Abigoliah: Welcome to All British Comedy Explained, a podcast we almost called An English Bloke Mansplains British Comedy to an American, because that’s exactly what we’re doing. I am stand-up comedian and ignorant American Abigoliah.
Tom: I guess that makes me mansplainer Tom Salinsky.
Abigoliah: There we go, there we go. Which technically, it’s not mansplaining because I’ve asked you to do this.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: I have asked you to explain this to me.
Tom: At the risk of mansplaining mansplaining – yes. If there’s consent both ways, then I don’t think anyone could object. I mean, this is the internet. People will find things to object to.
Abigoliah: Oh, don’t worry. People will find reasons to dislike us.
Tom: Yes. Anyway, our comedy journey is going to take us into the world of radio for the first time. How are you feeling about that?
Abigoliah: I’m very excited about it. I’m very excited. Why don’t you tell our listeners what we will be listening to today?
Tom: So this is very much the patient zero of British comedy. If you listen to somebody talking about the person or the group that inspired them, very often they’ll be talking either about The Goon Show or somebody who was inspired by The Goon Show. And that’s what we’re listening to today: Spike Milligan.
boing
Abigoliah: See, ’cause we’re doing radio, so I bought radio folios. We got boing and – and – and… what were you saying about Spike Milligan?
Tom: Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers…
boing
Abigoliah: Wait – wrong one. Wrong one. Hold on.
applause
Abigoliah: Yay! Yay!
Tom: So does that applause suggest that any of those names mean anything to you?
Abigoliah: I’ve heard the name Spike Milligan.
Tom: From me?
Abigoliah: From you. But I don’t know – I don’t know any of them.
wa-wah
Abigoliah: I gotta use it. So then it’s tax deductible?
Tom: Of course. Excellent. Yes, yes, yes.
Abigoliah: Eight quid.
Tom: All British accountancy explained. Peter Sellers – you ever heard of?
Abigoliah: Honestly, I’ve heard these names bandied about, probably by other people that are not you. But if you put up a photo of any of them, I would not know who it is. When people say Peter Sellers, I think Tom Selleck, and that’s a different person.
Tom: That is an entirely different person, yes.
Abigoliah: That’s just two people whose last name begins with the letter “sells”, you know? So, yeah.
Tom: All right. Now, I should also say for this one: I am not really a Goon Show expert. Okay, so I did get some help. I called in the big guns – a very fine podcaster and a long-time goon fan called Tyler Adams, who I want to give a shout-out to, who very kindly fact-checked an early version of my notes. So I want to say right up front: any little details I got right are due to him. Any errors, oversimplifications, or omissions are my own. And I would encourage listeners and viewers to check out Tyler’s excellent podcast, Goon Pod, if this is of interest to them.
Abigoliah: Very big thanks to Tyler.
Tom: All right. So The Goon Show was first broadcast in 1951.
Abigoliah: Okay, so we’re going back.
Tom: Way back. So this is the year that The King and I opened on Broadway.
Abigoliah: Classic.
Tom: King George VI opened the Festival of Britain, which was a huge exhibition mainly on the South Bank in London, with offshoots all over the country. And I thought of you when I discovered this: the very first episode of I Love Lucy was transmitted on CBS.
Abigoliah: You said fifties, and I was thinking about I Love Lucy. So yay!
Tom: So it’s starting that far back has an interesting consequence, which is: unlike people like Peter Cook and John Cleese, the architects of The Goon Show all served during World War Two. Peter Sellers was in the Air Force, as was Michael Bentine. Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe were both in the Royal Artillery, which is where they met. And according to legend, Spike Milligan was in charge of a huge anti-aircraft gun, which he allowed to roll off a cliff where it narrowly missed a truck containing, among others, Lance Bombardier Harry Secombe. Milligan stuck his head in the truck and asked, “Anybody seen a gun?” To which Secombe responded, “What colour was it?”
Abigoliah: So they were already working from the very beginning?
Tom: Exactly. In fact, they spent much more of their time in the service working as entertainers. Harry Secombe became too valuable as a comedian in the Royal Artillery Training Depot show to be sent to the front lines. Spike Milligan was playing trumpet for an army dance band, and Peter Sellers was touring England as part of the Entertainments National Service Association.
Abigoliah: This all sounds very familiar to me because it’s the opening scenes of the movie White Christmas.
Tom: Oh, right. Yes – which I’ve seen, but not for many years.
Abigoliah: That’s how they meet.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Yeah. That’s how Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby meet – serving in the war together.
Tom: I can never remember the acronym. Entertainments National Service Association is ENSA. This is how it’s normally referred to. Unless I had that in my notes here, I wouldn’t remember it. What I do remember is the joke version.
Abigoliah: Which is?
Tom: Every Night Something Awful. So after the war, Harry Secombe took his act to the Windmill Theatre in Piccadilly Circus, where he and Milligan met Michael Bentine. And these nightclub performances eventually got them an agent and an appearance on television. But this was a live broadcast from Crystal Palace.
Abigoliah: Ooh.
Tom: Because television was in its infancy.
Abigoliah: So this is back when television was plays. We’ve talked all about this in one of the other episodes. So there’s no footage of this.
Tom: No, absolutely not. Television was still kind of in this very early experimental phase, but radio was big business. That was where people went for their entertainment. They gathered around the radio set.
Abigoliah: Still is, sort of.
Tom: But a lot of the big radio stars were essentially music hall veterans. So music hall is the British equivalent of vaudeville in America. So these comedians and music acts and other speciality acts who tour around the country basically doing the same act wherever they went – and they were recruited into radio, and most of them were kind of replicating their music-hall act over the airwaves. So there were huge stars: people like Arthur Askey, Tommy Handley, Richard Murdoch. But Spike Milligan, in particular, thought that these shows were corny. They were boring. And he preferred American movie comedians like the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So you said these were big stars. I’ve not heard any of those names before.
Tom: And nor has anyone listening.
Abigoliah: I was gonna say. Yeah. Have they stood the test of time?
Tom: It’s The Goon Show that cast the longest shadow. And it kind of obliterates a lot of the other shows that are happening around the same time. If people do remember other shows from around the same time – like, for example, The Navy Lark – very often it’s because people in that went on to things that are remembered better. So The Navy Lark was an early outing for the third Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee. So people have heard the name The Navy Lark because whenever you read about Jon Pertwee, it’ll be: he cut his teeth in radio in things like The Navy Lark.
Abigoliah: Okay, okay. When you say–
Tom: No one’s ever heard The Navy Lark – at least no one my age or younger.
Abigoliah: Okay, fair.
