Goon Pod – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Sean Gaffney returns to talk about a favourite Goon Show episode from 1956 - Six Charlies In Search Of An Author, loosely based on a play by Fred Pirandello.

Was it a cry for help from Spike? A thinly-veiled portrait of a man whose life was beset by the weekly demand for a funny script, pouring scorn and contempt upon the very characters he created? Or was it just a neat idea for a particularly shambolic (and funny) episode?

We shall see.

Plus: an AI-generated 80,000-word examination of Series 7 of The Goon Show which leaves a LOT to be desired!

Fred Nurke is missing!

An over-ripe banana in a deserted Cannon Street shipping office is the only clue to his whereabouts. Inspector Ned Seagoon follows the trail to a British Embassy in South America.

Why are Senor Gonzales Mess and his gang trying to cut down the only banana tree in the Embassy gardens, and what is the connection between Fred Nurke and the over-ripe banana? 

Find out (maybe) by listening to this week's edition of Goon Pod, in which Tyler is joined by Jonathan Roberts!

They also examine the wider usage of the word 'nurk' (in its various spellings), wonder at a major US news anchor referencing this particular show and discuss the Guatemala revolution of 1954. Larry Stephens gets some well-deserved props too and they even manage to squeeze in Ed Wood's Bride Of The Monster!

Johnny Speight, creator of Alf Garnett, had a long friendship with Spike Milligan, stretching back to the mid-fifties and the Associated London Scripts days. Speight wrote Till Death Us Do Part which delighted and shocked television audiences in equal measure, with Garnett given to frequent outbursts against what he perceived as society's ills: immigration & foreigners in general, socialism, young people, increasing secularism, homosexuals, lack of due deference to the Royal Family and the ruling elite, feminism and anything else that he didn't really understand and felt threatened by.

In the mid-1980s Speight wrote a follow-up series to Till Death Us Do Part called In Sickness and in Health, which reintroduced audiences to Alf, now older but hardly any wiser. From the second series Alf was a widower (after the death of his co-star Dandy Nicholls) and there gradually grew a new set of characters to antagonise and exasperate him.

In the third series Spike had a guest appearance as Fancy Fred, squaring up to Alf at a tea dance and later bickering over where he parked his van. It's not a huge part and Spike wasn't aiming for any Bafta awards, but it's an intriguing cameo and one which we thought was worth talking about this week on Goon Pod - as well as talking about the Alf Garnett universe in general.

Joining Tyler is comedian John Dredge, currently riding high with a new series of his sketch show The John Dredge Nothing To Do With Anything Show - which can be found HERE: https://www.comedy.co.uk/podcasts/john_dredge_show/

Who is The Fox? 

I am The Fox!

In 1966 Peter Sellers made a film which this podcaster considers one of his top five despite it being commercially and critically underwhelming. It rarely gets spoken about in the same breath as some of the actor's other movies such as Dr Strangelove, Being There, The Pink Panther or The Ladykillers yet is a highly entertaining international romp featuring a standout performance from Sellers as Aldo Vanucci (AKA 'The Fox') and his co-star the wonderfully ebullient Victor Mature, who sends himself up something rotten as faded Hollywood star Tony Powell. 

Devised and written by Neil Simon and directed by Vittorio De Sica and also featuring Sellers' then-wife Britt Ekland as Gina, Vanucci's sister, After The Fox centres around an attempt by The Fox and his gang to smuggle stolen gold bullion into Italy by posing as a film crew. Naturally things do not go according to plan! Joining Tyler to discuss it is film lecturer and writer Graham Rinaldi and both struggle manfully to rid themselves of the catchy Hollies theme tune earworm. 

The award-winning master of spoken word audio, this week's guest is the endlessly entertaining Dirk Maggs.

Dirk has been overseeing the production of The Sandman: Act III, the latest in a long line of collaborations with Neil Gaiman. He was first introduced to Neil via a mutual friend at DC Comics, as Dirk had been involved in audio productions of The Adventures of Superman, Batman: The Lazarus Syndrome and other projects and it was also due to the DC connection that Dirk met Douglas Adams and so began the protracted process of bringing The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy 'back home to BBC Radio' as Adams put it. Dirk has also produced adaptations of Agatha Christie, Stephen King and Arthur C Clarke works.

But it is for his work in comedy that we are focusing on this week - Dirk devised and produced At Last The Go On Show in 1991 to mark the 40th anniversary of The Goon Show; he later was the brains behind Goon Again in 2001, a special one-off restaging of The Goon Show starring Jeffrey Holland, Andrew Secombe, Jon Glover and Christopher Timothy ('a genetically-engineered tribute band' was how he described it).

We also talk about his early break in BBC Radio comedy producing The News Huddlines and shows such as The Long Hot Satsuma starring Graeme Garden and Barry Cryer, and later programmes like Inside Sasha and Flywheel, Shyster & Flywheel which introduced The Marx Brothers to new generations.

