Goon Pod

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 - Tim Elms, Jon Street, Martin Gibbons and James Griffith - join Tyler this week to talk about "The Marriage Bureau" and Tony Hancock's history with Sellers and Secombe in particular. One of the biggest revelations was that Sellers had barely fifteen minutes to read and run through the script before recording yet pulled it off like a pro and the episode is now regarded as one of the standout shows from the first series of Hancock's Half Hour. It's a fun, fact-filled 90 minutes of chat which will appeal to all fans of the Goons, Hancock or radio comedy in general! http://www.tonyhancock.org.uk/ https://goonshow.org/ Twitter: @goonshowpod @NearlyAn @theGSPS @TonyHancockAS

"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 from May and filming Griff's Vietnam Adventure this year - joined Tyler to talk about his career (which does include a prominent role in the film adaptation of Spike Milligan's Puckoon) and was more than happy to reminisce about his time on the likes of Not The Nine O'Clock News, Alas Smith & Jones and The Young Ones, as well as university revues, radio, plays and his subsequent documentaries and travel shows over the last twenty years. Includes chat about: * Mel Smith and their long comedy partnership  * Some favourite S&J sketches (including Porno & Bribeasy)   * The Homemade Xmas Video * The Two Ninnies and Ronnie Barker's reaction to it  * Being Bambi  * Alexei Sayle  * Douglas Adams  * John Lloyd * Chris Langham  * Beryl Reid flirting with him  * The post-war generation of comedians * Almost appearing in Blackadder the Third  * Restoration  * Cleaning skyscraper windows in New York  * Performing in Australia and New Zealand  * The television landscape * Reacting to critics * And working with Frankie of course! As well as his thoughts and observations on Spike and the Goons in general. Griff was extremely generous with his time and tickets for his forthcoming tour are available here: https://www.chortle.co.uk/comics/g/34307/griff_rhys_jones

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 indeed sunken into the Thames in early 1955. Spike was amused by a photograph in the newspaper of an 'Out Of Order' sign sticking out of the river and so, fired by inspiration, wrote this episode to replace the scheduled show, The Six Ingots of Leadenhall Street. Much to Wallace Greenslade's chagrin.  Having previously come on Goon Pod to investigate The String Robberies, Molly McDade returns to talk about piers, oysters, farting mules, Russian frogmen, television police procedurals, David Attenborough, George Raft and even Winston Churchill! Along the way she performs an impressive Willium 'Mate' impression, delivers a heartfelt plea for more Goon-type animation and, most importantly, talks in some detail about seeing the recent Hislop & Newman play 'Spike' a total of three times last year! Molly is on Twitter @AuthorOfNebulae

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 behind the new podcast Podcasto Catflappo! Jeffers is doing God's work by scrutinising the unfairly overlooked Rik Mayall & Ade Edmondson one-series sitcom penned by Ben Elton: Filthy, Rich & Catflap - an important link in the chain between The Young Ones and Bottom. He's also co-host of Sitcom Showdown and waaaaay back in the day cut his teeth on The Goodies Podcast.  He's also Australian but we won't hold that against him.  It's fair to say that Jeffers saved Tyler's bacon on more than one occasion during the recording of this episode, having made copious notes and being properly organised. He was able to navigate through Milligan's peasouper of a plot whenever the hapless host got lost, however, thanks to judicious editing and money down to buy Jeffers' silence the listening audience will remain blissfully unaware of this fact.  https://t.co/SMjiQkp5Gm

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 recently released on Jasmine Records and compiled by producer & sound engineer (and Goons fan) Richard Moore. Bringing together a varied assortment of rare and in some cases never-before released recordings of songs and numbers from the likes of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Ray Ellington, Max Geldray, Angela Morley and George Chisholm, as well as a couple of original recordings which were musical staples of the Goon Show and the original theme music from I'm All Right Jack and Two Way Stretch, "An Album Called Fred" takes its name of course from the 1956 Associated-Rediffusion series A Show Called Fred (and the CD even features the famous 'Jump Into A Dustbin and Dance' number!) Richard joins Tyler to talk about the creation of the album and where the idea originally came from - the CD can be ordered directly from Jasmine here: https://jasmine-records.co.uk/gb/comedy/3660-the-goons-an-album-called-fred.html

"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, and how to a certain extent the incorrigible Milligan acted as a sort of self-appointed patron to the two younger writers.  That said, by this point in their careers they were well on the way to becoming household-name comedy writers with hit shows such as The Burkiss Way on the radio and End Of Part One on television, and Whoops Apocalypse just around the corner. David also had regular writing responsibilities on other shows, notably The Two Ronnies, and within a few years Renwick and Marshall would be the driving forces behind shows such as Alexei Sayle's Stuff.  However, it is for two major series in the 1990s (and into the 2000s) that David Renwick is best known: One Foot In The Grave and Jonathan Creek. As well as discussing Milligan, David talked at length about other aspects of his career, in particular One Foot In The Grave (including an explanation as to how the series is shot through with Neil Simon's creative DNA), as well as his early comedy influences, attending recordings of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and Monty Python's Flying Circus (and is it any wonder that Tim Brooke-Taylor from the former and Eric Idle from the latter were both involved with One Foot In The Grave?), his short-lived career as a journalist on a local newspaper, writing for Mike Yarwood, Bruce Forsyth's Big Night, working with David Jason again in the 2010s on the radio show Desolation Jests and... Bill Cosby.  Tyler's only regret? That he forgot to ask about *that* episode of Father Ted.

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 McGonagall are not universally loved (and it still surprises me the number of people who get wound up by The Magic Christian) but none of them are total stinkers.  Is GITNS really THAT bad? It's certainly up there as one of the worst films Sellers was ever attached to but it's no Where Does It Hurt.  The film features some great actors and performers such as Spike Milligan, James Villiers, Murray Melvin, Clive Revill and blink-and-you'll-miss-him Peter Boyle as well as Anthony Franciosa (described by Chris as being like one of those uncles you had as a kid who wasn't really your uncle) and Dave Lodge with very little to do. The script is pretty wretched, even though it was Milliganised, and had the film actually been released in cinemas at the time no doubt it would have sunk quicker than a pirate ship foundered on rocks.  But of course it did result in a memorable telly advert for gaspers. More on that in the show. 

"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 the many obstacles to making GITNS that Medak had to grapple with, and the largest obstacle was its star.  Tyler and returning guest Chris Diamond watched the documentary and the 1973 film and had a lot to say so their conversation has been broken down into two halves - this week their focus is largely on The Ghost Of Peter Sellers and next week's episode covers the actual film Ghost In The Noonday Sun.

"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 in every sense, Wal fitted right into the show and had no qualms about joining in, often playing odd characters as the script required alongside his official announcer responsibilities. Joining Tyler to talk about this wonderful show is Donna Rees and the pair had a great time talking all things Greenslade!  Also: Sellers' vocal fireworks; why they remade The Pevensey Bay Disaster on the same night; Irene Handl swearing; Ray Ellington barking; some Eccles continuity; Wallace in chains; the Coventry disaster; whatever happened to Morecambe & Wise?.... and Stanley Unwin.

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 run down the list, tease out interesting titbits and generally grumble like middle-aged men tend to do.   Where is YOUR favourite show placed? Will it be in the Top 10? The Top 5? Will it be the coveted Number 1?!  You’ll have to cancel all plans and strap in for ninety minutes of frenetic Goon chart chat to find out!