Tom: Unless you are just, like, a particular fan of old radio comedy. So one day, Michael Bentine invited his friend Peter Sellers to meet Milligan and Secombe. And Sellers was a bit younger than the others, but he was already developing an incredible range of impersonations and funny voices, which he’d already used to some effect on other people’s radio shows. But like Milligan, he wasn’t too impressed with the quality of the scripts that he’d been given.
Abigoliah: So this is becoming a theme in every episode. It happened with The Young Ones and Monty Python and Not Only… But Also: these people coming in and going, “I don’t like the way this is done. I can do it better.” So we’re just doing this through the decades. Everyone’s going, “I’m wiping the board clean and I will do it better.” So these are the first guys who wipe the board clean and did it better.
Tom: Yeah. And that’s partly because this is our landmark season – that’s going to be happening a lot. And it varies, actually, because–
Abigoliah: By the way, can I just jump in for our dear listeners? Because we have – I don’t want to brag – but we have been yelled at on the internet. The theme of this particular series – or season, depending on which country you’re listening in – is landmarks, as in: the shows that change the game. Just because you like Absolutely Fabulous doesn’t mean it changed the game. I also want to watch Absolutely Fabulous. We will get to Absolutely Fabulous and Only Fools and Horses and Fawlty Towers, but these are the ones that wiped the board and started over.
Tom: And it’s worth saying that it’s usually not a kind of scorched earth. Like, for example, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson talk very fondly about listening to The Goon Show. So they are building on what went before – but very often it’s what comes immediately before that they don’t like. So in the case of Milligan, Sellers, Secombe, it’s the radio comedians who are doing their music-hall act.
Did you know on radio at this time there was a show called Educating Archie?
Abigoliah: No. What’s that?
Tom: Which was a ventriloquism act on the radio.
crickets
Tom: It was hugely popular.
Abigoliah: Oh God – why is it still going? Hold on. It doesn’t like it.
Tom: You’re being heckled by your own technology.
Abigoliah: There we go. All right. I’ll stop playing that now. I just wanted to get crickets in once. Okay. Stop looking at your toy.
Tom: Yeah. It was one of the hugest shows, and a couple of other comedians that we might meet at some point got their break being the foil to Archie.
Abigoliah: You know, I think I could be a ventriloquist on the radio, I think.
Tom: Doesn’t seem too hard.
Abigoliah: Yeah. That’s one of those you look at and go, “I could do that.”
Tom: On the radio, they will never see your lips move. All right – so eventually all four of these men started working for BBC Radio and they were asked to make a comedy pilot.
Abigoliah: So this is Spike Milligan.
Tom: Harry Secombe.
Abigoliah: Harry Secombe.
Tom: Peter Sellers.
Abigoliah: Peter Sellers. Not Tom Selleck – Peter Sellers.
Tom: And Michael Bentine.
Abigoliah: Michael Bentine.
Tom: Who is the fourth Goon in the way that, like, Stuart Sutcliffe is the fifth Beatle. Okay, so we’ll come back to Bentine in a minute. But they realised they had this enormous talent in Peter Sellers, and they kind of oriented the whole of this pilot episode around his extraordinary ability to do funny voices and big vocal characterisations. And the BBC just didn’t know what to make of it, and they didn’t commission it. And maybe one mistake they made – and this they did go kind of back and forth over with their producer – but they didn’t record it in front of an audience.
Abigoliah: Ohh…
Tom: And that might have been an error. So eventually they got another chance a few years later, and this time they made sure there was a crowd there, and that reassuring laughter was enough to convince the BBC to give them a shot. But it wasn’t enough to convince the BBC to let them call it The Goon Show.
Abigoliah: So was it a series of sketches? Was it a one-play? So, as I was saying before we started: I’ve done adjacent research – I don’t research what we’re doing, but to get into the mood, I bought my folio and I’ve been listening to Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Shop.
Tom: Cool – which I’ve never heard.
Abigoliah: It’s fabulous.
Tom: Yeah, I bet.
Abigoliah: It’s him the whole time. And so it’s kind of like stand-up monologues and kind of like, maybe political or social commentary. And he plays different characters, but it starts out with, like, the sound of footsteps as he narrates – kind of like what will be the opening theme of that episode – and he’s walking to the sandwich shop, and then you hear a door open, and it’s like, “Welcome to Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Shop,” and then some music plays. And then he’s in the shop and–
Tom: His TV sketch show – he’d often do bits of essentially stand-up that were filmed with him walking down the street. Yeah. That’s obviously a thing he likes.
Abigoliah: Oh, okay. So that’s a little callback. See: always learning on this podcast. But yeah – I’ve listened to all five seasons – or series – they’re on BBC iPlayer. And it’s interesting: I started listening to the most recent one and going backwards. Because what happened: it starts in 2016, and then there’s some gaps in the years, but ends in, I think the last one was this year, 2025. So it’s interesting to hear – there’s a lot of political commentary, and obviously there was – there was a big event. I don’t know if you heard about it: the pandemic in between. So it’s really interesting to kind of listen to what he has to say. But it also holds up comedically.
Tom: Great.
Abigoliah: So yeah, highly recommend. But yeah. So what were they– Sorry. That was a huge tangent. So what were they doing?
Tom: So as television films were essentially theatre productions with cameras in front of them, a lot of radio comedy was essentially music hall with microphones in front of it. So typically a half-hour show would be two or three music acts interspersed with comedy sketches. And that’s what The Goon Show was.
Abigoliah: So Not Only… But Also, but for the radio?
Tom: Exactly. Yes. Yeah, yeah – very similar vibe. But the name The Goon Show was the thing that the BBC was stuck on.
Abigoliah: Me too! Because it sounds– I don’t know why. I don’t think it’s racist, but somehow the word “goon” seems racist to me. But I don’t think it is.
Tom: It wasn’t used as a term of abuse. It was what prisoners in World War Two used to refer to German guards.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: That’s its origin. And it does, not to put too fine a point on it, sound quite close to a word which is definitely a racial slur.
Abigoliah: Maybe that’s why I keep cringing every time you say it.
Tom: Yeah. But there is a story – probably apocryphal – about some BBC executives in the review committee going through the week’s programmes and saying, “What is this go-on show?” So for the first series, it went out as Crazy People.
buzz
Abigoliah: Wait – that’s the wrong one.
wa-wah
Tom: So this was a reference to the popular Crazy Gang, who regularly appeared at the London Palladium. From the second series onwards, they were allowed to call it The Goon Show, but the second series was billed as The Goon Show, featuring those crazy people Spike Milligan, Michael Bentine, Peter Sellers, etc.
Abigoliah: I mean, maybe this is just because it’s the ’50s so this was a novel idea, but the idea of being like “the crazy people,” I really hate that as a title. “I’m a wild and crazy guy.”
