Spike Milligan's Accordion : The Distortion of Time and Space in the Goon Show [1 ed.] 9789004310704, 9789004323704

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Spike Milligan’s Accordion

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts General Editor Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe (University of Lincoln, uk) Editorial Board Anna Bonshek (Prana World Group, Australia) Per Brask (University of Winnipeg, Canada) John Danvers (University of Plymouth, uk) Amy Ione (Diatrope Institute, Berkeley, usa) Michael Mangan (Loughborough University, uk) Jade Rosina McCutcheon (Melbourne University, Australia) Gregory Tague (St Francis College, New York, usa) Arthur Versluis (Michigan State University, usa) Christopher Webster (Aberystwyth University, uk) Ralph Yarrow (University of East Anglia, uk)

VOLUME 49

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cla

Spike Milligan’s Accordion The Distortion of Time and Space in The Goon Show By

Rick Cousins

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: image by r.j.c. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cousins, Rick, author. Title: Spike Milligan’s accordion : the distortion of time and space in the Goon show / by Rick Cousins. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2017] | Series: Consciousness, literature and the arts 49 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016034193 | isbn 9789004323704 (hardback : alk. paper) | isbn 9789004310704 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Goon show (Radio program) | Space and time on radio. Classification: lcc PN1991.77.G6 C68 2016 | ddc 791.44/72--dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034193

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1573-2193 isbn 978-90-04-32370-4 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-31070-4 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

The Goon Show’s world was full of Freds and Jims—names hung on a host of incidental figures when none other came to mind. My own world has been full of Bobs: this book is dedicated to the memory of two Bobs who were anything but incidental to me. Robert Sheppard—“Uncle Bob” to me, my brother, my sister, and an assortment of children in his neighbourhood—wasn’t a blood relative, but a close friend and colleague of my father’s, and my point of entry to Spike Milligan’s comedic universe. Uncle Bob’s house was where I first encountered The Goon Show: the copy of The Goon Show Scripts I used to pore over during stolen moments when my family visited the Sheppards is an inheritance worth a fortune in fortunes, as Spike might put it. It’s put to shame as a legacy, though, by my remembrances of Uncle Bob, his Goonish sense of humour, and his conversation punctuated with Seagoonish interjections. The second Bob will forever rank first in my heart. My father Robert Cousins often described himself as a frustrated comedian, and in doing so opened my eyes to the idea that the essence of all good comedy is to express or describe frustration. He may not have been a professional comedian, but he certainly wasn’t frustrated as far as understanding comedy was concerned: he was the one who introduced me to the value of shifting the spotlight onto the odd man out, and the power of what he called “the plausible impossibles” in defining a comedic vision. So here’s to you, Dad—and here’s a book about a unique comedic vision which created a world ruled by plausible (and sometimes not-so-plausible) impossibles, and full of odd men out. Say hi to Uncle Bob for me, when you see him. Chances are he’s hanging out with Seagoon, Eccles, Bluebottle, and the rest of the gang.

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SEAGOON: …looking for the lost year has made me a weak old man. BLUEBOTTLE: Oh—you hear that, Eccles? ECCLES: What? BLUEBOTTLE: He’s only a week old. —Spike Milligan, “The Lost Year”

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Contents Acknowledgements xi Prelude: A Few Words of Explanation xiii Introduction 1 “Good morning, sir, welcome to Chapter Two”: A Few Words on the Structure of This Book 6 1 The Accordion under Construction: The Origins of Spike Milligan’s Comedic Style, and of The Goon Show 10 1 Portrait of The Milligan as a Young Goon: Laying the Groundwork for a Personal Vision of Comedy 10 2 “Well, that’s the end of that corny routine”: The Goon Show’s Sketchy Beginnings 22 3 New Producer, New Approach: Peter Eton and the Transformation of The Goon Show 23 4  The Goon Show’s ‘Classic’ Format: Dramatic Structures Mature in the Service of Comedic Immaturity 26 5 Little Cardboard-and-String Heroes: The Goon Show’s Regular Cast of Characters 29 6 “This is the bbc”: The Goon Show vis-à-vis Mainstream Practices in Contemporary Radio Drama 33 6.1 “What is this Go On Show?” The bbc’s Official Narratives and The Goon Show’s Place in Them 33 6.2 “Meantime, back in the bbc torture room”: The Goon Show’s Deviations from bbc Radio’s Dominant Aesthetic for Dramaturgy and Performance 36 7 “Who are you, Ben Lyon?”: The Goon Show’s Thematic Links to Popular Culture between the Two World Wars 40 2 The Accordion Beating Time: Temporal Distortions in The Goon Show 51 1 Looking Backward to Look Forward Again: The Goon Show’s Narrative Framework 51 2 One Narrative, Many Narrators: The Goon Show’s Democracy of Diegesis 53 3 The Fragmentation of Time-Frames in The Goon Show and Its Effects on Narrative 64

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4 That Sabrina Sure Gets Around: The Free Flow of Anachronisms in The Goon Show 67 5 Musical Interludes in The Goon Show: Interruptions in Narrative Flow and Opportunities for Temporal Distortion 69 6 The Ageless Aging Process of The Goon Show’s Characters 71 7 “I’m for the dreaded deading this week alright”: The Impermanence of Death in The Goon Show 74 8 The Passage of Time and the Completion of Tasks: Two Sides of the Same Coin 75 9 Sounds and Their Effects on Temporality 80 Interruption 1: Milligan’s Laws of Time 84 3 The Accordion Stretching in All Directions: Spatial Distortions in The Goon Show 86 1 Setting the Scene: A Few Words on the “Landscape” of Radio Theatre 86 2 Mise en Scène as Mise sans Scène: The Goon Show as ‘Black Box’ Theatre for Radio 88 3 Contents Not Necessarily to Scale: The Variability of Container Capacity in The Goon Show 89 4 “My Lord, a piece of junk being found on the King’s Highway, it is declared treasure trove”: The Appearance of Objects Exactly When, and Exactly Where, They Are Needed 91 5 The Conundrum of Self-Duplication and Rapid Spatial Displacement, or, Being in Two Places at Once is Easier When You Don’t Know It Can’t be Done 92 6 Perceptual Fields Forever: Milligan’s Use of Simultaneous Multiple Perspectives within the Same Scene 95 6.1 The Perception of Doors 95 6.2 Getting That Long-Distance Feeling—Telephones as Disruptors of Spatial Integrity 101 6.3 The Use of Pre-Recorded Voices and Effects to Establish Additional Spatial Frames 102 7 All the World’s a Soundstage: The Recording Studio as Determinant of Spatial Frameworks 104 8 When Mental Maps Suffer Breakdowns: Around the World (and Back Again) with The Goon Show 106 Interruption 2: Milligan’s Laws of Space 113

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4 Children Teach Lessons on the Accordion: Preoperational Cognitive Strategies in The Goon Show 115 1 “Hello, folks, this is Neddy Seagoon speaking, folks”: The Spoken Word as Stage Manager of Radio Theatre 115 2 Suffer Little Children to Come unto Metonymy: The Preoperational Substitution of Words for Things 118 3 A Child’s Garden of Goon-Sense: Milligan as Children’s Author and Perpetual Child 120 4 Putting Together Pieces from Different Puzzles: Children, Goons and Cognitive Constructivism 124 5 Preoperational Perceptions of Time and The Goon Show 126 6 “And this is where the story really starts”: The Preoperational Mind at Work in Milligan’s Construction of Narrative 128 7 Time, Task Completion, Preoperational Cognition and The Goon Show 131 8 The Goon Show and Preoperational Modes of Spatial Cognition 132 8.1 Childlike Spatial Readings of Objects and Locales 132 8.2 “It must be a drowning cartoonist”: Other Childlike Animation-Based Spatial Reconfigurations in The Goon Show 137 8.3 “I have got a Boy Scout street map of Shanghai”: Childlike Geography in The Goon Show 140 5 The Accordion Plays a New Tune before Anyone Can Write It Down: Anticipations of Postmodernism in The Goon Show 144 1 Pipping Them at the Postmodern: Milligan the Advance Scout 145 2 Milligan’s Deconstructions of History and Historical Fictions 148 3 The Goon Show as Reductio ad Absurdum of the Metanarratives of Scientific Thought 157 4 Breaking Causal Chains Causes Causal Chain Reactions: Indeterminacy in The Goon Show 162 5 Postmodern Geographies, Thirdspace, and The Goon Show 164 6 Superspace—the Final Frontier: The Goon Show’s Universe of Multiple Universes 167 7 The Goon Show Hits a Heisenberg, but Doesn’t Sink: Milligan and the Uncertainty Principle 173

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8 Disorder as a Creative Force in The Goon Show 175 9 Chaos in The Goon Show: Not So Much a Theory as a Way of Life 176 Conclusion: The Accordion is Packed Away 181 Sources 189 Index 203

Acknowledgements The trouble with writing a book about The Goon Show is that when you get to the point of sitting down to write a set of acknowledgements that are meant to be taken seriously, you run the risk of being influenced by the style and tone of the acknowledgements and forewords (and sometimes backwords—yes, folks, they do exist—I’ve seen them) in collections of Goon Show scripts and other books by Spike Milligan. With this disclaimer out of the way, I now direct your attention to the serious and proper acknowledgements that follow. If there’s a first mover unmoved in the chain of events that led to what you’re about to read, it’s Daniel Mroz, my thesis advisor, and now the Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre at the University of Ottawa. He was the one who helped refine, shape, and focus my thinking on this topic (among others). He knew just what it took to guide me through a serious discussion of the serious ideas behind a body of work that didn’t take serious ideas very s­ eriously at all. My thanks go out as well to Yana Meerzon of the University of Ottawa, ­Director of Graduate Studies during my time as an ma candidate, not only for insisting that anything I wrote had a solid basis in accepted theory, but for g­ iving me the leeway to do things like using old cartoons and comic strips to explain the intricacies of speech act theory in a classroom presentation. Thanks as well to Kathryn Prince and Ian Dennis, who adjudicated the thesis that laid the groundwork for this volume. Many thanks to my editor, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, for his support and encouragement, and for helping keep the process of seeing this book through to publication on track. When I first met Dr. Meyer-Dinkgräfe, he was delivering a talk on the aesthetics of stagecraft in productions of Wagnerian opera. It would be hard to imagine a topic more far removed from Spike Milligan and The Goon Show (!). Thanks to Christa Stevens at Brill | Rodopi for her patience with my vacillation, dithering, waffling, and general procrastination over the very necessary final details that transform a book from a cloud of words s­ wirling around in someone’s head to a tangible stack of bound pages that someone can pull off a shelf and leaf through. Finally, a big thank-you is long overdue to my wife Alison, who married me just as I was beginning the graduate studies that supplied the foundation for this book. In addition to providing all the love I could ask for, at a fraction of the cost of the leading national brand (sorry, Ali—I was afraid one Milliganesque moment would slip into all of this—I managed to stave it off until now, at least), she’s also been my director and collaborator on several pieces of ­theatre, a trusted sounding board, and one of the best audiences for comedy

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that I’ve ever encountered. In the time between the inception of this book and now, we’ve also collaborated on a daughter named Ruby, who is already bidding to be a comedienne in her own right. I find her impersonation of me a scream, if that’s anything to go by. In fact, most of her impersonations consist of screams, but that’s another story. I’m working on expanding her repertoire to include Minnie Bannister from The Goon Show.

Prelude: A Few Words of Explanation This book contains more than its fair share of names in square brackets. In keeping with the free-form nature of Spike Milligan’s comedy, scripts and transcriptions of episodes of The Goon Show display a disconcerting inconsistency when it comes to nomenclature. Each of Milligan’s published collections of scripts renders character names in a slightly different fashion; the transcriptions to be found at thegoonshow.net and hexmaster.com/goonscripts contain a number of variations of their own. To eliminate the disorientation that would come from sorting through several names for the same character (and allowing the disorientation that will come from what they have to say to shine though as it should), I have standardized the way that Goon Show character designations appear in extended quotations drawn from scripts, transcripts, or recordings. The standardization is primarily derived from versions of character names used in The Goon Show Scripts, Milligan’s first collection. So…Neddy Seagoon appears as [SEAGOON] whenever the script or transcription renders his name as “Ned”, “Neddie”, or “Neddy”; Hercules Grytpype-Thynne appears as [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE] instead of “Grytpype” or “Thynne”; Henry Crun appears as [CRUN] instead of “Henry” or “Henry Crun”; Major Bloodnok appears as [BLOODNOK] instead of “Major B ­ loodnok”, “Maj. Bloodnok”, “Major”, or any other variation using his rank; Minnie Bannister appears as [MINNIE] rather than “Bannister”, “Minnie Bannister” or “Min”; Jim Spriggs, a minor recurring character noted for a sing-songy nasal voice, appears as [JIM SPRIGGS] rather than “Jim” or “Spriggs”; and Wallace Greenslade, whose function in The Goon Show combines his actual role as a bbc staff announcer with Milligan’s fictionalized version of his role as a bbc staff announcer, is called [GREENSLADE] whenever “Wallace”, “Wal”, or the inexplicable nickname “Bill” appears. In quotes from scripts, you will also find the notations “GRAMS” and “FX”. These are both standard notation used in the series for sound effects: “GRAMS” refers to any pre-recorded effect (whether its source is a gramophone record or ­reel-to reel tape); “FX” indicates that the effect was made live during the recording. Finally, a couple of notes on citations are in order. When referring to sound recordings, I have added a wrinkle to conventional academic style by including

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time-point references. These are meant to function in the same way as page references, to guide the listener to a precise point in the original recording (or, in the case of episodes downloaded from YouTube, my reconstruction of a recording uploaded in sections). Page references have been included for transcriptions of episodes downloaded from hexmaster.com/goonscripts as Word documents, but not for transcriptions from thegoonshow.net, where they are published as individual webpages with no page breaks. In my Works Cited list, I have included the names of transcribers of Goon Show episodes whenever they have been credited, with the exception of names which are obviously pseudonyms, such as “Yukka Tukka Indians” or “Stringy Flea”. And now, without any further ado, this in-print version of a radio “continuity announcement” gives way to the main part of the program…

Introduction What time is it, Eccles?

milligan and stephens 1957d

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This question, asked in one episode of Spike Milligan’s radio comedy series The Goon Show, sums up nearly the entire essence of this bizarrely, often enigmatically humorous program, which first aired on the bbc between 1951 and 1960. Whatever else remains is summed up by the question’s answer, “I’ve got it written down on a piece of paper” (Milligan and Stephens 1957d). This basic uncertainty about the existence of an objectively verifiable reality is revealed again and again in The Goon Show. Whether one listens to a recording of a Goon Show broadcast, or reads either a transcript of the broadcast or Milligan’s original script, what emerges through the forest of chaos, silly noises, and occasionally shopworn gags is a deliberate rejection of the laws of causality and probability, through frequent and systematic distortions of time and space. The Goon Show’s free-ranging approach to time and space was the by-­ product of an equally free-ranging approach to humour. The bizarre situations and plot twists that Milligan created led to comparisons with the works of Beckett, Ionesco, and other staples of the absurdist canon. At the time of ­Milligan’s death in 2002, Peter Barnes, the author of such comic plays as Red Noses, eulogized The Goon Show as being “as bleak as Waiting for Godot and funnier” (2002: 206). Contemporary views on The Goon Show were also quick to point out a connection between Milligan’s alogical stream of consciousness and a broader vein of English-language literary nonsense. Writing in Books and Art in 1957, Philip Oakes felt confident enough in the existence of this connection to say that “Critics have detected the influence of Lewis Carroll, [Edward] Lear, [and] Stephen Leacock” (qtd. in Milligan 1972: 11) in The Goon Show. In the best traditions of nonsense literature and absurdism, the comparisons are both apt and misleading. Certainly undertakings such as climbing the world’s highest underwater mountain or rocketing an armed forces cafeteria to the Far East in order to dispose of surplus tea rival any of Beckett’s or Ionesco’s plots for strangeness, and add to them a picaresque, peripatetic element reminiscent of Lear’s longer poems and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. There is more at the heart of the fantasy, though, than just the “sense of bewilderment and mystery” (Esslin 1971: 180) and “dreamlike modes of thought” (Esslin 1980: 349)

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004310704_002

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INTRODUCTION

so often noted among absurdist works. By Milligan’s own admission, The Goon Show is a direct challenge to the status quo, an act of comic civil disobedience which often takes the form of “one man shouting gibberish in the face of authority” (Milligan 1972: 9). Although they are generally held to be mutually exclusive, the concepts inherent in the terms “status quo” and “uncertainty” work hand in hand in The Goon Show. The program was the product of very uncertain times: the era of its original broadcast was one in which Britain was rapidly divesting itself of an Empire which in its recent heyday had bid fair to be eternal; it was also an era when the threat of nuclear war seemed likely to bring time, at least in the sense of time as measured by human history, to an abrupt stop. The prospect of imminent doom, and the hysteria that accompanies it, are never far from the surface of The Goon Show: in “The Fireball of Milton Street”, a rustic village believes the entire human race to be threatened by the discovery that “the sun’s on fire” (Milligan and Sykes 1955f: 4 and passim). Contemporary fears that the death sentence of nuclear annihilation might be commuted to a world takeover by the forces of international Communism are conflated with the fiendish schemes of Oriental masterminds in early twentieth-century British pulp fiction: Fred Fu-Manchu’s most notable attempt to undermine Western civilization involves the destruction of all metal saxophones (Milligan 1975: 77–90); the eponymous and unpronounceably-named Emperor of the Universe sabotages eggs with “yellow greasepaint and…pigtails” (Milligan and Stephens 1957a) in order to turn Britain’s population Chinese by enlisting their own digestive systems as covert operatives. Milligan’s transfer of the very real doomsday fears of the 1950s to more mundane, or more outlandishly fictional, frames of reference may have been unconscious, but it was far from accidental. From it, a clear picture of how space and time are constituted in the fictional world of The Goon Show can be reconstructed. In The Goon Show, time and space are each conceptualized as a single, unified and integral perceptual field, consisting of an array of temporal or spatial indices. These indices represent both actual and imagined times and places, which sacrifice permanent connections to specific points within the array for the potential ability to connect with any given point at any given time. The paradox inherent in this conceptualization of time and space has far-reaching effects on the models of causality, consequentiality and spatial ­organization which govern The Goon Show’s fictional world. Because events in this world appear not to be the predictable or foreseeable consequences of other events, time in The Goon Show is both plastic and elastic: it can be stretched, compressed, twisted, turned back upon itself, and otherwise

Introduction

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d­ istorted, depending on what is required of it at any given moment in a script. For Goon Show characters, time is literally what you make of it: BLOODNOK. …they wanted to know the time. I’m going to write and tell them, you know. SEAGOON. But, by the time they get it, it will be too late. BLOODNOK. I shall give them tomorrow’s time. milligan and stephens 1957m

Granting time the qualities of plastic ineluctably compels Milligan to grant the same qualities to space as well. In The Goon Show, spaces are defined, not by immutable landmarks or barriers, but by the very mutability of the concept of space itself. Reversals of scale frequently turn these spaces into topsy-turvy funhouses whose various dimensions have little or no direct relation to one another. For example, the 1955 episode “Robin’s Post” concludes with the discovery of the front door of a missing mansion “floating in the canal” (Milligan 1975: 144). The door is transported to dry land and opened, to reveal the rest of the house, its contents, and its inhabitants, which include the guests at a formal dance that has been going on since the beginning of the story (Milligan 1975: 144). In addition to constructing a fictional world with a set of rules which foreground this world’s mutability and instability, Milligan’s continual manipulation and restructuring of time and space gives The Goon Show a dramaturgical framework which imbues the narrative with an awareness of its own status as a thing created—or, to be more precise, in the process of being created. As it unfolds, a Goon Show story undergoes constant revisions, making it appear to be perpetually in a provisional form, and therefore subject to further changes while in progress. While the overall narrative destination of an episode of The Goon Show tends to be clear, individual details have a way of detaching themselves from the story, forcing it to take brief detours, or to change course completely. The 1957 episode “King Solomon’s Mines,” for example, refers only tangentially to H. Rider Haggard’s original story, and only begins to do so after roughly three minutes of introductory nonsense, a three-and-a-half minute scene set in a Monte Carlo casino, and a three-minute musical interlude during which, as narration subsequently informs us, “a plot started to emerge” (Milligan and Stephens 1957q; ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ recording: 0:00–9:30). There are distinct parallels between the moment-to-moment improvisations that act as The Goon Show’s catalysts and what developmental psychology has identified as children’s innate methods of conceptualizing, constructing and reproducing time and space in narrative. With a limited store of first-hand

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INTRODUCTION

information, a child “assimilates, or tries to assimilate, all experience to such fixed action patterns (reflexes) as it has at the start” (von Glasersfeld 2007: 188) of its life. The preoperational phase of cognitive development is thus marked by a high degree of literalism: Piaget notes that, up to around age eight, children experience “confusion between the sign and the thing signified” (1977: 71). Confusion between signs and signifiers leads to the concretization of abstract concepts such as time frames and spatial scales; as well, it tends to give utterances concerning these concepts both an absolute truth-value and the ability to alter whatever givens of time and space have already been established in the mind of the listener. This preoperational narrative style is very much in force in The Goon Show: [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. (off) What are you doing up there on the ceiling? [SEAGOON]. I’ve got news for you, Mr. Thynne. This room’s upside down. MORIARTY. (off) Sapristi! [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. (off) What? MORIARTY. (off) You mean we’re … [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE] & MORIARTY. (coming on-mic.) Ahhhhhh! FX. Two bodies falling to the floor milligan and stephens 1957a

The willingness of the listener—or the reader of a script or transcript—to take everything Milligan throws into The Goon Show, no matter how fantastic, at face value involves more than a simple childlike suspension of disbelief. It also calls for the ability to decipher and disentangle temporal and spatial arrangements that possess improbable combinations of mutually-exclusive attributes. Every one of the program’s full-episode-length adventures is played out in an unsettlingly sophisticated perceptual landscape: a highly linear mode of storytelling and a fragmented, scattershot approach to the passage of time take turns outflanking one another, within a spatial context in which all notions of size, location, and distance are merely temporary, and subject to reappraisal. However, The Goon Show’s chaotic jumps, pauses, and sidesteps in time, and its quicksilver reorientation of spatial scales and relationships, never completely eradicate existing frames of reference. Instead, they disassemble these frames, and reconstruct new frames from their constituent parts. The reconstruction often possesses a recursive nature, as in the case of a ship in the 1954 episode “The Dreaded Batter-Pudding Hurler”, which “was disguised as a train—to

Introduction

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make the train sea-worthy it was done up to look like a boat and painted to appear like a tram” (Milligan 1972: 33). The apparent randomness of such arrangements of information is far from illogical. A theory of a “theatre of chaos”, first proposed by William Demastes in 1998, argues that absurdist, surrealist and postmodern dramaturgies hinge on the deep structures and patterns which emerge from this randomness through “a dynamic blending of order and disorder” (1998: xii) in a way which parallels the mechanisms posited by physicists studying the most basic constituents of matter. As in chaos theory, the free flow of dramaturgical elements whose interplay defies traditional syllogistic analysis has a creative, rather than a destructive, function. In this view, entropy—the steady, linear decay of systems—is “a transitional phase, rather than an inevitable conclusion” (Demastes 1998: 15), and processes which appear at first to be chaotic, illogical, and disorderly actually function to arrest this decay, or at least to slow entropy’s progress. So it is as well with the world of The Goon Show: if things are about to get even farther out of hand than usual, Milligan’s characters have the option of pausing the proceedings, and running backstage for a brief restorative: [ JIM] SPRIGGS. […] I have a message for you, Jim. BLOODNOK. Play it on the gramophone. GRAMS. Typing BLOODNOK. Curse, it’s written in typewriter and I can’t speak a word of it. What’s on the other side? GRAMS.  Pre-recording of Ten Eccleses Singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ BLOODNOK. Oh, this is too much. Ellington, attack the hit parade with a melody divine. Brandy!! GRAMS. Great Running Away Of Boots—Screams etc. THE RAY ELLINGTON QUARTET. Music milligan 1975:102–103

Metatheatrical moments such as this in The Goon Show serve as a reminder of the indeterminacy of the “playing space” and “scenic elements” in a performance text written for the medium of radio, as well as of the indeterminacy of the element of time in all forms of dramatic performance. Anticipating the paradigm for postmodernism developed by Jean-François Lyotard, Milligan constantly uses the ambiguities of The Goon Show’s conditions of production “to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented” (Lyotard 1984: 81). Incoherent as Milligan’s cacophony of allusions may sound at times,

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INTRODUCTION

it is always cohesive: even though instability and indeterminacy feature prominently in The Goon Show’s world of time and space, they are anything but anomalies. Instability and indeterminacy are the very core and framework of Milligan’s entire conception of the way that time and space operate as conceptual constructs.

“Good morning, sir, welcome to Chapter Two”1: A Few Words on the Structure of This Book

Studying The Goon Show has made me keenly aware of the role that structure plays in Spike Milligan’s deceptively amorphous-looking approach to comedy. Whether he was tinkering with the structure of time, the structure of space, structures relating to politics and society, or the structures of thought that govern our understanding of how all these other structures work, Milligan’s preferred method was to call attention to the structure, and then deny it any power to restrain his imagination. Since this book offers a scholarly analysis of The Goon Show, it follows a structure appropriate to such an analysis, while deviating from this structure on a couple of occasions, in the interest of encapsulating some of the analysis and providing a fresh perspective on it. Chapter 1 is an overview of the origins of Milligan’s approach to comedy, and of The Goon Show itself: it begins with an examination of how Milligan’s upbringing and young adulthood helped to give him a sense of disconnectedness from the world, and from the times he lived in. This is followed by an account of the evolution of The Goon Show from a routine (if decidedly offbeat) exercise in sketch comedy to a self-contained world of surreal adventures, peopled by a consistent set of central characters. Milligan’s views on character, narrative and dramaturgy, as expressed through the scripts which created this world, are set in contrast to the practices and attitudes which had defined and dominated radio drama and popular entertainment programming at the bbc from 1 Even the most straightforward distillation of the subject matter about to be covered in these pages is an open invitation to quote The Goon Show. Milligan often wrote deliberately disorienting announcements of new chapters into his scripts, especially when there was no clear break in the action, or any other apparent need to divide the material into chapters in the first place. The quote above is from the 1956 episode “Six Charlies in Search of an Author” (Milligan and Stephens 1956m); the epitome of Milligan’s chapter fetish was reached in 1954’s “The Canal”, which announces a new chapter (or a series of chapters rattled off in rapid succession) a total of eleven times. On four of these occasions, the ensuing chapter lasts not much longer than the splash used to indicate that yet another character has been tossed into the eponymous waterway (Milligan 1954f: 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 17, 19).

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its inception up to the time The Goon Show made its debut in 1951. The chapter concludes with an investigation of elements of early twentieth century popular culture which furnish parallels and precursors to Milligan’s comedic style. Chapter 2 focuses on distortions of time in The Goon Show. Crucial to an understanding of how Milligan distorts time for comic effect is an understanding of how he uses a narrative framework as a backdrop for this distortion. By always telling the story in the present tense, never flashing back or forward, Milligan establishes a sense of predictability about both his narrative and the world it describes; no sooner has he done so than he proceeds to undermine the listener’s ability to predict very much at all by constantly changing the story’s narrator, and in turn, its entire narrative focus. The overall effect on time as well as narrative is one of destabilization: anachronisms creep in through the gaps between competing narrative frames of reference; time can flow at several different rates all at once, causing actions to lose their connection to the laws of motion and causality. Furthermore, characters can remain frozen at the same age for what seems like an eternity, turning that great standard-bearer of eternity, death, into more of a temporary inconvenience than a fact of life. The chapter concludes with a look at the role played by The Goon Show’s distinctive array of sound effects in distorting both its audience’s perception of real time and its perception of narrative flow. Between Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 is something designated as an “Interruption”. It acts as a brief recapitulation and restatement of the ways time operates in The Goon Show’s fictional world. This deviation from the structure of the rest of the book has a structure of its own: as a rough guide and aide-memoire to the reader, the main points of Chapter 2 are summarized as a series of observed regularities to which I have given the name “Milligan’s Laws”. Chapter 3 outlines the various means by which Milligan distorts space in the world of The Goon Show. In doing so, Milligan takes advantage of the potential for fluidity and reconfiguration in the implied spaces of radio theatre. No radio program before or since has exploited this distinctive feature of radio as a performative medium to quite the same effect as The Goon Show: this meant that the physical world implied by the words and sounds in The Goon Show was under constant revision during the course of every episode. Objects could appear and disappear, seemingly at will; the apparent size of objects depended largely on the purpose they were being put to at the moment; the same person could suddenly appear in two (or more) places at once; a doorway could instantly transport someone from home and hearth to a distant locale, while a telephone could bring the participants in a long-distance conversation into the same physical space. World geography in The Goon Show was subject to the same shifting frames of spatial reference: a map could be used, not just

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as a means of planning travel, but as a means of conveyance; every nation on Earth, no matter how far from its own neighbours it lay in a Goonish reckoning of distance, was within easy reach of Central London. Between Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 is another “Interruption”, to restate and recapitulate the previous chapter’s material. The distortions of space found in The Goon Show are grouped and classified as another series of “Milligan’s Laws”, to give the reader a handy reference to the concepts underlying them. Chapter 4 looks into the parallels between Milligan’s reorganization of space and time in The Goon Show and the strategies used to make sense of the world by children in the preoperational phase of cognitive development. Many of the details of Milligan’s adult life suggest he felt most comfortable viewing life from a child’s perspective; certainly his use of words as a quasi-magical agent of concretization in The Goon Show is reminiscent of a child’s substitution of the abstractions known as words for the tangibly substantive elements of the physical world which these abstractions so often represent. The similarity between Milligan’s mindset as a writer and a child’s everyday mindset extends beyond a tendency for individual words with multiple connotations to instantaneously alter the course of a narrative: it also shows up in The Goon Show’s fragmented frames of reference for time and space. The conflation of sequentiality and consequentiality, the agelessness of characters in a narrative, and the disjunction of task completion from empirically verifiable measurements of duration are equally present in both worldviews. So too are idiosyncratic readings of distances, relative size and the scales of local and world geographies. Chapter 5 situates the material from the preceding chapters in a broader cultural and metaphysical context, by examining the common ground shared by Milligan’s Goonish distortions of time and space and a number of areas of postmodern thought. Although he was by no means a meticulous theoretician, Milligan had very strong and clearly-stated views on his role as an innovator who challenged preconceived notions, not just about comedy, but about the world at large. The Goon Show regularly displayed the great pleasure its creator took in exploding grand narratives and cultural myths, and not just ones concerning British society and history. The unstable landscapes Milligan used as backdrops for, and engines of, comedy anticipate postmodern rejections of conventional ideas concerning geography and spatial relations. Instead of imputing an absolute, immutable nature to the spaces we inhabit, these reimaginings suggest that space is always necessarily a provisional construct, tailored to specific human needs and purposes. As befits a fictional world where ignorance is not just bliss but Nirvana, the efficacy and reliability not just of the science of physical spaces, but of the scientific method as a whole, came

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in for frequent skewering during the Goons’ adventures. To a Goon, causality is not a constant of the Universe, but simply something that has been rumoured to happen on occasion to other people. In this sense, Milligan’s radio nonsense prefigured popular scientific discourse: airing at a time when concepts like the Uncertainty Principle had yet to become common currency, it presented a world straight out of Heisenberg and Hawking, where uncertainty and chaos operated on a global level, and acted as creative rather than destructive forces.

