: Billy Liar from 1963. Here's the full episode for Goon Pod listeners to get a taste. As you’d expect from Tim the conversation takes many twists and turns – as well...

The man behind the Goon Show Compendiums, audio engineer extraordinaire Ted Kendall returns to answer your questions in this Christmas edition!

“For a shortened version of this programme, please read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and you won’t find much resemblance.”   On 24th December 1959 the tenth and final series of The Goon Show got off to a thoroughly festive start with a show VERY loosely based on the classic Dickens story, in which Scrooge (played by Henry Crun) entrusts Eccles with a Christmas pudding full of gold threepe...

Who were the key figures in getting the Goon Show to radio? Which people were pivotal to the Goons' success? Join Tyler and Roger Stevenson as they rank those within the Goon Show's orbit in order of importance and show their working. Roger took the brief seriously and put a lot of thought and care into his choices; Tyler slightly misunderstood the brief and went more down that 'Who was the Fifth...

On 4th December 1994 Jonathan Ross hosted the British Comedy Awards in front of an invited audience of the great and the good and Noel Edmonds. It was a good year for the likes of Steve Coogan, Michael Barrymore and the Drop the Dead Donkey team but almost from the off Ross was beset by problems, including announcing the winner of the wrong award, having to deal with an out-of-control Meatloaf who...

A rare straight acting role for Peter Sellers in 1960, Never Let Go starred Richard Todd as a man for whom life outside of uniform has never been easy, as he struggles to put food on the table and his problems multiply when his new car is stolen. The vehicle has been stolen to order by teen tearaway Adam Faith, who supplies local garage owner and all-round nasty piece of work Lionel Meadows (Selle...

In 1979 Peter Sellers released Sellers Market , an LP of all new material which was recorded mostly in Paris and included contributions from the likes of Alan Clare, June Whitfield and Irene Handl.   While it failed to reach the heights of his previous hit records The Best of Sellers and Songs For Swinging Sellers, Sellers Market does contain some good stuff – notably The Whispering Giant (featuri...

Released 69 years ago this week, The Cockleshell Heroes was a heavily fictionalised account of the real-life WW2 Operation Frankton, in which a group of marines, headed by Herbert ‘Blondie’ Hasler, covertly entered Bordeaux Harbour in kayaks (or ‘Cockles’) to sabotage German cargo vessels. The film starred actor/director Jose Ferrer and Trevor Howard, with Anthony Newley and… drum roll… DAVID LODG...

"In the little Essex hamlet of Great Bardfield, a tiger with influenza is mounting guard over a mysterious white box. What is the secret of the box of Bardfield—does it contain the dreaded International Christmas Pudding or is it really full of priceless Essex snow?" So ran the Radio Times listing that week for the show we are discussing, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the International C...

Everyone at Goon Pod Towers is very excited this week as this is the first time we've ever covered a Best Picture Oscar winner on the show, and this one features everybody's favourite beadle Harry Secombe who's in fine voice for this tremendous 1968 film based on the hit Lionel Bart stage musical! Joining Tyler are those incorrigible urchins Chris Webb & Robert Johnson from Still Any Good podc...

In 1975 David Dimbleby conducted an interview on television with Spike Milligan, and as the Fates would have it Spike was in the perfect frame of mind for such a probing and personal interrogation. They talked about his childhood, the war, his career, his mental health, the breakdown of his marriage in the fifties, his hopes and regrets and even touch on (then) contemporary events - the boy he sho...

Young Ned Seagoon, walking the streets of London during a particularly thick 'pea-souper,' accidentally knocks over a Miss Selina Clutch. Her strange behaviour mystifies young Neddie until a chance meeting with Dr. Rheingold Fnutt puts him on the track of an underground terrorist organisation led by the reckless 'Overcoat Charlie' intent on wrecking the capital's commercial life by blanketing Lond...

"There once was a beautiful moon, "It was up in the sky, chum, "When he said “What’s the time?” "They replied ‘What?’ "And the horse departed leaving spon." With poetry like that it's no wonder we lost the Empire. And it stands out as one of the most memorable bits of a Goon Show episode which is rather unfairly overlooked: The Moon Show from January 1957. Neddie is a tramp poet, who buys a poetic...

