by Ed Sikov
Michael Bentine, meanwhile, played the toothy, chirpy Captain (or Professor) Osric Pureheart, a variation of the mad inventor character he’d been toying with for several years. Pureheart’s notable skill was to invent warped variations of well-known, contemporary British products—a popular new race car, for instance, or an on-the-drawing-board airplane that had been in the news that week. On one episode Captain Pureheart supervised the launch of the Goonitania. The following week he led the salvaging of the Goonitania.
As befitted his essentially good nature, Harry Secombe played the expansive Neddie Seagoon, hearty and well-meaning, dispatched on important missions he inevitably bungled, rarely comprehending much of anything but never losing hope.
And then there was Spike’s Eccles, the prototypical Goon. If Seagoon was a genial British Everydope, Eccles was an inadvertently dangerous Everycretin, a man without a mind. A press item appearing a few days before Crazy People’s first broadcast attempted to define to the average Brit in the street what precisely this outlandish-sounding Goon creature was: “Something with a one-cell brain,” it explained. Eccles was precisely that human amoeba. Armed with a voice like a Manchester Goofy, Eccles was too stupid to be malicious, too oblivious ever to be considered criminal, and for these very reasons he was terrifying. Eccles was obviously a product of Spike’s wartime experiences.
“Gradually,” Milligan reflected, “piece by piece, this chemistry of Secombe, Bentine, Sellers, and myself . . . suddenly we were like a magnet drawn toward itself, unexplainably so. We only told lunatic jokes. Everything was lunatic. It wasn’t like any other jokes you’d hear.” And strangely, week by week, audiences began to embrace them. The Goons’ comedy began as a kind of idiolect and turned into widespread slang.
From its genesis in the Grafton Arms, Goon humor was always clubby and fraternal, but thanks to the BBC, now it spread across the airwaves like a social disease, a kind of mental herpes. The Daily Graphic predicted as much: “Listeners who like it will, according to the Chief Goons, become Goons of varying degree, depending on the strength of their liking. They will be associate Goons, honorary Goons, and Goon followers.” The prophecy was fulfilled. The first Crazy People episodes attracted listeners in the 370,000 range, but by the end of the first series of seventeen weekly broadcasts the audience was up to 1.8 million.
Still, only a relative few of these listeners could possibly have realized that they were the first initiates in what would become a fanatical worldwide cult, one that would eventually destroy the minds of millions, including John Lennon, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Elton John, and Charles, Prince of Wales.
• • •
Like children left unsupervised in an isolated orphanage, the Goons developed their own private language, only some of which they shared with their listeners. Secombe recalled the genesis of what became a classic Goon expression, an utterance so devoid of meaning that its very idiocy resonated as profound. Other comedy shows were full of catch phrases, Harry once explained, so Spike decided that the Goons needed one as well: “And he made up ‘Ying tong iddle I po,’ which means nothing. Within weeks people were saying ‘Ying tong iddle I po,’ in the street. It frightened us a bit.”
“Ying tong iddle I po”—a truly meaningless string of sounds with vaguely Chinese undertones. Because it meant absolutely nothing, “Ying tong iddle I po” was the perfect repeatable nugget of Goonspeak, a motto of linguistic anarchy, a kind of password. Spike inserted it in his scripts randomly, as was of course its very nature:
SEAGOON: I’m looking for a criminal.
BLOODNOK: You find your own—it took me years to get this lot.
SEAGOON: Ying tong iddle I po.
Just among themselves, the Goons’ private language could be rather more vulgar. “Secombe read a book on South America,” Spike once noted with glee. “There’s a South American monkey who, when it’s attacked, shits in its hand and throws it at the opposition. So whenever Secombe and Sellers used to meet, one would go ‘ptthhp!’ ” At this point in the telling Spike reached down to his ass, grabbed an imaginary handful, and hurled the contents aggressively forward. “And the other would go ‘mmmhmmmhmmgh!’ ” Under threat, the second monkey emitted an equally intense straining sound, reached back and grabbed nothing, and threw his hands in the air in a gesture of abject surrender.
This was how they dealt with one another out of the range of the microphones.