Tom: But these shows were bizarre, and they took a little while to find an audience. But by the end of the second series, the audience had grown from a few hundred thousand to nearly two million.
Abigoliah: Whoa!
Tom: And it started to become a really big popular thing. But a few things happened at this point.
Abigoliah: That is more listeners than I think Live at the Apollo gets in its current series.
Tom: That’s a good stat.
Abigoliah: Could be wrong. I don’t think it is. I’m not the one who does the research.
Tom: Do you know, it didn’t occur to me to research current viewing figures for Live at the Apollo when I sat down to do this, but anyway – that’s left as an exercise for the listeners. Yeah. So after the second series, Michael Bentine stepped away. He’d kind of been playing the lead character in the sketches – very often a mad inventor called Osric Pureheart – but I think he kind of felt as if he was playing to a different tune than the other three. And so he stepped away. And that allowed Milligan, Sellers, and Secombe to flourish. And Milligan had taken on the bulk of the writing. But the strain was beginning to tell. So the other thing that happened at the end of the second series is that he had the first of a series of nervous breakdowns.
Abigoliah: Spike Milligan.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Oh, what a comedy genius. Did he write an Edinburgh Fringe show about it? No, it was too early.
Tom: He definitely would have done.
Abigoliah: How many series did it run in total?
Tom: So it ran until 1960.
Abigoliah: Oh, this is American-style running.
Tom: Over the years, the BBC put out 238 episodes of The Goon Show.
Abigoliah: And they were each a half-hour or an hour. I could finish that in a day.
Tom: I suspect not.
Abigoliah: Come at me.
Tom: But yeah, it ran for a long time. It ran for ten years. And series varied in length. There are a few where Milligan was not well enough to perform. But this is one interesting thing: when Milligan was unable to perform, Peter Sellers just took over all of his characters.
Abigoliah: Just doing different voices.
Tom: But when there’s a couple of shows that Peter Sellers couldn’t appear in, it took two or three different actors to fill in for him because he was so vocally dexterous.
Abigoliah: Amazing. Now go back, because I interrupted. Tell me about the breakdown.
Tom: Spike Milligan said that The Goon Show ruined his health – the strain.
Abigoliah: Physically or mentally?
Tom: Both. It drove him mad. He was on lithium for most of the rest of his life.
Abigoliah: “Oh, the voices.” Sorry. It’s not funny. Mental health crises aren’t funny.
Tom: And the strain – just the physical strain of… They’ve been commissioned for 26 episodes. They’re recording one a week. And that means every week you just have to come up with another script. And there were times when he was, you know, finishing writing the script on the morning they were recording in front of an audience that evening.
Abigoliah: Wait, so you said 26 episodes?
Tom: Oh – many series contained 26 episodes.
Abigoliah: Okay. This is American-style. But unlike – as we talked about in our very first episode, zero – like, they don’t have a huge team of writers. It’s just the three or four of them – at first four, and then three.
Tom: Secombe and Sellers very, very rarely did any writing.
Abigoliah: So it all came down to Spike.
Tom: Spike Milligan had a few collaborators, notably Larry Stevens, who was a professional script writer, and he kind of taught Spike Milligan early on how to take his wild flights of comic fancy and mould them into something resembling a story. And then other people came in and out, like Eric Sykes – another name that might mean something to you – John Antrobus… A few other people kind of helped out here and there. But the bulk of it was Milligan, and The Goon Show is really what the inside of Spike Milligan’s head sounds like.
Abigoliah: This is very intriguing.
Tom: And it began, as we were saying, as a series of sketches. And then as time went on – and a lot of these early shows are lost – but by about the fifth series, it tended to be one story over the course of half an hour, with these musical interludes.
Abigoliah: A lot of people in entertainment have had their entertainment careers simultaneously make them and ruin their life, as he said. Did Spike Milligan say why – did he just say it was the strain?
Tom: Yeah, just the pressure.
Abigoliah: Did he say why he couldn’t walk away?
Tom: I mean, when you’re a success, it’s hard to walk away.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And in the end, they did bring it to a close. And that was for other reasons besides–
Abigoliah: After ten series, though.
Tom: I mean, nothing lasts forever.
Abigoliah: Now I really respect The Young Ones for going: “We’re doing two.”
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: “We’re doing two. We’re staying friends. We’re not losing our minds.” Yeah. Okay.
Tom: So the structure of a typical episode begins with a very proper BBC announcer – mainly a man called Wallace Greenslade – who acts as like an emcee. And then Harry Secombe generally just plays everyman Neddie Seagoon, who gets embroiled in some kind of scheme or other by one of the Goon Show repertory company of characters. So we have elderly couple Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister; purringly evil Hercules Grytpype-Thynne and his lackey Count Jim Moriarty; village idiot Eccles; eager Boy Scout Bluebottle; ancient army man Major Dennis Bloodnok; and more.
Abigoliah: Yeah, you’re gonna have– Once we start, I feel like all that came into my head and left my head. I’m not even going to nod and go. So when we listen to it, you’re gonna have to be like, “This is who this is.”
Tom: I mean, they pretty much introduce themselves. Okay. Should be fine.
Abigoliah: But are those all– That’s all the characters. That’s not just one voice. But that’s not one person voicing all of them.
Tom: It’s almost always Sellers or Milligan. So when it’s a double act – when it’s Henry and Minnie Bannister – one of them is Sellers, one of them is Milligan. If it’s a single character like Major Bloodnok or Bluebottle – or actually, Bluebottle is often paired up with Eccles – but Bluebottle is Sellers.
Abigoliah: It just occurred to me that as we listen to this – whereas everything else I could be like, “Oh, okay, that’s Terry Gilliam,” okay, that’s who that looks like – and then he shows up in another sketch and I can be like, “I recognise him.” Their voices are going to be changing, so I’m not going to know who’s who.
Tom: You’ll probably be able to pick out Milligan. But like I said, one of the things that they latched onto early on is Sellers’s extraordinary ability to transform himself. That was kind of what he was known for. He said in interviews again and again – it was sort of like a catchphrase of his almost – that there was no real Peter Sellers. He was simply the characters that he played.
Abigoliah: Oh wow. That is such an actor thing. That is– I mean, we both have friends who are actors, so I don’t want to besmirch them too much, but people who are really, really, really good at acting are horrible company because they don’t have a personality. They just let the character fill them. Yeah.
Tom: Oh – one other thing it might be worth mentioning. I don’t think this comes up in the episodes that we are going to listen to, but based on what you’ve said about The Goon Show’s name, this is maybe worth mentioning: Spike Milligan had grown up in India.
Abigoliah: Are we going to hear some Indian accents?
Tom: He was particularly fond of doing a British-Indian accent.