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The Accordion under Construction: The Origins of Spike Milligan’s Comedic Style, and of The Goon Show Degrees of instability and indeterminacy tend to creep into an analysis of The Goon Show’s origins, style, and genre. Even with the help of analogies to schools of dramaturgy, categorizing The Goon Show poses a challenge. As with other examples of “popular and everyday humour” in which “everything is subordinate to the production of pleasure” (Palmer 1994: 178), The Goon Show has tended to be dismissed as ephemera, despite the preservation of a significant proportion of the program’s original broadcast run. The theorist and scholar of communications Jerry Palmer has argued that the tendency of such humour to be “in accordance with the values of the initial receiving community” (1994: 182) rarely leads to it being considered as part of a canon whose works are assumed to “transcend historical and social change” (1994: 178). A perception of The Goon Show as merely the product of its time has tended to deny it status as a representative example of a recognized genre conferred by inclusion in a canon. To compound all this, Milligan’s creation has a definite knack for defying categorical distinctions. Although The Goon Show’s basic structure takes the format of a comedy-variety show, it is an unusual example of the genre insofar as it showcases the talents of an ensemble cast rather than a solo performer. Onto the comedy-variety substructure, The Goon Show grafts sketch comedy’s ability to shift rapidly between settings and locales and the continuing and consistent dramatis personae of the sitcom format. The Goon Show lets its central figures loose anywhere and everywhere during the course of any given episode. History, current events and literature (both the ‘classic’ and ‘popular’ varieties) are all fair game: if someone had been there, was there at the moment, or could imagine being there, Milligan could, and would, place his Goon Show characters there as well. 1

Portrait of The Milligan as a Young Goon: Laying the Groundwork for a Personal Vision of Comedy

Another aspect of The Goon Show which confounds the detachment required for textual analysis is the degree of Milligan’s involvement in the program on a personal as well as a creative level. Since Milligan gave numerous interviews © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004310704_003

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in which he took pains to establish his own life history and beliefs as sources of major themes in his work, a quick examination of potential biographical influences on The Goon Show is a necessary prelude to the analysis of Milligan’s conception and use of space and time. At the outset of this examination, a somewhat vexing question of authorship and attribution must be confronted. The spirit of collective creation behind Goon humour and the loose, often improvised style of performance which can be heard in Goon Show broadcasts raise the issue of how to properly weight the individual contribution of each member of the program’s creative team. While Milligan was The Goon Show’s principal writer, his was not the only name to receive writing credit on the program. One hundred and fifty-one episodes of The Goon Show have been identified from recordings and written materials as containing a single half-hour-length adventure: Milligan is the sole listed author of 76 of these; 42 are credited to Milligan and Larry Stephens; 26 to Milligan and Eric Sykes; 2 to Milligan and John Antrobus; 4 to Stephens and Maurice Wiltshire; and 1 to Stephens alone (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 137–153). Goon Show scripts were clearly not the work of a one author, but they do share a consistency in tone and approach which marks them as the product of a single unifying guiding principle. Milligan’s co-writers quite willingly pointed to him as The Goon Show’s driving force. Eric Sykes “claims that the foundations laid by Milligan made writing Goon Shows a delight—all he had to do was copy Spike’s style” (Farnes 1997: 165). Although Goonism fought shy of Surrealism’s “attempts to function as a formal organization” (Zinder 1980: 41) rife with rules, regulations, and manifestos, Spike Milligan can be seen to have served the same function for The Goon Show as Andre Breton did for the Surrealists, by providing what could have easily descended into forgettable “semi-drunken streams of consciousness…by delayed adolescents” (Lewis 1995: 194) with an articulate focal point and a dominant voice. Whether Milligan’s adolescence was delayed or not, his upbringing certainly helped to foster in him a sense of ‘otherness’, of being somehow set apart from the rest of the human race. Born to Anglo-Irish parents on April 16, 1918, Terence Alan Milligan spent the first decade-and-a-half of his life in India and Burma, at a succession of garrisons where his father, Leo, was stationed with the British colonial army. From the start, Spike’s view of his own place in the world was coloured by the experience of being not just a member of a foreign ruling minority in the land of his birth, but a member of a unique cultural subgroup within that minority. Only after his Goon Show years did Milligan express a full appreciation of his Irish heritage.1 Even so, this appreciation makes it 1 This appreciation sometimes extended to implying an Irish heritage for his mother’s entirely English side of the family. In his audiobook reading of Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall,

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clear that certain characteristics which he saw as being central to an ‘Irish’ way of thinking were crucial in shaping his outlook on life: “ ‘I’m Irish and the Irish think sideways’ was his racial explanation of Goon humour”, writes Humphrey Carpenter (2004: Ch. 1). Milligan’s novel Puckoon, set in an archetypal Irish town, is full of references to its residents’ idiosyncratic, ‘sideways’ approach to time and space. When the wife of the story’s central character, Dan Milligan, is first presented to the reader, she threatens her husband, telling him, “I’m going in for five minutes, if you’re still here when I come out in half an hour—” (Milligan 1965: 12) To someone living in Puckoon, the difference between five minutes and half an hour is no difference at all. This is a town where time stands still, in more than one sense: The clock in the church tower said 4.32, as it had done for three hundred years. It was right once a day and that was better than no clock at all. How old the church was no-one knew. It was, like Mary Brannigan’s black baby, a mystery. milligan 1965: 21–22

Some of Milligan’s reminiscences of family life recast his parents as characters who would not be out of place in Puckoon. I used to listen to my father, who was Irish…gosh, he was Irish. He was so Irish…I’ll give you an example of what he was like. Three o’clock in the morning he wakes me up, he says, “wake up—wake up.” So I said, “What is it then?” He said… [pause.] “I’ve never shot a tiger.” I said, “Why are you telling me?” And he said, “I’ve got to tell somebody.” milligan, Clive Anderson Talks Back

Speaking Leo’s words in a broad Irish brogue, Milligan implies that his father’s understanding of the appropriate time—or timing—for saying or doing something is more than a personal eccentricity: it is also an ethnic character trait. Milligan frequently cited his father as a source of inspiration, both for his sense of humour and his sense of life. In his biography of Milligan, Dominic Behan takes this idea one step farther, expressing the belief that “Spike’s soul comes from his father” (1988: 21). Soul-transfer notwithstanding, some of what rubbed off on young Spike was Leo’s ability to compartmentalize events,

Milligan delivers dialogue spoken by his mother in a wavery voice which sounds rather like an Irish niece of Minnie Bannister (‘Spike Milligan: Adolf’).

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thereby organizing simultaneous occurrences into separate time frames. He could, apparently, call upon this faculty whenever he saw fit, even in the face of compelling danger: On 7 September 1940, a daylight [air] raid of great intensity took place. Leo and [Spike’s brother] Desmond were sitting in the Astoria Cinema at Rochdale Road, Lewisham, watching Stagecoach…Leo was too enraptured with the early Western spectacle to contemplate leaving and they sat until the end of the programme. scudamore 1985: 70

In this instance, the alternative time frame was accompanied by an alternative spatial frame. For as long as he remained in his seat in the cinema, Leo was in the Wild West, half a century and more away from World War ii, half a world away from London and the bombs that were falling on it. An underlying theme in these recounted memories is the irreconcilability of an imagined ‘Irish’ way of life with the strictures imposed upon it by English rule. To the Irish (at least, as Milligan characterizes them), time and space cannot be measured and parcelled out; schedules and maps, and the perceived control that comes with them, are for the English. ‘Irish’ time and space, as rendered by Milligan, form a single, boundless, seamless, integral force of nature, beyond human control, and only occasionally yielding to human understanding. Behan’s phrase for this conceptualization is “time without memory” (1988: xiii), an essentialized, eternal present tense in which history and current events are forever one and the same. In spite of all this, depictions of the Irish—to say nothing of their conceptions of time and space—scarcely ever turn up in The Goon Show. Another of Milligan’s formative cultural influences, however, makes regular appearances. Two Indian gentlemen, generally referred to as “Lalkaka” and “Banerjee”, have a habit of showing up just when a Goon Show adventure is poised to make a dead run to its climax, for the express purpose of bringing the action to a dead stop. They can manage to turn the most straightforward tasks into interminable interludes by conversing in the general conceptual area of the job in question, without ever actually talking about it: in the 1958 episode “The Evils of Bushey Spon”, they spend well over a minute meandering through a largely fruitless, mostly off-topic discussion on how to erect a lamppost before coming to the conclusion that “this lamp-post is no good lying on the ground. We must get it in the little hole” (‘Bushey Spon’ recording: 21:28–22:43). The point of interchanges such as this seems to be to see how long the ­conversation can be sustained without anybody getting to the point. Milligan revelled in creating—and enacting his part of—the circumlocution of

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the Lalkaka/Banerjee dialogues. In so doing, he was also re-creating and reenacting a sense of timelessness, and insouciance about the passage of time, that he believed to be central to the cultural milieu of the Indian subcontinent. Milligan’s younger brother Desmond also remembers that time in this culture was not necessarily experienced as a continuous flow, but was marked by a series of annual disruptions brought on by severe weather conditions. “In the East, when the rainy season moves in, boy does it rain. It’s like a solid wall of water hitting the ground, and it goes on and on. All social activity comes to a halt” (Farnes 2010: “Desmond Milligan”). Milligan was prone to waxing nostalgic about how his own experience of time’s flow was borne along by what he took to be the natural rhythms of India: he once summed it up by saying “I think I must have felt my life out there” (Behan 1988: 61). It is important to remember, however, that Milligan’s belief in the universality of this relaxed pace was shaped by a very particular set of circumstances. Belonging to a subculture of foreign overlords, being catered to in his own home by a staff of Indian servants, “without being expected to do anything for himself” (Carpenter 2004: Ch.1), it hardly surprising that he remembered India as a place of “comfort, space, security, and relative plenty” (Scudamore 1985: 35) The picture of Spike Milligan that emerges from his childhood recollections is of a young man at odds with what he saw as the expectations of a dominant culture that was not his own. Although he grew up as a ‘child of the regiment’, Milligan was never at ease with anything resembling regimentation. His identification with Leo stemmed from the congruence between his father’s inner life and his own—“he also lived in a fantasy world” (Scudamore 1985: 37)— not from the strict adherence to rules and regulations that defined his father’s identity as a soldier. Discipline, insofar as it involved where to be, when to be there, and what to do when there, seems to have made Milligan uncomfortable from an early age. Part of his education took place at “a girls’ school…the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Poona” (Scudamore 1985: 14). As he remembered it, “I think my mother chose the girls’ school in one of her early attempts to protect me from the realities of life” (Scudamore 1985: 14). This view of the convent school as a refuge from the world at large reinforces the impression of Milligan as a lifelong outsider; as Milligan’s onetime amanuensis Pauline Scudamore sees it, “he was essentially a lonely child and perhaps isolated to some extent by unusually highly developed powers of awareness and perception” (1985: 19). Young Terence Milligan seems to have been conscious of not belonging in his surroundings, whether as “one of only half a dozen other boys” (Behan 1988: 43) in a classroom full of girls, a freethinker in a Catholic system of education, a free spirit on a military base, or an Irish child

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of an Irish soldier in an Englishman’s army. Added to this was an unfulfilled longing to be truly part of the wider environment he found himself in. Milligan looked back on his years in India with a regret that goes beyond wistfulness for the innocence of childhood. He resented his upbringing for denying him a sense of connectedness with the place he grew up in; to his mind, his parents were chiefly responsible for this, going so far as to eradicating his knowledge of one of the local languages. “I spoke fluent Urdu…when I was thirteen. Why didn’t they try and keep that alive in me at least?” (Scudamore 1985: 24) Much as he would describe his time there as “the ‘Golden Years’” (Behan 1988: 65), India was never a true home to Milligan. His boyhood home, at least in a spiritual sense, was England: “the word England just meant magic to me” (Scudamore 1985: 24). If England was ‘home’ as far as Milligan was concerned, it was also a home he visited fewer than half a dozen times during the first fifteen years of his life. This must have contributed greatly to his sense of disconnectedness from what others took for granted about time and space. The simple act of ‘going home’ required a sea voyage lasting weeks; the route taken was not a straight line between two points on a map, but a circuitous sea route which covered more than ten thousand miles. One of the main life lessons Milligan learned during his formative years in India was that times and distances can be deceptive. It can be a bit unsettling to grow up knowing that you’re not where you’re supposed to be, and that where you’re supposed to be is far away and takes a long time to reach. When Milligan came to England for good in 1933, he learned something rather more unsettling. Milligan’s father had been discharged from the army as part of a government economy measure, and brought the family back to “a cold, unwelcoming England” (Lewis 1995: 177), in search of a new living. Far from offering a fresh start, the Milligans’ new life soon “settled into a dreary routine of struggling for survival in [the slums of] South London” (Scudamore 1985: 38). It seemed to Milligan as though the first fifteen years of his life had counted for nothing, or had never really happened. Without warning, “his childhood…cushioned by servants and ceremony” had vanished; in its place was a “penniless existence in [the London neighbourhood of] Catford” (Lewis 1995: 177, 182). His family’s straitened finances and his lack of interest in formal schooling soon combined to drive Milligan into the job market. The low-level “dead end factory or bum-type jobs” (Lewis 1995: 182) he was forced to take imposed severe restrictions on his time and movements. A young man raised with a ‘sideways’ Irish way of looking at time, in an Indian subcontinent where life’s schedules were still set by nature, must have experienced considerable discomfiture when confronted with the factory punch-clock. Although Milligan

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was a century removed from the dawn of the industrial age, the psychological effects of his transition from an essentially pre-industrial mode of life would have been similar to those described by English historian Eric Hobsbawm: industrial labour—and especially mechanized factory labour—imposes a regularity, routine and monotony quite unlike pre-industrial rhythms of work […] Industry brings the tyranny of the clock, the pace-setting machine, and the complex and carefully-timed interaction of processes […] and above all a mechanized regularity of work which conflicts not only with tradition, but with all the inclinations of a humanity as yet unconditioned to it. (1968: 85–86) Milligan’s antipathy toward externally-imposed structures was cemented by his experiences with factory work; finding “the boredom of the ‘conveyor-belt’ job” less than congenial to his temperament, he took a measure of revenge against his lot in life by stealing factory supplies and by slacking off (Scudamore 1985: 48). Milligan soon threw over the regimentation of factory life to pursue another occupational path, the life of an itinerant jazz musician—first playing bass, then adding the trumpet and guitar to his repertoire of instruments (Carpenter 2004: Ch. 2 passim). The conditions of this life were hardly stable, but they did offer Spike a greater degree of personal freedom. Along with this freedom came an uncertainty which Milligan found exhilarating. Not knowing where and when the next gig may be, or how long into the wee hours of the morning it may last, deters many people from becoming professional musicians; for Spike, these were the very elements of the vocation which attracted him most. Any night he had a gig was a night away from a home with its own set of King’s Regulations—or, in this case, Queen’s Regulations, since they were laid down and enforced by his mother. Flo Milligan’s imperious approach to home and family comes across even in her eldest son’s most charitable reminiscences of her. Described through the filter of one biographer as “decisive and dogmatic”, she “ruled the household with a rod of iron […] and had no capacity to see her sons as individuals or to recognize that they might have their own ideas and aspirations which did not, of necessity, fall in with her own” (Scudamore 1985: 55). One specific aspiration which Flo seems never to have deemed worthy of consideration was a desire to live according to any schedule other than hers. In the Milligan home, things happened when, and for as long as, Flo wanted them to; this included timeconsuming temper tantrums: “sometimes she would rage and scold for a full half hour” (Scudamore 1985: 60) in an effort to make whatever point she felt

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like making at the moment. A regular theme for the diatribes was “her dislike of [Spike’s] ‘rakish’ progress” in the demi-monde of London jazz clubs (Behan 1988: 85). Assuming that there was any time to get a word in edgewise, the rake himself could always offer ample evidence that he was raking in at least as much money from this way of life as he ever had from working in a factory (Scudamore 1985: 55). Just as Spike Milligan was beginning to find his way and establish a name for himself on London’s jazz and dance club scene, an even greater uncertainty took over his life. The outbreak of World War ii found Milligan a less-thanenthusiastic conscript into military service: One day an envelope marked o.h.m.s. fell on the mat. Time for my appendicitis, I thought. […] Weeks went by, several more o.h.m.s. letters arrived, finally arriving at the rate of two a day stamped URGENT. […] One Sunday…as a treat Father opened one of the envelopes. In it was a cunningly worded invitation to partake in World War ii, starting at seven and sixpence a week, all found. milligan 1973: 18–19

This version of events is exaggerated for comic effect, but the truth behind it is that Milligan did not come the first time he was summoned by His Majesty. It may well be that Spike was compartmentalizing events in the same way his father did: perhaps he believed that, if he ignored World War Two long enough, it would go away and leave him alone. The irony in Milligan’s initial unwillingness to serve is that he adjusted well to life in uniform. British military discipline was not necessarily looser for its civilian conscripts, but the sheer number of new soldiers who swelled the ranks meant that enterprising recruits had an easier time finding and exploiting loopholes in the system. Milligan and his comrades appear to have taken full advantage of the army regulars’ inability to be everywhere and see everything: The Signal Section was a law unto itself. We organized the duty roster to suit ourselves. We all opted for one week’s duty and one week off. Two of you would work out who slept and kept awake. During the off week your presence in bed at midday was explained thus: “This man has been on duty all night, sir.” milligan 1973: 97

The circumstance that permitted Milligan to get away with breaches of army protocol and discipline was the same one that permitted him to evade the

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­demands of the workaday civilian world: musical talent. Providing the entertainment for regimental dances gave Milligan and the other members of his small jazz combo a certain amount of latitude, at least on dance nights. Curfew-breaking was a matter of course on such occasions; Milligan recalled that, after one raucous soirée at a private house, There was a lot of booze left in the kitchen. We drank it. Legend has it I slid to the floor, first calling for my mother or a priest. To make matters worse, the band truck wouldn’t start, so [Milligan’s bandmates] Edgington and Fildes dragged me along between them […] The billet was half a mile away, but after a while the Gunners Edgington and Fildes dropped Gunner Milligan in a ditch and said, “Sod it.” They sat a while smoking and Driver Kidgell said, “I’ll go and ‘phone for a truck.” An hour later the water waggon arrived. It was two in the morning […] There was only enough room for three in the cabin, so Edgington and I sat astride the water tank on the back and drove through the black silent streets of Hailsham shouting ‘Night Soil’. Thank God there wasn’t any. milligan 1973: 101–102

Milligan’s stint in the British army was marked by a disconnectedness in time and space similar to the one he had experienced in his childhood years in India. Even so, this form of disconnectedness had its own peculiarities. Wartime service is governed by indeterminacy: its one certainty is that you must be ready to react to situations and occurrences which you cannot predict. It is a life of moving on a moment’s notice to an unknown locale, then staying put for what often seems like an eternity waiting for something to happen there. A joke which turns up in both The Goon Show and Milligan’s war memoirs involves the narrator of a story saying: “suddenly—nothing happened. But it happened suddenly” (Milligan 1972: 31; 1973: 34). During the periods when nothing was happening suddenly, Milligan took the opportunity to disengage from the here and now. “High on his priorities on arrival in North Africa was to make a pilgrimage to the many archaeological sites […] He made a habit of digging in all the ruins that they encountered wherever they fought” (Behan 1988: 103). It is telling that Milligan recalled these journeys, and not ones into nearby towns, as his most fruitful means of escape from life at the front. Rather than engaging live and in person with a contemporary civilization, he chose to step backwards in time to investigate the remnants of a dead one. The abandoned relics of past ages crop up on numerous occasions in The Goon Show—ruined castles, lost gold mines, buried treasures—even the Mary

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Celeste, a sailing vessel famous for being abandoned. Milligan went so far as to imagine elements of mid-twentieth century life in a derelict, abandoned state. The Goon Show episode variously known as “The Scarlet Capsule” and “Quartermass, o.b.e.” concerns an archaeological find which is eventually discovered to be a disused London subway car, filled with the skeletons of forgotten commuters. If the war was leaving Milligan more and more (to borrow a turn of phrase from Kurt Vonnegut) unstuck in time, one specific wartime experience sealed this fate for him. On 22 January2 1944, while under heavy fire at Lauro, Italy, Milligan suffered a complete mental breakdown. Before being shipped out to hospital, he lost track of time altogether: “Milligan has gone. I’m a zombie […] I am aware that the date is January 27. A whole week? Where have I been?” (Milligan 1980: 284). Extended convalescence can tend to frame the hospital as a time and place apart, a world not governed by the rules and expectations of the patient’s everyday life. This certainly appears to have been the case with Milligan during his recovery from what was diagnosed at the time as “battle fatigue”. Two weeks into his hospital stay, Milligan had already begun to notice that the circumscribed monotony of his daily routine had begun to make it difficult to gauge the passage of time. “All day and every day I just sat on the bed and read. I wondered if I did anything apart from that” (Milligan 1980: 286). The aftermath of Milligan’s episode of battle fatigue produced yet another dislocation in time and space. Transferred from the Royal Artillery to Combined Services Entertainment, where he played in dance bands and acted in revues, he found himself running on a different track from his fellow soldiers. Although stationed at military bases, he was now exempt from many of the rules and regulations which organized an ordinary soldier’s days: “(t)here was no responsibility save being on time ready to perform” (Scudamore 1985: 123). Getting back this important aspect of his civilian life may have compensated for the effects of battle fatigue, but Milligan still regarded his entire period of military service as a disruption in—if not a waste of—time: “we won the war but I lost five precious years” (Milligan 1991: 5). It is undeniable that Milligan’s “war experiences were closely linked with his artistic and creative development” (Scudamore 1985: 114), but the experiences he had after he was discharged from the army in 1946 were crucial in

2 This is the date given by Scudamore (1985: 103) and Behan (1988: 115); Milligan’s memory of the incident, as published in Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall, puts it somewhere between the evening of 20 January and the early hours of the morning of 21 January (1980: 278–280).

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establishing a pattern for this development, one that would make The Goon Show more than just another comedy-variety program. By war’s end, the circadian rhythms—and the frequent absence of a circadian rhythm—common to itinerant entertainers had come to dominate Milligan’s life. The years immediately following the war were an on-again, off-again affair for him, his calendar dotted with intermittent one-night shows, far-ranging tours, and long stretches of inactivity. While spending at least some of his time entertaining others, he spent no time entertaining the notion of taking a more regular kind of work with more regular hours. The tension which this situation created between Milligan and his parents eventually drove him out of the family home for good: “His mother was unimpressed with his potential career as an entertainer and never failed to repeat her desire that he should get a ‘proper’ job” (Scudamore 1985: 127). By the end of the 1940s, Spike Milligan was leading a semi-nomadic existence, working wherever and whenever there was a stage available to perform on, sleeping wherever someone would put him up for the night. His lack of either a permanent job or a permanent home made time and space highly fluid components of his lifestyle. Constantly shifting frames of reference and a sense of impermanence were already central themes in his personal and professional life: they would soon become central themes of his creative output. All he required was the sort of opportunity which would give his creativity a clearer focus. The phrase that best describes this opportunity, when it came, is “better late than never”. Entering his thirties, Milligan had reason to believe, as Peter Sellers’ biographer Roger Lewis believes about him, that “he was born in the wrong era” (1995: 180). Lewis’ claim that Milligan “should have been in Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound’s gang, contributing to Blast!” (1995: 180), however, may not be as compelling as the assertion made by Neil Cornwell that Milligan’s work is timeless, in the sense that it is the heritor to “(t)he whole tradition of sotie and mascarade focused both in the great clowns of history, the numskull figures of folklore and the mystique of the local village idiot” (2006: 20). Before his luck changed, Milligan could have been excused for feeling a little like a village idiot, having drifted through the first three decades of his life without settling into a niche, finding himself either in the wrong place at the wrong time or not quite the right place at not quite the right time. A promising career in music which had been interrupted by war was just starting up again, his most frequent work coming as a guitarist with the Bill Hall Trio, a group specializing in novelty numbers and clownish costuming. The group’s successful tours of Europe seem to have done nothing to allay Milligan’s fear that time, in the form of changing styles and tastes in entertainment, was passing him

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by. Frustrated with marking time while his creativity stagnated, Milligan quit, later justifying his decision by saying that “(t)he Trio went on working for another twenty years doing the same act” (Milligan 1991: 152) without him. Clowning about on the Continent with Bill Hall was a tentative step towards a career in comedy: Milligan took a far more decisive one by insinuating himself into a coterie of comedians, writers, and entertainers who were regulars at the Grafton Arms, a pub in London’s Victoria district. Although he initially gravitated towards Grafton’s because “People who mattered congregated there: performers, writers, and producers” (Behan 1988: 133), Milligan found an atmosphere of openness that transcended the alehouse’s simple appeal as a place to make show business contacts. Grafton’s soon became a “home-fromhome” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 17), where Milligan and other kindred spirits developed a “crazy, pun-dizzy, logic-smashing humour that doesn’t despise your intelligence” (Hewitt 1951: 34) during late-night exchanges of badinage and tomfoolery which were the comedy equivalent of jazz musicians’ jam sessions. The Grafton Arms gave Milligan more than just a chance to try his hand as a fledgling writer and performer of comedy, in a low-pressure setting, with an accepting audience of fellow participants. It also supplied him with a preceptor and guide who could secure employment for him in the field of light entertainment—Jimmy Grafton, the pub’s proprietor. Grafton was instrumental in getting Milligan his first break as a comedy writer and performer; as he remembers it, Spike’s creative impulse for comedy was now stirring in him thoughts of script-writing. His mind was full of ideas, some of them brilliantly inventive and comic, but his ability to express them on paper was limited. Harry [Secombe] decided that I, as an already practising script-writer with the added advantage of a pub, was the person Spike should meet. wilmut and grafton 1977: 27

During Milligan’s apprenticeship under Grafton, the two men wrote as a team for an assortment of bbc Radio variety programs; Spike himself “wrote for several top comics of the day—Bill Kerr, Alfred Marks, and even Frankie Howerd” (Dixon 2002). Contributing to shows and performers with a safe, predictable style of comedy helped Milligan gain much-needed experience and confidence, but it did little to satisfy his need to experiment with the unconventional, or to refine his experiments into a full-fledged craft. Milligan’s once summed up his frustrations with this situation, and with the inequity of the relationship between master and pupil:

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I was obviously writing superior comedy to him…I used to make up jokes and he’d say ‘I’ve never heard that joke,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, I make them up.’ After a while he asked if I’d like to write with him, and I did. Yes, he was helping me, but he also was helping himself. behan 1988: 134

Even as Jimmy Grafton was helping Milligan—as well as himself—build a name with the bbc, Grafton’s pub was giving Milligan a forum for his wilder flights of fancy, and a chance to comb his circle of show business acquaintances for like-minded potential collaborators. By 1949, Milligan and three of the regulars of the after-hours sessions at the Grafton Arms—Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine—had begun to identify themselves as The Goons (Lewis 1995: 189). Even so, they had never appeared in public as a group outside the informal performance space of Grafton’s when the first series of The Goon Show, entitled Crazy People, aired on 28 May 1951 (Farnes 1997: 105). The Goons’ relative lack of experience as a comedy team had little bearing on the decision to grant them air time. The original impetus for the program that became known as The Goon Show was not a desire by the bbc to provide an outlet for Milligan’s unique style and sense of humour, but the desire to create a starring vehicle for Sellers, who was fast making a name for himself as a radio voice actor. Pat Dixon, a bbc producer whom Sellers had known for several years, “came to Grafton’s, laughed at the antics, and promised that if a script could be concocted, he’d recommend a series to the planning department” (Lewis 1995: 194). 2

“Well, that’s the end of that corny routine”3: The Goon Show’s Sketchy Beginnings

A Goon Show by any other name was not The Goon Show its listeners would later come to recognize. Apart from using prototypes of Milligan’s regular stable of characters, and having a certain predilection for offbeat situations, the Crazy

3 This line is spoken by Major Bloodnok in “The Internal Mountain”, one of the later episodes of The Goon Show’s fourth season (Milligan 1954c: 16). This was a period during which the program was making its final transition from a format based on stand-alone sketches to one featuring full-episode-length stories. Although Milligan never entirely discarded “corny routines” from his bag of tricks, this line may have been a way of venting his frustration at the dependence on them enforced by traditional sketch formats.

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People incarnation of The Goon Show bore very little resemblance to what the program would become, and “divulged more caution than innovation” (Lewis 1995: 198). Any flights of fancy tended to be quelled by the program’s adherence to “the standard variety format of that time, a series of freestanding sketches and three or four musical items” (Farnes 1997: 105). Possibly as a result of there being “rarely any continuity between sketches through an entire show” (Farnes 1997: 107), and the sketches themselves being largely plotless “monologues, or spots” (Lewis 1995: 199), Milligan’s mentor and original script editor Jimmy Grafton recalls that “the writing was somewhat uneven” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 41). This is understandable, given that Milligan was a novice scriptwriter faced with the task of keeping a fledgling program on the air. The threat of cancellation would have loomed over the entire first season, which was commissioned in blocks of “six shows…a further six, and then a further five” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 44). In any case, the tentative approach may have helped to ensure the renewal of what would henceforth be billed as The Goon Show for a second season: Roger Lewis is of the opinion that “the fact that there had been so few novelties must have boded well for its future” (1995: 199). 3

New Producer, New Approach: Peter Eton and the Transformation of The Goon Show

1953 saw the beginnings of a shift in elements of The Goon Show’s textual structure and production practices which would transform the program from a traditional comedy/variety show (albeit one featuring a slightly bizarre brand of humour) to an exercise in no-holds-barred parodic deconstruction. Crucial to this development was the appointment of a new producer to the program for the start of its third series of broadcasts. Peter Eton’s role in shaping the template to which The Goon Show would hew from its fifth through its tenth and final series went beyond his “reputation of being a hard man to make laugh” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 47), which in and of itself would have driven Milligan to be more scrupulous in both gag structure and proper contextualization of set-ups and pay-offs. The experience Eton gained during a decade of producing features and straight drama for bbc Radio (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 47) would prove crucial as he eased the show towards a stronger standard of professionalism, while at the same time fostering a climate conducive to experimentation. The first major change Eton instituted was to reduce the number of musical interludes from three to two, “one by [Ray] Ellington and one by [Max] Geldray” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 49), which served both to lessen the breaks to

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the momentum of the comedy segments, and to establish a consistent lineup of ‘side acts’ which would remain with the program through the rest of its run. The scripted portion of The Goon Show was also transformed, although a little more slowly: the second and third sketches increasingly formed “a single story in two parts—Eton was trying to get Milligan to write longer stories” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 50). The exposure Eton had received to the bbc Drama Department’s more conventional, chronologically-ordered style of narrative and the Features Department’s tendency towards “fragmented narratives, centred on dialogue and internal monologue…forms typically associated with modernist writing” (Frattarola 2009: 453) was a likely influence on the tendency of these stories to sequence events chronologically within a framework marked by spatial and thematic disjunction. The reconfiguring of The Goon Show’s scripted segments from isolated comic turns to episodes in a condensed, but cohesive, plotline continued through the program’s fourth series. “It was not until the second half of the series that the shows had a continuous plot as a regular thing, but at last the dramatic format which Eton had been urging the Goons to adopt was working” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 52–53). A comparison of two Goon Shows which handle a similar story idea helps to illustrate the effect the Peter Eton regime had on Milligan’s conception of the program. Episode 1 of The Goon Show’s second series (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 133), broadcast January 22, 1952, and Episode 24 of the fifth series, broadcast March 8, 1955 (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 140), take such radically opposed tacks to the search for the legendary yeti that they hardly seem the work of the same writer. The 1952 version of the yeti story is the last of its show’s three comedy segments, and takes a straightforward approach to subject matter and narrative form. An announcement by The Goon Show’s resident narrator at the time, Andrew Timothy, informs listeners, without a trace of irony, that what follows is “an adventure of that extraordinary creation of Peter Sellers, Major Bloodnok, in the Quest for the Abonimable [sic] Snowman” (Milligan and Stephens 1952: 10). The quest falls somewhat short of the promised adventure, and the implied promise of comedy, advertised in the buildup to the sketch. To take an example which concerns itself with spatial relationships, roughly two pages of the script are concerned with nothing more significant, or comic, than one character after another going out in and of the same door for the purpose of reporting that something isn’t on the other side of it. The payoff to the entire sketch is similarly perfunctory and predictable, serving as a clue to the sort of writer Milligan might have become without further nurturing and guidance. The Abominable Snowman is captured, but the subsequent discovery that “He’s melted!” (Milligan and Stephens 1952: 15) plays on the literal meaning of the ‘snowman’ part

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of the creature’s name in a way too obvious for it to stand alone and expect to get a laugh. However, since it displays no attempt in its structure to distract the listener from the task of waiting for the inevitable visually-based pun, it only stands as an example of how a joke which relies solely on the element of surprise can fail. Three years later, under Peter Eton’s guiding hand, The Goon Show and Milligan are scarcely recognizable for the changes both have undergone. This time around, the protagonist of the story entitled “The Yehti” is Neddie Seagoon, who is by now firmly ensconced in his role as The Goon Show’s all-purpose walking parody of heroism. Seagoon’s quest in “The Yehti” quickly becomes a search, not for the eponymous monster, but for places to begin the process of searching for it, in a house full of never-ending subterranean corridors. The activity which constitutes this search involves opening a series of doors, behind which are found (among other things) an inexhaustible supply of trains, equally innumerable flocks of sheep, and “[Goon Show announcer Wallace] Greenslade having a bath” (Milligan and Sykes 1955h: 16). Through elaboration, a single gag of the type encountered in the previous attempt at a yeti tale becomes a rondo of variations on the theme that anything at all could lie behind a newlyencountered door. The payoff to the quest is likewise a better piece of comedy craftsmanship than its predecessor. Finding a door with ‘The Yehti’ marked on it, Seagoon elects not to open it, but to “lock the door…and take the room to London” (Milligan and Sykes 1955h: 18). The episode’s climactic scene finds Seagoon preparing to display his capture, in much the same way as Bloodnok uncrated his melted Abominable Snowman. This time, however, the opening of the door with ‘The Yehti’ on it reveals something more substantial than water: SEAGOON. Right. Well, here it is. Now stand well back gentlemen, he may be armed. FX. [Key turns in lock] SEAGOON. Now when I fling this door open be ready to grab him. Right! FX. [Door slams open] GRAMS. [Train whistle] SEAGOON. Aaaaaaah! milligan and sykes 1955h: 18

The return to a running gag to close out the episode provides a comic finish which balances elements of the expected and the unexpected; the manner in which it does so recalls “the unvarying rhythm of a spring that coils and releases” characteristic of a rhetorical device labeled ‘the Jack-in-the-Box’ by Henri Bergson in his essay entitled “Laughter” (1974: 741). Although by this

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point in the script the act of opening a door has become a trigger mechanism for a payoff based on reversal of expectation, the result of opening this specific door is never as much of a foregone conclusion as the discovery of a melted ‘snowman’. Based on the precedent set during previous instances of the dooropening gag, the occupant of the room could just as easily have been more sheep, or Wallace Greenslade, in or out of his bath. The contrast between “The Yehti” of 1955 and its 1952 counterpart is emblematic of the great leap made by Milligan from the conventional (if sometimes anarchic) approach of The Goon Show’s first two series to Peter Eton’s conception of the program as “a bold and melodramatic rearrangement of all life” with “a nightmare landscape of its own [peopled with] men, beasts and machines terribly at variance with the observable universe” (1975: 10). 4

The Goon Show’s ‘Classic’ Format: Dramatic Structures Mature in the Service of Comedic Immaturity

The new format of The Goon Show brought to the program an integrated fictional world, but one which requires a little subtlety to parse. The necessary presence of a station identifier, along the lines of “This is the bbc” to open each episode, and end credits at the conclusion of the broadcast, mark it off as a selfcontained entity from the programming which precedes and follows it. However, for a first-time listener, the exact nature of this programming is not made immediately clear. The beginning of a Goon Show in its classic format is not essentially different from the beginning of a Goon Show in its embryonic form. With station identification out of the way, the proceedings do not move on directly to the story proper, but elide into a preamble which generally has little if any direct relevance to the forthcoming action. Instead, the performers introduce themselves, as well as the idea that they will be portraying multiple roles, while easing the audience into a state of attentive receptiveness for comedy by stringing together unrelated quips, nonsense language, and ­metalinguistic mouth-sounds. As in an evening of variety entertainment, the presentational style employs direct address, and uses a more informal tone than that of the main plot; performers often speak in their ‘natural’ offstage voices, rather than adopting a character. Each one of these preambles is something of an entity unto itself, but at least some of their more recognizable common features can be gleaned from the following example: [GREENSLADE]. This is the bbc Home Service. GRAMS. OUTBREAK OF PEOPLE SIGHING.

