Goon Pod

This week Duncan Gray - the man behind the GSPS's brand spanking new website - joins Tyler to talk about an underrated Goon Show from Series 7 - The Sleeping Prince. Although the show may not figure highly on fans' lists of favourite Goon Shows, it contains arguably one of the funniest bits of music in the show's history - the glorious national anthem of Yacabaku! The episode was bumpe...

"Things had been going too smoothly to continue as they were. It really was time we had another bout of applied chaos." In 1971 Spike Milligan published the first volume of his war memoirs: Adolf Hitler - My Part In His Downfall. The preface to it anticipates that it would be the first of a trilogy; in actual fact six further books were written over the next twenty years. Although AHMPIH...

Canadian comedian and writer Zach Mitchell spent an entire summer vacation listening to every existing Goon Show. While others on the beach were indulging in aquatic horseplay, flicking towels at each other or kicking sand in the faces of skinny sunbathers, Zach was on board Ned Seagoon's snow-plough, avoiding falling pianos outside London embassies and taking up the flugelhorn as a precaution...

John Williams returns to talk about one of the strongest - and confusing - Goon Shows from Series 8! This episode of Goon Pod goes out literally days after Larry Stephens' centenary and Treasure in the Tower sees the debut of an enduring phrase he gifted to the Goon Show - you'll have to listen to find out! Set in the year 1600 and the year 1957, Sir Walter Raleigh brings back treasure fro...

Exactly two weeks before his first encounter with the band which was to change his life, producer George Martin, assisted by Stuart Eltham, recorded a parody of the 1957 film The Bridge On The River Kwai at EMI Studios in London. Featuring the vocal talents of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and an uncredited Dudley Moore, Bridge On The River Wye was released on LP in No...

What happens when one man, a criminal mastermind, who is desperate for immortality and will stop at nothing to achieve it, comes up against his greatest foe - a weary pensioner with a lawnmower fixation? As if out of a Trap, this week actors & comedians Paul Litchfield & Jeremy Limb join Tyler to hem and haw and (occasionally) howl at Peter Sellers' final film, The Fiendish Plot of Dr...

Comedian Pierre Novellie is this week's guest. Born in South Africa, his family moved to the Isle of Man when Pierre was turning seven and it wasn't long after this that he discovered the Goon Show - he was hooked and has loved it ever since. Pierre joins Tyler to talk about this and other influences, and the two share memories of assimilating into a culture which was instinctively familia...

Real movie stardom pretty much eluded Spike Milligan, although he appeared in quite a few. He was an unlikely leading man and there are only a small handful of films in which his name appears above the title - this week Jeremy Phillips of Cinema Limbo joins Tyler to mull over one of them: arguably Spike's 'biggest' film, Postman's Knock from 1962. In the early sixties Spike was sig...

"Good heavens! It's Evans!" Jon Auty from Behind The Stunts returns this week to discuss the 1972 fish-out-of-water comedy film Sunstruck, starring Harry Secombe as Welsh schoolteacher Stanley Evans. His romantic intentions towards a colleague stymied by a beefier rival, Stanley sees a poster offering jobs to British schoolteachers in New South Wales. Stanley applies, imagining a lif...

"Who would have suspected him? I mean, nobody ever noticed him. I never did." In 1969 Canadian director Alvin Rakoff directed a big screen version of his successful television play Call Me Daddy, which had starred Donald Pleasance and Judy 'Keeping Up Appearances' Cornwell. Now renamed Hoffman, the film starred Peter Sellers and newcomer Sinead Cusack. Benjamin Hoffman, a manager...

Actor & writer Chas Early first heard the Goons when he discovered in his dad's record collection a 1967 LP called Goon But Not Forgotten, featuring Six Charlies In Search of An Author and Insurance, the White Man's Burden. It's the latter show which he discusses this week, a tremendous episode which at first appears to focus on a flannelled fool's attempt to make a fortune out...

Originally formed in 1972, The Goon Show Preservation Society (GSPS) has for over fifty years championed all things Goon and achieved remarkable success in keeping the show fresh and relevant into the 21st century. One of its patrons recently got fitted for a crown so it can count among its supporters folk from the highest echelons of society right the way down to poor wretches kipping in dustbins...