The Goons didn’t do comedy the way anyone else did. “Probably,” says Harry, “because we couldn’t tell jokes very well. I could never remember the endings.”
• • •
With Anne, Peter moved out of his mother’s domain and into a penthouse overlooking Hyde Park. Anne had already introduced her best friend, June Marlowe, to Spike over dinner, an evening that was enlivened greatly by the fact that Peter had earlier convinced Spike that it would be a lot more fun if Spike pretended to be Italian. The unsuspecting June spent much of the dinner trying to teach English to the happy immigrant. They soon became engaged.
With the notable exception of Beryl Reid, women were largely excluded from the Goons’ professional world, a fact Milligan tended to reiterate with some degree of pride. Spike: “Do you know there were only three women who appeared in The Goon Show? The first was Margaret McMillan, a classy girl. I was going out with her at the time.” Spike again: “The girls appeared from time to time according to who was dating them. Peter Sellers had one. Her name was Charlotte Greenwood, and I wrote a line for him to say to her: ‘You’re a dull scrubber!’ Peter said, ‘I can’t say that to Charlotte—I’m going out with her!’ ” Where was Anne, one wonders? He was married at the time, after all. Or are Spike’s recollections to be fully trusted?
• • •
In December 1951, Charlie Chaplin’s Burlesque on “Carmen” (1916) enjoyed a brief revival run in England, albeit in a newly burlesqued version that wasn’t approved by Chaplin. Chaplin had made the film for Essanay as a takeoff on Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 Carmen. DeMille’s epic melodrama starred Wallace Reid as Don Jose and Geraldine Farrar as Carmen; Chaplin’s spoof starred himself as Darn Hosiery with Edna Purviance as the eponymous gypsy, with the cross-eyed clown Ben Turpin doing a turn as the lover of the fat Frasquita.
But with the new release of Charlie Chaplin’s Burlesque on “Carmen,” English audiences were treated to a burlesque of a burlesque, for Chaplin’s comedy now sported a facetious voice-over commentary by Peter Sellers. Chaplin’s original two-reeler was left open to this farcical adulteration from the start. He left Essanay soon after filming it, whereupon the company shot new footage and doubled its length without his participation at all. Charlie sued, lost, and was distraught, but as he wrote in his autobiography, “It rendered a service, for thereafter I had it stipulated in every contract that there should be no mutilating, extending, or interfering with my finished work.” There are no reports as to whether Chaplin ever saw or heard Peter Sellers’s interference.
As one of the British trade papers sniffed, Sellers “impersonates the characters of the story, plugs away energetically and may amuse the unsophisticated.” It would take a few more movies for him to rise above that level.
FIVE
In March 1952, after being married to Peter for six months, Anne suffered a miscarriage, a tragedy that only served to enflame Peg’s maternal instincts. While Anne was recuperating in the hospital, Peg invited Peter to dinner every night, along with a series of his former girlfriends. Ever thorough, Peg is said to have made a point of including one who Peter believed had borne him a daughter (and put her up for adoption) during the war.
Peter Sellers was the painstaking product of a terrible mother, the fucked-up labor of her love. As even his best friends acknowledge, he could be a selfish, childish man, responsive to every need as long as it was his own. His cars, gadgets, and RAF and Goon Show buddies (not to mention his mother) occupied at least as crucial a place in his heart as his wife, with the RAF and Goon Show buddies (not to me
ntion his mother) outlasting all the others in terms of duration. When, for instance, in the spring of 1952, Peter and Anne moved to a house in Highgate, Spike moved in along with them and stayed until he got married. “He was tired of sleeping under people’s carpets,” Anne later explained.
There was little restraint in Peter’s life. Interests became manias. After Graham Stark became a proficient photographer, Peter, always entranced by mechanical equipment of any sort, grew equally fascinated by his friend’s ability to convince beautiful women to pose for pictures. Photography had much to recommend itself—one of his best friends loved it; it involved instruments that could be purchased and replaced; and girls, girls, girls—so Peter swiftly developed a passion for the art. At the very start of it, according to Stark, Peter beelined “to Wallace Heaton’s in Bond Street, the Rolls-Royce of camera dealers, and apparently bought every piece of equipment in the shop.” Stark claims that Peter even called in sick for a Goon Show recording one Sunday so he and Stark could meticulously retouch the breasts and buttocks depicted in one of Graham’s bikini-oriented pictures.