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[GREENSLADE]. Oh come, come, dear listeners, it’s not that bad— HARRY [SECOMBE, as himself]. Of course not—come, Mr. Greenslade, tell them the good news. [GREENSLADE]. Ladies and gentlemen, we now have the extraordinary talking-type wireless ‘Goon Show’. GRAMS. SCREAMS OF ANGUISH. PEOPLE RUNNING AWAY. HARRY [SECOMBE, as himself]. Mmmm—is the popularity waning? Ahem. milligan 1972: 99

Viewed as a whole, these preambles serve to demarcate time and space in the world of The Goons, setting a rough system of ground rules for audience expectations concerning temporal and spatial frames of reference. An episode of The Goon Show begins in a time and place that represent a departure from times and places in the everyday world. Audience response to jokes in the preamble gives a general idea of the size of the crowd, and therefore the size of the auditorium; no further cues are given about the dimensions of the rest of the performance space. The time of day when the performance takes place is never mentioned, giving rise to the question “what proportion of the home audience believed each new episode of The Goon Show to be a live event?” Any trouble we have, fifty years down the road, with speculating about how well The Goon Show’s radio audience understood that they were listening to a recorded program is compounded by two further complications. First of all, each episode was announced as a recorded program, but only in the closing credits. A first-time listener might not have guessed this for nearly thirty minutes; a longtime listener could conceivably turn off the radio as the conclusion of each episode’s adventure gave way to the credits, or could simply not bother to pay attention to the content of the credits. In the second place, new episodes of The Goon Show were broadcast twice within a week of being recorded (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 128). In the absence of specific questions or remarks from audience surveys on the subject of The Goon Show being pre-recorded, all the data we have is anecdotal information lifted from the memories of listeners such as Monty Python member John Cleese, who remembers that “I became almost obsessed with them [The Goons]…I used to lie on the bed, with the radio there, and a pillow on my ear, just to try to get the line that I’d missed two nights before [on the original broadcast]” (Monty Python: Almost the Truth). There is one more way in which the preamble to an episode of The Goon Show acts to distance the program from everyday temporal and spatial frames of reference. The preambles provide a regular home to characters who take no

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part in the main story of an episode, and have no relevance whatsoever to it. Many, such as a persistent, strident, and adenoidal singer (if ‘singer’ is the word for him) portrayed by Milligan show up solely as distractions; others appear to be auditioning for roles in future episodes. One such instance of this involves a character known variously as “Hern” or “Hern-Hern”, an onomatopoeic name derived from Sellers’ impression of the soft-palate-dominated sonorities of American speech. Frequently used in preambles as a newsreader or a voiceover man for spoof movie trailers, this character turns up in the main plot of the 1959 episode “Call of the West”, as the United States Cavalry officer Captain Slokum (Milligan 1974: 74, and passim). The strategies used during the preambles to the main story of a Goon Show worked together to engender a dissociative conception of time and space: ­listeners were encouraged to experience what followed as if it belonged to another world altogether. The transition from the preamble’s halfreal world of performers announcing their functions in the playlet that is about to be enacted to the wholly fictional world of the playlet itself is clearly signposted. The end of the preamble and the beginning of the adventure which will take up the balance of the episode is clearly signaled by either the staff announcer or one of the cast, in a manner which, insofar as it can be said to follow a pattern of any kind, follows this one: SPIKE. Ho ho ho, fear not Neddie lad—we’ll jolly them up with a merry laughing-type joke show. Stand prepared for the story of ‘Napoleon’s Piano’. milligan 1972: 99

Although straightforward enough in its intent to separate ‘show’ from ‘preshow’, such an introduction does not establish a strict boundary between the mimetic and diegetic elements of the narrative which follows. Characters in a Goon Show adventure frequently step outside their place in the script to give narrative asides in direct address. Milligan’s scripting of these asides often plays with the ambiguity of their presumed setting, specifically the incongruity of a character firmly located in a distant past recapitulating events from the perspective of the here and now: SEAGOON. Yes, it’s me folks. Where’s my muffled speaking trumpet? Hello folks, haaaallo folks. I’m speaking through my muffled speaking trumpet from directly outside the main gate of the Red Fort. milligan and stephens 1957o

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The ambiguity created by the fact that Seagoon is apparently speaking from a setting which has been specifically referred to as “India, 1857” (Milligan and Stephens 1957o), to a studio audience located in Britain in 1957, is left deliberately unresolved. The net effect of a performance whose preliminaries are a calculated non sequitur, and whose text enforces the simultaneous enactment of a role itself, the role of its performer, and the role of a performer in a role, is to create the impression that The Goon Show in its mature format is less a radio adventure serial framed by elements of a variety show than an adventure serial and a variety show stirred into a loose emulsion which is in constant flux. This mode of presentation requires the listener to be constantly on the alert for shifts in tone which temporarily reorient the balance between ‘adventure’ and ‘variety show’ elements in the narrative. 5

Little Cardboard-and-String Heroes4: The Goon Show’s Regular Cast of Characters

The dramaturgical flexibility of the collection of little sagas which forms the corpus of The Goon Show from 1954 onwards owes a great deal to the flexibility of its dramatis personae. For example, The Goon Show’s main protagonist, Neddie Seagoon, is an oddly nuanced amalgam of melodramatic heroism and craven cowardice. In “The Spy or Who is Pink Oboe”, Seagoon at first willingly accepts a counter-espionage mission, laughing at the prospect of certain death in front of a firing squad; upon talking himself through the details of his execution, he has a panic attack of epic proportions, running all the way to Glasgow in a matter of seconds before being brought back to do his duty (Milligan 1974: 63–64). However dangerous the task he may be faced with, Seagoon’s qualms are quickly overcome by an appeal to one or both of his sense of duty and his need for money. ‘Need’ is the operative word here, rather than ‘desire’, since Seagoon is often portrayed in straitened circumstances; even in stories where he occupies a position among the social elite, he is either an aristocrat manqué or the scion of a noble house that sits one misfortune away from financial ruin. Seagoon’s position at the core of The Goon Show’s world can be likened to a gyroscope in the guidance system of an airplane or an oceangoing vessel: by establishing a centre of gravity with a relatively free range of motion, it functions

4 This description is applied exclusively to one Goon Show character, Bluebottle, but seems a good way of hinting at the resemblance between Milligan’s characters and puppets created by children to amuse each other.

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best when placed within a system whose other elements have a similar ability to shift position as the occasion demands. The shift of Neddie Seagoon to the centre of The Goon Show’s new world of full-episode-length stories called for a corresponding drift into supporting roles by two characters who had featured as protagonists in sketch-length adventures. A character originally designated “Sanders” to denote the source of Peter Sellers’ vocal impersonation was originally cast in roles similar to the avenging knight-errant figures portrayed by character actor George Sanders in films of the 1940s. Acquiring the name “Hercules Grytpype-Thynne”, this character took on a new persona, based on the duplicitous, urbane villains Sanders was also known for. For the bulk of The Goon Show’s episode-length stories, Grytpype-Thynne acts as an antagonist, compounding the sheer absurdity of Seagoon’s entrusted missions with fiendish schemes of his own, which are calculated to bring him considerable benefits while exposing Seagoon to considerable danger. On the road to villainy, Grytpype-Thynne appropriated an accomplice in the form of a character who had often assumed the main villain’s mantle: Count “Jim” Moriarty. Moriarty’s degradation from a criminal mastermind who has “thought of everything” (Milligan 1954d) in 1954’s “The Great Bank of England Robbery” to the “bald, daft, deaf, and worthless” (Milligan 1972: 19) stooge of Grytpype-Thynne marks a character shift every bit as significant as GrytpypeThynne’s shift from hero to villain, in the process creating a dual antagonist for Seagoon to contend with. Rounding out The Goon Show’s regular cast of characters is a quintet of supporting figures whose function appears to be equally divided between helper and comic blocker, and who generally supply a fair degree of hindrance even when trying to help. The first of these is a character who functioned originally as the hero of one of the three-segmented Goon Show’s regular features. Major Denis Bloodnok, “Military idiot, coward and bar” (Milligan 1972: 20) was first conceived as an aging, blustery, but largely competent regimental commander. The Bloodnok familiar to listeners from full-length Goon Show adventures has the same vocal characterization and rank (although at times its legitimacy is called into question), but much less of his earlier self’s fitness for command. Faced with danger, duty, or any situation not involving easy money and even easier women, his first impulse is to hide, unless an opportunity for flight presents itself. The one quality which Bloodnok still possesses in ample reserve is braggadocio. This, combined with his pusillanimity and deviousness, places the ‘mature’ conception of Bloodnok in the company of stock comic military braggarts such as Il Capitano and Miles Gloriosus, while placing him squarely in Seagoon’s shadow. Two more Goon characters with similar links to the realm of comedy archetypes are a duo of “shambling, crumbling dotards” (Eton 1975: 10) by the names

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of Minnie Bannister and Henry Crun. Minnie and Henry have by far the most complex ongoing relationship of any pair of Goon Show characters. Although their disagreements have a tone and tenor which point to their being an old married couple, the exact nature of their relationship is never made entirely clear. Much of their discourse consists of misunderstandings and talking at cross-purposes which rival anything by Beckett or Pinter, while retaining the flavor of a vaudeville routine. Witness the way they attempt to save Seagoon from drowning in “The Canal”: SEAGOON. Helpp, bbbb, I’m going down. [CRUN]. Don’t do that, sir, or you’ll drown yourself. Oh dear, dear, this fog—I can’t see a thing in the fog, you know. [MINNIE]. Where are you, sir? SEAGOON. In the canal! [MINNIE]. He’s in the canal. [CRUN]. Oh. Mr. Seagoon, follow these instructions and you’ll be safe. Hand me the Life-Saving Manual Minnie. [MINNIE]. There you are. [CRUN]. Ready? [MINNIE]. Yes. [CRUN]. Hurry up then. SEAGOON. Yes, hurry up! [CRUN].  Mr. Seagoon, take three dozen eggs and break into a bowl. SEAGOON. Yes. [CRUN]. Mix in eight ounces of castor sugar. Add four pounds of millet flour and bring the mixture to—Minnie? This isn’t the Swimming Manual. [MINNIE]. (calls) We’ve got the wrong book, Mr. Seagoon. SEAGOON. What’ll I do with all this mixture? [MINNIE]. We’d better go in, Henry, it’s a shame to waste all that food. Coming, hupppp! milligan 1954f: 12

Played against one another, Minnie and Henry generate a sort of self-sustaining inertia in the form of perpetual non-motion; set against the progress of a Goon Show plot, they can bring it so decisively to a halt that only divine intervention or a musical interlude can get it going again. The final pair of regular supporting characters in The Goon Show can be considered the most truly clown-like in a world of admittedly broad clownish figures. Bluebottle and Eccles are paired so frequently that they operate as a double act consisting of mirror images of extended naiveté. Bluebottle’s

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innocence is in the process of being rather easily corrupted: his head can be turned by anything from a contemporary film starlet to any one of a number of his female schoolmates. Placing his age precisely is a little tricky, since he often turns up as the legitimate holder of jobs for which the age of majority would seem to be a minimum requirement. Whatever his occupation and sex drive say about his age, Bluebottle’s attitudes and behaviours are, on the whole, unsophisticated and childlike. His chief motivation in taking on a job is a desire for glory which extends beyond the narrative frame of any given Goon Show episode. Bluebottle habitually signals his entrance by soliciting applause, as in the following example: BLUEBOTTLE. … Help me, I’m drowning! I… Ohh. Sees audience. Hello everybody. GRAMS. Massive cheering from enormous crowd. BLUEBOTTLE. Oh, ta. Now back to my dramatic drowning scene. milligan 1958b

Valuing praise above all other forms of reward, Bluebottle is generally loath to sell his loyalty for money; however, a bag of candy or a pin-up photo is all it takes to convince him to rent it out. If Bluebottle constantly attempts to recast the world to fit his image of himself as one of its born heroes, his most frequent scene-partner, Eccles, is in a world all his own. There seems to be a common view that Eccles is an author-substitute for Milligan, or at the very least, a distillation of his personality. Jimmy Grafton maintained that “Eccles…is the real Milligan” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 28). Goon Show castmate Harry Secombe held a similar opinion, stating that “Eccles lurks behind Spike’s every move” (Milligan 1972: 190). Still, there is a degree of complexity to Eccles that vexes any easy description of him. The assertion, for example, that Eccles “Has never been employed” (Milligan 1972: 19) is quite flatly contradicted by his ability to hold whatever job is called for in any given Goon Show’s script. This is not to say that Eccles performs the tasks set for him with any great degree of competence or reliability. Quite often, Eccles’ inability to carry out even the simplest instructions without getting them confused is used to comment on not only his own incompetence, but the incompetence of whoever gave the instructions in the first place. The common sense of anyone who would entrust any responsibility to someone like Eccles, who “knows he’s an idiot, and never pretends otherwise” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 93) is certainly suspect at best. In light of this, there may be a degree of wisdom, or at least low cunning, lurking behind Eccles’ “village idiot” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 93) façade. Since “being an idiot absolves him from any form

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of responsibility” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 93), Eccles is well aware of who is ultimately accountable when his actions lead inevitably to disaster. It is, quite simply, anyone who expected things to turn out otherwise. 6

“This is the bbc”5: The Goon Show vis-à-vis Mainstream Practices in Contemporary Radio Drama

One area in which Eccles and Milligan seem very much to parallel one another is their marginalized status among the community of their peers. Despite The Goon Show’s popularity both with contemporary audiences and new generations of fans, it figures as a footnote when the story of bbc Radio is told, when it even figures at all. Some of this may be due to interdepartmental rivalries at the bbc which still play a role in determining the worthiness of material for inclusion into official and outside histories of the Corporation. Although the designation between the Radio Drama and Features departments has long since ceased to exist, the prevailing slant in scholarship valorizes the output of Radio Drama, with an occasional nod to specific programming produced by Features. In both cases, there is a decided bias in favour of contributions from writers whose work features in the literary canon. For example, the reputations of Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNiece as radio writers benefited greatly from their already well-established reputations as critically-acclaimed poets; the radio plays of Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard are studied not so much for their merits as radio plays as for their connections to these writers’ stage plays. “What is this Go On Show?” The bbc’s Official Narratives and The Goon Show’s Place in Them The inherent danger of biases such as these is not so much that they are unquestioned and widespread, but that they echo the bias of a single source which has long been taken as gospel. Asa Briggs’ five-volume History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom furnishes a wealth of inside information on the workings of the bbc to scholars who may not otherwise have obtained it; however, the sheer accumulation of data in Briggs’ history can obscure the fact 6.1

5 These are the first words spoken (with minor variations, such as “This is the bbc Home Service” and “This is the bbc Light Programme”) in every extant broadcast of The Goon Show. The next thing listeners heard (whether it was a sound effect or piece of back-talking dialogue) was meant to undercut the air of dignity and gravitas which the broadcaster strove to maintain, and turned a simple station identifier into the set-up for one of the program’s most familiar running jokes.

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that his access to information came at the price of a considerable degree of self-censorship. The preface to Volume ii contains a statement which is more than a mere a word of thanks for access to information; it is an admission of a wholesale borrowing of another man’s point of view: I remain deeply grateful for the friendly and invaluable co-operation of Lord Reith, who has placed at my disposal all his private papers and his extremely full and informative Diary […] My debt to Lord Reith goes beyond this, however, for it is in discussing people and problems with him that I have learnt a great deal, not only about broadcasting, which could have been learnt in no other way. I cannot conceive how this history could have been written without the interest he has shown in it and the help he has given. (1965: vii) The mindset of Lord Reith, the bbc’s first Director General, “whose influence has been dominant in the formation of broadcasting policy in Great Britain” (Coase 1950: 185), underpins and informs Briggs’ narrative of the bbc’s first half-century. So does an unspoken assumption that a strong degree of central control over program policy and broadcast entities is essential “in order to raise standards—in this context the standards of taste of the listeners” (Coase 1950: 190). These words were written by a critic of the bbc’s monopoly on broadcasting in 1950; the same critic goes on to parse the deeper meaning of this tenet: It assumes that a central body can distinguish between good and bad taste and will continue to do so as our notions of what constitutes good and bad taste change through time. It also assumes that control of individual activities is desirable in order to raise standards of taste. coase 1950: 190

Much as he may have believed himself to be an impartial chronicler of events, Briggs displays this basic flaw in reasoning on a regular basis, and with it a flawed and narrow view of artistic canons. Discussing the early output of the bbc’s Drama department, Briggs notes, with a pride which ought to have baffled his readers in 1965, let alone today, that “(i)n the ten years after 1929, the bbc broadcast a very wide repertoire of plays. In 1934, for example, five Shakespeare plays were broadcast, along with two Chekhov plays and two plays by Ibsen” (1965: 161). Considering the relative youth of the medium at the time, it seems reasonable to ask how a repertoire drawn from dead authors whose appeal to a mass audience remains an open question should be expected to contribute

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to radio’s vitality and long-term viability. Such evidence makes a mockery of Briggs’ later claim that bbc Radio Drama in its early years embraced a “popular repertoire, deliberately aiming at a large audience” (1985: 126). The net effect of the largely unquestioning and wholesale acceptance of Briggs’ version of bbc history is that it has been taken to be the last word on the subject rather than simply the first. For someone studying The Goon Show’s place in this history, that can be more than a little distressing. The brief mention given to the program is understandable, in view of the vast number of programs that have to be covered in such an undertaking; the slipshod way The Goon Show is dealt with is not. Briggs freely admits to relying on a single source for his information—Roger Wilmut and Jimmy Grafton’s The Goon Show ­Companion…that is to say, he admits to relying on another, non-existent book called The Goon Show: A Goonography, apparently written by Wilmut alone (1979: 546 n.). His level of accuracy about what the show was actually called leaves a little to be desired as well. In an error which he failed to correct in a later condensed history of the bbc, Briggs states, in typically categorical fashion, that from 1955 on, the program was known, not as The Goon Show, but simply The Goons (1979: 546; 1985: 295). This author can categorically state that a half-hour’s free time with any of the recordings of post-1955 episodes of The Goon Show which were circulating around 1985, when the second book was published, would prove this to be not the case at all. Had Spike Milligan taken the time to skim the bbc’s official history, he would likely have been just as categorical, and significantly less charitable, in his criticism of the Corporation’s official historian. For his part, Milligan made no effort to disguise the tense, often adversarial nature of his relationship with the bbc. Scudamore refers to this animus as “a despairing hatred for the bureaucracy of the bbc” (1985: 147). The hatred was tinged with more than a hint of condescension, as far as creativity was concerned; Behan quotes Milligan as saying that “they don’t have a department of imagination at the Beeb at all” (1988: 142). Milligan may have, as Carpenter puts it, “regularly complained that the bbc high-ups never told him what they thought of [The Goon Show]” (2004: Ch. 11), but he was rarely shy about airing his opinion of them. One thing which struck Goon Show listener Graham Chapman, and influenced his future work with Monty Python, was the way that Milligan’s program made no secret that the people involved with it (the one of them doing the writing, at any rate) “didn’t like the bbc” (Monty Python: Almost the Truth). This is almost an understatement: Milligan went out of his way to use The Goon Show to broadcast his disdain for bbc standards and practices, and the people who enforced them. The classic instance of this opens the 1959 episode “Quatermass, o.b.e.”:

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GREENSLADE. This is the bbc Home Service. [PETER] SELLERS. Hold it up to the light—not a brain in sight. milligan 1959b: 1

“Meantime, back in the bbc torture room”6: The Goon Show’s Deviations from bbc Radio’s Dominant Aesthetic for Dramaturgy and Performance Whether one believes it to be prompted by brainlessness or not, British radio culture’s reluctance to grant legitimacy to its more populist elements dates back to its earliest days. By the end of the 1920s, the bbc had already earned a reputation for granting preferential treatment, and a greater proportion of its resources, to “programmes based upon artistic judgements that had little regard for the varied tastes of its audience” (Pegg 1983: 92) These judgements may not have been informed by the concerns of the general public, but by no means were they made without forethought. The newness of the medium of radio, combined with a perceived need to justify the broadcast of texts and formats derived from live theatre, led to radio dramaturgy receiving an almost Aristotelian examination from first principles. Some of the first efforts to describe and categorize the art of radio drama are surprisingly cogent, given the degree to which radio programming as a whole was still in a state of flux and experimentation. The most thorough of these early investigations took the form of a series of articles published in the Radio Times in 1929 by Val Gielgud, who as head of bbc Radio Drama had a vested interest in establishing the ground rules of the new genre for both listeners and prospective writers. Gielgud’s notes on the subject of radio dramaturgy are worth examining for the way they anticipate textual and production challenges addressed in The Goon Show. The Goon Show’s extensive use of a third-person semi-omniscient narrator whose main function is to provide exposition is itself a dramaturgical device favoured by Gielgud: “It is not a fact that narrative is always boring or an inartistic excrescence upon the form of radio drama. Particularly is this the case when a radio play is founded upon a novel” (cited in Crook, “Val Gielgud”). On other key points, however, The Goon Show veers sharply away from Gielgud’s prescribed norms. If Gielgud saw “little room for caricature in radio” (cited in Crook, “Val Gielgud”), Milligan saw little room for anything else. Peter Sellers’ recollection that Goon characters were “caricatures of real people”

6.2

6 This line of narration is spoken by Seagoon in the second of The Goon Show’s two send-ups of George Orwell, both entitled “1985” (Milligan and Sykes 1955d: 14). Milligan’s enjoyment of biting the hand that fed him is made plain by frequent references in both versions to the bbc as the “Big Brother Corporation” (Milligan and Sykes, 1955d: passim).

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(qtd. in Lewis 1995: 189), delineated with “serpentine, brittle, scratchy lines” which Roger Lewis compares to those of English cartoonist Ronald Searle (1995: 204), would seem to put the lie to the assumption that verisimilitude is any more a litmus test for characterization on radio than it is for any other art form. The rapid-fire delivery of many Goon characters appears to flout Gielgud’s suggestion that “Speed of dialogue in the radio is slightly slower than that taken in the theatre” (cited in Crook, “Val Gielgud”). On a general note, the decision to bring as much as possible of both the bbc’s arsenal of technical effects and the cast’s repertoire of character voices to bear on any given episode of the Goon Show seems to be an overt violation of the diktat not to “use as much complication in its production as possible” for its own sake (cited in Crook, “Val Gielgud”). It can be argued that Gielgud’s initial vision still affects how British radio drama practitioners view their craft. Recent writings on radio dramaturgical technique often seem to rely on Gielgud’s paradigms rather than the medium’s inherent possibilities. The statement that a “need for simplification…influences the kinds of narratives used by…radio dramas” (Shingler and Weiringa 1998: 82) may as well have come from Val Gielgud himself; in fact, it dates from 1998. In his 2001 Writing for Radio, Vincent McInerney cautions aspiring radio dramatists against writing “Very short speeches” due to the confusion created by “the speed of the dialogue and its shortness” (2001: 135). Statements like these do nothing to alter the fact that the following complicated stretch of narrative featuring short, quick, and ambiguous speeches, aired on the bbc in 1958: [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. …Taxi! [JIM SPRIGGS]. Where to, Jim, where to, Jimmmm? [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. Drive me up the wall. [JIM SPRIGGS]. Wo, wo wo wo wo wo wo wo. [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. Thank you. How much? [JIM SPRIGGS]. That’s four and six, pronounced— Grams. [ Jim Spriggs] (Pre-Recorded) Saying ‘Tennnnn Bob’ [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. Right, take it out of this. FX: Pistol Shot [JIM SPRIGGS]. Thank you, Jim. milligan 1975: 117

The overall effect of the prescriptive, even proscriptive, outlook of Val Gielgud was that “Radio Drama tended to be hidebound by the conventions and codes of conventional theatre and dramatic narrative” (Crook 1999b). In spite of Val Gielgud’s proscriptions, a second aesthetic gained a foothold at the bbc,

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originally in the shadow of radio drama, but eventually eclipsing it. This praxis, derived exclusively from light entertainment and incorporating many of the unique features of the medium of radio, was the product of the bbc’s Variety department, created in 1933. As Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff note in A Social History of British Broadcasting, bbc Variety felt its way to a rough-andready set of best practices through a process of trial and error, slowly drifting “away from the stage conventions of existing forms of entertainment as they discovered the techniques and methods that were appropriate to the medium of radio and its situational properties” (1991: 246). These properties were somewhat different from the ones which Val Gielgud identified as radio’s defining performative features. bbc Variety programming drew its original guiding principles from types of live in-person performance whose traditions of presentation and performance contrasted and competed with those of the ‘straight’ or ‘serious’ drama favoured by Gielgud as a source of inspiration. The piecemeal format and more informal approach to acting shared by music hall, cabaret, and revue proved to be fertile ground for the bbc’s initial forays into variety programming: “(i)t was in revue that Variety began to evolve a ‘radiogenic’ style of entertainment” (Scannell and Cardiff 1991: 260). The crucial element in making this revue-derived entertainment ‘radiogenic’ and securing its broad appeal was bbc Variety’s success in crafting an easy familiarity and identification with personalities and their repertoire, through simplification and repetition. As Scannell and Cardiff explain it, Faced with a vast and socially diverse public, radio variety staff discovered that a common framework of associations could only be achieved through the mechanisms of catchy signature tunes, well-established characters and situations and familiar voices uttering familiar catchphrases. This was the real value of the series format, of the stock situation as well as the stock character. Each week a new variation was found for the reiterated theme. The new and the predictable, sameness and difference, were skilfully interwoven. (1991: 273) Such goals and techniques, of course, were already part of the stock-in-trade of seasoned revue artistes, whose careers depended on the ability to bring an air of spontaneity and freshness to repeated performances of time-and-audiencetested material. Added to this recipe for success was the long-standing tradition of at-home concert parties and other intimate gatherings with which the revue artiste would be familiar: such settings furnished invaluable experience

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in pitching one’s performance to the smaller groups which collectively made up the larger radio listening audience. To say that bbc Variety’s approach to performativity paid dividends would be understating the case. Between 1934 and 1937, “(w)hile expenditure [at the bbc] on serious music actually decreased by about £1000 over the four years, expenditure on variety, vaudeville, revue and musical comedy increased by about £31,000” (Scannell and Cardiff 1991: 241). By the end of the 1930s, “Variety was in the ascendant” (Scannell and Cardiff 1991: 244), as far as its demands on the bbc’s resources of time, personnel and money were concerned. The Goon Show, in its mature format, reflected both of the bbc’s competing aesthetics for performing arts radio programming. Under Peter Eton’s guiding hand, the narrative flow of each episode was influenced by the guidelines set by the Drama department, establishing a “structure from which some of Spike’s more way-out ideas benefited” (Farnes 1997: 112). Thanks to Milligan’s ideas, however, the spirit of the program remained very much rooted in the ludic traditions of bbc Variety. As Denis Norden put it in a televised tribute first broadcast on Milligan’s eightieth birthday, “he took the conventions of radio, and just went a little further, just overplayed them slightly for comedy effect” (Loose Canon). Even though its spirit earmarked it as a Variety department product, The Goon Show began more and more to sound like standard bbc Drama, thanks to Eton’s and Milligan’s insistence on using Drama’s “large sound effects department as well as [its] rapidly expanding library of pre-recorded effects” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 48). Roger Wilmut notes that, until The Goon Show broke down this particular barrier between Variety and Drama at the bbc, a “sophisticated use of effects had not spread into the Variety Department and the use of effects in variety programmes on the whole was extremely limited” (1977: 48). One of Milligan’s collaborators, writer John Antrobus, expressed the opinion that The Goon Show, in fact, raised the bbc’s existing level of technical and conceptual sophistication, in the process creating “a whole new understanding of what sound effects could do on radio” (Loose Canon). The Goon Show’s half-Variety, half-Drama sound was another case of a part of Milligan’s life occupying a place in two conceptual worlds at once, in the process creating another world all its own. However much of his early writing and acting experience may have come in popular entertainment—from servicemen’s revues to bbc Variety programs—Milligan felt no more bound by this genre’s expectations than he did by any other. Apt as he was to use one of Variety programming’s signature tactics—“a tendency to parody other forms of entertainment from the legitimate stage and music hall” (Scannell

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and Cardiff 1991: 252)—on ‘serious’ literature and drama, he was just as prone to turn it against the very practices fostered by the bbc Variety department. Send-ups of the stale, catchphrase-ridden routines of third-rate comics were a Goon Show staple, as was the insinuation that the bulk of what the bbc put out in the guise of light entertainment barely attained third-rate status. 1957’s “The Missing Battleship” begins ostensibly as this sort of broadcast fare—“that favourite programme, ‘Variety Awash’” (Milligan and Stephens 1957p), whose emcee’s attempts to amuse the crew of a Royal Navy vessel make something less than a big splash: But seriously lads. I always take my wife with me everywhere. I’d rather take her than kiss her goodbye! Hahaha ha…ha…………ha. Aye, you’ll have to see them faster than that. I said ‘I’d rather take her than kiss her goodbye!’…What’s the matter with the audience tonight? I paralysed them at Bolton with that one. Where…where’s me glasses? milligan and stephens 1957p

7

“Who are you, Ben Lyon?”7: The Goon Show’s Thematic Links to Popular Culture between the Two World Wars

A penchant for taking the mickey out of the bbc’s other offerings aside, several key components of Milligan’s, and The Goon Show’s, style originate in modes of artistic expression with characteristics quite distinct from those of spoken word radio performance. Three of these art forms had their first great periods of development and experimentation during Milligan’s formative years: sound motion pictures, the animated cartoon, and jazz. A number of strategies and techniques for distorting time and space which parallel Milligan’s own strategies and techniques crop up in the live action and animated films, and the jazz music, of the period roughly bracketed by the two World Wars.