Abigoliah: It’s okay, man. Hank Azaria was doing it in the ’90s. You know what I mean? I grew up with that sort of thing.
Tom: He later reprised this in his television sketch shows and his 1969 ITV sitcom Curry and Chips.
wa-wah
Tom: And there are also two musical interludes per episode, almost always by Dutch harmonica player Max Geldray and the Ray Ellington Quartet. And just like with Wallace Greenslade, Geldray and Ellington occasionally get heard in other contexts – they get kind of dragged into the action. And in Ray Ellington’s case, the joke is usually about the colour of his skin.
Abigoliah: Oh no.
Tom: It was a different time, I should say. I think these jokes are often– I was thinking about this the other day. I think it’s fair to call them innocent. So, for example – I don’t think this is in the episodes we’re going to listen to – but there’s an episode in which Neddie Seagoon says something like, “Are you a blacksmith?” and Ray Ellington responds, “My name’s Smith, and you’ve got eyes, haven’t you?”
Abigoliah: Okay. Yeah. That’s–
Tom: So they’re not, like, punching down.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But I think the word “innocent” has two connotations: positive and negative. The positive connotation is “no harm is meant,” but the negative connotation is “no care has been taken.”
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And I think that is a fair assessment of those jokes. And there are occasional jokes about Max Geldray being Jewish as well. I think in one episode Harry Secombe says that his nose is fine – after all, it’ll keep the rain off his tie.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Here’s the thing: whenever we talk about, like, what you can and can’t say in comedy, and some people say you can’t say anything anymore – comedy has evolved as more people have entered the discussion and have been able to be listened to. And like – not to excuse anything that’s ever been said in comedy, and not to be like, “It wasn’t that big of a deal,” because usually I’m not the punching bag, being a white lady – but yeah, I think it’s often kind of important to know what was acceptable at one point, to see how it’s evolved, and then to look at certain jokes and be like, “Yeah, but if you could say it, would you want to?” Yeah, exactly.
Tom: And I don’t think Ray Ellington and Max Geldray would have experienced these jokes as cruel, or themselves as victims. That doesn’t come across at all. And they wouldn’t have stuck around for ten years, I don’t think. You know, even given that maybe they didn’t have their absolute pick of gigs and this was a plum role to get. I don’t think they were persecuted. I don’t want to run away with that idea. Yeah. But this just does sound to me a bit– a bit careless.
Abigoliah: They’re not around to ask how they felt about it anymore. But it kind of makes me think about when Friends started to stream on Netflix. Younger generations started to watch it–
Tom: Yes, this pasty-white New York, which bore no resemblance to the New York that you’d actually see if you went and visited.
Abigoliah: And they were also horrified at how homophobic it was. And everyone was like, “It’s so homophobic, it’s so homophobic.” And I don’t disagree. But what I will point out is one of the creators of Friends was a gay man who is alive, and I never saw anyone ask him, “How do you feel about it now?” And this is what I mean. Like, I wrote it, so he would have been okay with it – but looking back, was it like institutionalised, like, “Oh, this is what the joke is,” and you never thought about how you felt about it at the time? How do you feel about it now? I’m always so curious, as tastes and sensitivities evolve, how people might feel about it now.
Tom: This is a real digression, but there’s another radio comedy a little bit later called Round the Horne, which again featured– it wasn’t a story; there’d be different sketches, but there were recurring characters. And you had very proper, avuncular Kenneth Horne anchoring these crazy characters played by a small repertory company of actors. And the most celebrated were a very effeminate couple called Julian and Sandy, played by closeted gay man Kenneth Williams. And I think– was Hugh Paddick gay or was he straight? I actually don’t know. But anyway: these very, very camp men talking in this slightly made-up, slightly appropriated Polari language, full of all this obscure slang and some very, very dirty jokes.
So Kenneth Horne would visit them and they had, like, a different job every week. And he visited them and they were working as lawyers:
Kenneth Horne: Can you help me? I’ve erred.
Sandy: Yeah, we’ve all ’eard, ducky.
Kenneth Horne: Will you take my case?
Julian: Well, it depends on what it is. We’ve got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time.
Kenneth Horne: Yes, but apart from that.
Tom: That’s a very good joke. And the point is: you listen to them today and they sound like the most outrageous stereotypes. But gay men in the early ’60s loved Julian and Sandy because that was the only representation they had, and it seemed very affectionate.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And just when you start to get included in the conversation, I guess – like you were saying, how they make jokes about their Jewish cast members – it’s like, at least we’re talking about it. At least they know the Jewish people are on the radio. They wouldn’t know otherwise.
Tom: The last thing to say about The Goon Show is that Spike Milligan’s scripts also tested the BBC sound effects department to its limits.
Abigoliah: What do you mean?
fart
Abigoliah: That’s a fart sound.
Tom: The sound effects department was used to only providing footsteps on a gravel path, or the opening of a squeaky door. But it was pushed to near breaking point by Milligan’s request for things like a sock full of custard hitting the ceiling.
Abigoliah: That’s not on my thing.
Tom: Or an elephant falling downstairs. I think he’s supposed to put in the stage directions: “If an elephant isn’t available, a rhino will do.” But as time went on, the effects team got better and better understanding what it was that Milligan needed. So there’s also a little strand of, like, the development of rock music here – like things starting to become more and more aurally sophisticated and creating a real landscape of sound, rather than just a momentary ping or whistle to let you know that something had happened.
Abigoliah: I mean, we don’t have a Patreon yet, but it is one of those things where, like, if we did a small side episode, I think it’d be really interesting to talk about the evolution of– folio. Folio is the word, right? Foley.
Tom: Foley, yes.
Abigoliah: What’s a folio? I’ve been saying the wrong thing the whole time.
Tom: Folio is like a folder. Foley is– so people distinguish between recorded sound effects and Foley.
Abigoliah: I told you guys I was the ignorant American. How long have we been talking? Twenty minutes, and you didn’t– not once did you say, “Abigoliah, stop saying you brought your own folio.”
Tom: We started the conversation by characterising me as the mansplainer. That kind of backed me into a corner.
Abigoliah: Okay, okay. I did this to myself.
Tom: Foley artists in films are the ones who will watch the action, and then when a punch is thrown they will take a baseball bat and hit a piece of canvas or something – to try and time it and make those sound effects exactly right – as opposed to a pre-recorded whooshing wind or something like that, which you just play in for the appropriate length of time. That’s the distinction.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And likewise, yeah: with a radio comedy show, typically there would be both pre-recorded sound effects that were being played in, and then you want to play this in for the audience so the audience can hear it – and a guy, almost always a guy, standing in front of a tray of gravel with a pair of shoes and a little mini door, which would squeak when he opened and closed it, and doing all those things on cue.