At the same time, Peter could be good-hearted and generous, sometimes exceedingly so. He simply could not keep himself from buying gifts for people he liked. He wanted things, and so, he concluded, must they. And if, stubbornly, they would not acquire these objects for themselves, he would step in and provide them. “He used to call me when he wanted to go downtown in London,” the Goon Show harmonica virtuoso Max Geldray remembers. “He would say, ‘I’m going to the camera shop’—which he did all the time—‘and why don’t you come with me?’ One particular time he said, ‘I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.’ ” Geldray told him, no, he had other errands to do and he’d meet him there, especially because he, Max, needed a new flashbulb for his own camera. When he got there, Peter was admiring a new and very small Swiss camera.
“Look, it has a brighter picture, but the amperage is much lower,” said Peter. “And he went on about the thing,” Geldray continues. “He said to me, ‘Why don’t you get it?’ ”
“ ‘I don’t need it,’ ” Max replied. “Several hours later, I opened the door of my home, and in the middle of the living room was a package. He and Anne were sitting in my living room. He didn’t say anything—he just pointed at the package. I opened it, and there was the new Swiss camera. I said, ‘I don’t need a camera!’ He said, ‘Yes you do. Yours is broken.’
“He meant the flashbulb. For him, that was ‘broken.’ ”
Technicalities failed to impress Peter. He didn’t have time for them. Graham Stark describes the frenzy that accompanied every new purchase: “Pete believed in brute force. He’d tear the box open, ignore the instruction book, and press every button until something worked.”
His equipment fever didn’t stop at still photography. New movie cameras were also purchased, used, and replaced by still newer and fancier models. Off-hour Goons were a favorite subject of Peter’s cinematic eye, as were his wife and mother. As he would continue to do for years to come, he recorded his free time in the form of reel after reel of home movie footage—Harry mugging in a striped bathrobe. Peter hamming it up in a park. A glamorous-looking Anne posed in the driver’s seat of a shiny new red sports car. Spike trying to keep hold of a manic dog. A gas station attendant filling Peter’s mouth with gasoline. Anne, in a comedy skit, being served a poisoned cocktail by Peter. . . .
“We liked undercranked film,” said Harry, the manic, fast-motion effect being characteristically Goonish. And, he also adds, “We were all devotees of Buster Keaton rather than Charlie Chaplin,” by which he meant that Keaton’s dark absurdity resonated much more deeply than Chaplin’s comic ballets, not to mention the fact that Chaplin’s Victorian sentimentality had no place in the brutal, existential world of the Goons.
“He had a 16mm camera,” Spike noted a little more brusquely. “He was richer than we were—richer by 8mm.”
• • •
The second series of The Goon Show began in late January 1952. To the Goons’ great satisfaction, the title of their program now actually was The Goon Show. This victory, like many others, came at a price, one that was paid largely by Spike Milligan. “I was trying to shake the BBC out of its apathy,” Spike reflected in the mid-1970s. “And I had to fight like mad, and people didn’t like me for it. I had to rage and crash and bang. I got it right in the end, and it paid off, but it drove me mad in the process, and drove a lot of other people mad. And that’s why I don’t think I could be a success again on the same level—because I just couldn’t go through all the tantrums.” By July, when the second series finished recording, Spike was twitching in the direction of a mental collapse.
Peter, in contrast, tended to treat his Goon work precisely as the workmanlike job it was. He was always “the most serious of the group,” says Max Geldray, but then he could afford to be. Unlike Milligan, Sellers didn’t have to face the pressure of writing a hit series comedy script every week only to perform it on the weekend. Instead, Peter showed up on Sundays for the recording sessions, read the script, did the voices, and went back home. His talent, at this point anyway, wasn’t agony.