7 This is a question asked of guest star Groucho Marx in The Goon Show’s first version of “1985”. The sequence of dialogue surrounding the question contains an array of pop-culture references. The principal targets of the guying are Ben Lyon and his wife and co-star Bebe Daniels, two American film actors with pedigrees extending back to the silent era who had become staples of British radio comedy; Groucho himself is not referred to in name, his voice alone (as it still is today) being introduction enough (Milligan and Sykes 1955a: 5).

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To borrow a bit of musical terminology, this is the appropriate moment to restate an earlier theme: although Milligan was a relative latecomer to comedy writing and performance, he had already amassed a great deal of onstage experience as a working musician. Stints with dance bands in London during the 1930s, and in North Africa and Italy during World War ii, then in small combos touring Europe after the war, infused Milligan’s sensibilities with the eccentric rhythms and syncopated cadences of swing-era jazz. Syncopation functions as more than the organizing principle for the performance of a specific piece of music: it can become a tool for structuring one’s perception of the flow of time. Playing jazz engenders an idiosyncratic approach to both time and timing: musicians who take a lot of solos (as Milligan would have) develop an ability to “coordinate their actions with beats produced by the rhythm section of a band” (Repp 2005: 969), while at the same time creating complex rhythmic patterns which are slightly out of step with those beats—as jazz parlance puts it, to play ‘behind the beat’. Moreover, a jazz soloist’s sense of rhythmic flow appears to be highly personal, and, to some extent, independent of context. Summarizing their own findings and a survey of research literature, Anders Friberg and Andreas Sundstrom have determined that jazz musicians display a considerable degree of variation in playing behind the beat; although “musicians in a jazz ensemble have an intricate common pattern of timing related to which instrument is played and to the tempo” (2002: 348), their timing relative to one another “is not invariant under tempo transposition” (2002: 346). Moreover, no two jazz soloists have the same sense of the ideal time-lag for playing behind the beat: altering the tempo seems to accentuate individual differences in dependence on tempo (Friberg and Sundstrom 2002: 334). Put more simply, play enough jazz and you start thinking in jazz…and it is very much a language all one’s own. Milligan’s personal lexicon in this language would have set him apart even from his bandmates: his experience playing solos on trumpet, laying down rhythmic lines on bass, and doing a combination of both on guitar, likely influenced his sense of where the beat fell from one measure to the next, and made it much more fluid than that of a musician who specialized in a single instrument. ‘Thinking in jazz’ becomes doubly disruptive when set in relief against the rhythmic expectations of those who don’t think this way. Non-musicians— that is, the bulk of the general public—resist incorporating syncopation into an overall cognitive schema of time, even when syncopation is presented as time’s dominant rhythm. Studying a group of people with a varying range of musical aptitudes, Fitch and Rosenfeld discovered that

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(p)articipants tended to reset the phase of their internally generated pulse with highly syncopated rhythms, reinterpreting or “re-hearing” the rhythm as less syncopated. High complexity in rhythmic stimuli can thus force a reorganization of their cognitive representation. Less complex rhythms were more robustly encoded than more complex syncopated rhythms in the delayed memory task. (2007: 43) This finding is in contrast to the performance of experienced musicians in tests which involve the replication of complex and changing rhythmic patterns. “A musically trained and practiced individual can achieve a standard deviation of asynchronies as small as 2% […] whereas it will typically be at least twice as large for novice participants.” (Repp 2005: 975) Milligan’s comedy offers strong evidence that he ‘thought in jazz’. His writing deviates from predictable patterns, using dramaturgical analogues to two devices commonly found in jazz: it uses simply-stated or fragmentary themes as points of departure for complex narrative elaborations, and it employs frequent changes of conversational rhythm. Interviewed for the Channel 4 series Heroes of Comedy, British jazz bandleader and broadcaster Humphrey Lyttelton characterized the thought processes behind Milligan’s writing in this way: “(i)t sounded spontaneous—as though, when he sat down to write the Goon scripts, he simply started with one line on the paper…representing, say, the theme of a jazz tune” (Heroes: Milligan). Speaking on the same program, Denis Norden saw things in much the same light: “it worked like jazz, in other words…it was a storyline…in which he went off in various different directions, but came back for the last eight bars” (Heroes: Milligan). A sense of narrative flow is one thing; a sense of humour is quite another. Carpenter offers the observation that “jazz musicians have an especially highly developed sense of humour. Puns and wisecracks go hand-in-hand with ad-lib musical solos” (2004: Ch. 2). Hand in hand with the puns and wisecracks goes a slightly off-beat take on what ‘plays’ as wordplay. Milligan often exploited the disjunct between his own music-influenced style of cognition and the assumed, non-musical, cognitive style of his audience, by offering up musicians’ in-jokes in The Goon Show, just to see if anybody got them. The 1959 episode “The Tay Bridge Disaster” features a three–minute sequence in which rival architects sing their plans for the title structure (‘Tay Bridge’ recording: 13:15– 16:02). Occasionally, material like this even dominates an episode, as it does in 1958’s “Ten Snowballs That Shook the World,” where the value of the British pound has “dropped from F sharp to E flat,” and the solution devised to save the currency from collapse is “to raffle the equator in the key of E flat” (Milligan 1958a). The standard musicians’ disclaimer for a thing done not quite well, “it’s

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near enough for jazz”, shows up often enough to qualify it as a sort of motto for the series as a whole (Milligan 1959d; 1960; 1975: 143). For all that it called attention to its own shortcomings in this way, The Goon Show called still more attention to itself as a musicians’ comedy show. Its three cast members began their performing careers in music—Milligan as a trumpet player, Sellers as a drummer, Secombe as a tenor trained in bel canto. Moreover, the program foregrounded jazz as a central thematic feature through the performances of its two permanent musical guest acts. Max Geldray and The Ray Ellington Quartet each dealt in the syncopation and variation on theme characteristic to jazz, but they presented other significant disruptions of audience expectations as well. Geldray’s harmonica solos not only provided fresh, wordless takes on popular melodies with familiar lyrics, but his chosen instrument lay well outside the usual range for featured jazz soloists. Ellington’s singing played around with lyrics, sometimes substituting passes of scat for the ‘proper’ words, sometimes veering off into unabashed verbal burlesque akin to the type practised by Fats Waller. Ellington went so far with this tribute as to perform word-for-word copies of Waller’s recorded vocal extrapolations on light ditties such as “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” (‘Lurgi’ recording: 14:34–16:02). Buffoonery based on song lyrics was very much in keeping with the Milligan approach to comedy. In its own way, this had a profound effect on Milligan’s identity as a comedian, through his choice of sobriquet for his professional career. As dubious as the chronology of his own remembrance may be, Milligan’s statement that he replaced his prosaic given name of “Terence” with “Spike” as a tribute to drummer and comedian Spike Jones, the leader of “one of the zaniest, noisiest bands anybody ever heard” (Behan 1988: 75) makes the decision almost appear to be a mission statement for his eventual career path. The characteristic feature of the noise and zaniness that emanated from Spike Jones and his City Slickers was a use of sobersided song lyrics as cues for mayhem; taken all in all, the Jones band’s guerrilla attacks on the pretentions of serious and popular music have much in common with Milligan’s later use of “the noises of combat” (Lewis 1995: 202) as a comedic shock weapon in The Goon Show. Without mentioning Spike Jones (or anyone else) by name, Carpenter notes that “it was striking how many comedians, both British and American, had started life as musicians” (2004: Ch.5). While no hard-and-fast rules apply to the work of those who shift from music to comedy, it is interesting to note the affinity between Milligan’s outlook and that of an erstwhile musical act much better known for the anarchy and absurdity underlying its approach to humour (and life in general). Milligan frequently made it clear that the Marx Brothers provided him with both a stylistic influence and a target to reach, if not surpass.

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In an authorized biography by Dominic Behan, Milligan recalls showing one of his earliest attempts at comedy writing to friend and mentor Anthony Goldsmith during his service days, and receiving the following reaction: “This is mad. It’s very like the Marx Brothers but it’s very funny” (Behan 1988: 93). The assessment may be apocryphal; more important than this, however, is Milligan’s retention of the memory that such a favourable comparison was made by someone whose approval he was seeking at the time. Similarly, Milligan’s statement that “Not even the Marx Brothers” (Farnes 1997: 54) were quite like The Goon Show sets up the stars of Duck Soup and other films as the creators of something worth admiring, and worth outdoing. Others have noticed a definite congruence in style, if not content: attempting to place the humour of The Goon Show in an historical context, Neil Cornwell notes in his book The Absurd in Literature that “the one analogue that comes to mind would be the Marx Brothers” (2006: 299). It is hard to imagine how The Marx Brothers could not have influenced Milligan, given the thematic parallels between their body of work and The Goon Show. Milligan created a rogues’ gallery of transparent grifters, scroungers, and buffoons, whose behaviour appears to have implicit or explicit sanction from the corridors of power in a world where “Caddishness, cowardice and ignorance replace virtue and heroism” (Lewis 1995: 176). This inversion of values bears a definite resemblance to the ways in which Groucho, Chico and Harpo (sometimes with the help of Zeppo) use society’s most cherished institutions as so many maypoles to cavort around. Groucho himself figured highly enough in Milligan’s estimation to have been included in one episode of The Goon Show, in a pre-recorded cameo appearance (‘1985’ recording: 6:40–6:48). The affinity between Milligan and the Marx Brothers has a basis in more than just iconoclasm. Marx Brothers movies feature moments in which conventions for organizing time and space are treated with the same disdain the Marxes showed towards social conventions. The climactic sequences of Duck Soup form a montage of anachronisms: as supreme commander of Freedonia’s army, Groucho switches uniforms from one shot to the next, each regalia representing a different historical period (Duck Soup). The entire climax of the film is signposted as being somewhat outside a proper chronological rendering of time by a staged tableau vivant portraying the brothers in in garb from the American War of Independence (Duck Soup). The time-bending continues into the following sequence, with Harpo recreating Paul Revere’s ride, in faithful detail right down to his garments and horse. For the duration of Harpo/Revere’s journey, the horse is the only traffic on the streets of Freedonia (Duck Soup); evidence from earlier in the film suggests that these streets were more accustomed to carrying more modern forms

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of conveyance, such as a motorcycle with sidecar (although never both at the same time, but that’s another story) (Duck Soup). Though the Marx Brothers occasionally toyed with time, space was their preferred plaything. The famous “stateroom” scene from A Night at the Opera tests the limitations of a given enclosed space as a container for people and objects. The scene begins, however, with an even smaller enclosed space whose contents exceed its capacity beyond belief. Chico, Harpo, and the film’s romantic lead Allan Jones are revealed to have stowed away on board an ocean liner inside Groucho’s steamer trunk; when we first view the trunk before it is opened, it appears large enough to house one man at the most (Night at the Opera). Harpo, who is discovered last in the trunk, sleeping in a drawer, is the constant factor in the Marx Brothers’ spatial manipulations. It is Harpo who produces a seemingly endless supply of footballs from a horse-drawn Department of Sanitation wagon in Horse Feathers. Earlier in the same film, a teammate helps him remove his football jersey, pulling on the jersey by the collar. The jersey apparently has little interest in being removed: it stretches halfway across the field before finally coming off (Horse Feathers). Another item of Harpo’s clothing with a mind of its own is his trademark weatherbeaten raincoat, which appears to be a law unto itself as far as spatial relationships are concerned. In the first place, it grants Harpo the ability to conceal any portable object, no matter how large or cumbersome it may be, on his person. The most spectacular example of this is an entire gramophone, complete with horn, which he uses to conceal his muteness and his identity when doing an impersonation of crooner Maurice Chevalier in Monkey Business (Monkey Business). The raincoat may be more than a spatial law unto itself; it may be a whole world unto itself. Harpo’s sang-froid when “reaching into his…pocket8 with his accustomed ease and transcendental dexterity and pulling out a steaming hot cup of coffee” (Adamson 1973: 179; italics his), and later, a candle lit at both ends, in Horse Feathers indicates that such occurrences are par for the course with him (Horse Feathers). He seems not concerned at all that such things involve two highly improbable things to be possible: first, there has to be sufficient space under the raincoat to keep the hot cup of coffee and the lit candle far enough from Harpo’s body to keep from burning him; second, a special type

8 Adamson says “his coat pocket” (1973: 179); it is, in fact, the pocket of his pants (Horse Feathers). Still, the pants pocket is concealed under the coat, and may plausibly be considered to be subject to whatever alterations the coat makes to the laws of the Universe.

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of gravity has to be in operation within the confines of the coat, one which keeps hot cups of coffee and burning candles level no matter what bodily posture Harpo finds himself in, to minimize the potential for accident or injury. It is correct, but perhaps incomplete, to say that the ability to pull coffee cups, candles, axes (Horse Feathers), blowtorches, alarm clocks, phonograph records, school bells (Duck Soup), and sundry other items at will from beneath his coat means that Harpo possesses magical powers—or at the very least, an inchoate set of vaguely defined and constantly changing “supernatural qualities” (Adamson 1973: 323). Thinking of Harpo’s coat as a conduit to alternative spatial dimensions, however, offers a way of explaining the mechanism behind the magic. Milligan’s own mechanism for creating The Goon Show involved augmenting The Marx Brothers’ general disregard for the niceties of space, time, and life in general by adding a specific disregard for the conventions of the physical world appropriated from another area of popular culture. Milligan’s distortions of time, space, and causality are similar enough to those perpetrated in much of the output of American animation studios during the 1930s and 40s that a direct line of influence can be inferred from this similarity. In this respect, there is a particularly striking resemblance between The Goon Show and two specific bodies of work in the field of the American cinematic cartoon. The first of these corpora is the Fleischer Brothers’ cartoons released by Paramount from the early-to-mid-1930s, which were marked by a free-spirited approach and “relied heavily on surrealism for their effect” (Fleischer 2005: 73). The early Paramount sound cartoons often have “a hallucinatory quality” (Barrier 1999: 181), one in which continuity appears to be an accidental by-product rather than a desired end. Narrative gaps and jumps, and variations in the size, scale, and proportions of characters between scenes (or within the same scene) are a testament to the laissez-faire style of Dave Fleischer, the studio’s principal director during this period. Generally speaking, Fleischer’s animators were handed a certain amount of footage, told roughly where their assigned scenes fit into some loose overall storyline, and left very much to their own devices after that: Each animator was assigned a sequence, with a vague notion of its leading to a particular point, another animator was to pick up the action at that juncture. In doing the scene, an animator might think of new ideas or be inspired to pursue a particular gag. This informal procedure accounts for the odd transitions—and frequent lack of transitions—from one scene to the next. maltin 1987: 88

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The second potential source for Milligan’s bending of temporal and spatial parameters is the work of director Tex Avery, particularly work which dates from his years at mgm. Like Milligan, Avery resisted any and all demands that creativity “should strive for the Illusion of Life” (Kenner 1994: 27). Avery’s directorial method can be described as a distillation of a semi-improvisational process similar to the one used at the Fleischer Brothers’ Studio, one with which Avery was familiar with from his own days as an assistant animator (Barrier 1999: 328). Avery’s approach to narrative and situation parallels and prefigures Milligan’s even more strongly than the Fleischers’ does, in three key aspects. Like The Goon Show, Avery’s cartoons often move at a breakneck pace, forging complex chains of extrapolations from apparently simple situations with a speed that can be hard to follow. Also like Milligan, Avery’s exaggerations of scale and scope often showed very little in the way of restraint, or logic. Referring to Avery’s working method as “the relentless working out of a foolish idea” (1999: 343), animation historian Michael Barrier also notes that “Avery demonstrated that a silly idea could become a funny idea if a director pursued it with disarming vigor and single-mindedness” (1999: 333). Finally, just as Milligan had distilled the collective-creation process of the late-night sessions at the Grafton Arms into a personal working method, Avery both condensed and circumvented the collaborative writing process common to the cartoon studios of his time. No matter how many directions they rode off madly in, his apparent improvisations were the product of one mind, as opposed to many. A workaholic who, by his own admission, “attempted to do everything,” Avery “was intensely involved in every detail of his cartoons” (Barrier 1999: 430, 431). One of the details which Avery consistently worked into his cartoons was the facility with which his characters violated the conceptual spatial boundaries of both their fictional worlds and the medium those worlds were presented in. Avery’s body of work is replete with such “meta-gags, bringing the process of production into the cartoon” (Scheib 1980: 127). In Dumb-Hounded, an escaping convict runs ‘out of frame’ in the literal sense, passing the sprocket holes on the moving strip of film before noticing it (Dumb-Hounded). While being tormented by the title character in Magical Maestro, a baritone pauses mid-song to pluck a hair which has been animated to appear as though it is stuck on the lens of the projector showing the film (Magical Maestro). Although more numerous in the cartoons Avery directed for mgm, metatheatrical disruptions of spatial integrity are not uncommon in his earlier work for Warner Brothers. As Tortoise Beats Hare opens, Bugs Bunny walks in front of the picture’s title card and reads it aloud, casting aspersions on the names in the credits (which include Avery himself) (Tortoise). Thugs With Dirty Mugs, from 1939, is full of moments like this, beginning with an extended aside to

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the audience by the cartoon’s lead gangster, who takes a lengthy break from the plot to indulge in an impersonation of radio comedian Fred Allen (Thugs). Later on, a policeman leans across the diagonal split-screen dividing himself and an informant, to tell him to speak up during their telephone conversation (Thugs). The gangsters are finally apprehended thanks to a tip by a silhouetted audience member: although initially spotted by the gang leader and told to sit back down as he makes for the exit, this concerned citizen outwits the ­criminals by outwaiting them. In the next scene, he gives the police crucial information on the gang’s next job, which he learned by sitting “through this picture twice” (Thugs). The Avery cartoon universe is full of spatial indeterminacy. It is a place where a character can completely conceal himself behind a tree narrower than he is; a character driving a truck can likewise disappear behind a narrow tree, truck and all (Three Little Pups). In such a universe, a single character can be in an infinite number of places at once. This is such a commonplace occurrence that Avery allows official provision to be made for it: in Happy-Go-Nutty, a guard dog disposes of a duplicate of the cartoon’s star Screwy Squirrel in a trash can bearing the label “FOR EXTRA SQUIRRELS” (Happy-Go-Nutty). On rare occasions, doppelgangers of Avery’s characters are revealed to be twins, close relatives, or lookalikes; the rest of the time, simultaneous self-duplication is taken as a fact of life. In Avery-style cartoon physics, spatial barriers can be manipulated by anyone. A matador traps a charging bull in Señor Droopy by closing a door behind the bull, then folding the door down to the size of a postage stamp (Señor Droopy). The catch to this is that spatial barriers can also manipulate themselves, as the matador discovers to his horror after cavalierly tossing the folded door over his shoulder. The instant the door hits the ground, it unfolds to its normal size, opening up onto a set of cellar stairs to let the bull charge back into the arena.9 Milligan’s identification with Americans such as Spike Jones, The Marx Brothers, the Fleischer Brothers and Tex Avery reinforces the public image he crafted for himself as an outsider in British society. As revelatory as this is, it is also somewhat surprising. Even though The Goon Show has a great deal in common with the slam-bang antics of Spike Jones’ City Slickers or the Marxes, Milligan’s writing also “reaches back to the English nineteenth century [sic] nonsense tradition of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll” (de Rijke 2002: 233). 9 Scheib mentions a later use of the same gag, in 1954’s Homesteader Droopy (1980: 125). This time, the rampaging beast temporarily folded up inside the door is a moose (Homesteader Droopy).

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The Goon Show appears to be set in a Wonderland without an Alice, a world whose constant shifts in perspective are governed by a logic which defies rational explanation, marked as it is by the “Pointlessness and arbitrariness [which] are singled out as building blocks of both nonsense and the absurd” (Cornwell 2006: 22). Despite the wealth of ludic, alogical material which has accumulated in English literature (particularly from the nineteenth century onwards), the conflicting timelines in Spike Milligan’s statements about the relationship between literary genres and his own style make it difficult to establish a clear genealogy of influence. Milligan often fostered an impression of himself as a late-blooming literary naïf by taking pains to stress that the homes he lived in during his childhood were hardly havens for literature of any kind, let alone the nonsense variety. Behan relates Milligan’s recollection that “only two novels, Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson” (1988: 45) graced the shelves of his family abode. By way of contrast, it is difficult to know how to contextualize his later statement that he “liked Lear” (Farnes 1997: 54), since no time period is specified for the development of this preference. As well, Milligan’s admission to author and poet Robert Graves that “not until I was 35 did I become aware of literature” (Scudamore 1991: 119) is difficult to place in a proper context. If true, this would have placed his great awakening somewhere in 1953 or early 1954, and made the question of literary influence on The Goon Show moot, since by that time the style of his writing for the program was already well-established. This particular version of events, however, is hard to reconcile with the one that Milligan allowed Pauline Scudamore to publish in an authorized biography. In this account, Milligan began to familiarize himself with literature 1940, when, while billeted with his artillery unit at an abandoned girls’ school at Bexhill-on-Sea, he received permission to reorganize and catalogue the school’s library (Scudamore 1985: 67). Just as Spike Milligan’s own accounts of the genesis of his personal style are full of contradictions, the threads of cultural influence which manifest themselves throughout The Goon Show display few overt links or connections with each other. Because of its hybrid nature, the program has an uneasy relationship with strict boundaries of genre, no matter what Andrew Crisell holds to be true about the way it “neatly typified [one of] the two main strands of radio comedy which had developed in the medium’s short history” (1997: 76).10 10

Questions of interpretation aside, the main trouble with this statement is that Crisell never essentially identifies or defines the strand of comedy which The Goon Show is supposed to typify. Although he finds in The Goon Show “the essence of all great clowning” (Crisell 1997: 76), he offers no examples of earlier British or American radio programs which may have been tinged with that same essence.

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In The Goon Show, one encounters something which is not exactly many things at once: not exactly a comedy-variety program, not exactly a sitcom, not exactly pure absurdist nonsense, not exactly a stock-figure-populated radio cartoon. When entering an investigation of The Goon Show along any dimension, therefore, one has to be aware of the internal inconsistencies which abound in both the program and its creator. This in turn, however, provides a vital insight which adds immeasurably in understanding how and why the distortion of time and space are so crucial to The Goon Show’s style of humour. If Milligan presents things that are not exactly as they seem, it is because they were never that way in the first place; at the same time, these same things are exactly as they seem, are nothing else at all, and are unavoidably so.

chapter 2

The Accordion Beating Time: Temporal Distortions in The Goon Show 1

Looking Backward to Look Forward Again: The Goon Show’s Narrative Framework

Being one thing and not being it at the same time is at the heart of the presentational mode used by Spike Milligan to introduce his audience to a temporal and spatial framework whose construction is not as inchoate as it may appear. Although many of the specifics concerning contemporaneity, simultaneity, and the passage of time in an episode of The Goon Show are complex, recondite, and deliberately disorienting, they function as details of an overall picture which is remarkably simple. The onset of events in a Goon Show’s main plot is clearly demarcated, and the temporal flow of the narrative is straightforward and unambiguous. In its essence, a Goon Show’s story is told entirely in flashback: some indication is always given in an episode’s exordium-cum-audiencewarmup that what follows should be taken as a re-enactment of events that have already come to pass. Milligan’s most commonly-used means of separating ‘show’ from ‘pre-show’ divides the job of doing this between members of the main cast and the staff announcer, following a readily discernible pattern: SEAGOON. Welcome to the Goon Show! GRAMS. [Various moans and wailings…] SEAGOON. Thank you listeners! And a Merry Christmas to all our readers. For the Christmas festival, we present on the new curved speaker radio set: A Bandit Of Sherwood Forest! OMNES. Ole! ORCHESTRA. [Grand opening fanfare] GREENSLADE. Doncaster late in the 12th century, ‘tis December and the snow covered coaching yard of the Bowman’s Inn is thronged with travellers each awaiting to go his journey. milligan and sykes 1954e: 1

By introducing both an adventure’s title and a verbal description of its initial setting, Milligan is hewing to a well-established form of narrative shorthand,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004310704_004

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one which even by the 1950s had become a cliché of radio dramaturgy. However, he is also calling attention to the status of what follows this introduction as a story, an act of imaginative reconstruction rather than a set of incidents occurring in the here and now. As such, he is also calling attention to the potential for inconsistencies, biases and outright errors to creep into this particular version of events, even as it unfolds. The technique of announcing-the-storyas-a-story became enough of a routine with Milligan that he came to use it on occasion as a means of creating, then subverting, an audience’s expectations as to subject matter. The 1957 episode “The Missing Boa Constrictor” features Neddie Seagoon constantly asking all and sundry to “hold this boa constrictor” (Milligan and Stephens 1957i) as a running gag; the reptile mentioned in the title has no other bearing whatsoever on the flow of events. “The Sleeping Prince”, also from 1957, pulls an even more audacious bait-and-switch routine. After a story featuring nothing resembling a prince at all, Wallace Greenslade concludes the episode by awakening a previously-unnamed snorer with the words “Come on Prince. Time to go home” (Milligan and Stephens 1957e). Whether or not its stated title is featured in its story, the narrative in an episode of The Goon Show moves in one direction, and one direction only: forward. Events are portrayed in the order in which they are assumed to have occurred: temporal disjuncts and prolepses are generally not employed. Analepsis is Milligan’s preferred method of leaving the time frame of the performance to establish the time frame of the narrative; rather than embedding it in the narrative itself, he generally utilizes direct address, in the form of a character’s remembrances which elucidate the given conditions before the enactment of any particular scene gets underway. As the hero of most Goon Show adventures, Neddie Seagoon is well accustomed to receiving this privilege: SEAGOON. I had retired from the Army and was on a goodwill tour of North Africa teaching Morris Dancing to the Arabs. They didn’t seem to be quite getting the hang of it. (Giggles) Ha hum. However one night, out of curiosity, I entered a curiosity shop. milligan 1955b

This practice in and of itself calls into question the stability of the main narrative’s time frame, since it requires a character to step out of this frame and move forward in time to address the audience, while appearing otherwise unaltered by the passage of time implied by the shift from enacted past to narrating present. Milligan minimizes the attendant confusion that may result from characters continually bouncing forwards and backwards by restricting each of his narratives to a single, easily traceable plotline whose events are

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presented in sequence. An episode of The Goon Show may contain many irrelevancies, detours, instances of padding, and exercises in time-killing, but it never contains a subplot. When characters fill time for the sake of filling time (as the Eccles-Bluebottle and Minnie Bannister-Henry Crun tandems often do) they do so secure in the knowledge that their relevance to upcoming action has already been made clear, or will be made clear before long. There is a compelling reason for Milligan’s straight-ahead approach to narrative, one which has more to do with pragmatic concerns than with any dramaturgical theory. The Goon Show, no matter how disorienting it can get, is designed to get laughs. As such, its comedic impact depends not just on its content but on the order in which that content is selectively presented. Receptor models which focus on the mechanisms through which the mind encodes information as humour stress the importance of the sequence of the presentation of this information as a vital cue to its encoding. One of the chief influences on the present generation of study in the field of receptor models of humour, Jerry Suls, holds that “the reader or listener uses the preceding text of a joke to structure what will appear next by formulating a narrative schema […] Next, predictions about forthcoming text are formulated from the schema. These predictions are then compared with the most recent text input” (1972: 86). Seen in this light, the linear time structure of a Goon Show episode’s narrative is far easier to reconcile with its often absurd content. In order to have their desired effects, elements of this narrative need not follow one another logically, but they absolutely have to follow one another chronologically. By adopting a simple, unidirectional time vector as the road down which an episode of The Goon Show travels, Milligan affords himself considerable scope for creating and subsequently demolishing audience expectations concerning content and information in ways calculated to produce laughter. 2

One Narrative, Many Narrators: The Goon Show’s Democracy of Diegesis

Milligan’s decision to move time forward, and only forward, in the telling of a Goon Show story stems from more than a comedian’s desire to simplify the route from set-up to punch line. As well as selectively manipulating and distorting time frames at specific points along his narrative road, Milligan uses The Goon Show’s presentational format to signal the possibility of e­ ncountering distorted and disrupted time frames and scales within the narrative’s apparent linearity. Like many another comedy-variety program, The Goon Show comes equipped

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with a ready-made source of general information on a variety of subjects including the narrative, in the form of a staff announcer. Other programs in this genre had already blurred the lines between “using the deep-voiced, well-spoken announcer…as the ‘straight man’” (Douglas 2004: 110), thereby partially integrating him the cast, and employing him in a more traditional role as an all-purpose third person semi-omniscient narrator, in ­order to relate all matters concerning setting, the passage of time, and intervening action which could not be comfortably embedded in the dialogue of any given scene. For example, listeners of Jack Benny’s long-running program frequently heard Don Wilson exchange his function as staff announcer for that of house guest at the highly fictionalized version of Benny’s home which served as the focal point for a goodly portion of the comedy material. Even so, his status as a co-worker, employee, or invited personal friend was always offered as a clear rationale for Wilson’s presence in the Benny ‘household’. Likewise, Fibber McGee and Molly’s announcer Harlow Wilcox straddled the domains of m ­ aster of ceremonies and fictional character by interpolating the sponsor’s message into each episode’s main story. The comic disparagement which Wilcox’s ‘­interruptions’ to the ongoing action received from Fibber McGee and Molly’s other characters became an integral part of each week’s broadcast. As with its counterparts on The Jack Benny Program, Fibber McGee and Molly, and other American comedy-variety shows, the function of the staff announcer on The Goon Show evolved from ancillary voice to auxiliary cast member as a rapport developed between the announcer and the regular cast. For the entirety of the program’s single-story-per-episode format, this function was filled—to overflowing, if a pattern of Goon Show jibes about his bulk can be borrowed for the occasion—by Wallace Greenslade. Although the program’s original announcer, “Andrew Timothy had found himself involved in the plot of the Goons’ sketches even as early as the first series” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 107), his replacement was a performer who was capable of more than the occasional sobersided walk-on. Wilmut sums up the difference between the two men thus: “in Greenslade they [the Goons] found an excellent foil, arguing with them about the quality of his announcements, passing sarcastic comments on the show in general, and eventually acting parts with them” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 52). That characteristic of group performance often referred to as ‘chemistry’ is difficult to quantify, or to reduce to words on a page; there is, however, recorded evidence to support a claim that onstage ‘chemistry’ was the key element in Wallace Greenslade’s relationship with the Goons. In 1968, seven years after Greenslade’s death, the original Goon Show cast filmed a performance of the

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1959 episode “Tales of Men’s Shirts” for broadcast on television. Rather than an adaptation of the original script for a different medium, this was a line-forline re-enactment of the version recorded for radio, with future Monty Python member John Cleese taking over the role of staff announcer. Cleese is a creditable substitute for Greenslade, his deadpan delivery providing solid support for the antics of Milligan, Sellers, and Secombe. Even so, the camaraderie and bonhomie which permeated the Goons’ interplay with Greenslade in the radio original is noticeably absent from the televised re-creation (Tales of Men’s Shirts video). The difference between the two “Tales of Men’s Shirts” is, as much as anything, a difference in the approaches and inclinations of their main narrators: Cleese interprets the role as a ‘straight man’, striving to maintain an air of detachment from the tomfoolery going on around him; Greenslade, on the other hand, appears to derive a perverse pleasure from participating in the nonsense. Indeed, his work on The Goon Show revealed him to be a willing, and very capable, comic stooge. Firmly fixed as it was in its own alternate reality, The Goon Show required that its announcer act as an associate lord of misrule far more than a voice of reason. Milligan’s use of Wallace Greenslade as this type of sidekick is a special use of the dramaturgical convention of narratorial exposition, setting it up for the sole purpose of knocking it down. An episode of The Goon Show establishes Greenslade’s voice as its first source of information, creating both the expectation that this voice will be the primary source of narration, and the impression that its owner’s version of events is likely to be the definitive or ‘legitimate’ one. Both the expectation and the impression are quickly revealed to be illusions. Greenslade often gets not much further than intoning the words “This is the bbc” with respectful solemnity before being interrupted by noisy gibberish or disrespectful backtalk. Seagoon is a frequent heckler, goading Greenslade with variations on a general theme of “Go on there now Wal, give us the old posh wireless talking there Wal” (Milligan 1958j), and going as far on one occasion as to shoot him for the temerity of limbering up his singing voice (Milligan 1975: 108). It must be said that Greenslade gives as good as he gets: despite his own frequently-commented-on girth, he has no problem with referring to Seagoon as “a short fat round blob” (Milligan 1975: 120). Although no such enmity existed between the real Harry Secombe and Wallace Greenslade, the rivalry between the fictional personae that Milligan created for them is a natural one. Seagoon is far and away The Goon Show’s most persistent (and, apart from Bluebottle, its most shameless) appropriator of the narratorial function, often resorting to a megaphone through which he shouts

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“hello folks” to get the audience’s attention as he does so.1 However, if Seagoon’s insistence on telling his own story cancels out Greenslade’s presumed monopoly on the narratorial function, incursions by other characters likewise explode the notion of a Greenslade-Seagoon cartel. At any time other than its opening few seconds, just about anyone is likely to be serving as the interim narrator of a Goon Show episode. This includes not just the familiar Goon characters, but other voices whose only contribution to the dialogue consists of narration. When such a voice was called for, Milligan took full advantage of Peter Sellers’ versatility, casting him as a host of newsreaders and commercial pitchmen with a variety of British and American accents. Not all of these creations were entirely fictional: Sellers’ impersonation of bbc commentator Richard Dimbleby provides the combination of exposition and narration unique to on-the-spot reportage during extended sequences in “The Starlings” and “Operation Christmas Duff” (‘Starlings’ recording: 19:00–25:45; ‘Duff’ recording: 4:12–6:53). A story so widely, almost indiscriminately, shared among storytellers should be full of contradictions, denials, and mutual negations, as successive details are brought in from contrasting and conflicting points of view. Instead, as a Goon Show story unfolds, every character who takes up the task of narration adds details which modify, but do not deny, what has previously been narrated. By doing so, Milligan’s characters can be seen to be replicating his own creative process, as encapsulated in an exercise Milligan engaged in during the early years of his association with the other members of The Goon Show’s cast: Goon-sequences is played with a home [audio] recorder. Each Goon tells part of a story and passes only the last word on to the next speaker. When half-a-dozen Goons have goon to town [sic] with the English language, the recording is played back and they hear for the first time what the others have said, shrieked, chirruped or mumbled. farnes 1997: 20

This mode of collective creation, conditioned as it is by consequentiality, and by accumulation rather than revision, is a strong contender to be considered as a prototype for the style of storytelling which emerged during The Goon Show’s fourth season, and dominated the rest of its broadcast run. 1 Based on visual evidence provided in bbc Television’s 1972 special The Last Goon Show of All, an acoustic megaphone wielded by Harry Secombe in the vocal guise of Seagoon, rather than any form of control-room-based electronic manipulation of the signal from Secombe’s microphone, was used to produce this effect (Last Goon Show video).

