Goon Pod

He's someone who refuses to embrace modernity and is still scandalised by the obsolescence of wax cylinders in favour of shellac discs, however this week your hidebound host Tyler has been listening to sound recordings via the medium of Compact Disc, albeit with a stiff brandy and a cool damp flannel to hand.  But he needn't have worried - "An Album Called Fred" is a delightful new CD recentl...

"I remember he once castigated me for picking up a wine bottle by its neck." That's David Renwick talking about dining out with Spike Milligan, and in the early eighties Renwick, along with his regular writing partner Andrew Marshall, worked on Spike's 'Q10-by-another-name' There's A Lot Of It About.  David joins Tyler this week to talk about Spike the man, the comic, the creative juggernaut,...

This week Chris Diamond returns to discuss Ghost In The Noonday Sun, a film in which Peter Sellers in a bad wig and bad accent fannies about for ninety minutes. Goon Pod has clocked up 91 episodes - good grief - and so far we’ve talked about a dozen or so films either starring or featuring Peter Sellers and mostly they’ve been pretty good– true, The Blockhouse, Down Among The Z Men and The Great M...

"I want to kill people but... they're all dead!" Director Peter Medak had a less than shipshape experience making the 1973 'pirate romp' Ghost In The Noonday Sun, starring Peter Sellers & Spike Milligan. The film from day one was beset by difficulties, dramas and indignities and as an exercise in therapy in 2016 Medak made the feature-length documentary The Ghost Of Peter Sellers. It charts th...

"Let those undisciplined sprites, The Goons, do their worst - he, Wallace Greenslade, will be true to BBC traditions!" Officially voted listeners' second favourite Goon Show episode of all time, The Greenslade Story is a love letter to the Goons' beloved announcer, 'The Massive Greenslade' (as a colleague nicknamed him) who joined the show in 1953 and stayed with it right to the end in 1960. Big i...

In summer 2022 listeners to Goon Pod were asked what their favourite episodes of The Goon Show were and the response was brilliant - so many of you voted that it took Tyler and a team of unpaid interns several weeks to collate the data, interpret the results, hem and haw and finally prepare THE definitive list of Listeners’ Top 20 Goon Shows. Tyler is joined by Mike Haskins & Sean Gaffney to r...

Actor, writer and director Lee Moone joins Tyler this week to talk about the history of Spike Milligan's The Phantom Raspberry Blower Of Old London Town and how he brought it to the stage in 2015 with 'Guest Phantoms' Jon Culshaw, Danny Baker and John Challis.  Following on from last week's chat with Joel Morris, Lee and Tyler look at the genesis of the original script and dig a bit deeper in...

Comedy writer, author, podcaster and musician Joel Morris is our special guest this week and what could be more Christmassy than a chat about The Phantom Raspberry Blower Of Old London Town? (Plenty - Ed.) Originally conceived by Spike Milligan as a vehicle for him, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, this proposed Goons special was stymied early on by Sellers' filming commitments elsewhere. A couple...

One of Peter Sellers’ favourite episodes of The Goon Show, The Jet-Propelled Guided NAAFI was inspired directly by the news, after Spike Milligan seized on a Daily Telegraph story about the misuse of taxpayer money overseas. James Page joins Tyler to discuss the episode, exploring how a fortunate detail in the original article gave Milligan the perfect comic hook — a gag whose original context may...

As it's nearly Santa's birthday what better way to mark the occasion than by two podcasts doing a crossover episode?   Christopher Webb & Robert Johnson are the hosts of Still Any Good which examines films and television shows that they enjoyed in their misspent youth and now revisit to see if they still hold up today. A perfect example is the 1981 Mel Brooks anthology comedy movie H...

If there's one thing the public cannot reach agreement on it's what was the greatest British black & white Peter Sellers film of all time. There is obviously a strong groundswell of support for that popular favourite, I'm All Right Jack , while trendier types (sneering metropolitan elites looking down on the hoi polloi) insist that Only Two Can Play is far superior. Others argue for The Naked...

Comedian and podcaster Ben Van Der Velde joins Tyler this week to discuss The Fear Of Wages, Spike Milligan's favourite Goon Show ever and a neat parody of the classic French film The Wages Of Fear (later remade as Sorcerer).  Broadcast in March 1956 its entry in the BBC Transcription Services catalogue reads: "For fourteen years Major Bloodnok and Captain Neddie Seagoon have been fighting th...