Think of all the great comic characters brought to life by Peter Sellers - Bluebottle, Clouseau, Strangelove, Percy Quill, Dr Pratt, Fred Kite and countless others - but chances are you won't think about Tommy Grando. Who? In 1972 Sellers made a surprise guest appearance in his old mate Eric Sykes' titular sitcom, co-starring the sublime Hattie Jacques. Although Tommy Grando could hardly b...

In 2022 Spike Milligan’s family opened up his archive to selected guests – and what an archive it is! Hundreds of tapes, film rolls, scrapbooks, photographs, unpublished novels & scripts, box files and albums, much of it meticulously documented and annotated by Milligan himself, including bound volumes of family history, wartime journals and assorted paraphernalia covering his earliest childho...

Chris Diamond returns with the second part of our chat about 1957's The Smallest Show On Earth. We talk much more about the actual film and highlight several delightful moments, such as the scene in which the three elderly staff watch an old silent movie while the kinema is closed, and projectionist Percy Quill's evident elation following a (nearly) faultless film showing. We also ask the...

Chris Diamond returns once again to examine one of Peter Sellers' most beloved earlier films, the 1957 Basil Dearden-directed The Smallest Show On Earth. As well as Sellers the film features winning turns from Margaret Rutherford, Bernard Miles and Francis De Wolff, with stolid support from the film's nominal stars, husband and wife Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna. Matthew & Jean Spe...

Mark Cousins returns to look again at the radio career of Peter Sellers, this time concentrating on the 1950s and largely eschewing his Goon Show activity. Sellers was constantly in demand, and nowhere more so than on the wireless; indeed, it wasn't until the latter half of the decade that he began to wind down his appearances behind the microphone and focus more on the silver screen. He more...

For this 100th edition of Goon Pod writer and podcaster Tim Worthington dons a sailor's tunic with arrows printed on it and returns to discuss the classic Goon Show Tales of Old Dartmoor, which was on the first LP ever issued of Goons episodes in late 1959. We discuss the show itself and what was happening in the world around the time it was broadcast... and listeners can expect to hear us chat ab...

As next week sees the 100th edition of Goon Pod drop, here's a special 100-minute long Easter bumper bonus episode! Tyler shares clips of some of the many guests he's hosted on the pod over the last hundred shows - the selection is designed to showcase how the show has developed and evolved and (in theory) can be enjoyed by anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Goons, as long as they...

"There was only one man for the job... there was only one man available!" And so begins The Case of the Vanishing Room, the earliest Goon Show we've covered so far on this podcast, from 1954. It was later remade for the Vintage Goons series and that is the version most people will be familiar with but it stuck very closely to the original script. This week returning guest Mike Haskin...

This week's guest is John Williams, who joins Tyler to examine a couple of classic telly interviews from the seventies hosted by Barnsley's favourite son Michael Parkinson. In 1972, fresh from their triumphant return in The Last Goon Show Of All, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers joined Michael Parkinson for a special show, with Spike Milligan on VT and Ray Ellington providing the music. A c...

Last year the sky was dark with hats when it was announced that a missing Hancock's Half Hour radio show had been discovered, and for once Hancockians and Goonatics were able to put aside their differences and embrace like sisters because it turned out that this newly discovered episode featured the vocal talents of Peter Sellers! The hosts of Very Nearly An Armful, the Tony Hancock podcast -...

"He opened the door and there he was standing in just a pair of gold boxer shorts..." This was how a young BBC Radio producer named Griff Rhys Jones met Frankie Howerd for the first time! Sometimes on this podcast we like to open it up and talk more generally about comedy - and especially when we get a special guest of Griff's calibre! Rude not to.  Griff - who will be touring his new show fr...

How to salvage London's sunken Westminster floating Pier? Simple. Don't raise the pier - lower the river! And so begins another (mis)adventure in which the two arch fiends Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty hoodwink the hapless Neddie Seagoon in what was probably one of the most topical shows the Goons ever attempted - The Sinking of Westminster Pier, broadcast the week after that historic landmark had...

President Fred of Argentina owes the South Balham Gas Board four pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence and thus begins a thrilling tale of international intrigue, replete with revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, forged money, real money, red sacks, blue sacks and even coercion by liquorice allsorts!  Joining Tyler to unpack this awfully knotty Goon Show from 1955 is Jeffers, the man b...