That said, the Goons’ joint ambition was, if anything, intensifying. They didn’t want to do just radio. Plans for the Goons’ first television appearance, Trial Gallop, were drawn. The program was scheduled to air in mid-February, but George VI put a crimp in the Goons’ schedule for achieving stardom by dying in his sleep at Sandringham on Wednesday the sixth. The Goons’ comedy show, which would necessarily have been in bad taste even in the best of circumstances, was canceled. Peter and the others had to wait until July 2 to make their joint television debut; they did so with the one-shot Goonreel.
And they still wanted to make a good Goon movie. Penny Points to Paradise had apparently taught them little. One can appreciate their artistic ambition, but the execution remained problematic. At the core of the issue was money. It wasn’t as though the big British studios—J. Arthur Rank, Ealing, Hammer—were clamoring for the Goons. They were, at best, interesting new radio stars, still too small to generate movie buzz. If Sellers, Secombe, Milligan, and Bentine were to make another film together, it would have to be rock-bottom cheap. And so, Down Among the Z Men (1952).
Filmed in two abrupt weeks in April in a small studio in the northwest London neighborhood of Maida Vale, and faring poorly at the box office upon its release, Down Among the Z Men takes the four Goons and, in an apparent effort to broaden their appeal, strips them of most of their Goonishness and replaces it with a low-conventional story, a pretty girl (Carole Carr) who sings two songs, and a dozen tap-dancing chorines. Spike’s Eccles and Bentine’s Pureheart emerge most clearly from the murk, but Peter’s Bloodnok (promoted here from major to colonel) is so anemic a rendition that it takes a few moments to recognize in Bloodnok’s introductory scene that the dull-looking gray-haired man sitting behind a military desk is actually supposed to be Sellers’s familiar and colorful radio character.
Then again, this was never meant to be art. On the first day of shooting, Peter cornered the director, Maclean Rogers. “I feel,” he began, “that the character I am playing has certain undercurrents of repression, which I might best express by having a noticeable twitch.” Maclean was blunt: “I’ve got eight minutes of screen time a day to shoot. Do it quickly.”
It’s a caper. Spies try to steal a secret nuclear formula. They fail.
Harry Secombe cuts the back off a woman’s skirt with a pair of scissors. Michael Bentine pulls Harry’s apron down. The best comedy bit is taken by Spike and Harry: “Guerrilla warfare? I know that!,” at which point they both begin doing a chimp routine. There’s a laughing-gas/crying-gas sketch that would have made even Shemp blush.
The chorus girls, corralled into an earlier Army-camp-workout-turned-dance-number, reappear toward the end of the movie in an ENSA-like evening’s entertainment for the camp. Backstage, Carole Carr turns to Spike and Harry. “I’m on next!” she tells them. “As soon as I
’m through I’m going over to get the formula back before my second number!”
Inanely—and not in a good way—Colonel Bloodnok takes the stage after Carr’s song and proceeds to amuse the audience with an impersonation of an American army officer from a Hollywood movie he saw the week before. It’s Peter, not Bloodnok, and it makes no sense, especially since the whole point of the beloved Bloodnok is that he has little talent for anything but intestinal distress. Forced by circumstance, however—the circumstance being that the producer, E. J. Fancey, needed to pull this bit of cheap taffy into a feature-length thread—the bumbling Bloodnok reveals himself to be a cabaret star of exquisite skill. The routine is just an excuse to let Peter shoehorn in an impression routine: a Midwestern American army man and his fast-talking, Brooklynesque subordinate.
Osric Pureheart comes on next with an equally misplaced nightclub schtick. It’s Bentine and his old chairback routine.
More disturbing, and consequently a lot funnier, is the fact that Down Among the Z Men provides a rare chance to see Bentine’s Pureheart as well as hear his voice. In addition to Bentine’s ridiculous hairiness and drastic British underbite, he gives Pureheart a truly wacky bandy-legged walk, the ghastly gait of a madman with testicular issues.
• • •
The Goons’ main focus (for good reason) remained the BBC radio, where The Goon Show was evolving artistically from its initial run. It wasn’t necessarily better yet, as the Goonographer Roger Wilmut notes. It was increasingly popular with audiences, but it remained relatively unrefined.