Our guest this week is podcaster and producer Tilt Araiza, who joins Tyler to talk about Michael Bentine and his ground-breaking television series It’s A Square World. Written by Bentine and John Law, It’s A Square World ran on the BBC from 1960-64 totalling 57 episodes and was a clear influence on later comedy series, notably Monty Python’s Flying Circus. As well as Bentine the programme featured...

Phil Cannon from the Who's He? podcast joins Tyler this week to discuss a film unfairly overlooked by the Academy - Spike Milligan's The Great McGonagall from 1974.  Written by Spike and Joe McGrath (Casino Royale, Digby the Biggest Dog in the World, Not Only But Also) and starring Milligan as the titular poet & tragedian, the film also featured Peter Sellers as Queen Victoria (kneeling o...

Novelist and writer Jonathan Coe is our guest this week. He is the author of several novels which your host holds dear, including What A Carve Up! and The Rotter's Club and his latest book, Bournville, is published this week. A master of social & political satires, state-of-the-nation sagas and generation-spanning comic narratives, Jonathan often plays with the form and, as we find out, before...

EVERYBODY OUT!  For this week's show Tyler and comedian & writer Meryl O'Rourke downed tools and refused to record a podcast until their demands were met! To pass the time they chatted about the cracking 1959 film I'm All Right Jack, starring Peter Sellers, Ian Carmichael, Margaret Rutherford, Terry-Thomas, Dennis Price, Richard Attenborough, Sam Kydd, Victor Maddern and many others. They...

This is where the story really starts: Having enjoyed success on the stage with The Wipers Times and Trial By Laughter Nick Newman & Ian Hislop hit upon the idea of writing a play about Spike Milligan, focusing on his Goon Show years and highlighting his running battles with the BBC. And so they did.  As the play's publicity puts it: "Flanked by his fellow Goons and bolstered by the effor...

This week Tyler talks to voice actor and restorer Keith Wickham about his history with the Goons, about a show he has produced for Radio 4 called Raiders of the Lost Archive (which is being broadcast the day after this podcast goes out, on the 13th October) and a recently discovered Hancock's Half Hour featuring Peter Sellers.  One of this country's most in-demand voice artists, Keith discove...

If you are listening to this show on the day it goes out - Wednesday 5th October 2022 - then it is exactly 60 years since the Beatles' first single, Love Me Do, was released*. It's also exactly 50 years to the day since The Last Goon Show Of All was broadcast! We've previously dedicated a show to the connections between the Beatles & The Goons and an argument could be made that were it not for...

Returning guest Sean Gaffney is back to talk about the Series 9 opener The Sahara Desert Statue - the one about what would happen if a nude Welshman holding a rice pudding in the middle of the desert got hit by an atom bomb.  We talk a great deal about the events and circumstances leading up to the beginning of Series 9 and how it almost didn't get made. Spike Milligan was in Australia issuin...

Roger McGough, John Gorman and Mike McCartney first performed together sixty years ago and very quickly found fame and success as The Scaffold, combining comedy, poetry and music. With Top 10 singles (including a Number One with Lily The Pink in 1968), a slew of acclaimed live shows, albums, television appearances and collaborations with the likes of the Bonzos (as Grimms), The Scaffold proved to...

This week we welcome to the show Chris Shaw of the mighty I Am The Eggpod podcast, who came along to talk about a loch, a sunken galleon, a family inheritance and a faithful old man dog.  Yes, it's The Treasure In The Lake (also known as The Treasure of Loch Lomond) from Series 6 which was issued on LP by the BBC in 1978 (with The Greenslade Story on side 2) and is a fondly-regarded fan favou...

The Goons made China Story twice: once as part of the fifth series and a year or so later as part of The National Radio Show at Earls Court. It was producer Peter Eton's favourite show and a Spike Milligan/Eric Sykes collaboration although exactly who had the lion's share is unclear - probably Spike but Eric must have had a hand in the overall structure.  It's a firm fan favourite, despite pe...

Actor Jeffrey Holland is best known for his role as Spike Dixon, the third rate camp comic in the popular BBC sitcom Hi-De-Hi! but he is of particular interest to this podcast as he took on the rather daunting task of performing Peter Sellers' characters in the much-acclaimed 2001 show Goon Again, alongside Andrew Secombe, Jon Glover and Christopher Timothy and produced by friend of the show Dirk...

Steven Cockcroft, co-host of the tremendous Nothing Is Real podcast, joins Tyler this week to delve into the many connections between the Beatles and the Goons. A major influence on all four Fabs - especially John - The Goon Show ran until 1960 but Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan were to go on and develop friendships with all the Beatles and even work with them professionally (notably Sellers and...