Abigoliah: My first exposure to Foley was in the musical Annie. There’s a scene where it cuts to them doing a radio programme, and someone is holding tap shoes on a box, pretending to be the tap dancer. And I remember just being like – not that I even listened to a lot of radio – but it was one of those, like, “Oh, the magic of entertainment.” Like, I think it’s really interesting. I know you’ll be surprised: I know very little about Foley. Anyways.
Tom: All right. So like I said, the first three or four series of The Goon Show – very few episodes exist. I think most of the scripts exist, but very few of the episodes. So I started listening from series five. I listened to more episodes of The Goon Show in the last few weeks than I have in my entire life to date, and I picked a couple. So one I zeroed in on quite early on because it contains one of Spike Milligan’s most celebrated comic riffs. And then another one – I just thought, that’s kind of pretty accessible. That feels to me like a good way in.
So we’re going to start with series five, episode two, which is called The Lost Goldmine. And that’s, I think, pretty accessible. And then we’re going to do series seven, episode nineteen, which is called The Mysterious Punch-Up-the-Conker.
Abigoliah: Punch-Up-the-Conker. That sounds dirty.
Tom: It’s not dirty.
Abigoliah: That sounds very nasty.
Tom: So we’ll start with The Lost Goldmine.
Abigoliah: Okay, let’s do it.
Tom: Okay. I think you asked me in our episode zero what was the most recent show we were likely to watch. This is probably going to be the oldest. I don’t think we’ll go back much further than 1951. And this is definitely the product of a bygone age in all sorts of ways. Did it work for you at all?
Abigoliah: All right. So I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this, but there’s a famous interview with Aretha Franklin – before she passed – where a journalist is asking her what she thinks of certain pop stars. And the journalist says a pop star, and Aretha Franklin is like, “Beautiful voice.” Another pop star: “Wonderful sound.” And then the journalist says, “Taylor Swift.”
“Great gowns. Beautiful gowns. Well-dressed.”
And what did I think of The Goon Show? Wonderful music. Really enjoyed the harmonica.
Here’s the thing. When we said we were going to do this, you were like, “This will be weird because it’s radio, so you’ll have nothing to watch.” And I really wasn’t worried because I listen to podcasts. I listen to more podcasts than I do music. I didn’t think I’d have a problem with it.
So when I gave up social media for three months, usually when I listen to a podcast, I’m doing something: I’m running, I’m cleaning the house. And there’s always this moment where I’d finish doing something and I’d have fifteen minutes of a podcast left, and I’d sit down and I’d be like, “I don’t know what to do with my hands.”
So I’m gonna say The Goon Show wasn’t one of my favourites. But you did say it’s on Audible.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: So I’m going to go away and give it a chance and say, how do I feel about it when I’m actively doing something? Because I feel like if I’m moving– Also, I’m really tired this morning. I wanted to– like you said, it inspired so much, and I was like, “Abigoliah, you are going to get it, you’re gonna like it.” And I’ll try it again.
Tom: A lot of it is just weird juxtapositions. Like in the last one, the whole business with the leather omnibus – that’s just a weird juxtaposition. A bus should not be made out of leather. Okay. Therefore funny.
Abigoliah: So yeah. So a couple of things. One: The Mysterious Punch-Up-the-Conker – until they mentioned nose guards, I didn’t know what they meant by conker. At first I thought conch.
Tom: Conk is nose.
Abigoliah: Because at first I was like, “Oh, are they talking about the things on trees in America? We call them buckeyes.” And then that clearly wasn’t it. But if you’re going to punch up at something, I was like, “Is this an intimate part of the body?” So then–
And then an omnibus: I know what a bus is, but what’s an omnibus?
Tom: Bus is short for omnibus.
Abigoliah: All buses are omnibuses.
Tom: They are, yes.
Abigoliah: What’s omni mean?
Tom: Many. So it’s a vehicle that carries many people.
Abigoliah: Well, you know, I am always learning something on this podcast.
I mean, I’m never gonna be mad that we watched or listened to something like– I’m not like, “This is the worst thing ever.” And it is kind of like Monty Python. I’m just like, “Okay,” and just not for me. But I do want to go– like I said, I think it’d be interesting to experience– Do you have to buy it on Audible, or is it free on Audible?
Tom: It’s free with a subscription.
Abigoliah: Okay. Yeah. I’m good. I’m going to go away and listen to it on Audible.
Tom: It does help to get more familiar with the characters and the running jokes and so on. And it’s not really a sitcom in the traditional sense because the characters don’t have pre-existing or ongoing relationships. It’s more like Looney Tunes: Daffy Duck and Porky Pig will be in different contexts in different episodes, and it’s never clear whether they’ve met each other before, and you certainly wouldn’t expect the events of a previous cartoon short to influence the one you’re watching now. So likewise: we hear Henry and Minnie Bannister in the first one running a hotel, and then in the second one making leather omnibuses. And there’s no hint there’s a journey that got them from point A to point B. It’s just: it’s these guys again.
Abigoliah: It felt like a quest show, is what I wrote down. So it’s like they go on a treasure hunt, they do a mystery– like it’s these characters, like you said, put in different places. So I understand that they’re not attached. It’s like, “Okay, now we’re going to go experience this.”
So for The Lost Goldmine of Charlotte – which, as we watched it on the screen, it said Charlotte – I asked if they were in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Tom: I think actually they’re in New Orleans. Which is why everyone’s speaking French.
Abigoliah: There is no desert in New Orleans, and I don’t know why that bugged me so much. And also when they got to the end and he’s– what was it? It’s like–
Tom: There’s no gold because–
Abigoliah: “That’s shallot.” I was like: this was an episode that was written backwards. Spike Milligan came up with that line and then had the mispronounced Charlotte the entire time for that one payoff.
Tom: I mean, good shows that have payoffs are fairly rare in themselves. So that one had one. That was one of the reasons why I thought it was worthwhile including.
Abigoliah: Also, if Charlotte hadn’t been written on the thing, I would have thought it was shallot – like the vegetable – the whole time. I hate to be this guy, but the gold rush didn’t happen in New Orleans. Like, they were like, “We’re in New Orleans,” and then it was like, okay, we’re in New Orleans. And then they started speaking like they’re out West, but they never said, like, “We’re in Colorado where the gold rush really happened,” or like, you know–
Tom: So Milligan is sort of taking all these different bits and pieces and putting them in a kind of comedy blender. So it’ll be bits of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, bits of Fu Manchu, bits of Sherlock Holmes. There are episodes set in the past. There’s one which is a riff on Pepys’s diary. When a very famous production of Nineteen Eighty-Four on BBC television caused uproar, Milligan wrote an episode called Nineteen Eighty-Five which spoofed George Orwell. So he’s always kind of taking these familiar tropes – and particularly this kind of boys’ own adventure stuff, like being lost in the desert and treasure maps endlessly being divided, and so on.