It's a terrific conversation about a wide-ranging and never-dull career. More on Dirk here: www.dirkmaggs.com 

Recorded recently during his latest tour as The Pub Landlord – Gig For Victory – Al Murray joined Tyler to talk comedy and revealed how The Goon Show formed the foundations of his comic sensibilities. Al explained why he considers Spike Milligan’s war memoirs to be among the greatest of their kind – brutally honest while blisteringly funny and as fine a testament to the day-to-day life of soldiers during World War II as anything ever written. 

It’s a conversation which took in a lot of topics including Peter Cook, Denis Norden, Spitting Image, Monty Python, Al’s podcast We Have Ways Of Making You Talk, Vic & Bob, Britain’s satire tradition and even prog rock. There's also an impromptu book club as Tyler asked Al for some reading recommendations!

https://thepublandlord.com/

In all, Peter Sellers played Inspector Clouseau in five films (within his lifetime that is!) - The Pink Panther, A Shot In The Dark, The Return Of The Pink Panther, The Pink Panther Strikes Again and Revenge Of The Pink Panther. The Clouseau character was also portrayed on screen in a 1968 film starring Alan Arkin as the hapless Inspector. 

Gary Rodger from podcasts The Sitcom Club & Jaffa Cakes For Proust joins Tyler for a bumper-length chat about the character and the films.

As might be expected, the conversation ranges far and wide and while the pair have a lot to say about Sellers and the franchise there are a handful of handbrake turns involving Hylda Baker, Dudley Moore, Yootha Joyce, Richard O'Sullivan and Talfryn Thomas, not to mention Never Say Never Again and The Melting Pot!

Gary can be found @garyrodger @TheSitcomClub @jaffasforproust

Novelist and scriptwriter Eddie Robson is this week's guest and we discuss the stone cold classic from Series 7, "Wings Over Dagenham" in which Seagoon & McChisholm invent the aeroplane (at a stroke putting the horse-drawn zeppelin market out of business), Henry Crun builds an aerodrome at Croydon and a flat-earther from the Geographical Society sets up a classic Goon Show gag.

The conversation, as ever, veers hither and yon and includes chat about Stanley Kubrick, Kenneth Connor, Die Hard (yes, really), George Martin, why the Coens remade The Ladykillers and we tip the hat to that top-notch trombonist and a man with a reasonable claim to the title of 'Fifth Goon': George Chisholm.

We also talk about the positioning of characters in the show, the effective use of sound effects, underrated gags and a sequence recycled from Series 1. 

This all hopefully will provide you with a mental picture of a particularly fine podcast episode. 

Eddie's new novel 'Drunk On All Your Strange New Words' is published soon: Drunk on All Your Strange New Words: Amazon.co.uk: Robson, Eddie: 9781250807342: Books

@EddieRobson

@goonshowpod

Sacré Fred! This week we're popping across the Channel to the Paris of 1880 and meeting Neddie Toulouse-Lautrec and his beloved Fifi in the classic Series 6 episode 'Tales Of Montmartre'. This was to be the last script collaboration between Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes on The Goon Show and that was not the only thing coming to an end - the following week there'd be a brand new theme tune and soon after a new producer too! 

Our guest this week is motorsport commentator and pundit Jake Sanson who confesses to a deep affection for this particular episode and over the course of an hour he explains what it is that makes it such a special listen for him. 

We also talked about actress Charlotte Mitchell those other rare sightings of actual women on the show, the story behind The Case of the Mukkinese Battlehorn and Tyler's uncle's fondness for the gee-gees. And was Toulouse-Lautrec the most parodied artist in comedy?

Jake is on Twitter @JakeSanson

@goonshowpod

@TheGSPS

Joining Tyler this week is Jon Auty from Behind the Stunts to talk about a 1971 British comedy film featuring some of the biggest names in comedy and light entertainment at the time. 

The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins was conceived, directed and produced by Graham Stark and he managed to bring together the likes of Bruce Forsyth, Harry H Corbett, Leslie Phillips, Alfie Bass, June Whitfield, Ronnie Barker and others to appear in a series of interlinked sketches illustrating the titular sins. 

Notably, it also featured two Goons - Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe - the former writing and appearing in a standout sequence called 'Sloth' while his erstwhile colleague adopts a series of desperate disguises to hoodwink Geoffrey Bayldon in 'Envy'. 

Things discussed include: On The Buses, recasting with Terry Scott, Paul Hardcastle's The Wizard, walnuts, Keith Flint from The Prodigy, 'Boob Coverage', Bert Kwouk's stunt double, the extremely talented Madeline Smith, the mystery of DB Cooper and much much more!

Check out Jon's work: linktr.ee/behindthestunts