Take three Pythons, a Goon, the father of modern satire, some Mel Brooks regulars, a Young One, a rock legend, a couple of stoners and a host of familiar British character actors and put them all into a comedy pirate film and what have you got? Arrrrrnswers on a postcarrrrrrd please. Joining Tyler this week to discuss Graham Chapman's ambitious if undercooked 1983 film is writer and performer Adri...

"... Sellers is very funny. Unfortunately, the movie’s general approach to hippiedom is what we’ve come to dread. Hippies wear funny clothes, sleep on the stove, don’t wash, read the Los Angeles Free Press, bake pot brownies, put up posters everywhere and operate with a sort of mindless, directionless love ethic. So the movie becomes conventional after all. If they’d dropped Sellers into a real hi...

In 1966, at the height of World Cup fever, an unassuming little British comedy film came out and caused nary a ripple despite a stellar cast of well-known faces. Michael Bentine stars as Horace Quilby, the titular Sandwich Man, who walks the streets of London and seems to know everyone he passes. Without anything so distracting as a plot the film meanders somewhat and is essentially a series of sk...

This week a slight departure as Chris Diamond returns to take a leisurely meander through the world of British comedy, randomly choosing from a selection of topics (such as Who Was The Fifth Goon?) and pondering upon the genius (or otherwise) of such performers as Kenneth Williams, Michael Bentine, Bob Monkhouse, Arthur English, Hinge & Bracket, Bernard Manning and Spike Milligan, plus shows s...

Seven years after the publication of Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel Lolita Stanley Kubrick brought it to the big screen, having adapted the author's screenplay sufficiently, assembled a fine cast and applied the directorial flourishes that would come to mark his films out as unique. As Humbert Humbert Kubrick cast James Mason, who portrayed the predatory intellectual with just the rig...

Sean Gaffney returns to talk about a favourite Goon Show episode from 1956 - Six Charlies In Search Of An Author, loosely based on a play by Fred Pirandello. Was it a cry for help from Spike? A thinly-veiled portrait of a man whose life was beset by the weekly demand for a funny script, pouring scorn and contempt upon the very characters he created? Or was it just a neat idea for a particularly sh...

Fred Nurke is missing! An over-ripe banana in a deserted Cannon Street shipping office is the only clue to his whereabouts. Inspector Ned Seagoon follows the trail to a British Embassy in South America. Why are Senor Gonzales Mess and his gang trying to cut down the only banana tree in the Embassy gardens, and what is the connection between Fred Nurke and the over-ripe banana?  Find out (maybe) by...

Best known to audiences around the world as Lt Gruber from 'Allo 'Allo! Guy Siner joins Tyler this week to talk about the show, his career and his brand new podcast - Listen Very Carefully - in which he and friends & colleagues Kim Hartmann (Helga) and Richard Gibson (Herr Flick) look back fondly and drink gin. Before landing the role of Gruber Guy had appeared in Genesis of the Daleks...

A chaotic naval lieutenant, who cannot be discharged due to his connections, is transferred from the Admiralty to a mothballed destroyer whose crew is running dodgy Bilko-esque money-making schemes. David Tomlinson stars as Lt Fairweather and Peter Sellers, with a whiskery Irish brogue, plays Chief Petty Officer Doherty. Returning guest Graham Rinaldi discusses Val Guest's 1958 comic romp - do...

John Rain & Paul Litchfield join Tyler to discuss Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's 1978 adaptation of the classic Sherlock Holmes story, an attempt to make a hit mainstream comedy but which failed to find an audience. Mostly owing to it not being very good. Directed by American Paul Morrissey this was the first major film project he made without the involvement of Andy Warhol. Rather bizarrel...

It's 50 years since Spike Milligan recorded an LP version of his children's story Badjelly the Witch, with music by Ed Welch. The story is simple and hilarious. Two children, Tim & Rose, go in search of their lost cow Lucy and along the way have adventures with characters such as Binklebonk the tree goblin and his grasshopper Silly Sausage, Mudwiggle the worm and Dinglemouse, a former...

In early March 1958 the elderly actor A.E. Matthews staged a protest outside his cottage in Bushey Heath – he sat on a chair over a hole the council had dug with the intention of erecting a lamp post there. A minor squabble which quickly caught the ear of the media, Matthews’ stand against his local council became a cause célèbre and he was interviewed on television. Spike Milligan liked the cut o...