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This is not to say that The Goon Show is in essence a collective creation. Certain features of its creative process do, however, situate it at an intermediate place on a continuum between pure collective creation and the product of a single authorial voice. The issue is confounded in part by the role of voices in this process. The recollections of all concerned make it clear that, although neither Secombe nor Sellers participated in scriptwriting for The Goon Show, the specifics of their vocal characterizations played a crucial role in shaping plots and stories, by establishing a range of probable and plausible character functions for each voice they performed. Some of these characterizations came virtually fully-formed from outside sources. The idea of Bluebottle as a walking disaster area whose enterprise outstrips his abilities and acumen sprang from an encounter between the Goons and a dedicated fan. The accepted version of events runs roughly as follows: “a large scoutmaster with a high-pitched voice…was sent round to see [Peter] Sellers by [Michael] Bentine. The scoutmaster tried to persuade Sellers to participate in a boy’s club concert” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 91). The real-life inspiration for Bluebottle, Ruxton Hayward, corroborates the story from his own viewpoint: I was at school, and the [scout] troop [he belonged to] were going to open a fete, and asked me to find someone to open it. So I went to Chiswick Empire [Theatre] and I said to Michael Bentine, you know…and he said, “clever idea; you’re a genius.” Now, apparently, that is a code word between the boys—“you’ve got a Muggins on your hands here.” But I didn’t know that, of course… “Heroes: The Goons”

Mediated by Peter Sellers’ exaggeration of his vocal cadences and inflections, Ruxton Hayward, Goon Show fan was transformed into Bluebottle, Goon Show character. The extent to which Milligan tailored his scriptwriting to the talents of the program’s cast means that The Goon Show’s storytelling structure is strongly influenced by what dramaturgical theorist Eli Rozik calls its praxical layer, a “performative layer” composed of “all the actions of a character deriving from its macro-motive” (2011: 83). All the same, The Goon Show offers rather a special example of the praxical layer in action. Milligan’s characters do not enter a situation informed by pre-existing motives which govern their behaviour; instead, their motives and their behaviour are entirely determined by the demands of the situation. This allows Milligan’s creations (whether enacted by others or not) to have spur-of-the-moment changes of attitude when confronted with

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changing narrative realities. The only trouble that characters in The Goon Show have with changing their attitudes so quickly is that these changes have the tendency to change the direction of the narrative itself. In the 1955 episode “The Man Who Won the War”, unwilling wartime conscript Seagoon hastily constructs a web of lies to avoid military service, only to see it turn into a web of truth which ensnares both himself and recruiting officer Grytpype-Thynne: SEAGOON. It’s all a mistake sir, It’s all a mistake. I can’t join. You can’t take me I’m, (Welsh accent) I’m an American buddy you see. I’m an American. I, I, I’m from the prairie ay ay I’m from the prairie, I’m er, I’m from New York. [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. New York? SEAGOON. Yes. [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. Oh, do you know the Bronx? SEAGOON. (Welsh accent) I know them well, I married their daughter Gladys Bronk. [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. You’d better report to the American army authorities, just through there. SEAGOON. (Welsh accent) Oh thank you buddy. FX. OPENS DOOR. CLOSES DOOR. SEAGOON. Ah. Good morning. [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. Good morning buddy. You want to join the American Army buddy? SEAGOON. No no I can’t join you see, I, I’m, I’m, I’m British. [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. I knew you weren’t American the moment you mentioned your marriage to Gladys Bronk. SEAGOON. Why? [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. I am Gladys Bronk. SEAGOON. Darling, together again. milligan and sykes 1955k

The potential for limitless shifts in intention and motive among the multiplicity of character voices in The Goon Show magnifies the need for a strong central authorial voice, to prevent the program’s narratives from dissolving into an incomprehensible mess of competing storylines and narratorial perspectives. A unified narratorial outlook which remains consistent no matter which character is doing the narration is the engine of The Goon Show’s narratives, driving its deceptively simple plots and holding them together through many complex twists and turns. This engine draws its motive force from a uniform

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use of language by all The Goon Show’s characters, at least as far as statements which move the story forward are concerned. Two equally important features of language in The Goon Show allow its narration to be parceled out all comers, while still representing a single, consistent narratorial voice. One is the absolute truth-value of all statements of a primarily diegetic nature in an episode of The Goon Show. Utterances made in direct address to the audience by Goon Show characters are always entirely reliable, and objectively verifiable, albeit within the unusual context for verification that the program’s fictional world presents. Because of this, the narrative baton can be passed from one character to another, and to the half-character, half-disinterested-observer-figure of Wallace Greenslade, without any fear of personal agendas distorting the narrative. Even when faced with The Goons playing themselves, Greenslade has his work cut out for him to finish a simple introduction without unsolicited help: HARRY [SECOMBE]. …Mr. Greenslade! [GREENSLADE]. Yes, Master? HARRY [SECOMBE]. Tell the masses what’s the play. [GREENSLADE]. Ladies and gentlemen… HARRY [SECOMBE]. Thank you. Yes, it’s ladies and gentlemen in…‘The Affair of the Lone Banana’! ORCHESTRA. DEEP SINISTER CHORDS HELD UNDER:– PETER [SELLERS]. The Affair of the Lone Banana—not a pretty story, I fear; still the BBC will buy this cheap trash. milligan 1972: 61

One of the constituent features of Milligan’s writing which makes The Goon Show’s equal-opportunity policy of narration possible is the inability of his characters to use direct address to provide misleading information. By far the least trustworthy of the program’s characters, Grytpype-Thynne is transparent and honest when revealing his plans and motivations to the listening public. In 1958’s “The Spon Plague”, he convinces the entire population of Britain that it suffers from a non-existent disease so that he can sell a fraudulent cure for it, then shares his triumph with the audience in a way that would do Desperate Desmond, Snidely Whiplash, or any other cartoon-melodrama villain proud: GRAMS.  Great Shoveling of Money. Coins Everywhere— Rolling Along The Ground [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. Hear that sound, folks? Money—M-O-N-E-Y, pronounced—

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GRAMS.  Grytpype-Thynne (Pre-Recorded), Slightly Faster, Saying ‘Moneyyyyy’ milligan 1975: 116

Whether accompanied by a pre-recorded self or not, a Goon Show character engaged in the act of storytelling relates events as they actually unfold, with no interpretation, wishful thinking, or any other interposition of intentionality or bias. This condition holds even when the intended audience for the story is another character. One of the side-effects of this is that any character can enter a Goon Show story at any time, and be certain of a faithful recapitulation of events up to that point. Hired to sabotage the eponymous drag-racing pipe organ of “The Mighty Wurlitzer”, Major Bloodnok himself is quickly brought up to speed: MORIARTY. […] Bloodnok, remember, loosen all the nuts and bolts so that when he is travelling at speed the whole organ falls to pieces. BLOODNOK. Thank you for telling me the plot. milligan 1972: 146

To return to Rozik’s structural model, the net effect of the unwavering truthfulness of all Goon Show characters when engaged in narration is to negate the “naïve layer” of the fictional structure, neutralizing, if only for a moment, the independent viewpoints at the heart of characters’ motives and actions (2011: 84). This unity of viewpoints gives even greater significance to what Rozik characterizes as the personified layer— “the fundamental layer on which the entire structure of a fictional world is built”, based on the premise that, in all fiction, “a single psyche is represented by a world of characters” (2011: 82). The single psyche behind The Goon Show’s characters belonged to Spike Milligan, a firm believer in the fundamental interchangeability of conceptual constructs and tangible objects. This belief underscores the second feature of language in The Goon Show which allows for the presentation of an entirely reliable, if changeable, narrative: the transformative nature of language itself. The frequent characterization of The Goon Show’s fictional world as dependent on spectacular sound effects obscures its true essence: contrary to appearances, this world is a logocentric, not a sonocentric one. No matter how prominently sounds figure in Milligan’s conception of a Goon Show episode’s narrative, these sounds always take their cue from the words around them. This principle obtains whether the words or the sound effects come first.

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Milligan’s propensity for word-play means that his characters need to be aware of the potential effects of double meanings before they speak: SEAGOON. […] Moriarty? MORIARTY. Yes? SEAGOON. I’ve just made myself a peer. MORIARTY. Good, I’ll get down the end of it and start a concert party. SEAGOON. Come back here… It’s not that kind of peer. MORIARTY. What? SEAGOON. ‘P’ double-‘E’ ‘R’ not ‘P’ ‘I’ ‘E’ ‘R’! FX. splash! MORIARTY. (far off) Oh you swine you… milligan 1956b

Since so much of Milligan’s writing hinges on the ability of words to create detailed mental pictures, it is not surprising that a goodly amount of his comedy hinges on the contretemps that arise when contrasting mental pictures are created by homophones. This particular linguistic device is a well-worn one; what takes Milligan’s use of it out of the world of bedroom farces and sitcoms, and into a realm all of its own, is his use of it to engender misunderstandings which have immediate and concrete physical manifestations. This is by no means the only string to Milligan’s linguistic bow: he also uses words to make sense of sound retroactively. If there were a phrasebook for the Goon variant of English, the question “what was that noise?” could never be followed by the answer “I don’t know”. The concept of not knowing what a sound may signify does not exist in Milligan’s scheme of things. In our world, as in The Goon Show’s, the source of every sound is ultimately discoverable. The Goon Show differs from our world in that there is always someone handy who knows exactly what the source of any sound happens to be. This in itself is handy when the sound is utterly inexplicable: FX. GRAMS. FX. SEAGOON. ECCLES.

[Door opens] [Donkey brays, then farts] [Door slams shut] Who was that? Fred the Oyster!

sykes and milligan 1955h

The fact that Fred’s sole reason for existence is to show up every now and then in one Goon Show episode or another and make his signature noise makes it

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indeed fortunate that he can be so easily recognized, at least by Eccles. The association of any identifiable noise whatsoever with an oyster is but one example that, in The Goon Show, saying something absolutely makes it so. When sounds follow words, they do so not merely as a consequence of temporality, but as the ineluctable effects of very well-articulated causes. As with Fred the Oyster’s cameo appearances, when sounds precede words, the audience does well to avoid jumping to conclusions until further clarification is provided. A “Slight Explosion” (Milligan 1975: 79), the din of heavy machinery, a “Rumbling and Bubbling Cauldron” (Milligan 1975: 121) or something resembling the gurgling and burbling made by Alec Guinness’ laboratory apparatus in The Man in the White Suit are all used at various times to herald Major Bloodnok bemoaning his chronic gastric complaints. This particular running gag created its own set of expectations, which Milligan gleefully reversed in the 1957 episode “King Solomon’s Mines”. Two flatulent blasts from a boat whistle does indeed lead to a line from Bloodnok: the cause of the noise is revealed to be “a river steamer”—not the curry powder which Bloodnok has just swallowed as a tonic (‘King Solomon’s Mines’ recording: 9:35–9:52). A pier that appears when confused with an honorific, rudely articulate mollusks, and the even ruder mechanical contrivances at work in a faulty digestive tract are just a few of the singularities one might encounter in a fictional world which can be changed by whoever has the last word. One Goon Show episode in particular stands as a case study of the perils that constantly-changing narrators present to one another. In contrast with its Pirandellan title, the 1956 episode “Six Charlies in Search of an Author” casts a minor member of The Goon Show’s stable of intermittently recurring characters, Jim Spriggs, as a writer who is both familiar with and in control of his characters from the outset of the narrative. Spriggs’ position as the undisputed authority on events, sequences, and outcomes appears at first to be unassailable: the alleged ‘source material’ of the episode is referred to as “Jim Spriggs’ immortal book, ‘Six Charlies in Search of an Author’” (Milligan and Stephens 1956m) Control over the narrative is quickly decentralized when Henry Crun skips ahead “a couple of pages” to reach a destination first, even in the face of Seagoon’s warning that “I’ve a good mind to tell the author” (Milligan and Stephens 1956m). The rest of the characters soon get wind of the possibilities inherent to this premise, and form a sort of fifth column against the “official” narrative. One by one, they uncouple individual links from the chain of events, reshaping them to suit their own purposes. Ever the hero, Seagoon makes the first assault on authorial absolutism; trapped with Major Bloodnok in a safe, and having “nothing on this page we can open it with”, he types his way out of the situation, conjuring up

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“one eighteen-foot crowbar and one sledgehammer” (Milligan and Stephens 1956m). Neither implement is brought to bear on the situation before Spriggsthe-author re-invokes his right of eminent domain, in a manner which Milligan would later elaborate upon in his novel Puckoon, which features a running dialogue between Milligan-as-character and Milligan-as-author: ‘…did you write these legs?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well I don’t like dem. I don’t like ‘em at all at all. I could have writted better legs meself. Did you write your legs?’ ‘No.’ ‘Ahhh. Sooo! You got some one else to write your legs, some one who’s a good leg writer and den you write dis pair of crappy legs for me…’ milligan 1965: 9

As an author, Spriggs is no match for even the neglectful writer of The Milligan’s legs. Overwhelmed by force of numbers, Spriggs abandons his creations to their fate, and opts “to go to the country for a long rest” (Milligan and Stephens 1956m). This open invitation to take license with the plot leads to a game of ‘hot potato’ with the authorial function, which even sees the rightful author Spriggs temporarily written out of his own work. Restored by means unknown to his seat of power behind the typewriter, Spriggs re-establishes order by writing “a happy ending” which lasts long enough for Seagoon to wed, then lose his new bride to the charms of “a certain handsome virile youth” on the steps of the church after the wedding (Milligan and Stephens 1956m). The youth in question is none other than Bluebottle, who has snuck into the author’s chair to provide himself with a little long-awaited satisfaction, and prospective writers with a case in point about the dangers of allowing one’s work to be revised by too many hands. In “Six Charlies in Search of an Author”, Milligan is doing more than simply having fun with long-established literary conventions concerning an author’s arm’s-length relationship with his own creations. He is also sending up The Goon Show’s well-established convention of deputizing any given character as a narrator, regardless of that character’s other functions in the narrative. Beyond that, he may also be getting a little of his own back at an audience which over the course of seven seasons had become accustomed to hearing The Goon Show’s continually switching narrators and its suddenly throwing its plots off on tangents, but remained somewhat mystified by it all. As the series wore on, Milligan’s writing showed more and more signs of impatience with what he perceived to be unreasonable expectations concerning proper plotting, or

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anything that did not involve following the impulse of the moment. Later episodes in the seventh series have a tendency to end abruptly, and with disclaimers. In “Insurance, The White Man’s Burden”, Neddie Seagoon notices that the show has come to an end, and runs off for brandy, leaving Wallace Greenslade to explain the anti-climax by saying “Well, you can tell it’s getting near the end of the series can’t you” (Milligan and Stephens 1957g). “The Missing Boa Constrictor”, which aired three weeks after that, ends with Greenslade forestalling complaints by noting that “if you weren’t satisfied with that ending you’ll be glad to know that neither were we” (Milligan and Stephens 1957i). Back-handed apologies for refusing to follow conventions of narrative closure are not an uncommon comedic device: in Milligan’s case, a comedian’s desire to disarm the audience by anticipating their complaints concealed a world-view with a considerable degree of complexity and nuance. For Milligan, time was no more a closed system than narrative was; just as narratorial authority could be divided up and shipped off in parcels tailored to the needs of the recipient, so too could the moments, hours, days, and even years which ordinarily blend together to create the flow of time. 3

The Fragmentation of Time-Frames in The Goon Show and Its Effects on Narrative

Challenging to follow as they are, the changes of narrators in The Goon Show can still be seen to operate within a unidirectional conceptualization of time. Even so, diegetic statements made by Goon Show characters reveal this conceptualization of time to be far from one-dimensional. Milligan’s writing has a tendency to fragment time into a series of independently-operating frames of reference, each one moving forward, but at its own rate of speed. Any two characters (or more) can interact effectively in the same scene, while operating under radically different conceptions of temporal flow. Reporting to a Boer War outpost in “The Battle of Spion Kop”, recruit Seagoon is asked by Major Blooknok “what’s the time back in England?” (Milligan 1974: 23). Both Seagoon’s reply of “Twenty to four” and Bloodnok’s counter-response that “it’s nice to hear the old time again” (Milligan 1974: 23) give rise to the notion that more than just the two-hour difference between the United Kingdom and South Africa is at play in the minds of both men. Even if Seagoon subscribes to Bloodnok’s vision of an England in suspended animation at twenty minutes to four, it becomes clear that his view of temporal succession is very much his own. Later on in the episode, he is confronted with a threat which he instantly recognizes as “a genuine hand operated 1914 tiger” (Milligan 1974: 31). This would seem to be less a

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case of recognition than precognition, though, since the entire episode takes place in “the year 1907” (Milligan 1974: 21), and Seagoon’s specification of a year of manufacture for the tiger would appear to indicate that he, for one, regards it as a vintage model. Furthermore, as far as those in this particular story are concerned, 1907 is the “second year” (Milligan 1974: 21) of the Boer War, which in fact ended in 1902. Taken as a whole, such an array of inconsistent views of time comes across as totally consistent with a fictional world governed by temporal inconstancy. Milligan often takes the premise of temporal inconstancy to even greater extremes by throwing conflicting accounts of temporality on a collision course with one another. “Shangri-La Again” from 1955 is a primer in how time as experienced by Goon Show characters can become detached from time as measured by more objective methods of chronometry. Fleeing Peking by air, Seagoon and a party of British nationals crash-land soon after “Dawn, December the twenty-fifth” (Milligan 1955c). As they wait for the plane’s radio to be fixed, “Three weeks went by” (Milligan 1955c). Discovered by Bluebottle, who offers to lead them to Shangri-La, they walk through the mountains of China for another “Three weeks”. “Then on the second of January—a miracle!” (Milligan 1955c). Strangely, the miracle has nothing to do with six weeks elapsing in the eight days which separate Christmas and January 2nd. It must be said that not all of the chronological anomalies in The Goon Show represent a deliberate attempt on Milligan’s part to dismember the flow of time in order to create comedy through incongruity or the juxtaposition of anachronisms. Some are simple errors in continuity, and are the direct result of the time pressures that accompanied the making of each Goon Show episode. In order to have a script ready for a Sunday night recording session, Milligan had to have something resembling a rough working draft ready no later than the previous Wednesday, in order for sound effects to be “tested out, and if possible, pre-recorded” (Lewis 1995: 218). “On Thursday, the script was re-typed, duplicated and distributed” (Lewis 1995: 218), leaving precious little time for proofreading and revision, even on scripts where Milligan had a co-writer to help him catch inconsistencies which could not be laid down to the effects of The Goon Show’s fictional world. When events conspired to leave even less time for double-checking than usual, a Goon Show episode could inadvertently extend its temporal distortion to the real-world framework of its studio and listening audiences. 1955’s “The Sinking of Westminster Pier” is the program’s outstanding example of last-minute changes of plan drawing the real world into a Goonish conception of time. One of the few Goon Show scripts which takes its plot from current events, it was apparently “inspired by the appearance of a photograph

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of the floating pier at Westminster under several feet of water with an ‘Out of Order’ notice being pinned to it” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 141). An in-text reference fixes the date of the pier’s inundation as “the 7th of Feb 1955” (Milligan and Sykes 1955e). The date in question was a Monday, eight days before the broadcast of the episode on “February 15, 1955” (Milligan and Sykes 1955e). This would have left Milligan and his co-writer Eric Sykes no more than seventy-two hours to have something resembling a finished script ready for the Thursday copying and distribution deadline. Whatever additional grace period there may have been to ensure that sound effects were satisfactory was not likely to have lessened the deadline pressure appreciably. The mention of a very recent date early in the script can be assumed as a signal to the audience that the events related in this particular Goon Show had taken place in an immediate past which could logically extend no farther back than six days before the episode’s recording on February 13. Even granting a certain degree of temporal and artistic license, the narrative frame that establishes the plot as a current event could also extend no further forward than the intended broadcast date of February 15. “The Sinking of Westminster Pier” manages to remember this for about seven-and-a-half minutes (‘The Sinking of Westminster Pier’ recording: 7:22) before its sense of time begins to go awry. When Seagoon narrates that “For a week we tried to raise the valuable sunken Westminster Pier” (Milligan and Sykes 1955e), he moves the story forward to February 14—one day after the date on which those words would have been recorded, but still narrowly within the realm of plausibility for the following Tuesday’s radio audience. Plausibility teeters slightly with a joke, apparently still happening on Monday, Feb. 14, 1955, concerning an oyster that currently happens to be closed on account of “Wednesday… early closing” (Milligan and Sykes 1955e). Verisimilitude falls off the rails altogether not long after that. Having been conned by Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty into a scheme to raise Westminster Pier by pumping out the Thames, Seagoon tells them that “You’ve been pumping for 8 weeks now and the river hasn’t gone down one inch” (Milligan and Sykes 1955e), which would make the date of the accusation somewhere in the week of April 11. At least, it would make it so for anyone keeping track of time. Major Bloodnok, for one, has not been doing so. With a typically Goonish disregard for the niceties of chronicity, he places his discovery of Seagoon foundering in the river shortly after this mid-April accusation of malfeasance as “mid-February” (Milligan and Sykes 1955e). Because it occurs between different characters in the same scene, such a discrepancy in perception cannot be read in the same way as the standard discrepancies between the ways that Goon Show characters and their audience comprehend the passage of time.

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Rather, it seems to be the clear product of a lack of attention to detail in a script that was rushed into production to take advantage of events while they remained fresh in the audience’s minds. Most of the time, Milligan is content to leave to the listener the task of sorting out his tangle of roughly-linked time frames. On occasion, however, a Goon Show script will pause to clear up potential misunderstandings about relative rates of temporal flow. The 1955 episode “The Greenslade Story” takes pains to mention that “six weeks went by” for Seagoon and Greenslade as they waited outside the London Palladium during a performance there by Eccles, and that “At the same time, inside the London Palladium, six weeks had also passed at the same speed” (Milligan 1955f: 14). In typical Milligan fashion, what is not made clear is whether Seagoon and Greenslade ever left the spot they were waiting at, or whether Eccles left the theatre (or, for that matter, the stage) during the six weeks which passed. Given the circumstances, it is reasonable to assume that, in the absence of outside forces acting upon them, all concerned carried on with their current activity (or lack thereof) until directed by narration to do otherwise. 4

That Sabrina Sure Gets Around2: The Free Flow of Anachronisms in The Goon Show

A fictional world in which the same six-week period passes concurrently for different people only if so specified, and in which six weeks may go by in the story while only eight days go by on the calendar, implies a conceptual model of time in which no moment or event in the past, present or future can be seen as entirely completed or self-contained. In The Goon Show, all moments, no matter how widely separated in time, are potentially accessible to all others. A useful way of comprehending Milligan’s overall schema for historical time is to view any episode of The Goon Show that does not take place in the “present day” of the 1950s or a “recent past” extending roughly to the turn of the twentieth century as occurring in a roughly-conceived historical era which has no firm chronology, and within which all moments in time are equally accessible 2 “Sabrina” in this case is neither a teenage witch nor the title character of an Audrey Hepburn film, but a bosomy 1950s British pin-up girl who is one of Bluebottle’s favourite sources of daydream material. In all his travels throughout history in Goon Show adventures, Bluebottle never fantasizes about famous women who belong to the historical period he finds himself in. Instead, he concentrates his thoughts on sirens whose names would resonate with the studio audience he continually solicits for applause.

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to one another. Thus, for instance, when constructing the narrative for “The Histories of Pliny the Elder,” Milligan conflates the last decades of Rome’s republic with the first century of its empire. Landing Julius Caesar in Britain “in the year ex-el-one-one-one [43] b.c.” (a year after his assassination), he moves narrative and integers forward while moving time backwards to “49 bc,” casts Bloodnok as Spartacus (dead since 71 bc), and ends the episode on Mount Vesuvius, presumably in 79 ad, during the “The Last Days of Pompei [sic]” (Milligan and Stephens 1957j). This schema can lead not only to absurd chronologies, but to readings of history which suggest alternative realities: “The Nadger Plague” takes place in a 1656 England ruled by a king, rather than by Oliver Cromwell (Milligan and Stephens 1956g). One of the additional implications of investing narrative time with such a quality of porosity is that topical references from the present can pass backwards into this narrated past with great regularity. Taking the example of “The Nadger Plague” once again, a magical solution to the horrors of this episode’s eponymous malady (which affects only those wearing pants) involves a potion which turns whoever swallows it into “any object you want” (Milligan and Stephens 1956g), to obviate the need for clothing. Why Eccles should want to turn into a gas stove, and Seagoon “an eight day, all weather clock, with device for waking you up with a cup of tea” (Milligan and Stephens 1956g), and how Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty should recognize both objects as common ones, begs a question that is unanswerable using any form of logic, other than that involved in putting a joke across to a mid-twentieth century audience. The same logic applies to many of the other throwaway gags in this episode, including one which hinges on a play on the double meaning of the word ‘coppers’ to denote penny pieces and policemen. A studio audience in 1956 laughed (as you or I no doubt also would have) without troubling itself to consider that, within the temporal confines of the narrative, this reference anticipates the establishment of Britain’s first civilian police force by a full two centuries (‘Nadger’ recording: 16:46–17:00). The free flow of individual anachronisms in The Goon Show inevitably means that, on occasion, entire time periods may seep through and emulsify with one another. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a 1957 episode entitled “The Treasure in the Tower.” The episode’s first main plot complication introduces one of Milligan’s rare uses of prolepsis, as the narrative jumps forward from the year 1600 to 1957 to explain why The Ministry of Works is digging in vain for buried treasure under the Tower of London. From there on in, Milligan’s script makes periodic leaps back and forth between the two time periods, suggesting an intention to create suspense by selectively including or withholding expository information in each leap. The separation of time

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frames is soon revealed to be an illusion, and the resulting proleptic/analeptic jumps a false device, as characters from 1957 and 1600 begin to interact with one another. Eccles and Bluebottle carry on one of their music-hall-inspired patter routines across three centuries as easily as two neighbours might talk across a backyard fence. Even when Eccles admits the inherent impossibility of the situation, since “if this is nineteen fifty-seven, I’m dead” (Milligan and Stephens 1957n), the conversation goes on unabated. It is evident from the rest of the episode that those involved in and affected by the narrative see no need to explain, or even question, the temporal paradox that lies at its heart. Rather than delve into the theoretical and practical aspects of how bits of the years 1600 and 1957 have become detached from their moorings, and now sit side by side, Goon characters accept the situation as a given, and get on with the business at hand. This business culminates in a causal impasse of the sort which forms the crux of many a work of science fiction: the reason that “in nineteen fifty-seven they didn’t find the treasure that was buried in sixteen hundred” (Milligan and Stephens 1957n) is that the people from 1600 who buried it waited for the fine folks from 1957 to dig an empty hole for them to bury it in. 5

Musical Interludes in The Goon Show: Interruptions in Narrative Flow and Opportunities for Temporal Distortion

On the face of it, approaching time from all directions at once would seem to be a violation of the linearity of The Goon Show’s overall narrative framework. However, the program’s structure contains a built-in pretext for temporal distortion. Each episode incorporates two musical interludes lasting between two and four minutes apiece, one featuring a jazz harmonica solo by Max Geldray with the studio orchestra, the other an up-tempo rhythm combo number by the Ray Ellington Quartet. Holdovers from The Goon Show’s origins as a sketchbased variety show, these interludes serve as a gateway to the manipulation and distortion of time frames which are features of the program’s mature format. By parceling out the dramatic action of an episode into three discrete subsections clearly separated by intervals which have no bearing on the action, they introduce the concept that the performance time of a Goon Show script may not be altogether the same as the performance time experienced—or expected—by its audience. This discrepancy in the time frames of performance and reception is further complicated by the variability of Milligan’s use of the musical interludes as time-markers. Milligan’s tendency is to use the music to bring the action to a full, if temporary, stop: only on rare occasions, as

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in 1954’s “Dishonoured,”3 when Ray Ellington and his quartet provide cabaret entertainment at “the Burrapow Sewer Club” (Milligan and Sykes 1954d: 9) in an unspecified part of India, does he choose to incorporate it into the story. Instead, he generally acknowledges the music as an entity unto itself, and uses one of two basic methods to introduce it. The first is a variation on the standard variety-show introduction by a staff announcer or master of ceremonies. In this role, Wallace Greenslade is charged with the dual task of notifying the audience of the change from dialogue to music, and of providing at least the semblance of a referent for the dialogue’s resumption at the conclusion of the song: GREENSLADE. Astute listeners will no doubt be puzzled at a horse sounding like a taxi and a train. The truth is the animal was also a brilliant impressionist. And here now is his impression of Ray Ellington. Milligan 1955a

Far more often, however, Milligan dispenses with the services of an announcer, and instead has one of his characters introduce the music as an abrupt non sequitur in the midst of what may be a string of other non sequiturs: BLUEBOTTLE. Then I will go! Sprin-ges on to ladder. Effect is ruined as trousers fall down. Oh! Short vest! Tee-hee! Max Geldray, cover up my short bits! MAX GELDRAY. [Musical interlude] milligan and sykes 1955f: 10

This method, particularly on the frequent occasions when Ray Ellington has been called upon to voice a role in the preceding dialogue, forces the listener to consider whether the elapsed time of the music should be taken to be part of the elapsed time of the story proper. The answer to this question varies from episode to episode: a Goon Show timeline may resume at the point where it paused for the music, it may jump ahead to a point well after that, or it may pick up exactly when the music stops. When incorporated into an episode’s dramatic timeline, the duration of a musical interlude has unpredictable, and highly discrepant, effects on events in the ongoing, but interrupted, scene. If dramatic action continues during the music, it may be sped up to a rate that stretches credulity no more than any other occurrence during the episode: once one is willing to believe, for instance, that an entire bank can 3 The story was reworked in 1959 under the title “Dishonoured—Again”, and used the same device to introduce the Ray Ellington number.