Abigoliah: I will say, I have two predictions of what other episodes might be. And I’m gonna be honest: I’ve thought I might be right before. Now that you’ve said that, I’m like, I think I’ve nailed the game. I think I know the game.
But yeah– And then, as we were watching it, I had a lot of trouble focusing. And when I looked up at the ceiling, I could visualise it a little bit more. But you asked me something about The Lost Goldmine and– just in case we don’t pick that up in that record– can you ask me again? Do you remember?
Tom: What did I ask?
Abigoliah: You– what– I thought of the–
Tom: Oh, yes. So one of the characters in The Lost Goldmine – again, a kind of tropey character – is the quote-unquote “Red Indian.”
Abigoliah: And I completely missed that happened. Like, it just went over my head.
Tom: Big Chief Worryguts.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Who speaks in that stereotypical quote-unquote “red Indian” style: “Me, me heap big…”
Abigoliah: Yeah. See, that’s the thing: I just had so much trouble focusing that I completely missed an incredibly cringey and culturally insensitive part of American culture that I’m hyper aware of because– I know this sounds stupid, but my sister lives in New Mexico, so she’s very on point with what you can and cannot say about Native Americans. And that came up and I just completely missed it. So that’s how unfocused I was watching it.
So then comes the question for me of: am I even giving this a fair shot? You know what I mean? Like, you know when an Edinburgh reviewer will review eight shows in a day and you’re the eighth show – did you even have a chance? So I’m just wondering: was I just too tired? Am I too unfocused to really get it?
Tom: That sequence towards the end – which, about the “time” written on the piece of paper – that’s one of the most celebrated bits of the whole Goon Show. Did that work for you at all?
Abigoliah: I thought it was funny. But because– I asked you, is this the more accessible one, or is this the one with a celebrated bit? I was hoping I would be like, “That must be the one.” I thought it was fun, but I wasn’t like, “That’s it. That’s the one.”
When you got to the part where he was like, “I fell in the water, fell in the–” and you were like, “Famous catchphrase,” I was like: wouldn’t have known it.
Tom: I just thought it was worthwhile explaining why an innocuous phrase like “fall in the water” suddenly got a huge round of applause.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I think the audio in it was fantastic. Like, before we started recording, I asked you – I was like, “Am I going to be able to hear it? Is it going to be scratchy?” I thought whatever they’ve done to remaster it, it sounded great. I really liked the music and the orchestra was just gorgeous. Like, do you know how big the orchestra was?
Tom: Off the top of my head? No. Probably about ten.
Abigoliah: Okay. It’s a great sound. And then the harmonica guy and the Ellington–
Tom: Quartet.
Abigoliah: Quartet, I thought was really fun. What did you think I liked the music is not a ringing endorsement of one of the most influential shows, you know?
You know what? I wonder if this is going to wind up being a thing: the ones that are the most influential are the ones that I’m like, “Yeah, I can’t wait to see what the next guy does,” because this is how I felt about Flying Circus.
Tom: That’s often how innovation works. The people who do things first don’t do it in the most refined way. And so other people will take those same ideas and build on them and do a more sophisticated version. It’s really rare to have somebody doing something brand new and get it right first time.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And maybe it’s just the time. You could hear them break at times, start to giggle. And obviously they’re in front of an audience that loved it. It was cool to hear a live recording like that.
And when I started doing stand-up 3,000 years ago, people weren’t doing specials for YouTube or constantly recording Netflix specials. Most comedians were recording albums. Yes – even in the early 2000s when I started comedy, I would listen to comedy albums all the time, and I kind of miss that. It’s not that you can’t do it anymore. It’s just like: why would you? No one does. But I loved walking around listening to live comedy.
So like I said, I’m not going to give up on it, but yeah: that was a long hour. That felt like a long hour for me.
Tom: It’s interesting you say you can kind of hear how much fun they’re having. Peter Sellers, who suffered from depression, would often say later in his career – when he was a movie star, when he was dating people like Sophia Loren–
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: He would say: “I was happiest on Sunday nights recording The Goon Show with my friends.”
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: Let me tell you what happened afterwards. So the show finished in 1960. By this time, it’s become a national institution, counting among its fans not just, as mentioned, the young Peter Cook, the young John Cleese, the young Ade Edmondson, but also the Beatles, Elton John, and especially the then Prince Charles, who would do all the voices to amuse his RAF buddies.
Peter Sellers became a film star, who was already making movies during The Goon Show. He’s in classic British comedies like The Ladykillers, I’m All Right, Jack, The Smallest Show on Earth. He made two movies with Stanley Kubrick – Lolita and Dr Strangelove – which made him an international movie star.
Abigoliah: That’s how I know his name. He’s in Dr Strangelove.
Tom: Three roles.
Abigoliah: Yes – I listened to another podcast about Dr Strangelove, which, guess what, I have also not seen. But they were talking about all the characters that this one guy does, this Peter Sellers, and that’s who it is. Okay.
Tom: And then he partnered with an American director called Blake Edwards on several projects, including five Pink Panther films.
Abigoliah: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, I do know who Peter Sellers is. Why didn’t you say all of this at the very beginning? Yeah, yeah – I know exactly who he is.
Tom: And Sellers himself was working on a script for a sixth Pink Panther film when he died, following the latest in a series of heart attacks. He was 54, and he’d been planning to meet up with Milligan and Secombe for a Goon Show reunion the next day.
Abigoliah: That’s gonna make me cry. Oh my God.
Tom: I mean, he was also a nutcase. It’s worth saying. Like, he was phobic about the colour purple and refused to have it on any film set he was working on. He got on so badly with Orson Welles when they were filming the spoof James Bond film Casino Royale together that they actually couldn’t both be on set at the same time.
Abigoliah: To be fair, I don’t think Orson Welles would have been a cup of tea either. Like, I don’t know much about Orson Welles, but he doesn’t seem like he would have been an easy person.
Tom: They were both show-offs. But Orson Welles was an extrovert who wanted to be the centre of attention and would annoy, especially Peter Sellers, by doing magic tricks when they were supposed to be filming. And Peter Sellers was much more introverted, but had this ability to disappear into these incredible characters.
It’s a shame that I can’t show you Dr Strangelove without telling you that three of the characters are played by Peter Sellers, because most people don’t clock it until halfway through the movie, if at all.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I did know because I’ve listened to another podcast about it, but okay. So Peter Sellers suffered from depression.
