Goon Pod

" One small brown pot containing... another small brown pot." With its memorable cover, photographed by Angus McBean and voted Number 25 in the NME's list of Genuinely Disturbing Record Sleeves, Milligan Preserved was released in late 1961 and featured a series of songs and sketches written and performed by Spike Milligan, with assistance from the likes of Valentine Dyall and Graham...

This week's guest is a man more used to asking the questions - the writer and broadcaster Clive Anderson. A former barrister, Clive turned to comedy and wrote for the likes of Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones before gaining radio & television fame as the host of top improvisational comedy series Whose Line Is It Anyway? He then went on to present a series of chat shows and interviewed some o...

"Excuse me, what is the price of sliced ham per portion?" And so this enigmatic enquiry opens the first episode of Series 7 of The Goon Show - and to launch the new series of Goon Pod Graeme Lindsay-Foot returns to talk about it! Broadcast in October 1956 as the situation in Suez was worsening, it was a busy period for the Goons - The Ying Tong Song was riding high in the Hit Parade, Son...

Comedian Rory McGrath is this week's guest and he freely admits that it was the Goons that got him into comedy. The conversation ranges hither and yon and among other topics we talk about: The creation of Chelmsford 123 Peter Cook The genius of Phil Pope Rory's falling out and eventual reconciliation with Jimmy Mulville Who Dares Wins and Tony Robinson letting it all hang out Barry Cryer -...

Mark Cousins, Mike Haskins & Sean Gaffney join Tyler for a very special New Years Eve bonus episode! Earlier this year listeners to Goon Pod were asked to nominate their favourite Peter Sellers films and they didn't disappoint - hundreds of people responded and thus a Top Twenty list emerged. The chaps count down the list and although most of Sellers' more notable movies appear there a...

As it's Christmas this week we wanted to shake things up and try something a little different... so we decided to talk about a British comedy film which doesn't feature a Goon! A change is as good as a rest and anyway, the film is a cracker. In 1986 John Cleese starred in a Michael Frayn-scripted comic farce called Clockwise, in which he plays headmaster Brian Stimpson who needs to get to...

This week our very special guest is John Lloyd, much admir'd comedy producer and writer, whose credits range from The News Quiz and Quote Unquote on the radio, to Not The Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder, Spitting Image and much much more. At the height of his career he could boast of more BAFTAs than Dame Judi Dench yet so much success took its toll and John freely admits to having suffered...

Emmy-winning screenwriter, author, cartoonist and performer Andy Riley is this week's guest - and rather appropriately, given the time of year, we're talking about the classic series six Goon Show episode The International Christmas Pudding. In a far-ranging conversation Andy and Tyler talk about his history with the show and some of the topics this specific episode raises - such as the ol...

In 1963 a film was released which, had its original casting remained intact, would probably be barely remembered today - The Pink Panther, directed by Blake Edwards. With Peter Ustinov as a sure-footed and dependable French police inspector on the trail of a notorious jewel thief it would doubtless have made respectable money and garnered warm reviews but would hardly have spawned a slew of spin-o...

Writer and host of Comfort Blanket podcast Joel Morris joins Tyler this week to talk about Monty Python's Life Of Brian, released in 1979 to howls of impotent rage from those who refused to accept it for what it was but considered by everyone else as just a really funny film. In some ways a satire on the nature of organised groups, be they politically or religiously motivated, the film centres...

In 1973 Richard Lester's rollicking romp The Three Musketeers was released - subtitled 'The Queen's Diamonds' (The Four Musketeers was filmed at the same time and followed a year after) the movie starred Michael York as D'Artagnan, Oliver Reed as Athos, Frank Finlay as Porthos and Richard Chamberlain as Aramis. Perhaps most memorable was the pairing of Raquel Welch with Spike M...

Comedy writer, novelist and playwright Jon Canter joins Tyler this week. He talks about Spike Milligan and some of the people he's had the pleasure of working with over the course of his career, including Miriam Margolyes, Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie, Douglas Adams, Lenny Henry, Richard Wilson, Mel Smith & Griff Rhys-Jones and John Lloyd. They also discuss Margaret Thatcher trying comedy...

“Don’t you see? If I’d had a barrister who’d asked questions and made clever speeches then I’d be dead as mutton! Your artfulness paid off! The artful way you handled it, the dumb tactics, it saved me!" Released in America as Trial & Error, The Dock Brief starred Peter Sellers as Wilfred Morganhall, a long-in-the-tooth barrister whose career has been blighted at every turn by a lack of op...