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be hoisted into a hovering zeppelin, then it is equally plausible that the deed can be done within the roughly two minutes it takes to play “a recording of a piece of cardboard highly amplified by Ray Ellington” (Milligan and Stephens 1956i; ‘Great Bank Robbery’ recording: 18:15–20:10). The music can also be used to compress the time required to complete actions on an even grander scale than that: in “Under Two Floorboards,” for example, Max Geldray is asked by Grytpypye-Thynne to “Play Neddie’s journey to Marseille” (Milligan and Sykes 1955c: 5) from England to join the French Foreign Legion, a trip that even in the age of supersonic jet travel takes rather longer than the two minutes Geldray spends playing “Happy Days and Lonely Nights” (Milligan and Sykes 1955c: 5) to cover it (‘Under Two Floorboards’ recording: 7:38–9:39). 6

The Ageless Aging Process of The Goon Show’s Characters

This dilation and contraction of time and action relative to one another is not restricted to The Goon Show’s musical interludes. Milligan’s entire conception of the passage of time in his ongoing fictional world appears to be related less to observable changes in the physical universe than to the subjective experiences of his characters. At one point in “Shangri-La Again”, Milligan has Minnie Bannister explain the title locale’s hold on its inhabitants: “The air in this valley keeps one young” eternally (Milligan 1955c). He need not have made the stipulation. Characters in all episodes of The Goon Show are almost entirely immune to the effects of aging. Each one is fixed, if not at a specific age, then at a clearly-identifiable stage of the life cycle. Bluebottle is perpetually prepubescent; Seagoon, Grytpype-Thynne, and Eccles are in an energetic, vital phase of full adulthood; Moriarty shows the wear and tear of late middle age; Bloodnok is nearing or just past retirement; Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister are so far beyond senescence that carbon-dating may be necessary to determine their dates of birth. The key difference between Goon Show characters and other kinds of stock figures whose ages remain fixed through diverse retellings of their exploits is that Milligan often lets his creations loose on adventures with expansive time spans. One of the most expansive of these, a 1954 episode entitled “The Spanish Suitcase,” sees Seagoon “sentenced to 94 years in jail,” 93 of which he serves before the episode ends (Milligan and Sykes 1954c: 4, 20). In the meantime, neither he nor the rest of The Goon Show’s regular male characters, who have all joined him in his cell, appear to have aged at all. In addition, extraordinary lengths of time can pass in an episode of The Goon Show without either its characters aging or the narrative time frame

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moving forward appreciably. “The Whistling Spy Enigma”, from 1954, sees Seagoon and Moriarty locked in a standoff of epic temporal proportions: SEAGOON. … I was all for attacking him right away, but Bloodnok stopped me. BLOODNOK. No, wait ‘til he gets older. SEAGOON. Finally, on his ninety-third birthday, we sprang. milligan 1954e

To have full impact, this joke depends on the audience’s assumption, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that Moriarty is nowhere near the age of ninety-two at the outset of the standoff. In any case, the struggle that ensues, in which the combatants “grappled for three hours” (Milligan 1954e), shows all participants, regardless of their chronological age, to possess a vim and vigour not normally found in senior citizens. The exact date at which the action picks up again after the fight cannot be pinpointed, but it is meant to be understood as occurring between the November 1953 defeat of England’s football team by Hungary, which forms the background of the episode, and the May 23, 1954 rematch between the two countries in Budapest, three weeks after the original broadcast date of this episode of The Goon Show. The tendency of Goon Show characters to stay put in one clearly-defined phase of life, no matter how much time elapses around them, is another instance of a theme from Milligan’s personal life bleeding into his writing. For most of his adulthood, Milligan appears to have had difficulty managing the transitions which mainstream Western culture uses to demarcate the interrelated concepts of aging and maturing. Marriage in 1952 failed to transform the thirty-four-year Milligan from a footloose young bohemian bachelor into a stable fulltime family man who was passing from late youth into early middle age; what it did instead was to split Milligan into two competing personae. From then on, he alternated between being a devoted suburban husband and father and a high-living libertine, using his office in downtown London as a pied-à-terre to bed an ever-changing roster of girlfriends which his inner circle of friends referred to as a “harem” (Farnes 2010: passim; 2004: Ch. 7 and passim). Milligan carried on this pattern of behavior through four decades which saw him marry a total of three times and father six children, four by his first two wives, the other two by mistresses. His remorse over his disinclination to take a more mature approach to his family responsibilities was often powerful, but it was never any match for his ability to compartmentalize his conflicting sleeping arrangements. Equally strong was his ability to rationalize this compartmentalization, never more so than during 1977 and 1978, when his second

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wife, Paddy, was dying of cancer. As his longtime manager Norma Farnes remembers it, Spike coped with this as he did with every crisis: he detached himself from the situation and threw himself into his work. […] The Bayswater Harem was called out for dinners…The routine went like this. Spike would phone Tanis [Davies, his receptionist] about four o’clock. ‘Get me someone to have dinner with this evening.’ Tanis knew that did not mean a male friend so she would pick up [Milligan’s address] book and do a ring around. He really was as casual as that. I wondered how, with two illegitimate children under his belt and the wife he professed to love seriously ill, he could still bear to see these other women. (2004: Ch. 15). While it is by no means laudable for a man closing in on his sixtieth birthday to desert his dying wife for a series of one-night stands, the impulse behind it is at least comprehensible. Milligan was trying to escape the thoughts of mortality which accompanied the knowledge of a loved one’s declining health and his own advancing age. His solution to the dilemma was irrational, but it paralleled the solution he had already found to questions regarding age and infirmity within the irrational world of The Goon Show. If anything approaching a rational explanation can be offered for Goon Show characters’ relative immunity to the aging process, it has something to do with their relative immunity to physical deterioration of all kinds. Goon Show characters, as Roger Lewis puts it, “travel gaily towards death and dismemberment” (1995: 176), with an uncanny faith in their own essential indestructibility. This faith is not altogether misplaced: their creator Milligan may have spoken freely of his willingness to have his characters “struck, beaten, burnt, boiled, drowned, clubbed, nailed to a cross” (qtd. in Lewis 1995: 177) for comic effect, but he also brought them back week after week for more of the same treatment. The cartoon-like resilience of Goon Show characters and their ability to survive a wide variety of assaults upon their persons defy the passage and effects of time in two important respects. In the first place, most threats to the corporeal integrity of characters in The Goon Show occur independently of the time-consuming process of recuperation. The damage from whatever degree of physical punishment any of them undergoes generally lasts no longer than the time it takes to remark on it. Following the Goon Show’s narrative principle that saying something makes it so, injury and dismemberment can only occur so long as they are acknowledged. Eccles’ ongoing experiences with high explosives are a prime example of this: in a running gag which crops up in several Goon Show episodes, he mistakes lit sticks of dynamite for cigars, in one case

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musing “what brand are they now? tnt brand. Hmmm, must be a new make” (Milligan 1954b) as he puts one in his mouth just in time for the inevitable explosion. The worst he ever suffers for this mistake is a little charring, of the kind that easily “wipes off” (Milligan 1954b). Even when violence produces more lasting and tangible effects on a Goon Show character, these changes come without pain, shock, blood loss, or any of the usual concomitants of trauma. Legs are forever being knocked off their owners, whose reactions tend to be chiefly concerned with the indignity and inconvenience of the loss. Milligan gives the idea that legs are a particularly disposable feature of the human anatomy its fullest expression in a 1960 episode entitled (appropriately enough) “Ned’s Chinese Legs”. In this adventure, due to an accident of history (not to mention geography), Seagoon was “born astride the Chinese-India border” (Milligan 1960), making his legs the rightful property of the Chinese government. Unscrewed from Seagoon’s body, the legs become the subject of an international incident which leads to warfare. The question of whether Seagoon’s legs are restored to him is never entirely resolved: promises offered by the Chinese “As soon as you give up your legs to us” (Milligan 1960) seem to indicate that these lower limbs, if no other part of him, are occupied by forces friendly to Seagoon. 7

“I’m for the dreaded deading this week alright”4: The Impermanence of Death in The Goon Show

The lack of a clear-cut answer to the question of what becomes of the owner of legs caught in a crossfire while under siege points to the second way in which Goon Show characters deny the time factors involved with threats to physical integrity. Partly due to its nature as an ongoing series with recurring characters, The Goon Show tends to skirt the concept of death. Goon Show characters can be killed, but never permanently. If an explosion is the only way to ensure the “death of the well-known bbc tenor Webster Snogpule” (Milligan 1954b), a minor character who disrupts several episodes with an enervating habit of breaking into song (he has to break in because he can’t find the key), the explosion is only fatal to the extent that it silences him for the moment. The Goon Show’s resident advocate for resurrection through the power of positive thinking, Bluebottle, generally refuses to stay dead through the next line of dialogue. 4 When not turning his attention to thoughts of Sabrina and other pin-up girls, Bluebottle was wont to kvetch about Milligan’s constant use of him as a sacrificial victim. This particular intimation of mortality comes from the 1956 episode “The Hastings Flyer” (Milligan 1972: 169).

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Bluebottle’s penchant for interpolating his own stage directions and interior monologue into the text may have given Milligan the idea that here was a character who might refuse to play along when Death came calling. Whatever the case, Bluebottle’s acknowledgement of the situation brings with it no acceptance of its implications: BLUEBOTTLE. Oyyyy! I’m drownded in the deaded water. Look! All the silver paper’s come off my cardboard cutlass. My best trousers is wetted. This means I’ll have to wear Mum’s old drawers while they dry. Heeheeheee! Exits left to hear Ray Ellington’s Quinten [sic]. milligan and sykes 1955i: 12

Like a child who gets up again after being ‘shot’ in a game of ‘cops and robbers’, Bluebottle refuses to give Death, and therefore Time, a full and unequivocal victory over him. His ‘posthumous’ asides to the studio audience make it clear that, even if this week’s script has pronounced him gone for good, he is still very much alive, well, and ready to be “deaded” over and over again. The unreality of death in The Goon Show may very well have had its genesis in Milligan’s wartime experiences. The incident which led to Milligan’s hospitalization for shell-shock found him “wounded in the left leg and badly shaken as he lay unattended with shells falling all around him” (Behan 1988: 115). Having been to all intents and purposes a sitting duck under heavy bombardment, Milligan would have had good reason to wonder why Death passed up such an easy chance to claim him, when it took so many of his comrades. His frequent statements that “I should have died” (Scudamore 1991: xlv) immediately after the end of World War ii represent an attempt to redress this imbalance and impose a sense of cosmic justice on a state of affairs that still bewildered him. They also represent an attempt by Milligan to lock his life forever into a period he considered to be its most definitive one, in the same way as he did for his Goon Show characters. 8

The Passage of Time and the Completion of Tasks: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Subjective experience as a determinant of the flow of time affects not only the aging process in The Goon Show, but also the elapsed time associated with the completion of actions and tasks. In a fictional world intended to mimic reality, the correlation between time and task would be simple enough for an outsider to intuit: elapsed time would tend to vary directly with the perceived difficulty

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of the task. In The Goon Show, however, Milligan frequently inverts this ratio, in a way that disrupts an audience’s expectations concerning the relationship between time and task. Goon Show characters often take inordinate amounts of time to do the simplest things, while doing near-impossible ones in seemingly no time at all. When they undertake a task, one of the main difficulties Goon Show characters face is the sometimes insurmountable problem of simply getting things started. The proverbial journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step, but the first step can often be more time-consuming than all the rest combined: FX. [Horse hooves running, Crun crying, Neddy shouting as they go] CRUN. Captain, Captain Seagoon! SEAGOON. What? What, what what? CRUN. Tell me, is it very far to Hungary? SEAGOON. Yes! CRUN. Then why do we keep galloping round and round this blasted room? milligan 1954e

Travelling a long way and getting nowhere is a common experience for Neddy Seagoon. The 1956 episode entitled “The Fear of Wages” prolongs anxiety similar to that faced by the protagonists of the film The Wages of Fear, by requiring him to drive truckloads of high explosives all the way back to Britain from Burma. The title of the source material is not the only thing in this episode which appears to have been thrown into reverse gear: “Five weeks of travel saw the lorries well on their way” (Milligan and Stephens 1956c: 10) but apparently no closer to their destination than when they started. However difficult it often may be for Milligan’s characters to get beyond Square One, the reversal of expectations concerning the length of time it takes to complete a task receives its fullest expression in The Goon Show when the task in question is nearing completion. As soon as a specific concluding phase of a task is marked off by dialogue or narration, then the length of time it will take to complete the task begins to vary inversely with its difficulty, regardless of how long the task has taken hitherto. For example, anyone undertaking to solve the mystery of the abandoned ship Mary Celeste using a roundabout two-stage plan to “build and man a second Marie Celeste”, then “re-sail the ill-fated voyage and reconstruct the mystery” (Milligan and Sykes 1954b: 9)

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knows that the difficult bit of Stage One of the plan is the part at the beginning that involves building the ship. Not so Neddie Seagoon—this time around, he knows the precise words to throw the process into overdrive: [SEAGOON]. When will the boat be finished? [CRUN]. Mmmmmm, after dinner. [SEAGOON]. You’ll have the whole ship completed after dinner? [CRUN]. Yes. [SEAGOON]. What’s the delay? [CRUN]. The wood, you can’t get the wood you know. [SEAGOON]. All right, I’ll just have to be patient. After dinner then. milligan and sykes 1954b: 10

The key to Seagoon’s success in this instance is that his inquiry made no reference to any portion of the task of shipbuilding other than its desired end result. By asking when the ship would be “finished”, rather than when it would be “started”, or when “work would be underway” on it, he invoked an assumption concerning the inevitability of the task’s completion which hastened the fulfillment of his request. Words have the power to accelerate more than the end of a task in an episode of The Goon Show; they have the power to accelerate the end of the episode itself. Many an episode of The Goon Show wrapped up more or less as follows: [GREENSLADE]. And that, we fear, is the end of our story except, of course, for the end— we invite listeners to submit what they think should be the classic ending, Should Seagoon eat the Batter Pudding and live or leave it and in the cause of justice—die? Meantime, for those of you cretins who would like a happy ending—here it is. GRAMS. SWEET BACKGROUND MUSIC, VERY, VERY SOFT. HARRY [SECOMBE, as himself]. Darling—darling—will you marry me? BLOODNOK. Of course I will—darling. [GREENSLADE]. Thank you—good night. milligan 1972: 37

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This sort of speedy conclusion, once a conclusion is announced as imminent, can be as much a matter of necessity as anything else. The amount of time that Goon Show episodes spend elaborating their plots, then systematically detouring from them, frequently makes rapid action essential once matters finally come to a head. As events roll on towards the final payoff, Milligan’s writing often appears to be in a race against time to combine climax, conclusion and dénouement before the program has to sign off. In “The Nasty Affair at the Burami Oasis” from 1956, Milligan (aided and abetted by Larry Stephens) gets so wrapped up with the business of emptying the title oasis, filling it up again, emptying it, and re-filling it with gin, that he forgets that the reason everyone was at the oasis to begin with was that “the Burami garrison [of the British Army] is to play football” (Milligan and Stephens 1956f: 4) against the local Arabs. As a consequence of his obsession with this Sisyphean sidetrack, Milligan is compelled to dismiss his original plot, and send it home brusquely: SEAGOON. …The result of the match was a forgone [sic] conclusion. GREENSLADE.British garrison, twelve; drunken Arabs, sixty-eight. Which, erm, just goes to prove, that gin is a dashed good drink. Goodnight. milligan and stephens 1956f: 17

The practice of ending stories any old which way is something The Goon Show has in common with the Fleischer Studios’ early sound cartoons, which display a perverse pleasure in defying “classical narrative’s predictable, conventionalized trajectories” (Telotte 2010: 81). When strapped for ways of using footage before the final iris-out, the Fleischers would resort to marching off the entire dramatis personae in a parade which may or may not have been occasioned by goings-on up to that point in the action. The Fleischers were also not above ending a cartoon with an iris-out in the middle of the action if further elaboration of the plot’s resolution seemed unnecessary. Is My Palm Read, a Betty Boop cartoon from 1933, finishes with Betty’s dog ‘boyfriend’ Bimbo kicking a seemingly endless train of unusually tangible and therefore kickable ghosts out of a hollow log and off a cliff. It is up to the viewer to decide if this is supposed to mean that victory is assured for the heroes of the piece, or if they have been transported to Tartarus, and are enduring an eternal ghost-kicking torment (Palm Read). For Milligan, as for the Fleischers, endings are where you find them, and the best place to find them is generally at the end of your allotted air time. One of the attendant hazards of this race-to-the-finish style of scriptwriting, however, is that loose ends in plot and continuity are far too often left lying around as The Goon Show’s closing credits are announced. A number of the denouements

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Milligan concocted for his scripts seem to recognize this fault, and do their best to rectify it. The 1957 episode “Emperor of the Universe” appears to end with Seagoon arresting Grytpype-Thynne for changing Englishmen into Chinese, but with no hint that the transformation will be, or can be reversed. In an epilogue meant to come off as post-show off-microphone chatter, Seagoon explains that he “changed all the Chinese back into Englishmen by giving them injections of Brown Windsor Soup, and inhalations of soot, smoke and beans on toast” (Milligan and Stephens 1957a). Milligan frequently makes a comedic virtue of the necessity of wrapping things up within a half an hour, by using the final moments of a Goon Show story to discard everything which has occurred in the narrative up to that point. In The Goon Show’s fifth season—the first one to exclusively feature full-episodelength stories—this device shows up often enough to qualify as a sub-theme for the season as a whole. The season’s thirteenth episode, “Forog”, obviates all its preceding actions and events in six lines which demonstrate conclusively to Seagoon that “There is no such person” as himself (Sykes and Milligan 1954: 15). In episode twenty-three, “The Six Ingots of Leadenhall Street”, the entire dramatis personae, Seagoon included, is obliterated when Bluebottle uses a bomb to give them a taste of “what it feels like to be deaded every week” (Milligan and Sykes 1955g: 15). Three weeks later, in the season’s final episode, Milligan reversed this process, bringing The Goon Show’s cast of regular characters spontaneously to life all at once to short-circuit the climax of a story about Seagoon battling delirium during a rest cure. Emerging from a trunk, they launch into a deliberately ragged version of a variety-show ‘big finish’ musical number (‘The End’ recording: 25:07). Sometimes, Milligan denies the need for any ending, big or small, and instead simply admits that this week’s episode of The Goon Show is marking time until its half-hour on the air is over. Continually dispensing with the concluding stages of a Goon Show narrative appears to have been as much a product of temperament as of the pressures of a weekly broadcast schedule. Two statements made to biographer Dominic Behan combine to offer a clue about why Milligan was often so hasty to get the ending of a Goon Show story over and done with. Not only did he confess that “I get bored very quickly”, but Milligan made it clear that “by the time the first programme in the second series [of The Goon Show] was due to be transmitted [January of 1952], he had lost all but manic interest in the proceedings” (Behan 1988: 142, 140). Milligan was rarely unwilling to conceal his frustration with the strain that life put on his attention span. Norma Farnes recalls that one of his constant complaints was that “‘I’m always being overwhelmed by time wasting’” (Farnes 2004: Ch. 6). In his writing for The Goon Show, Milligan was never quite

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so plangent on this subject; still, he found ways to slip in reminders of the ways in which we are all forced to watch time slip slowly away from us. A good example of this occurs in the deliberately anticlimactic ending of “The Internal Mountain”. Having finished elaborate preparations for the easiest ascent of Mount Everest on record by installing an elevator in the mountain, Seagoon and company have little to do but step in, press a button, and rise to the peak. Milligan could easily have omitted the uneventful elevator journey itself, but instead he plays with the Bergsonian durée associated with this mode of travel by deliberately drawing out the ennui well beyond the point of awkwardness: BLOODNOK. Here we are: The first men to go up Everest from the inside. [JIM] SPRIGGS. 3000 feet Jim, 3000 feet. ALL. [Whistling, singing] [JIM] SPRIGGS. 4000 feet, Jim ALL. [More whistling, singing…] SEAGOON. This must be terribly boring for the listeners. BLOODNOK. I know, I know, but what can one do in a lift? milligan 1954c: 17

When all is said and done, the entire trip takes up one minute and twelve seconds of air time (‘Internal Mountain’ recording: 26:02–27:14). The broadcast recording of the sequence also contains a full ten seconds during which the only sound heard is the whine of the elevator’s motor (‘Internal Mountain’ recording: 26:15–26:25). 9

Sounds and Their Effects on Temporality

Sequences like the one just cited illustrate the power of sound effects in The Goon Show to generate temporal context. Milligan’s Goon Show sounds incorporate three characteristic types of time-scale alteration. The first two involve a compression of time which can be heard in the increased or increasing speed of the sound effect in question. Milligan is particularly fond of one specific prerecorded sound effect to demonstrate improbably quick movement through great distances, motivated principally by fear or cupidity. Referred to in scripts and transcripts as a ‘whoosh’, this stock effect lasts between one-half and three-quarters of a second. When used, for example to whisk Seagoon across the Shanghai dockyards when Grytpype -Thynne says “something that had him at my side—money” (Milligan and Sykes 1955b), it conveys both the comedy

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inherent in such a precipitous exaggeration of speed and the strong emotions motivating it. In addition to playing entire pre-recorded effects back at an increased rate of speed, The Goon Show also compresses time through the progressive speeding up of recorded effects during playback, by altering the speed of either a turntable or a reel-to-reel tape player. This form of acceleration frequently brings with it the side-effect of functioning as a parody of the convention of improbable speed per se as a source of comedy. Thus, when Milligan makes a transition from one scene to another in “The Terrible Revenge of Fred Fu-Manchu” by having a horse and cart play for 2.65 seconds at its normal rate, then sped up for a further 4.46 seconds while fading out under narration (‘Fred Fu-Manchu’ recording: 14:28–14:35), he calls attention to the mechanics behind the effect as well as to the effect itself, passing oblique comment in the process on how such a simple form of incongruity can reduce writer and audience alike to the level of giggling schoolchildren. At the other end of the scale, when Milligan chooses to expand apparent or perceived time using sound, he generally refrains from slowing prerecorded effects down. Instead, he takes single effects or chains of them, and plays them at their normal speed, but for much longer than would seem necessary to delineate a desired action and still keep the story moving along. The suspense created by these deliberate sonic longeurs functions both as set-up and payoff within its own self-contained gag structure. Milligan was using this type of drawn-out frustration of audience expectations in the earliest singleadventure episodes of The Goon Show: “The Great Bank of England Robbery”, from near the end of the program’s fourth season, features a forty-one second stretch where dialogue gives way to the “Sound of postman singing lightly as he walks, opening pillar box, gathering letters, closing pillar box, and walking off” (Milligan 1954d) without noticing that Seagoon, Eccles, and Bloodnok are trapped inside the pillar box, much less rescuing them (‘Great Bank of England Robbery 1954’ recording: 13:52–14:33). What goes on inside that pillar box will not require another postman to open a door on the discussion of the manipulation of spatial frames in The Goon Show which forms the chapter that follows this one. The latitude which Milligan grants his simple one-way narrative flow by damming it up and diverting it as often as he does imposes restrictions of its own, which have their parallels in the restrictions imposed on his spatial landscape by his distortions of it. A narrative which is allowed to spread itself freely over time, forming undercurrents and tributaries, each flowing at its own rate, can very easy lose a focal point from which an audience can gauge its overall progress. Instead, it can appear from the distance of the radio listener to be static, less a moving .

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aural picture than a snapshot of a moment in time during which other moments in time are delineated rather than replicated. To review then, here is another snapshot—one outlining Milligan’s strategies for distorting time frames and scales in The Goon Show. These distortions depend first and foremost upon each episode’s linear narrative framework, which presents events in the sequence in which they are presumed to have occurred. Each scene in a Goon Show episode follows not only sequentially, but consequentially, from the one immediately preceding it; the actions in each scene are meant to be understood as the outcomes of actions which have just been enacted, or have been referred to in dialogue or narration. The narrative framework itself supports a metanarrative superstructure: a Goon Show adventure is as much told as it is enacted. Narration both frames and intrudes upon the action: not only is a separate narratorial function instantiated, in the form of a foregrounded staff announcer, but characters also periodically step outside their roles within the story to deliver narration directly to the audience. Milligan’s use of multiple narrators, however, still constitutes a unified narratorial perspective: each successive voice which offers narration elaborates on, but does not contradict, information supplied by its predecessor. The overall reliability of The Goon Show’s many narrators and the chain of causality implied by its linear approach to narrative form a stable background against which Milligan’s distortions of time occur. Although time moves forward in the telling of each story, it may do so at different rates for different characters. Even when measured by more objective means than individual experience, time often flows simultaneously at different rates: scenes whose action encompasses weeks, even months, are frequently bracketed by calendar readings which are only days apart. The Goon Show’s format offers the listener a clue that fragmentation and distortion of time frames are a key element of the program. Breaking up the program into five distinct segments through the insertion of two musical interludes first of all serves as a reminder to the listener that the forward motion of time in a Goon Show may be subject to disruption. In addition, since the time frame of the interludes is not consistently integrated into that of the story as a whole, the interludes themselves remind the listener of the indeterminacy of time as a concept in Milligan’s fictional world. Further complications to the listener’s conception of temporality in The Goon Show are created by the stubborn refusal of Milligan’s characters to submit to the ravages of time. In the first place, Neddie Seagoon and his cohorts appear immune to the aging process, frozen as each one of them is in a distinct phase of the life-cycle, regardless of how many years may pass during

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the course of a given episode. Beyond that, they display a marked disregard for the role of time in processes involving physical deterioration, recuperating instantly not only from serious injury, but from death itself. In The Goon Show, time and action can easily become dislocated from one another, rendering it difficult for the listener to gauge how long any activity Milligan sets for his characters is likely to take. Often, an inverse ratio of timeto-task is in force, making nearly impossible tasks easy to accomplish and easy tasks nearly impossible. Confounding this even further is a tendency for the action in Goon Show episodes to accelerate and compress as the end of the program’s allotted half-hour of air time approaches. Acceleration can also be noted in a number of the aural effects brought into play by Milligan and The Goon Show’s production team. Sped-up sounds are frequently used to indicate time scales under compression, just as slowed-down sounds and extended periods of silence are used to denote time scales expanding. It is important to note, as a means of bridging the gap between a discussion of Milligan’s distortions of time and an investigation of his distortions of space, the relative weight given to words and sound as generators of meaning in The Goon Show. Despite its reputation as an exercise in furious noise and “improbable sound effects” (de Rijke 2002: 242), The Goon Show’s fictional world reveals itself to be one where these sounds take their cue from the spoken word. Even though no perceptual cues in particular are required to indicate the passage of time, Milligan still leans far more heavily on spoken rather than sonicallyconceived descriptions of the constant modifications he makes to time’s flow. When instituting changes to the spatial landscape, Milligan is even more dependent on the power of the spoken word as “the primary code of radio…since [in the absence of visual feedback] words are required to contextualize all the other codes” (Crisell 1994: 54) used to indicate these changes.

Interruption 1

Milligan’s Laws of Time Spike Milligan frequently allowed his own voice to interrupt the flow of a Goon Show recording, in order to admit to his audience that what they were hearing was “all rather confusing, really”. Unlike Spike’s confession, this interruption is in the interest of reducing confusion. It is meant to serve as a rough guide to the tendencies which have just been noted in Milligan’s distortion of time in The Goon Show. For ease of reference, these tendencies have been given the label “Milligan’s Laws”; this is not, however, meant to imply that they can be tested and proven by rigorous experimental designs. The term ‘law’ is being used in the same way as it is in the folkloric corpus of “Murphy’s Laws”, which denote phenomena (usually disastrous) whose descriptive value comes not from their regularity or predictability, but from their noteworthiness. In the previous chapter, the following “Milligan’s Laws of Time” have been noted: — Milligan’s General Law of Narrative Time: Once a Goon Show story has begun, narrative time, as with time in the real world, can only move forward. Flashbacks and flash-forwards almost never occur. —Milligan’s Special Law of Narrative Time: All of this, of course, takes place with the understanding that every episode of The Goon Show begins with a narrative flashback to the point in time when the story begins. —Milligan’s Law of Temporal Fragmentation: Even while time is moving forward, the rate of flow of time within specific frames of reference can vary significantly. The most noticeable effect of this is that two or more characters may interact in the same scene, while displaying evidence that each one is experiencing the passage of time at a slightly different rate. —Milligan’s Law of Free Association of Anachronisms: This is a corollary to the General Law of Temporal Fragmentation; since time flows at different rates in different frames of reference, frames of references from distant historical eras can overlap with the present day. This allows for the frequent appearance of references and objects from 1950s Britain in Goon Show stories set far in the past. —Milligan’s Three Laws of Aging: 1. Unless forced to do so by the requirements of the plot, characters in The Goon Show do not age. Regardless of the length of time which

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passes during a Goon Show story, each of its characters will remain at the same age, or stage of the life cycle, from beginning to end. 2. Goon Show characters’ astonishing rate of recuperation not only grants them immunity from age-related physical deterioration, but also allows them to recover instantaneously from most forms of injury. 3. The ability to instantaneously recover from physical injury means that death is not necessarily a permanent state. Characters can die and return to life, even while passing comment on the fact that they are, for the moment at least, dead. —Milligan’s Law of Task-Related Time: The length of time to accomplish a task, or any phase of a task, tends to vary inversely with the difficulty of the task. The acceleration or deceleration of time is most noticeable when the task (or phase of a task) is nearing completion. With the task of sorting out Milligan’s Laws of Time now completed, the task of describing the distortion of space in The Goon Show can now begin. There will be another brief interruption after the upcoming chapter, to provide a thumbnail sketch of Milligan’s Laws of Space.

chapter 3

The Accordion Stretching in All Directions: Spatial Distortions in The Goon Show 1

Setting the Scene: A Few Words on the ‘Landscape’ of Radio Theatre

The previous chapter concluded with the idea that Spike Milligan’s distortions of time and space in The Goon Show have a common dependence on the spoken word. It is perhaps not surprising that Milligan’s conceptualizations of time and space are linked in this way, since the representation of space on radio involves a constant and active presentation of scenic elements. In contrast with its live in-person counterpart, where relatively static scenic elements are presented to be actively perceived by the spectator, radio theatre calls for a steady flow of manufactured sounds and spoken cues to remind the listener of existing and changing conditions in the implied scenic landscape. As Frances Gray and Janet Bray point out in their analysis of the subject, “The mind is not a fixed stage waiting to be peopled, a permanent spatial code. A radio play does not exist in space, but in time” (1985: 295). Moreover, in the case of The Goon Show (not to mention a host of other radio programs), this stipulation is confounded by two additional factors: the presence of a live studio audience who are able to view the cast in everyday dress behind microphones, the studio orchestra, and any special areas set aside on the soundstage for live and prerecorded sound effects equipment; and the listening audience’s awareness of whatever approximation of these conditions best represents its understanding of the recording process. Even in the absence of a “site or space of performance into which we direct our gaze” (Stanton 2004: 96), the listener imputes elements drawn from his or her array of schemata for organizing the spatial elements of the physical world into the purely conceptual space which defines a form of scenography for radio theatre. The notion that this purely imagined world has an empirically verifiable analogue is crucial to an understanding of how a radio audience constructs the equivalent of a ‘stage set’ for what it hears: when, for example, Alan Beck chooses to “refer to ‘mise en scène’—the locations, spaces and perspectives created in radio’s sound pictures” (1999: 5), his comparison to theatrical praxis is informed by the expectation that radio’s own praxis will draw on ideations of space and perspective already familiar to the listener.