Tom: He did.
Abigoliah: Spike Milligan had a breakdown. This is just like the comedy world of: “I am a genius, but I am a troubled soul.” And then what about Beekman? Aikman.
Tom: Harry Secombe.
Abigoliah: Secombe. There we go.
Tom: Harry Secombe seems to have had a perfectly kind of affable life. He ended up doing lots of musical theatre. Have you seen the film Oliver!?
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: He’s Mr Bumble.
Abigoliah: Okay, okay. Yeah.
Tom: And he sort of retired from that kind of performing sometime in the ’70s and ended up hosting lots of religious television programmes for the BBC, like Songs of Praise and Highway. And he died in 2001 at the age of 79.
Abigoliah: A good, healthy, long life. Beautiful.
Tom: But it’s Milligan who is the heart and soul of The Goon Show. And nothing he did after this quite lived up to it, certainly in terms of impact. He wrote some books which are very highly regarded. He inspired the Pythons with his Q series. You might remember in episode one, I said that Terry Jones had this idea that they could abandon punchlines and realised that Spike Milligan had beaten them to the punch – but they had Terry Gilliam, so they could do it in an even more free-flowing way.
He’s in various British comedy films of varying degrees of quality. He can be glimpsed in Life of Brian. Okay: he happens to be on holiday in Tunisia when they were filming there and they said, “You have to be in it.” So of course. Do you remember the bit in Life of Brian where they’re all following Brian because they think he’s the Messiah? And there’s one bit where the crowd disperses and one old man is left looking bewildered – that’s Spike Milligan.
Abigoliah: Okay, cool.
Tom: And he was given a lifetime achievement award at the British Comedy Awards in 1994. And when host Jonathan Ross was reading out a tribute to him from Prince Charles, he interrupted to call the Prince of Wales “a little grovelling bastard.” He later faxed the palace with a note reading: “I suppose a knighthood is out of the question.”
Abigoliah: You know what – I don’t know much about now-King Charles, but I do know that he loves theatre, he loves performing, and he took the time to write that. And when it got back to him – what Spike Milligan said – it would have crushed his little royal heart.
Tom: I think he would have found it funny. I think the truth is, Milligan and Charles were actually quite good friends.
Abigoliah: Did they know each other? Okay, then that’s a different story.
So how did Milligan’s life– Is he still alive?
Tom: No. He died in 2002 at the age of 83.
Abigoliah: Okay. He sounds kind of like the Peter Cook of the crew, where it’s like the driving force, the great writer, the comic genius. And then after they left the show–
Tom: And his sidekick becomes a film star. Yeah, yeah. It’s very similar.
Abigoliah: This is interesting. Now to watch how it all kind of looks similar to each other.
Tom: So you said you had some predictions about what you thought future episodes might hold. And I should stress again: I’ve listened to a lot of Goon Shows recently, but I haven’t scratched the surface because there are hundreds of them. So when you say, “Did they do this in a future episode?” very likely my answer will be, “I don’t know,” but we’ll see.
Abigoliah: We could maybe check in with this Tyler fellow.
Tom: We could. We could ask Tyler.
Abigoliah: So this is the one that might not have happened, but since they ended in the ’60s – that was the beginning of the space race – so The Goon Show goes to space in search for life on Mars.
Tom: Ooh, interesting. I haven’t heard a kind of science fiction Goon Show. But you’re right – there’s lots of pulp sci-fi knocking around in the ’50s.
Abigoliah: That was also around when your show Doctor Who was going on radio then?
Tom: No. Doctor Who started on television in ’63. So this should have finished before Doctor Who. But Quatermass was on TV in the ’50s.
Abigoliah: My next one, which I really do think I nailed: they go to Egypt to look for the tomb of a cursed mummy.
Tom: Oh, I’m sure that happened. Yes.
Abigoliah: I’m like: done. It’s always a quest, isn’t it? Which does make it seem fun. Again: I was like, okay, we’re in a mystery. Okay, we’re in a Western set in New Orleans. Look at a map. Like, I’m the dumb country. I’m the dumb– Oh yeah, just move it to Colorado. Just move it to Colorado.
But yeah, I like the idea of– you know, when I was a kid, reading The Baby-Sitters Club or The Boxcar Children or Nancy Drew, it was always like: Nancy Drew goes and does this; the Boxcar Children go and do this; the Baby-Sitters Club go and do this. It was always these people in different scenarios. So I can get on board with the premise. I just couldn’t stay focused long enough to enjoy it or even notice the racial undertones.
Tom: And you might ask: why didn’t they go to TV?
Abigoliah: And because you can get away with playing a Native American on the radio, but not on TV.
Tom: There are a few attempts to do The Goon Show in front of cameras. There are some early goon characters in a film called Down Among the Z Men, which was as early as 1952, so it still has Michael Bentine in it. But Milligan wasn’t allowed to write the script. It was adapted from Goon Show scripts by someone else, and it didn’t make any money.
And then Milligan, Sellers and Secombe made five episodes of a show called Fred – you can tell they like the name Fred – for ITV in 1956, and then another eight under the title Son of Fred later that year. And then there are some episodes kind of made for children, of a series called The Telegoons, which was episodes of The Goon Show re-edited down to about fifteen minutes. The voice is re-recorded by Sellers, Milligan and Secombe, and then puppets are used to play the characters.
Abigoliah: Oh, that could be fun.
Tom: And it’s fine. But the most significant partnership they had was with a young American director called Richard Lester. And he made a film with them called The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film.
Abigoliah: I like that title.
Tom: Lester went on to make the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, which has some of that kind of frenetic Goon Show energy. And some people will tell you that A Hard Day’s Night essentially is the birthplace of the music video–
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Because for the first time you have a song with a piece of visual accompaniment specifically made for it that gets associated with it.
Because what I think most interesting to me about The Goon Show, in terms of the overall entertainment landscape, is it goes from ’51 to ’60. And in that time, television eclipses radio as the place people go for entertainment. So in ’51, everyone’s listening to the radio and television is in its infancy. But by 1960, television is a mature medium, and more people are watching television than are listening to the radio.
There’s one final bit of the chapter, which is: in 1972 – over ten years after the final Goon Show had been broadcast – they were reunited to record a new Milligan script, The Last Goon Show of All. And this was broadcast on the radio and shown on television. So you can see what a Goon Show would have looked like. And I nearly chose to show you that. But the thing is: A) it’s not very representative, B) it’s not very good, and C) it’s kind of playing the hits and you sort of have to know what The Goon Show is in order to appreciate what’s going on.
Abigoliah: Okay. I will say, I think that’s interesting because for Not Only… But Also you did just show me the hits. But for this, you have to know all the in-jokes. I guess you have to know the characters.
