Goon Pod

"Excuse me, what is the price of sliced ham per portion?"

And so this enigmatic enquiry opens the first episode of Series 7 of The Goon Show - and to launch the new series of Goon Pod Graeme Lindsay-Foot returns to talk about it!

Broadcast in October 1956 as the situation in Suez was worsening, it was a busy period for the Goons - The Ying Tong Song was riding high in the Hit Parade, Son Of Fred was showing on ITV and Harry had a song in the charts. Producer Pat Dixon was too busy to helm the first couple of episodes of the new series so former producer Peter Eton agreed to briefly return. There were also tensions between co-writer Larry Stephens and the BBC.

As well as discussing this and the show itself, Graeme & Tyler touch on Morecambe & Wise, Bob Dylan, Little & Large, George Harrison, Anita West and others!

Plus: Goons in rehearsal, Bentine vs Dawson and the best Goons theme tune!

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 ascribed superlatives aplenty to Irene Handl and Liz Fraser and proposed a motion to officially acknowledge that Esma Cannon was criminally underused!

The film is still strikingly relevant in many aspects and they were able to draw parallels between some of its themes & issues and current events some 60+ years later. Has the world really moved on all that much?

As well as talking about the film itself there were many conversational meanderings via The Young Ones, Battleship Potemkin, Frankie Boyle, Mick Lynch and what is likely to be the first and last reference to Little Mix ever on Goon Pod!

Check out Meryl: https://watch.nextupcomedy.com/videos/merylorovanilla0

According to Peter Sellers: “It all started because Spike Milligan and I once said we wanted to experiment in visual humour. We got as many friends together as we could and went and found a field. That was all we had – friends, a field, a roll of film.”

What resulted was 'The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film' (1959), directed by the up-and-coming Richard Lester, a friend and collaborator of Sellers and Milligan.

The short film soon became a word-of-mouth hit and was even nominated for an Oscar. It helped pave the way for Lester to work with the Beatles several years later and Spike Milligan claimed that it was one of the very few true visual representations of Peter Sellers' sense of humour.

Although accounts vary it has become accepted that the total budget for the film was £70 (including the rent of a field) and the entire cast was made up of - as Sellers says - friends. So we see Graham Stark, Leo McKern, David Lodge, Mario Fabrizi, Bruce Lacey and Johnny Vyvyan, as well as the two Goons themselves.

This week film academic Dr Adrian Smith joins Tyler to talk about this highly influential 11 minutes of mayhem.

Comedy writer, novelist and playwright Jon Canter joins Tyler this week. He talks about Spike Milligan and some of the people he's had the pleasure of working with over the course of his career, including Miriam Margolyes, Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie, Douglas Adams, Lenny Henry, Richard Wilson, Mel Smith & Griff Rhys-Jones and John Lloyd.

They also discuss Margaret Thatcher trying comedy and Prince Charles dancing to Hot Stuff.

It's a packed show folks!

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 childhood memories right up until his final years.

Sky Arts filmed a documentary which originally aired in December last year where viewers saw the likes of Joanna Lumley, Ian Hislop, Eddie Izzard and Sarfraz Manzoor (as well as former Goon Pod guests David Quantick and Al Murray) nosing around this treasure trove.

Spike’s whole life is under the spotlight, from his early days in India to his underwhelming introduction to a Britain of fog, cold baths and terrible food, a world away from what he’d been used to; the wartime highs and lows (a whirlwind romance, being blown up); The Goon Show; his marriages and children; his post-Goons career on television; his campaigning and activism; his books, poetry, music and much more.

Joining Tyler is Simon Meddings - Meds - from Waffle On podcast – a trailblazer in terms of telly and film review podcasts and certainly one of the few to have covered such diverse topics as School For Scoundrels, Fight Club and Donald Sinden! Meds and Tyler talk at length about Spike and his life as filtered through the documentary but find plenty of time to go off on tangents (within the first four minutes they've talked about Michael Caine and The Smiths, for instance) so there's plenty here for everybody who likes a good natter about old films, old telly... and old comics.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/waffle-on-podcast/id298729068