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Even so, what seems to distinguish radio from other stages for the performing arts is a high degree of flexibility and indeterminacy in the way it references space. Television, film and theatre each place fixed boundaries on the spatial fields their audiences are meant to take in; these fields are framed by an array of techniques as well as by the physical dimensions of the screen or staging area. For radio, the delineation of spatial fields is less a process of taking things in as of filling them in: in the words of British radio playwright David Pownall, “(t)he theatre of sound relies as much on the creative receptiveness of the listener as the playwright’s words” (2010: 22). It is equally important for listeners to be creative and receptive when conceptualizing the places radio takes them: space, size and position are only posited by the array of sounds which play out before them. As artfully constructed as they may be, these sounds serve as the blueprint for the final act of construction, to be performed by each member of the audience. The building materials vary with each listener’s store of imagination and experience, and with the proportion of these two elements which the listener brings to bear on what he or she hears. Even when guided by sophisticated technical manipulation into a range of choices, the listener enjoys considerable latitude in aurally configuring a space. Voices, for example, which reverberate crisply against a backdrop of choral singing accompanied by a pipe organ suggest a fair-sized Christian church; assuming there are no further cues supplied by dialogue to specify the exact nature of this building, the listener can well imagine it to be an imposing high-vaulted Gothic affair, a sprawling exercise in Rococo excess, or a squat, low-domed Romanesque structure. Radio theatre can establish relative distances within its frame, but the one thing it can never establish is that frame’s absolute boundaries. Despite the best efforts of writers and production teams to guide and focus the ears of the audience, the specific configuration of the playing space for a scene in radio theatre is based on decisions made by each individual listener. Theoretician and practitioner Dermot Rattigan’s view on the matter, that “the hearing mechanism is individual to each listener but each listener can only hear sound from a fixed point—that is the position of the individual relative to any sound perspective” (2002: 209), is true as far as it goes, but leaves out the vital final leg of the conceptual journey. The radio audience is free to imagine the action they hear as being staged in front of them, off to one side or the other, behind them, above, below, or all around them, using any or all of the envelope of space which surrounds their bodies. If, as Rattigan holds, “(r)adio….makes use of a pseudo three-dimensional sound concept as an intrinsic part of its production process” (2002: 198), this space receives its limits as well as its shape during the process of reception—in

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other words, from the imagination of the audience. The sounds created by a piece of radio theatre can only tell us about the most distant source of sound that can currently be heard; they tell us nothing at all about the most distant source that could possibly be heard under the circumstances we imagine. They also tell us nothing about the most distant but silent objects which could be seen in any staging area which radio helps us to visualize. All perceptual thresholds for radio theatre are subject to the judgements of the individual listener. The power that radio theatre grants its audiences to design imagined staging areas also implies the power to change them. Much has been made of how a radio play can effortlessly transport its audience from one place to another, making smooth transitions from panoramic vistas to the conceptual spaces in which interior monologues occur. What is less well documented and understood, even by the most comprehensive of theorists, is something you and I intuit whenever we hear a story enacted for us in sound: we can reconfigure the imagined spatial parameters of any scene while it is in progress. When Rattigan states that “(r)adio drama consistently shifts and alters its aural perspectives throughout a production” (2002: 210), he is referring solely to work done by the production team—work which can be significantly altered, if not obviated, by the active imaginations of the audience. The listener can scrap any background he or she dreams up for a piece of radio theatre to play against and instantly replace it with another, turning the characters into audio equivalents of Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. or Daffy Duck in Duck Amuck. Taken all in all, the sounds of radio theatre comprise a set of tools which can be used to delineate and depict at the listener’s discretion, and which have a potential which transcends their actual and insubstantial form. As Tim Crook argues, “radio is auditory in the physical dimension but equally powerful as a visual force in the psychological dimension” (1999a: 8). 2

Mise en Scène as Mise sans Scène: The Goon Show as ‘Black Box’ Theatre for Radio

Theories of the creative arts have a way of being undone by practice. When writing for The Goon Show, Milligan was not working within any specifically-­ articulated theoretical framework, but the product of his work sets itself in direct opposition to any model of spatial arrangement which has reference to the sense-experience of his audience. In order to establish a conceptual ‘staging area’ which is plausible yet significantly discrepant from everyday experience, Milligan exploits the tendency of the listener to assume “that the represented world, unless otherwise indicated, will obey the logical and physical laws of his own world” (Elam 2002: 93), in the absence of information to the contrary.

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In addition to this, his manner of releasing information concerning the divergence between The Goon Show’s world and the world of the everyday sets up a time-lag in the perception of this divergence, and fosters a sense of indeterminacy about the matrix of spatial relationships which constitute and govern this world. To return to the example near the end of the previous chapter, the difficulties encountered by Seagoon, Bloodnok, and Eccles in “The Great Bank of England Robbery” of 1954 go beyond the predicament of being trapped in a pillar box; in fact, they originate in the sheer violation of practicable models of spatial scale that this predicament implies. Milligan forestalls the question of how one full-grown man, let alone three, could wind up stuck in a mailbox by presenting the situation as a fait accompli: Bloodnok fails to see Seagoon at first during a midnight rendez-vous with crime because Seagoon is already “inside the pillar box” (Milligan 1954d). Seagoon’s incontestably self-sufficient answer to the question of how he managed to enter the pillar box at all is that he is “in a brown paper parcel” (Milligan 1954d). The pillar box’s internal dimensions are soon put to a further test by the entry of Eccles, who, even though armed with a key, takes less time to get himself locked in than it takes to read this description of it (‘Great Bank of England Robbery 1954’ recording: 10:13–10:21). The idea that a pillar box could possess internal dimensions of hitherto-unimagined vastness is given still more emphasis by the appearance inside it, first of an unnamed woman who suggestively greets Eccles with the words “hello sailor” (Milligan 1954d), then of Bloodnok. The accident which traps Bloodnok inside the pillar box illustrates, but does not explain, a potential method for gaining entry to such a structure: trying to pull Seagoon and Eccles out using a rope he has thrown through the mail slot, he is instead pulled in himself, to the sound of an inhaled bilabial fricative, followed by a cork popping and two sharp thuds (‘Great Bank of England Robbery 1954’ recording: 13:10–13:15). 3

Contents Not Necessarily to Scale: The Variability of Container Capacity in The Goon Show

The case study of man-versus-postal-system just referred to is one of a host of similar instances in the Goon Show corpus which make it clear that, despite Crisell’s assertion that “Radio allows the Goons to assume Protean form” (1994: 172), Milligan’s characters cannot be assumed to have undergone the significant changes of size which he imagines to be the necessary condition of their entering a space presumed too small to hold them. Rather, containers should be seen as defining two spaces—one formed by the boundaries of the container itself as seen from the outside, the other a space whose actual dimensions are indeterminate until the container is entered. The Goon Show’s

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tendency to reconfigure containers from within depends upon a realignment of categorization within the perceptual landscape. Instead of being grouped based on their position in space, objects are temporarily reassigned to one of two categories: containers and objects to be contained. By disregarding any distinctions within these categories based on size, a simplified view of location based on function is brought into force: anything classed as a “container” can perforce hold anything classed as an “object to be contained.” When Milligan designates an object as a container, it is therefore safe to assume that he is doing so for the express purpose of testing an audience’s suspension of disbelief regarding its capacity. Even something as roomy as a passenger airliner (albeit one of 1930s vintage) is no match for the scope of his imagination: SEAGOON. Yes. The weight of our baggage became too much. In a moment of desperation we ditched the following vital equipment; eighteen hundred weight of rusty iron piping with fittings… MILLIGAN. Twenty four lead budgerigar perches… BLOODNOK. One long thin object with no fixed abode… SEAGOON. One bronze bicycle with cement parachute ejector seat… MILLIGAN. One …(Singing) Oooooo oooooo ooooooo! BLOODNOK. One bus… LALKAKA. Thirty six cardboard replicas of Nelson’s Column from the inside…. BLOODNOK. One rubber Mosque with detachable beard. milligan 1955c

Even assuming that the replicas of the interior of Nelson’s Column are less than full-scale, and that the rubber mosque can be bent to fit into an available corner, the bus alone would have strained the ability of the aircraft to take off—not to mention potentially obviating it as a means of transport. The overall schema of container variability, however, functions as a variablesize container in its own right by accommodating a significant conceptual anomaly. The variability of a container’s capacity in The Goon Show appears to obtain only when materials are placed inside the container, or taken out of it. If the container itself is removed or opened from the outside, its contents may still retain the shape of the container, regardless of what their actual physical properties dictate they should do. This amendment to the laws of physics is given free rein throughout a 1955 episode of The Goon Show entitled “The White Box of Great Bardfield”. Cozened into transporting “one hundred tons of snow to the Sudan” (Milligan and Sykes 1955i: 7) in a cardboard box, Seagoon

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is horrified to find that “The box is full of water” (Milligan and Sykes 1955i: 13) when he opens it. In all other respects, however, his cargo remains intact: it has not soaked through the cardboard or seeped away through crevices in the box, as one might expect. Carrying on with what is now a box-load of water, Seagoon suffers a further reversal of fortune, thanks to the heat of the Sahara Desert. “Only steam” (Milligan and Sykes 1955i: 16) remains when the box is opened a second time. Both of these contretemps immediately beg the question of whether the box was pre-treated to make all this possible. It is just about plausible that a sufficiently waterproofed and hermetically-sealed cardboard box could be made to retain any quantity of snow, water, and even steam over long distances. An undertaking like this, which would take ridiculous lengths to avoid finding more apt material for the container in the first place, is worthy of the plot of an entire Goon Show in itself. However, part of the humour behind Seagoon’s escalating misfortune lies in the fact that there is no evidence in the script that any such preparations were undertaken. Instead, the contents of the box have stayed put, waiting to be discovered through two successive changes in their state of matter, simply because it has not occurred to anyone that they could go anywhere else. 4

“My Lord, a piece of junk being found on the King’s Highway, it is declared treasure trove”1: The Appearance of Objects Exactly When, and Exactly Where, They Are Needed

A spatial framework which allows for a substance to remain in the same state of matter regardless of the prevailing conditions of its immediate environment would seem to invest space with a number of unusual, if not singular, qualities. One of these qualities can best be described as a porosity which calls into question the entire concept of object permanence in The Goon Show’s fictional world. As far as Milligan is concerned, the question of whether an object exists is immaterial in two senses of the word. Nothing in Milligan’s world has to be anywhere in particular, or even be anything in particular, unless called into being for a specific purpose. Frances Gray is quite correct in stating that “Objects appear when needed for a quick laugh” (qtd. in Crisell 1994: 170) in The Goon Show, but the significance of their spontaneous appearance goes beyond their utilitarian function as generators of simple comedic effects. Indeed, the 1 This statement, made in court during the 1957 episode “The Junk Affair”, sets a Goon Show legal precedent by establishing the inherent value of all found objects, as well as their inherent usefulness. The fact that the episode never specifies what exactly the piece of junk is also goes a long way towards establishing the inherent equality of the value and usefulness of found objects (Milligan and Stephens 1957l).

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full impact of an object’s sudden and unheralded appearance in a Goon Show storyline depends not so much on the unexpectedness of the appearance as the incongruity and inappropriateness of the location in which the object appears. A quick comparison of three instances of the spontaneous appearance of objects illustrates the differences between Gray’s characterization and the actual mechanics of Milligan’s method. In “The Africa Ship Canal”, Grytpype-Thynne has Moriarty set out a fire bucket to catch a falling Neddie Seagoon (Milligan and Stephens 1957h: 14). Although the idea of a fire bucket lying around handy out of doors—and at the exact spot in the entire continent of Africa where it is needed—is a little odd, it violates no concepts of relative scale. Similarly, Seagoon menacing Grytpype-Thynne in “The Junk Affair” by threatening to “set this wardrobe on you” (Milligan and Stephens 1957l) may strike the listener as a highly idiosyncratic understanding of the distinction between pieces of furniture and guard dogs, nothing in the dialogue before that line indicated that a wardrobe was not standing by, poised to attack, somewhere “on the pavement2” (Milligan and Stephens 1957l) at the never-actually-specified locale of the scene in question. Notwithstanding the strangeness of the previous two examples, occurrences such as the one which begins the 1958 episode “The Sahara Desert Statue” come closer to expressing the full implications of Milligan’s conceptualization of space as a highly permeable and not necessarily discrete dimension. Unwrapping a “brown paper parcel”, the show’s cast discovers “a life-sized Goon Show in imitation plastic”, complete with “a set of spare glass jokes”, one of which obligingly crashes to the studio floor (Milligan 1958h). In other words, the ephemerality of an entire event has become fully concretized, and a number of smaller events associated with it have been detached from it and duplicated, in case their counterparts malfunction and need to be replaced. Not only that, but this event, whose spatial scope must be thought of as encompassing the whole of the recording studio, including the soundstage, auditorium, and control booth, has been enclosed in a package of sufficiently manageable size for its unwieldiness not to become a source of comment. 5

The Conundrum of Self-Duplication and Rapid Spatial Displacement, or, Being in Two Places at Once is Easier When You Don’t Know It Can’t be Done

The notion that objects essential to the advancement of plot and story can be concretized on demand, in spite of the impossibility of their existing within a 2 In North American English, this would be rendered “on the sidewalk”.

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given space as previously conceptualized, gives rise to an interesting chain of corollaries. If something that cannot or should not be somewhere happens to be in that very place, then it can just as easily be somewhere else at the same time. It also follows, then, that the ability to be in two places at once can be ascribed not just to objects, but to people as well. Eccles takes a particular, almost perverse, joy in availing himself of this faculty. In the pillar box where we left him looking for Seagoon, Eccles not only has a heated dispute with his own echo on the subject of who is “the real Eccles”, but discovers that the echo has a sufficient physical presence to warrant hand-to-hand combat as a means of settling the issue (‘Great Bank of England Robbery 1954’ recording: 10:37–11:31). At other times during Goon Show adventures, Eccles is heard forming squad-fours all by himself (Milligan 1975: 86), and bedeviling Bloodnok with a relentlessly wassailing one-man choir (‘String Robberies’ recording: 14:24–16:25). Closely related to the concept of being in two (or more) places at once is the concept of disappearing from one place and reappearing almost instantly in another one far away. Admittedly, this is where the lines between spatial and temporal frames begins to blur, since this involves a violation of all conventional notions of the limitations of the speed of travel by three-dimensional bodies through distances of any size. The ‘whoosh’ sound effect referred to in the previous chapter on time distortion in The Goon Show is a frequent auditory cue that highly improbable instantaneous spatial displacement is taking place: GRAMS. WHOOSH FX. DOOR SLAMS COLONEL JIM. I say stop him before he gets to the bus stop. GRAMS. WHOOSH (pause). FX. DOOR OPENS (struggle) SEAGOON. (over above) Let me go, I’m a professional coward I tell you…. I don’t want to go to war. JYMPTON. I caught him in Glasgow sir […] milligan 1959a

Rapid spatial displacement can happen towards as well as away from the current frame of reference. Sometimes, this brings unexpected results: MORIARTY. SEAGOON.

Here, Ned, put this bomb in their E flat organ pipe. I’m too fat to get in that.

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MORIARTY. Let me see now, who’s thin enough…Mmm— BLUEBOTTLE. Can I go home now, capatain, I got my… SEAGOON. Yes you… GRAMS. WHOOSH AWAY. BLUEBOTTLE. (miles away) Goodbye. SEAGOON. Bluebottle, come down off that Mount Everest. BLUEBOTTLE.  (miles off-affrighted) No, no, you will dead me – ‘blange’ you will go, and I will be blanged. SEAGOON. Here’s a picture of Sabrina. GRAMS. WHOOSH. BLOODNOK. Where where??? milligan 1972: 149

Further complications arise from this example. First of all, the Everest that Bluebottle has scaled may not be the original, but an incredible simulation which, obeying Milligan’s principle of spontaneous object appearance, hove into view when the occasion demanded. However, given that Seagoon is all the while at the foot of this highly mobile Himalayan mountain, Bluebottle’s post-ascent position is several miles away, and presumably well out of earshot. In spite of this, Seagoon and Bluebottle are still quite able to carry on a conversation with each other (‘The Mighty Wurlitzer’ recording: 24:51–25:03). What is in force in this instance, as is so often the case in The Goon Show, is a spatial frame which expands with reference to one activity but remains constant with reference to another. For the purposes of avoiding perceived danger, Bluebottle needs to be a long way away, and so can climb a mountain as easily as he might shinny up a stepladder; however, in order to keep talking to Seagoon, and thus remain part of the action of the episode, he has to be close at hand. Meanwhile, Bloodnok, who has not been heard from in just over eight minutes of airtime (‘The Mighty Wurlitzer’ recording: 16:44 and 25:04), and can be assumed to be nowhere near the scene of the action (and certainly out of earshot), is conjured up out of the ether by the mere mention of a pin-up of a contemporary ‘sweater girl’. The ability to be in two places at once, in Milligan’s world at least, therefore appears to involve at least as many conceptual issues as purely physical ones. Milligan allows his spatial frame to stretch far beyond the bounds of the example just provided, while keeping it intact as far as discourse between­his characters is concerned. “African Incident,” from 1957, features this exchange: ECCLES. (Sings rubbish) I can’t stand this singing. I wish I’d escaped with Lieutenant Seagoon. I wonder if he got back to the base.

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SEAGOON. Yes I did. ECCLES. Oh. Where are you den? SEAGOON. I’m a mere six hundred miles away. ECCLES. Oh goodie. I won’t tell anybody. BLOODNOK. Seagoon you fool. Stop talking to that man six hundred miles away. milligan and stephens 1957r

Telecommunications, of course, makes a mockery of distances far greater than this in order to facilitate conversation: Milligan could have just as easily chosen to have workmen trek across Africa to install a telephone, as he did for a 1956 episode entitled “The Telephone”. His decision not to do so was conditioned by the focus, and the needs, of the situation. Seagoon’s and Milligan’s needs at that moment were one and the same: to answer Eccles’ question, and in so doing supply the latest development in the plot. The need to convey this information, as well as the punchline to a joke, as quickly and with as few distractions as possible meant that both the effort of installing a telephone (or telegraph), and laying six hundred miles of cable so that it would work, were superfluous. All of the examples just cited share a common trait which can be found in operation time and again throughout the Goon Show corpus. In order to accept the situation as a set of given circumstances which operates as a context of normalcy within which incongruities can be introduced to create humour, the listener must process the playing space implied by Milligan as one comprising distances and scales which extend in scope beyond those which can actually be encompassed with human perceptual fields. As well, the listener must conceptualize space in a way that allows several of these scales to be in operation simultaneously, often in competition with one another. 6

Perceptual Fields Forever: Milligan’s Use of Simultaneous Multiple Perspectives within the Same Scene

6.1 The Perception of Doors The Goon Show’s organization of space into multiple frames of reference with incompatible scales takes on a special set of meanings when those frames are used to separate and define ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Milligan’s use of doors displays a distinct lack of faith in the efficacy of buildings and the rooms therein as either containers or barriers. As dividers between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, doors in The Goon Show’s fictional world have all the stability

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and permanence of beaded curtains: that is how Goon characters understand them to function, at any rate: MINNIE. SEAGOON. MINNIE. SEAGOON.

How did you get into our blung--bungalow? Through the bead curtain. We haven’t got any. I carry my own.

milligan and sykes 1955l

To rearrange the words of William Blake a little, the perception of doors reveals things to be as they are in Goonland, infinite. Milligan’s writing frequently takes advantage of radio’s lack of early sensory cues to indicate the impending presence of a door, instinctively creating metatheatrical moments such as the following: FX. [Knocks on door] [SEAGOON]. Come in. FX. [Knocks on door] [SEAGOON]. Come in! [BLOODNOK]. It’s you that’s knocking! [SEAGOON]. Oh, then I’ll come in! milligan and sykes 1954b: 4

The line of reasoning that can be inferred from Milligan’s joke in this particular case appears to be that, if the presence of a door can only be announced at the last possible moment by someone knocking on a door, then the positioning of people in relationship to that door need not be announced any earlier, and can even be announced later if need be. An additional aspect of this joke’s construction is a reminder that a number of the comic effects in the fictional world of The Goon Show depend on two mutually exclusive forms of implied visual perspective. For the listener, space is meant to have something resembling the depth of field and three-dimensionality of the non-fictional ‘real’ world; for Goon Show characters, space can be made twodimensional by any given sensory cue that has apparent relevance to the situation at hand. A knock on a door certainly indicates that a door exists: it does not in and of itself indicate that the door is part of any greater structure, or functions as an entranceway at all. It may, for all Seagoon and Major Bloodnok are concerned, be a prop door in a free-standing frame, which has been set down any old place for reasons best known to whoever set it there. However, once a door is presented to a Goon Show character, its very ­presence

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becomes sufficient cause to take the existence of a building as a given; the part not only implies the whole, but generates it. In addition to this, the existence of a door generates a visual plane which is two-dimensional to the extent that travel across it must follow a single vector which can only pass through the door itself. Milligan’s choice to use doors as self-sufficient barriers across an implied two-dimensional perceptual field is the product of active visualization rather than a radio scriptwriter’s unconscious omission of extraneous detail. In his play The Bedsitting Room, Milligan gave physical form to the mental gymnastics that Goon Show characters’ uncertainty with doors put radio audiences through: Enter PONTIUS KAK pushing a door. The door is portable and on wheels […] He rings the bell on the door. Door opens. […] MATE. Yers? KAK. Is this Number 29 Cul-de-Sac Place? MATE. No, mate, that’s next door. MATE closes door. KAK wheels door along to the right, leaving MATE standing like an idiot… milligan and antrobus 1975: 42

This joke has an antecedent in a 1955 episode of The Goon Show entitled “The International Christmas Pudding”. The absence of visual cues gives the all-toonecessary explanation of the situation an extra layer of surrealism: FX. Knocking. SEAGOON. Heavens, it’s two men carrying a door. Come in. milligan 1955d

The confusion which comes from this confounding of perspectives can reach epic proportions. A routine from “The Whistling Spy Enigma” in which Seagoon and Eccles help Crun gain re-entry into his own house goes from curioser to curioser as it unfolds. Informed by Crun that he can’t let them in because his door is “locked, and the key’s lost” (Milligan 1954e), Seagoon valiantly tries the window, leading to a further complication: SEAGOON. Oh curse! The window’s locked as well. CRUN. Its open. SEAGOON. Its locked. Come out and see for yourself!

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CRUN. FX.

I will. [Door opened and shut]

milligan 1954e

Fortunately, Eccles has a solution to this: ECCLES. Oh, Ill go inside and open it. […] FX. [Door opened and shut] milligan 1954e

At this point, everyone’s troubles would appear to be over. However, Eccles’ revelation that “the window’s locked from the inside as well” (Milligan 1954e) sends the confusion down a fresh path. By this point, everybody is beginning to lose track of where they are: SEAGOON. Are you sure you can’t find the key to the door? CRUN. My dear military gentleman, come inside and look for yourself. SEAGOON. Right. Lead on! FX. [Door opened and shut] CRUN. Now, it used to hang on the nail behind this door. SEAGOON. Well, it’s certainly not there. Looks as if we’re locked out. milligan 1954e

Before long, Eccles is outside, and opens the window so that Crun and Seagoon (who are still inside) can let themselves back in. Crun and Seagoon explain that the door is still locked, which leads Eccles to come back inside, using the supposedly-locked door to help look for the key. Eccles is no sooner in than Crun remembers that the key “was in my pocket all the time” (Milligan 1954e). This is not the end of the routine. The end begins when Crun opens the door to find out who was knocking, only to discover that “There’s nobody out here” (Milligan 1954e). Things finally reach a final, if not altogether logical, conclusion when Seagoon (who should be able to remember that he, Eccles and Crun have been the only ones around throughout the whole ordeal) surmises that “The fools must have got impatient and run away” (Milligan 1954e). In broadcast form, this runs a full two minutes and forty-five seconds, ­including thirty seconds of highly ineffective ‘secret’ knocking at its outset (‘The Whistling Spy Enigma’ recording: 10:40–13:25). The crux of the dilemma is that none of those involved in the contretemps is ever entirely sure whether he is inside or outside, or what either of those concepts actually entails.

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­ hroughout it all, those concerned are only as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, or as locked T out, or locked in, as they believe themselves to be. In turn, what they believe at any given moment all depends on the utterances of the last person to assess the situation. Sometimes, not knowing who’s on which side of a door can lead to unexpected results: [MINNIE] (off). Henry! Henreeee! CRUN. What is it now, Minnie? [MINNIE] (off). Can’t you hear, Henry, there’s no-one knocking at the door. CRUN. Then I won’t answer it, Min. You never know who it might not be. [MINNIE] (off). Aaaaaaah! But it might not be somebody we know. CRUN. Oh, then I’d better see who isn’t there. FX. [Door opens] [GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. Good evening. My name is Grytpype. milligan and stephens 1957b: 3

All in all, Henry Crun’s track record with doors in The Goon Show suggests that he should, under no circumstances, be allowed to live in a dwelling that has one. This goes double for him on any occasion when he shares living quarters with Minnie Bannister. “The Terrible Revenge of Fred Fu-Manchu” contains a routine similar to the one from “The Whistling Spy Enigma”, one which makes it clear that Mr. Crun and Miss Bannister have no need of an alternate entranceway to make the task of entering a building worse than hopeless when they have each other to make it so: FX: Knocking on Door MINNIE. (off) Who’s there? [SEAGOON]. It’s me. MINNIE. (off) Henry, there’s a man called ‘Me’ at the door. CRUN. (off) Me? He’ll have to prove it. (Raises voice) You, out there! [SEAGOON]. Yes? CRUN. (off)Prove you’re me. [SEAGOON]. All right. I’m Henry Crun. CRUN. (off) That’s me. Minnie, open the door and let me in. MINNIE. (off) But you are in, Henry. CRUN. (off) Well, you’ll have to let me out again.

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MINNIE. (off) Why? CRUN. (off) Because I’m out there waiting to come in. milligan 1975: 88

As in the previous example, not only do misunderstandings concerning one’s position vis-à-vis a door cause confusion regarding which side of the door one is on at the moment, they can just as easily cause a loss of one’s sense of identity. Henry Crun’s trouble with doors stems less from the people that may lurk behind any given door than from the concept that lurks behind it. The existence of a door denotes the existence of a barrier, even if that barrier fails as badly at keeping anything from passing through it as Crun’s doors generally do. For all that, Crun sees every door as a barrier, no matter how many times he may go through it himself. An audience seeing a character in such a state of affairs would be bound to see the door, but not see it function effectively as one, and therefore to bear witness from a distance to the character’s “systematic absentmindedness” (Bergson 1974: 744) stemming from a failure “to look about himself” (Bergson 1974: 745) and perceive the merely obvious. In Henry Crun’s defense, The Goon Show rarely deals in the merely obvious. Self-evident as it may be in our world, in The Goon Show the presence of a door requires further explanation, such as the one Milligan puts into the mouth of Wallace Greenslade in another 1955 episode, “The Lost Emperor”: Listeners will no doubt think it ludicrous that Eccles should suddenly come through a door a thousand miles from the nearest building. The truth is several doors have been placed at intervals in the Mongolian mountains so as to obtain the sound of a door opening. Thus making it more interesting for listeners. Especially those without doors of there [sic] own. milligan 1955a

In addition to turning ordinary doors into portals between one ambiguity and another, Milligan is also not above blurring the distinctions between doors and other means of inflicting one’s presence on a space, if it means he can inflict a little disorientation in the name of humour on his audience: FX. KNOCKING AT DOOR. SEAGOON. Eccles for heaven’s sake answer that phone. FX. DOOR OPENED WITH MUCH RATTLING OF DOOR KNOB. ECCLES. Hulllooo. […]

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[GRYTPYPE-THYNNE]. ECCLES. SEAGOON. […] SEAGOON. FX. RATTLE. SEAGOON. FX. RATTLE. SEAGOON. FX. DOOR SLAMMED.

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(distort) Doctor Seagoon? (quietly) It’s for you. Give it to me. Hullo, hullo? Hullo, ullo, ullo? Curse! He’s hung up.

milligan and stephens 1956a

As well as bringing the concepts of spontaneous object substitution and the indeterminacy of doors as spatial dividers into play, this sequence constitutes an elaborate and implied play on words. By deliberately confounding two vastly different concepts of ‘calling on someone’, Milligan also gives an indication of the power of the telephone to act as a conceptual stand-in for a door, and thus to have the same ability as a door to establish and segment spatial frames of reference. Getting That Long-Distance Feeling—Telephones as Disruptors of Spatial Integrity Milligan makes the parallel between telephones and doors even more explicit in the conclusion of the sequence just referred to:

6.2

FX. RING OF TELEPHONE. SEAGOON. Come in. FX. PHONE BEING GRABBED OFF HANDSET. MORIARTY. Ah, now then what’s this we hear about hair? milligan and stephens 1956a

In the world of The Goon Show, the scope of the telephone to carry sound as an indicator of a physical presence is extended to encompass the power to carry a physical presence itself. For Milligan’s narrative purposes, anything that can be heard over the telephone can travel by telephone as well. The beginning of the routine which follows, from 1954’s “The Kippered Herring Gang”, is an old chestnut familiar to viewers of animated cartoons, centering on the idea that a gun fired into the mouthpiece of one telephone will send a bullet directly through to the earpiece at the other end of the conversation. Milligan, however, pays the gag off in a fashion no cartoon director had thought of attempting:

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OPERATOR. Well there’s a call for you, go ahead, you’re through dear… GUNMAN. Hello!? SEAGOON. Yes? GUNMAN. Is that Inspector Seagoon? […] GUNMAN. Hands up! […] I’m gonna kill you! SEAGOON. You do and I’ll, I, I’ll reverse the charges. OPERATOR. Hello, have you two finished your… […] FX. [Bang bang bang] OPERATOR. Owww! SEAGOON. Fool! You shot the operator! GUNMAN. Right! And now I’ll get you, take that! FX. [Phone being slammed down] GUNMAN. Oh me finger! SEAGOON. Before he could shoot again, I hung up. milligan 1954a: 6–8

The logic which generates the sequence’s conclusion is inescapable, given its initial premise. If picking up the phone makes something appear ‘here’ as well as ‘there’, hanging it up makes it go back there, and stay there. The Use of Pre-Recorded Voices and Effects to Establish Additional Spatial Frames For Milligan, however, ‘here’ and ‘there’ is not a simple binary distinction: as a radio program, The Goon Show enjoys a physical presence which is understood by its audience to be concurrently occupying multiple, and distinct, locations. On its most basic level, it is quite evidently the product of events which were recorded at a specific time in a specific soundstage environment, which are meant to represent occurrences reported to have taken place elsewhere. B ­ eyond that, there is the clear and present fact that for the purposes of the l­istener, all of this occurs as an event within the listener’s immediate physical surroundings, as the program is being broadcast or replayed from a recording. Milligan often toys with the concept that his show is simultaneously taking place ‘right here’, in some other ‘real’ locale, and in any number of fictional locales, by stretching the capacities of sound recording and reproduction techniques. In doing so, Milligan nests spatial frames within one another. Pre-recorded snippets of dialogue are often embedded within ‘live’ in-studio passages of dialogue by characters, as with the following example from “The Spon Plague”: 6.3

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MORIARTY. GRAMS.