Tom: And also this isn’t a very linear narrative, but it is: each episode is a self-contained story, whereas Not Only… But Also is a sketch show, so you can cut it up more easily.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I don’t think this would translate to television because, oddly enough, television being the new piece of technology – which is like, “We can go so much further because we can show people where they are and what they’re doing” – would be really limiting to what they do. Because if one episode they’re doing a murder mystery, a “Punch-Up-the-Conker,” and then the next one they’re in America searching for gold, that’s a lot more expensive to film. And obviously they weren’t going to go on location, but even just building the sets–
Tom: And Bluebottle blowing himself up with dynamite is very funny on the radio, but almost any way of visualising that just makes it horrible.
Abigoliah: Yeah, it just doesn’t work.
Tom: Something I found out quite recently– Do you remember watching the old classic silent comedies? I’m thinking specifically here of Harold Lloyd.
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: So Harold Lloyd– he’s like the third of the big three, along with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. And one of his stock-in-trades was thrill pictures. So his most famous film is Safety Last, where because of some plot, as Thom Tuck would put it, he has to take the place of a human fly and climb up the outside of a skyscraper.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And audiences in the 1920s – this was the most incredible thing they’d ever seen. And in fact there is a certain amount of trickery involved, but it looks incredibly convincing as this man – who they know is a movie star – is climbing up the side of this enormous skyscraper and about to fall to his death at any moment.
And then when sound came in, like a lot of the big silent stars of cinema, Harold Lloyd struggled to adjust. Although actually speaking for him wasn’t a particular problem. But one thought he had was, “Oh, I’ll remake some of my classic silents as sound films.” But the thing is: when you can just watch somebody climbing up the side of a building and slipping and about to fall, it’s funny. When you can hear his whimpers and cries of distress, it kind of becomes a bit upsetting.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And that little change makes all the difference.
Abigoliah: That’s so interesting. I would love to see them do a live recording of The Goon Show.
Tom: Well, you can see The Last Goon Show of All. So you can see them in front of the mics and with the orchestra behind them.
Abigoliah: Which I will definitely look up. Like, I think this would be delightful to watch if they tried to turn it into a traditional studio comedy– not a sitcom, but for lack of a better word, sitcom. I just don’t think it would be nearly as funny if you could see it.
And I didn’t laugh that much. Like, I think as a radio programme, it was perfect. And it’s like you said: the Foley found it challenging. I can’t imagine making it visual.
Tom: All right. So I think I know where we’re headed with this, but does The Goon Show earn a place on the shelf of fame, or is it consigned to the bargain bin?
Abigoliah: Oh, it’s in the bargain bin. I mean, when you turned to me after we listened to the first episode and went, “Can you do another?” I nearly went, “I don’t need to.” But I wanted to. But like I said, I am going to go away– who knows? Maybe I’ll go away, listen to it in a different circumstance and change my mind. Because you never know.
Tom: Families used to all sit around the radio and listen to dramas, comedies, entertainment shows, and we just don’t do that anymore. We’re out of the habit of exercising our visual imaginations in that way.
Abigoliah: Well, when I put my head back, I could see it more, which was nice. But it is interesting because I was like, okay – what if I had some Lego? Or what if I had my embroidery? Or what if I was on a run? Or just to sit there and let it wash over me? I found that so difficult. And like you said, that’s how everyone did it. Maybe mum would be doing some knitting.
Tom: But we have one more radio show to come in this first season. If you want to bring embroidery, you should feel free.
Abigoliah: Maybe I will. Maybe I will just for the visual of, like, I’ll put on my little glasses. It’ll be real cute. Yeah – it’s in the bargain bin. But I do think if I give it a chance outside of our little sessions, it could wind up on the wall.
Tom: Okay. All right. We haven’t–
Abigoliah: I do think they’re wildly talented. I think it’s a wonderful idea. Again, it’s like Monty Python: you explain it to me, I’m like, “This is great.” I watch it and I’m like, “Let’s just talk about the concepts.”
Tom: All right. So without wanting to preempt anything, I suspect our show for next time might strike a deeper chord. Definitely one of my personal favourites, and someone who redefined the landscape in a rather different way. Next time we’re going to be watching Victoria Wood, who became a national treasure despite having essentially no role models to follow– or so we could watch.
I think pretty much any episode of her TV show Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV and have a lovely time. I’ve picked, after quite a lot of debate and kind of back-and-forth with myself, episode five of series one and episode one from series two – basically because each one contains one favourite bit of mine.
Abigoliah: Well, I’m very excited to watch a female-led comedy in Landmarks. Is that– was that the landmark? She was a woman.
Tom: I mean, kind of. Yes.
Abigoliah: Which–
Tom: Okay, that’s not nothing.
Abigoliah: I just want to say: when we were doing this, it stuck in my freaking head since I think it’s when we did The Young Ones and we were talking about how she didn’t go on to do stuff after her and Rik split, and you were like, “That’s the ’80s, man.” The Goon Show opened in 1951. What was on American television?
Tom: I Love Lucy.
Abigoliah: I Love Lucy. For every show you show me, I could do an American equivalent that was just as big and just as beloved for every decade that was female-led. But you know what? It is interesting. Everyone forgets that happened. Yeah, everyone forgets about the lady.
Tom: The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Abigoliah: The Carol Burnett Show.
Tom: Absolutely.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom: And I’m preempting myself here slightly, but Victoria Wood would have had no way of seeing any of those, I wouldn’t have thought. She certainly never mentioned any of those incredible women, because it was just harder to watch American shows in Britain at the time.
Abigoliah: I’m very excited to check this out. Because I know nothing. I keep saying I know who she is, and then I realise whenever people say Victoria Wood, I just picture Jennifer Saunders and–
Tom: Dawn French.
Abigoliah: Dawn French. Like, I have no clue where we’re going with this, so I’m excited.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening to All British Comedy Explained. A couple of ways you can support the show: one, tell a friend about it – help spread the word. We are a new podcast, and we so value your help and listenership and getting the word out. Secondly, go into your podcatcher app and leave us a five-star review. Helps other cool people like you find the show.
And we are on social media. We are on YouTube if you want to watch the series, and we are mostly on Instagram and TikTok: BritishComedyPod, if you want to follow us there. Anything else to add?
Tom: That we have a mailing list. You can sign up to our mailing list to get notified as soon as a new episode is released.
Abigoliah: And the mailing list you can find at–
Tom: AllBritishComedy.com.
Abigoliah: Great. And thank you so much, guys, for listening. That’s all from me. I’m Abigoliah Schamaun.
Tom: And I’m Tom Salinsky. Goodbye.
Abigoliah: Goodbye.