This week Tyler is joined by the delightful Katy Secombe, who talks warmly about her dad Harry and reveals what it was like growing up as the daughter of a Goon. They discuss Harry's career and family life: how he met Katy's mum Myra under rather inauspicious circumstances; his alter-ego Neddie Seagoon; health issues in the 1980s; his relationship with the other Goons and various leading f...

Comedy writer Andrew Marshall is this week's special guest. Andrew, along with former writing partner (and Goon Pod guest) David Renwick, wrote for Spike Milligan in the eighties but is perhaps best known for the television programmes 2.4 Children, Alexei Sayle's Stuff, Whoops Apocalypse (and its film spinoff), Hot Metal and The Burkiss Way for radio. More recently he and Rob Grant have cr...

"Happens to all of us y'know... being born." Between 1970 and 1975 Peter Sellers made films which mostly fell flat commercially, and some of which didn't even get released, but there was the odd little gem and The Optimists of Nine Elms, directed by Anthony Simmons and based on his novel, is perhaps one of Sellers' most personal films. The task of embodying Sam, a washed-up o...

This week writer and journalist David Quantick on Ned's Atomic Dustbin. As someone who spent time with the band while writing for the NME and a former member of the GSPS, David was the ideal person to tackle NAD. The band took their name from a Goon Show episode, with band member Jonn Penney suggesting it after flicking through the More Goon Show Scripts book. The Goon Show itself was from the 9th...

October 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Telegoons, a television spin-off of The Goon Show which ran for two series and 26 episodes between 1963 and 1964. Each fifteen-minute show was adapted by Maurice Wiltshire from an earlier Goon Show episode, many of which were firm fan favourites such as Napoleon's Piano, The Canal and Lurgi Strikes Britain, with new soundtra...

2023 is the centenary of Larry Stephens, writer and collaborator with the Goons and Tony Hancock, a unique comedy creator whose life was cruelly cut short in 1959. To celebrate Larry's contribution to British comedy this year, as part of the Birmingham Comedy Festival, the team who previously breathed new life into the Goon Show by restaging a handful of classic episodes has come back together...

"Mrs Wilberforce..? I understand you have rooms to let." And so we are introduced to the sinister and mysterious Professor Marcus, performed with brio by Alec Guinness as a sort of unhinged Alastair Sim grotesque, in Alexander McKendrick's sublime 1955 Ealing comedy The Ladykillers. The film – described by McKendrick as a film about Britain in subsidence - was the first major film role for Peter S...

In 1977 BBC Records released Goon Show Classics Volume 4. It became one of their biggest sellers and no wonder: on the A-side was the episode considered the greatest Goon Show of all time (as voted for by people of impeccable taste, breeding and judgement - Goon Pod listeners) - Napoleon's Piano; on the B-side was the show we're talking about today: The Flea. You heard her back in January...

This week we look at the life and career of the late great Dick Emery (1915-1983), as Tyler and Chris Diamond talk to his son Nick. Dick worked with the Goons both collectively and individually: appearing in a number of Goon Shows, as a substitute for Secombe in The Case of the Mukkinese Battlehorn and briefly in the Sellers film The Wrong Arm of the Law, as well as working extensively with Michae...

Writer and film academic Graham Rinaldi joins the pod this week to discuss the much admired 1963 British comedy romp The Wrong Arm of the Law, starring Peter Sellers, Lionel Jeffries and Bernard Cribbins. Very much a soulmate of the earlier film Two Way Stretch, and featuring many of the same cast, The Wrong Arm of the Law drew upon the talents of the cream of British comedy at the time - scriptwr...

It's Part 2 of The A-Z of Q with Adam Leslie! We talk large noses, Costume Dept tags, Ed Welch, public lavatories, the Queen, a man inside an elephant, terminal dandruff, Neil Shand, 'the w-word', scouts, Hitler, Bob Todd in blackface and much more, plus we discuss how the comedy landscape had altered beyond recognition by the time Q9 bowed out and even include some interesting thought...

The A-Z of Q - Part One! Writer & podcaster Adam Leslie joins Tyler for the first of a two-parter, examining Spike Milligan's Q series on BBC Television, from Q5 in 1969 to Q9 in 1980 (there was also There's A Lot of It About in 1982 but we don't really talk about that). It was heralded as a massively influential show, particularly upon the group which would shortly after the trans...