A pub tape recorder and a runaway howitzer gave Britain The Goon Show
Spike Milligan first met Harry Secombe when Milligan's unit let a gun roll off a cliff onto Secombe's position. A few years later the pair, with Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine, were taping nonsense in a Victoria pub. The BBC reluctantly hired them, and the Beatles and Monty Python took notes.
The four men gathered from 1948 at the Grafton Arms, a London pub run by Jimmy Grafton, and recorded their Sunday-night fooling on an aluminium disc machine. BBC producer Pat Dixon heard one of those discs and lobbied for a contract, partly because it would tie Sellers to the corporation year-round. The first run went out in May 1951 under the name Crazy People, and its audience climbed from about 370,000 to close to two million over 17 shows. Not one episode of that opening series is known to survive.
The second series brought the new title, while Bentine departed after it amid creative friction with Milligan. Producer Peter Eton, arriving from the drama department, imposed discipline and a sharp ear for sound effects and microphone work. Milligan, the chief writer, suffered a severe breakdown in December 1952 and was off the air for roughly two months; he later blamed the relentless scripting load for that collapse and for the end of his first marriage. Writers such as Larry Stephens, who worked on around 140 episodes, and Eric Sykes kept the scripts coming.
By series 4 each show had settled into three acts joined by a single ridiculous plot, with Max Geldray's harmonica and Ray Ellington's quartet filling the gaps. Milligan and Sellers voiced nearly every character, leaving Secombe as the hero Neddie Seagoon. Catchphrases such as Bluebottle's complaint about being deaded slipped into everyday speech, and the Ying Tong Song reached number 3 on the UK singles chart in 1956. Some baffled BBC executives reportedly called it The Go On Show; Milligan said the name came from Alice the Goon in Popeye.
Ten series ran on the Home Service until 1960, and a reunion titled The Last Goon Show of All followed in 1972 on radio and BBC Two at once. The BBC Transcription Service carried edited versions to Australia, India, Canada and beyond, and NBC aired it in the United States from the mid-1950s. Later episodes used effects from the young BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which other programmes went on recycling for decades.
Source: The Goon Show
