This article was written for the December 2024 issue of the Goon Show News,
published by the Goon Show Preservation Society, http://www.goonshow.org.
I remember the time and place the Goon Show entered my life. It was Dublin in the late 1980s – a long way, culturally speaking, from 1950s East Acton and Sabrina – and I was in my early teens.
At that age, I would have known Peter Sellers from the Pink Panther movies and Spike Milligan, if at all, from his guest appearance on The Muppet Show. More importantly, I had already discovered Monty Python, so the door to offbeat comedy was ready to be prised open a little more. Or, as it turns out, wrenched off its hinges.
One morning, I went into the kitchen in search of pre-snack sustenance, where my father – as was his wont – was working at the dinner table with the radio on. But rather than the usual chart music, RTÉ Radio 1 was channelling 1950s comedy: an episode of the Goon Show called The Canal. As luck would have it, I had arrived just in time to catch the scene where Minnie and Henry attempt to rescue Neddie from the dreaded canal with helpful tips from a cookery book. And I was instantly hooked.
As an Englishman born in the mid-40s, my father had grown up with the Goon Show – along with cricket and school dinners that had names that sounded like sexually transmitted diseases – and was happy to answer my questions and, I imagine, quite chuffed that I had taken to it like a sock to custard. The Goon Show Classics tapes were readily available in Eason’s bookshop on O’Connell Street, so I slowly built up a collection, chasing that original high until well into the MP3 age when I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of The Canal, still one of my favourite slices of Goonery.
In recent years, I have found that many others of my generation had made the same discovery at a similar age, usually through a parent or another older relative. Over in New Zealand, one of the furthest points on the planet from suburban Dublin, future GoonPod host Tyler Adams was already laying the foundations for a lifelong obsession. As a regular listener to his excellent podcast – on which I appeared as a guest myself recently, talking about that oft-overlooked gem The Moon Show – I find that many other comedy enthusiasts of my age have had a similar experience, albeit with less of a collective urge to lapse into silly voices.
A niche interest of this kind is always an important bonding element, and while none of my schoolfriends were aware of the Goon Show – and wouldn’t have cared if they had been – it was fun to share this private treasure trove with my father. To this day, he and I continue to pepper our conversations with Goonish elements, giggling merrily while other people avoid eye contact and tiptoe silently away.
Another important aspect for me is escapism. Not, I hasten to add, that my life is something I need to actively escape from, but after being exposed to doom, gloom and arse-contracting lunacy on the daily news – or after a particularly gut-wrenching episode of The Sopranos, The Wire or The Vicar Of Dibley – it’s nice to have a rose-tinted world to escape to.
For me, this takes the form of listening to audiobooks and radio series at bedtime. Chief among these are the works of PG Wodehouse, whose riotously fruity language and balmy plots – which, by the author’s own admission, are essentially “musical comedies without music” – are ideal for dispelling internal chatter and drifting off to sleep with a smile on one’s face.
Needless to say, the Goon Show falls into this category as well. After 35 years as a fan, I have long since committed my favourite shows to memory, complete with ad libs, corpsing and the world’s most infectious giggle. Cocooned in this cosy familiarity, I usually drop off before Geldray’s wretched harmonica makes an appearance.
But there was more to it than the comforting garb of the familiar. It has been well documented that Milligan’s Goonish creations were his way of coping with his first-hand experience of war, which saw him suffer mortar wounds and shell shock. His own private universe was one where explosions never hurt anyone, where being “deaded” wasn’t a career-ending condition, and where any limbs that happened to be lost in the chaos would grow back, cartoon-style, in the seconds between scenes.
And just as the worst fate that could ever befall Bertie Wooster was an aunt-shaped cloud hovering ominously over his idyllic bachelor existence, nothing truly bad ever really happened in Goonland. Which, the occasional overly manic episode aside, makes it an ideal world to fall asleep to.