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Owwww, we’re ruined. R-U-I-N-E-D, pronounced – Moriarty (Pre-Recorded) Saying ‘Ruinedddddddd’

milligan 1975: 117

Milligan frequently extends this technique to include embedding of pre-­ recorded sound effects within the apparent spatial frames created by other pre-recorded sound effects, relentlessly fooling with the audience’s expectations concerning which of the effects were meant to be processed as legitimate parts of a scene, and which were meant to be understood as mere recordings. As well as leaving the listener temporarily befuddled, this can lead to a form of recursion which is the aural equivalent of a drawing by M.C. Escher, as demonstrated by the following rapid-fire passage from “Shangri-La Again”: BLOODNOK.  […] Shhh! There’s someone outside the window. Look-out! GRAMS. Pane of glass smashing. SEAGOON. What is it? BLOODNOK. It’s a gramophone record. SEAGOON. Quick, put it on. BLOODNOK. Right! GRAMS. (Recording [Slightly faster]) Pane of glass smashing. SEAGOON. What is it? BLOODNOK. It’s a gramophone record. milligan 1955c

This sequence of dialogue and effects repeats itself four more times, sped up on each repeat, and lasting a grand total of thirty seconds (‘Shangri-La Again’ recording: 5:46–6:16). The method behind this madness is soon thereafter revealed to be “a Japanese mirror trick” (Milligan 1955c), which somehow alters perception across the normally-constituted boundaries between visual and aural perception. Trickery with mirrors offers a useful metaphor for grasping an additional concept which is crucial to an understanding of how a multiplicity of spatial perspectives can create an integrated perceptual landscape in The Goon Show. Regardless of how they interlock with or contradict one another, all spatial frames of reference in The Goon Show’s fictional world, like the mirrors in a funhouse or a magician’s act, are essentially static. The sound recording technology at the heart of every Goon Show episode is not used to manufacture changes in the relationships between characters and landmarks in the scenic background implied either through sound effects or dialogue. Although

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­technical facilities existed for multiple microphone set-ups mixed at different relative levels to create a filmic montage of sonic ‘close-ups’, ‘long shots’, ‘pans’ and ‘zooms’, The Goon Show instead chose to move its actors and leave its lone vocal recording microphone stationary. This practice gave the program scope “to create remarkably vivid impressions of their imaginary locales” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 49), without recourse to more sophisticated and time-consuming methods of mediatization. 7

All the World’s a Soundstage: The Recording Studio as Determinant of Spatial Frameworks

The use of a static frame of reference for recording imposes a single, static frame of reference on both The Goon Show’s live in-studio audience and its listeners. Because this perspective remains largely independent from the perspective of any individual character in the story, the audience is granted an overview from which it can construct its own coherent picture of the story’s setting at any given time. This in turn gives the audience a basis from which to judge the congruity of any newly-introduced element with the rest of the previously-constituted fictional world. Having been prepared to receive such elements as components in the construction of a comic effect, the audience reads the incongruities in perspective as part of a theatricalized mode of staging intended to fashion an epic structure to induce detachment, rather than as inconsistency or sloppiness on the part of the scriptwriter. Thus, even while events are taking place within one spatial framework, another framework with a conflicting set of parameters can be inserted into the first one without any alteration of the overall narratorial point of view. The multilayered role played by The Goon Show’s announcer Wallace Greenslade in “The Spanish Suitcase” is a study in this kind of spatial and temporal kaleidoscoping at its most recursively byzantine. Greenslade’s first appearance is as himself, a bbc staff announcer addressing the studio and home audiences as the “Ladies and Gentlemen” they no doubt are (Milligan and Sykes 1954c: 2). No sooner have The Goons interrupted his announcement to announce that their story takes place in “the summer of 1902… in Madrid” than Greenslade reappears in the scene itself, stating that “My name is Wallace Greenslade, I was in Spain at the time” (‘The Spanish Suitcase’ recording: 3:00–3:04). At this point, it is still an open question whether he should be understood to be in the Madrid of Alfonso xiii’s reign, or still in the studio in London in 1954. The question is closed before long, as Greenslade begins to take an active role as a semi-embedded narrator, observing events from within the scene itself, rather than from his usual lofty perch behind a studio microphone: “I watched

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the hurrying figure of Moriarty with my binoculars as he sped towards the Congressa De Los Dipotalos. There he was met by a man heavily disguised as Ned Seagoon” (Milligan and Sykes 1954c: 11). Shortly thereafter, with the words “Let us now re-cap”, Greenslade re-ascends to his accustomed perch long enough to remind the audience of the key events in the story so far, as well as “reminding listeners to post early for Christmas” (Milligan and Sykes 1954c: 12–13). Back in 1902 Madrid, and being referred to by Bloodnok as “Mr. Greenslade the porter” at the hotel around which the story’s action revolves, Greenslade narrates himself back into the story while “sitting outside the Hotel Fred reading the Radio Times” (Milligan and Sykes 1954c: 15), which he has presumably brought with him from 1954 London. From there on in, Greenslade stays with the story as a character, until its bitter end, “93 years” (Milligan and Sykes 1954c: 20) later. No reference is made to the fact that the end of the story would therefore be in 1995—thirty-nine years in the future, from the audience’s perspective.3 The addition of rotating time frames to the constantly-shifting spatial perspectives in “The Spanish Suitcase” makes a near-Herculean challenge out of the job of ascertaining how many places and times Wallace Greenslade, or anyone else, may be able to occupy at once in any given Goon Show episode. It also calls to mind a later use of frames-within-frames by Milligan in The Bedsitting Room: …a large television set on legs is moved onstage. Inside it are three men… They are in the set visible from chest up, as in a medium long shot. Therefore they are dressed in evening dress from the waist up, below the screen level they are still in underwear. milligan and antrobus 1975: 47

The three men in the television then proceed to present the bbc Ten O’Clock News, complete with a feature report and an end-of-transmission sign-off. At no time during this is any attempt made to clarify whether this is a staged representation of a broadcast coming from a distant studio (or studios), or whether the oversized tv set goes door-to-door giving nightly news reports. A reasonable educated guess is that the audience is free to imagine that both scenarios run concurrently, that each is valid within its own frame of reference, and that these frames overlap one another. There is an irony in Milligan’s continual use of overlapping and competing frames of spatial reference when spatial conventions derived either from live 3 Neither is any reference made to the possibility that the upheaval caused by the Spanish Civil War may have affected the outcome of the episode’s narrative. The Spain of 1995 in “The Spanish Suitcase” is, to all intents and purposes, the Spain of 1902 (as imagined by Milligan) transposed ninety-three years into the future.

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theatre or the broadcast media dictate one or more of the frames involved. Although Milligan habitually calls attention to The Goon Show’s status as a radio program, and makes winking references to some of the technologies used in its creation, he never does so in a way that questions the program’s status as a live performance, recorded for posterity, but otherwise unmediated. Given that The Goon Show was recorded on tape for broadcast from its fourth series on, it seems strange that Milligan never chose to exploit the weaknesses of this particular technology in the name of humour. Anyone who has ever worked with reel-to-reel audio tape knows that its propensity for permanently distorting (or destroying) sound by becoming scratched, distressed, demagnetized, stretched or broken brings as many comic possibilities as it causes headaches. Milligan’s unwillingness to exploit the comic potential of audio tape may be as much as anything the result of his having relatively little to do with the process of editing tape after a recording, busy as he was with the preparation of scripts for upcoming shows. His use of gramophone records as portals to alternate (and competing) realities certainly makes it plausible to suggest that he would have used tape in the same way, had he been more familiar with it at the time. An exchange of roughly twenty lines (plus effects) in 1957’s “The Missing Boa Constrictor” displays Milligan’s full range of reality bending through the judicious use of grooved black vinyl. Bloodnok begins it by rejecting the assertion that a record was made by Frederic Chopin, on the simple grounds that since “Chopin’s dead. It can’t be him” (Milligan and Stephens 1957i), but not on the more reasonable grounds that Chopin died before the invention of the phonograph. Seagoon’s solution to this case of identity is to “put the record on and ask him” (Milligan and Stephens 1957i), stopping the pre-recorded music as if it were being played live on a bandstand. The soi-disant Chopin produces his bona fides, or at least tells Seagoon where to find them, by stating that “my birth certificate…is on the other side” (Milligan and Stephens 1957i) of the record, which indeed it is. At no time does anyone call into question the double anachronism that the music Chopin is playing is “bad dance hall jazz”, and that the record has earlier been referred to as “a rare recording of Grieg’s A minor piano concerto” (Milligan and Stephens 1957i). It would have to be rare indeed, since Chopin died when Grieg was six years old, likely well before the concerto in question existed even in first-draft form. 8

When Mental Maps Suffer Breakdowns: Around the World (and Back Again) with The Goon Show

One of the discrepancies of scale which drives many a Goon Show plot involves the size of the world itself. The Goon projection of the world map employs

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a double distortion that would put Mercator to shame. In the first place, the entire world can, whenever necessary, be encompassed within the confines of Great Britain, or when more convenient, within the confines of the city of London. This extreme skewing of perspective gives rise to a secondary effect which shrinks all geographical locations in direct proportion to their distance from London. Milligan shows a particular propensity for using this world-view to change the size of Africa to suit his current narrative purposes. In the 1956 episode “The Telephone”, Henry Crun lives at “17A, Africa” (Milligan and Stephens 1956k), a street address which can be reached by going “down the Finchley Road” (Milligan and Stephens 1956k) through London’s East End. Seagoon’s first attempt to locate Crun leads him to the wrong address, and the discovery that addresses in Africa with “Odd numbers are right over on the other side” of the continent (Milligan and Stephens 1956k). The spatial scale undergoes a further significant distortion in this episode. Although Crun’s house at “17A, Africa” is on the “Finchley telephone exchange” (Milligan and Stephens 1956k), there are long distances involved in laying the local line to connect it to the London gpo telephone system. Seagoon’s assistant lineman, Willium, complains that the job has led him into an endless routine of commuting: “as soon as I gets back I has to turn ‘round and cycle back here in the morning” (Milligan and Stephens 1956k). Milligan’s sense of distances varies greatly throughout this episode: even with the detour to the even-numbered side of Africa, the “forty-eight thousand miles of cable” (Milligan and Stephens 1956k) used to go from London to a house which turns out to be closer to the Sahara Desert than the heart of the continent (Milligan and Stephens 1956k) would wrap roughly twice around the earth’s circumference, and suggests a route which, at best, is circuitous and inefficient. The ability to make local telephone calls to London is far from the only municipal service which Milligan extends to far-flung parts of the world. “Tales of Men’s Shirts” sees Seagoon and his group escaping from a German prisoner-ofwar camp thanks to the appearance of Willium, who in this episode is working for the London sanitation department and “does the sewers” (Milligan 1975: 131) on a route which apparently extends under the North Sea. 1955’s “Foiled by President Fred” shows London’s service infrastructure to have reached clear across the Atlantic, thanks to the gas board of the suburb of South Balham, which has the presidential residence at “Casa Rosa, Avenida Varest, Buenos Aires, Argentina” on its list of delinquent accounts (Milligan 1972: 117). On the face of it, there is a certain naïve chauvinism, even imperialism, behind a world-view which underpins the city of London with infinitely-­spreading catacombs of subway tunnels and sewer mains, while allowing a handful of men to “surround Africa” (Milligan 1955d) when the need arises. There is a little

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more to it than that, however. Milligan’s reversals of scale can also be seen to be the product of personal experiences which were common to young men of his generation. Although military service in World War ii had taken Milligan to North Africa, then to Italy, he would hardly have been in charge of either his itineraries or his destinations. As an enlisted man, he was likely to have known neither where he was going, nor when he was going there, until he received the order to pack up and go. Furthermore, while travelling long distances to unknown locales without much in the way of explanation might have been new to many of his fellow soldiers, for Milligan it was merely a continuation of a wellestablished way of living. By the age of fifteen, he had been taken around the Cape of Good Hope five times on the long sea journey between India and Britain. Each time, he was accompanied by at least one of his parents, who were responsible for the travel arrangements. Likewise, after the war, the details of his tours around Europe with variety acts were planned by others for him. Despite his numerous sojourns abroad, it is well within the realm of possibility that the Spike Milligan who began work on The Goon Show in 1951 saw himself less as a seasoned world traveler than as a well-travelled piece of luggage. Milligan’s experience as a traveler, combined with his inexperience as a travel planner, led him to set great store in the ability of boats to go anywhere with relative ease: [CRUN]. With the closing of the canal our ships have been forced to travel around the Cape. POLITICIAN. Ahhhhh, just a minute, couldn’t they travel overland? [CRUN]. Yes, we’ve tried that, but it ruins the bottoms of the ships! milligan and stephens 1957h: 2

The issue at hand in the above exchange had nothing to do with whether such a thing could or should be attempted, or even if it had been. It was simply a question of how much wear and tear might be acceptable under the circumstances. The distances involved in detouring around the Suez via an overland route seem not to have been a consideration, either for the speakers or the man who created them. Another thing Milligan’s travels may have given him, therefore, was an unwarranted confidence in his knowledge of world geography, as well as an apparent disdain for consulting maps. The Goon Show takes place in a world where, at any given time, the most direct route “to make your way to Hungary” is “via Budapest” (Milligan 1954e), thus requiring the traveler to go deep into the heart of the country as a prerequisite to entering it in the first place. For those who prefer entering countries from the outside, the quickest way to get to Guatemala from England is to “book a ticket to South America” (Milligan 1972: 63), some 1500 miles at least from Guatemala’s actual

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location. At journey’s end, the traveler (in this case as in most others, Neddie Seagoon) will arrive at “the Port of Guatemala” (Milligan 1972: 65), which, since the events which immediately follow his arrival take place at the British Embassy, is quite probably meant to be Guatemala’s distinctly landlocked capital Guatemala City. On the other side of this world (presumably) there can also be a “Singapore-China frontier” (Milligan 1955a), replacing the current border between Singapore and Malaysia. With geography as jumbled as it often is in their world, it is small wonder that Goon Show characters often resort to verifying distances the hard way: SEAGOON. Kowloon? That’s six hundred miles from here. BLOODNOK. Is it? GRAMS. FOOTSTEPS RUNNING AWAY INTO THE DISTANCE, ­S ILENCE, FOOTSTEPS RUNNING BACK TOWARDS MICROPHONE. SEAGOON. (panting) Yes. It’s exactly six hundred miles. BLOODNOK. That’s too far to travel… milligan and sykes 1955b

Even when they take the time to do their own reconnaissance, Goon Show characters frequently find themselves in places other than the ones they expect to be: SEAGOON. Gladys, I have a feeling we’re lost. GLADYS. Do not worry. Me come from old tracking family. Me come this way many times before. SEAGOON. Good, where does it lead to? GLADYS. Me don’t know, me always get lost, cor blimey. milligan and sykes 1955l

Perhaps some of the confusion can be put down to the fact that ‘Gladys’ is a man with a woman’s name, being played by the very masculine-sounding Ray Ellington. Be that as it may, when even the natives of an area are unfamiliar with familiar surroundings, outsiders like Neddie Seagoon stand even less chance of knowing where they are. As often as Seagoon and Major Bloodnok sing “On the Road to Mandalay” together, it is doubtful that they could ever find such a road, or find their way to Mandalay once they were on it. It is even more doubtful that they could find their way with Spike Milligan as their guide. Milligan’s naïve sense of geography does more than make one wish that the bbc had placed a copy of an up-to-date world atlas at his disposal. It also delineates a surprisingly stable and consistent set of boundaries for his fictional world. The Goon Show places London not so much in the centre of the

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universe as in the foreground of a picture plane with highly forced perspective, analogous to the one in Fig. 1: Milligan’s mental map of the world, as rendered below in the spirit of Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker magazine cover, has a boundary beyond which the degree of detail radically decreases; Milligan employs the English c­ oastline

Figure 1

A Goon Show map of the world. Illustration by r.j.c.

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to divide the world into two spaces which can be broadly conceptualized as ‘Home’ and ‘Everywhere Else’. Similar to Alfred Jarry’s use of “a colourless background” so that “(e)ach spectator can then conjure up for himself the background he requires” (1961: 179), Milligan effectively stages the entire world within a single performance space, making all locales equally accessible from each other. In this world, the distance between ‘here’ and ‘not here’ is never any greater than the word ‘not’. Milligan’s solution is a Gordian feat of wordplay: remove the ‘not’, and you are ‘here’…wherever ‘here’ happens to be. Seen from this perspective (or lack thereof) The Goon Show’s fictional world map reveals itself as “not geographical but graphic in nature” (Leslie 2002: 19, qtd. in Telotte 2010: 80). It occupies a firmament with no stable, permanent existence beyond the moment of its creation and, in its essence, is “a world of flatness” (Leslie 2002: 19, qtd. in Telotte 2010: 80), a blank canvas on which only the most relevant details are sketched in, then erased, and where the shortest distance between two points is a punch line. Regardless of where he places them on the map, or whether he subsequently moves them, Milligan’s locales are almost always ‘real’ in the sense that their names can be found elsewhere, either in the atlas or in an extant work of fiction. The only notable exception to this is the 1957 episode “The Sleeping Prince”, whose main action takes place in a fictional country with the selfevidently Goonish name of “Yukkabukkoo” (Milligan and Stephens 1957e). This island nation, so impoverished that it hires its presidents from “the Battersea labour exchange”, and has the same man as “leader of both sides” of its permanent revolution (Milligan and Stephens 1957e), is located somewhere in the South Pacific, but otherwise has all the earmarks of a fictionalized Latin American republic. Its revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) leader speaks with a stereotypically sleepy Hispanic peon’s accent, using the word “señor” as a frequent form of address to remove all remaining doubt as to how the audience is meant to interpret his ethnicity (‘Sleeping Prince’ recording: 10:19–11:27). The 1957 air date of the episode makes it impossible to mistake this for a satire on the exported revolutions of the post-Castro era. “Yukkabukkoo” should not be taken in retrospect for Angola, or anywhere else that Cuban military advisors were dispatched to: it is quite simply a caricature of a “banana republic”, exported lock, stock, and barrel to the South Pacific, for reasons Milligan himself may have been at a loss to explain. Overall, the liberties that Spike Milligan takes with conceptual matters concerning world geography in The Goon Show serve to disrupt an audience’s expectations far less than the liberties he takes with spatial scales which are implied by sound to lie within the scope of immediate sense-experience. No matter how many liberties Milligan takes with the ways in which time and

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space are conventionally understood, however, neither time nor space ever suffers anything worse than distortion in a full-episode-length Goon Show story. Neither is wholly obliterated, nor is it eliminated as a relevant factor in either the narrative or the text as a whole. There is one notable exception to this during The Goon Show’s era of full-length stories. A 1957 episode entitled “What’s My Line?” offers a glimpse at a direction the program might have taken without Peter Eton’s insistence on an overarching plot structure to which Milligan could attach his storytelling tangents. The Goon Show take on “What’s My Line?” uses its namesake, a television panel show of the 1950s in which mystery guests sign in on a blackboard, as a jumping-off point, a framing device rather than an engine of plot. Signing in on a blackboard becomes a running gag, as each familiar member of The Goon Show’s repertory company of characters enters the proceedings, and proceeds to take it in a fresh direction. What emerges from this is not a single story, but an olio of sketches and comic turns, held together only by whatever degree of continuity the framing device of blackboard-signing can provide. This continuity has a looseness bordering on laxity: as each new character signs in, a fresh story begins, one whose reference to its predecessor in terms of time period, locale, event, and incident is scant at best. The headlong impetus that is characteristic of The Goon Show’s narrative style slows noticeably when forced into a series of stops and restarts by such a framework, as it becomes apparent that the Milligan imagination requires as much time and space as any particular presentational format affords in order to operate effectively. Characters’ statements about when and where their stories in “What’s My Line” are taking place appear to be immaterial: the format of reportage inherent to its source material makes the Goon Show version’s implied panel-show studio the dominant reality of the episode. One clue to how it leaves this impression lies in Milligan’s employment of Neddie Seagoon as something other than the protagonist for the entire episode. Although he features as the central character in one segment, he also crops up afterwards, as the same character but fulfilling functions which have little or nothing to do with one another. Perhaps more than any single Goon Show episode, “What’s My Line” reveals the vital difference between Milligan’s corpus of half-hour comic mini-epics and the program’s sketch-show origins. Any framing device which can bring a galloping non sequitur to a dead stop simply by moving on to (while stealing a catchphrase from a group of Milligan’s spiritual descendants) ‘something completely different’ robs The Goon Show of a certain magical quality, by making it stay rooted in one ‘here and now’ at a time. On the other hand, when Milligan places his characters in a situation from which there is no escape until the closing music begins, he and they are forced to commit to the idea that frames of time and space with drastically different implications can exist simultaneously, side by side, and must all be taken equally seriously.

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Milligan’s Laws of Space Just as tendencies can be observed in Spike Milligan’s distortion of time in The Goon Show, a number of rules of thumb can be observed in his distortion of space. In the previous chapter, the following “Milligan’s Laws of Space” have been noted: —Milligan’s Laws of Containers and Contents: 1. All things with a physical form can be grouped into one of two categories: containers; and things to be put in containers. Anything designated as a container can hold anything designated to be put into a container, regardless of their relative sizes. 2. The interior and exterior of a container constitute two independent spatial frames of reference. Therefore, the actual capacity of a container cannot be assumed based on the apparent size of the container when viewed from the outside. —Milligan’s Laws of Object Impermanence: 1. Any object can be called spontaneously into existence at any point in space. The probability of this happening increases with the improbability of such an object ever being found in such a location. 2. As a corollary to the above, abstract concepts, and non-dimensional representations such as sound recordings, can be given physical form, and called spontaneously into existence at any point in space. 3. If any object can be called spontaneously into existence at any point in space, it is also possible that it can be called spontaneously into existence in more than one place at the same time. When the object in question is a Goon Show character named “Eccles”, the word “possible” should be replaced with the phrase “altogether likely”. —Milligan’s Laws of Spatial Frames: 1. (The Special Law of Spatial Elasticity) Spatial frames of reference can simultaneously expand, contract, and remain constant in size depending on the needs of each activity going on within them. Two activities involving the same object can also cause the spatial frame to simultaneously expand and contract in scale with reference to that object. 2. Objects which function as conceptual links between spaces can bring unrelated spatial frames together. Free-standing doors can open into previously unseen buildings; telephones facilitate not only conversation, but physical contact. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004310704_007

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—Milligan’s Laws of Geography: 1. The entire known world consists of two places, which can broadly be defined as “England” and “Everywhere Else”. 2. The relative positions of geographical locations in the “Everywhere Else” part of The Goon Show’s world are subject to constant, but not predictable, change. This has a corresponding effect on distances and boundaries. 3. No matter how far from England someplace in the “Everywhere Else” part of this world is, it might still be attached to England by some part of the infrastructure of the city of London.

chapter 4

Children Teach Lessons on the Accordion: Preoperational Cognitive Strategies in The Goon Show The constant shuffling and reshuffling of temporal and spatial frames in The Goon Show, gratuitous as they may often appear, form part of a clear pattern of dramaturgy which operates towards a consistent goal. As with much of the rest of what he does in The Goon Show, Milligan distorts time and space for the purpose of creating laughter: the mechanisms he uses for turning temporal and spatial manipulation into comic payoffs demonstrate an understanding of both human psychology and the semiotic codes of radio which is no less profound for being intuitive. Specifically, Milligan plays off the primacy of the spoken word as a generator of meaning in radio theatre, using it to guide the listener towards accepting his bending of the laws of the universe. As we shall see, the terms of reference which aid the most in meeting The Goon Show’s universe on its own terms belong most properly to the later stages of a phase of cognitive development which can be broadly defined as taking place in children between the ages of six and eight; this phase was first labeled by Jean Piaget as ‘preoperational’. 1

“Hello, folks, this is Neddy Seagoon speaking, folks”: The Spoken Word as Stage Manager of Radio Theatre

Before embarking on a journey through Goonland with a child’s point of view as our guide, it will be useful to review a few of the basic principles concerning the place of the spoken word as the chief locus of meaning and context for radio theatre. Despite differences of opinion concerning the semiotics of radio, there appears to be a general consensus among scholars of English-language radio on a hierarchy of the medium’s signifying systems. Primacy is accorded to the spoken word as a primum mobile which establishes, organizes, and initiates the interplay of all potential signifying elements in the radio soundscape. Crisell’s analysis is the most cogent distillation of the argument for the spoken word as the foundation for radio’s aesthetics and sign-systems: How…does radio set about surmounting its limitations and create something analogous to conventional drama? Partly by a process of © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004310704_008

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‘transcodification’—the replacement of one code or set of codes, in this case visual cues, by another, in this case auditory, the code of speech. (1994: 146) Implicit in the idea that meaning is principally carried by the spoken word in radio is the idea that radio is a conversation—albeit largely a one-sided one. Shingler and Wieringa postulate that because “there appears to be little in the way of equipment or technology mediating this relationship” between the speaker and the person spoken to, listeners are therefore “able to establish more intimate relationships with radio programmes and personalities” (1998: 80). The intimacy that radio can create with its audiences has frequently led theoreticians to fix their attention on a borderland that radio appears to share with humanity’s most basic oral storytelling traditions. Rattigan feels that (t)he aural appeal of the spoken word, the good story and the dramatically imaginative event is a primal response in most humans regardless of age, social standing, education or cultural background. Radio drama […] can provide an aural literature of immense richness in its diversity (2002: 106). Emotionally satisfying as this description is (particularly for a practitioner of radio theatre), the immediacy and the communality implied by linking radio with the oldest narrative traditions of human culture must be tempered with a caveat. The realities inherent to radio broadcasting mean that both the story and the teller are generally separated from the hearer by a considerable distance. William Stanton notes the effect that the fragmentation of radio’s audience over a broad geographical area has on the act of reception: we are more separated from each other than in any form of dramatic performance. Whether listening at home or in a car, we are unaware in any physical way that we are part of an audience numbering hundreds of thousands. Whether alone or with one or two others, we cannot be positioned—physically or psychologically—in a way that is as specific as in a theatre building or a street or a chosen site, as members of a collective. (2004: 94) Radio’s parallels to storytelling do not rest entirely in orality, however. Angela Frattarola notes a tendency among “(t)heorists and writers of radio drama” writing during the 1920s and 1930s to “liken listening to a ‘microphone play’ to reading a novel because both ask us to imagine an unfolding narrative,

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bringing us into an intimate relationship with voices and characters” (2009: 451). More recent theorists also liken radio to written literature: Crisell notes that “Words on the radio could be regarded as the application of oral language to a situation which normally calls for writing, that is, where what is referred to is not simultaneously apparent to sender and receiver since they are separated” (1994: 55). At the same time, Crisell stresses that “to avoid creating this impression of absence and impersonality much radio talk which is actually scripted […] is delivered as if it were unscripted and impromptu” (1994: 56). The idea of radio as a form of mediated storytelling serves well to inform the relationship between Milligan and the listener which is mediated by The Goon Show. As stated earlier, the changes which Milligan wreaks upon space and time take the bulk of their cues from the spoken word; now is the appropriate moment to add that, for all its impressive array of sonic, musical, and other extra-dialogical effects, The Goon Show is as akin to pure storytelling as it is to drama. Milligan’s preferred method for opening the program, with Wallace Greenslade saying “This is the bbc” followed by anywhere up to two minutes of jocular by-play involving Greenslade and the cast, all without a signature tune, introduces the listener to the idea that what will follow is more informal, and essentially more conversational, than standard radio drama or variety fare. The continual use of characters as narrators in their own ongoing story further establishes a bond of intimacy between character and listener. As well, it reinforces the idea that the story is being told as much as it is enacted while it unfolds. Milligan was sufficiently aware of the need for storytelling to fill in what Alan Beck refers to as the “absent content” (1999: 7) of radio that he was already sending up this dramaturgical technique in The Goon Show’s first season of full-episode-length stories. 1954’s “The Silent Bugler” features the following less-than-helpful plot synopsis: GREENSLADE. For listeners who have been asleep, of whom I am one, here is a short resume of what’s gone on before. PETER SELLERS (as a posh lady). Helen Lovejoy, beautiful heiress to the Halibut millions, has been jilted at the altar by Villion de Paprikon, the legitimate son of Louis the…­ ex-one-vee [xiv]. Peter, Villion’s Eton boating friend, has heard this, but being in Tibet has embarrassed… Mary, his fiancée, who, being the only cousin of Sir Raymond Ellington, has passed the title on to Baron Geldray, also heir to the Halibut millions. Now read on. ‘Silent Bugler 1954’ recording: 22:14–22:50

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Earlier in the same episode, what is announced as “a rapid synopsis” “for listeners who have just tuned in” turns out to be Milligan doing a rather convincing live-on-mic impersonation of a sped-up tape recorder (‘Silent Bugler 1954’ recording: 11:09–11:16). Milligan’s predilection for using narration to introduce and contextualize the subsequent enactment of a story becomes apparent from his writing for other performance modes with visual components. His lone stage play, The Bedsitting Room, supplies the bulk of the initial information necessary for the understanding of its plot and setting in one go, in a radio news bulletin (Milligan and Antrobus 1975: 13–14). Milligan never explained why he put the narratorial function in the driver’s seat, but his rationale for doing so articulates itself throughout The Goon Show. By granting narration the position of authoritative voice in the creation of a fictional world, then granting it the further authority to instigate changes in this world, Milligan sets up a paradox which continually puts the laws of probability to the test. This paradox in turn requires the listener to reorient his or her conventional methods for suspending disbelief. Adults have learned that merely saying something does not necessarily make it so. For The Goon Show to work as narrative as well as humour, Milligan must have his audience believe that it is only on the strength of someone saying so that things come into being at all. Not only must words have the power to create things, they must also be equated with things. In the process, the bridge of abstract thought between words and things not seen must be removed: once this is accomplished, all utterances, simply by virtue of being uttered, become concrete. 2

Suffer Little Children to Come unto Metonymy: The Preoperational Substitution of Words for Things

Concretizing words, and thereby conferring on them equal status with the things they represent, requires us to learn no new or special strategies of cognition. All it asks is that we temporarily unlearn, or disregard, cognitive strategies that most of us have had in place since the latter years of primary school. During his researches into childhood cognitive development, Jean Piaget discovered that “(up to the age of seven or eight), the children [in the group then being studied] made no distinctions between the word and the thing, and failed to understand the problem” (1977: 72). This confusion concerning the substitution of logos for phenomenon is recorded by Piaget, in passages which sometimes read like first drafts for routines in The Goon Show. In this example, the italics are the child’s responses to the researcher’s questions:

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Is a word strong? No, it can’t do anything at all. Are any words strong? Some words are strong. Which? The word “strong” because you are saying it’s strong. Is the word “elephant” strong? Yes, because an elephant can carry people. An elephant can, but simply the word? No, it isn’t strong. Why not? Because it doesn’t do anything. What? The word. piaget 1977: 73–74

Compare this to Eccles and Bluebottle’s difficulties with chronometry in a routine which begins with a reprise of the first line of this book: BLUEBOTTLE. What time is it Eccles? ECCLES. Err, just a minute. I’ve got it written down on a piece of paper. A nice man wrote the time down for me this morning. BLUEBOTTLE. Ooooh, then why do you carry it around with you Eccles? ECCLES. Welll, um, if a [sic] anybody asks me the time, I can show it to dem. BLUEBOTTLE. Wait a minute Eccles, my good man. ECCLES. What is it fellow? BLUEBOTTLE. It’s writted on this bit of paper, what is eight o’clock, is writted. ECCLES. I know that my good fellow. That’s right, um, when I asked the fella to write it down, it was eight o’clock. BLUEBOTTLE. Well then. Supposing when somebody asks you the time, it isn’t eight o’clock? ECCLES. Well den, I don’t show it to ‘em. […] BLUEBOTTLE. Well how do you know when it’s eight o’clock? ECCLES. I’ve got it written down on a piece of paper. milligan and stephens 1957d

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It should be noted that the first line of this routine is actually a punch line, set up by twenty-eight seconds of ticking, striking, and cuckooing clocks (‘Punch-Up-The-Conker’ recording: 24:26–24:54). In the midst of numerous objects, any one of which could be used to form an educated guess, Eccles and Bluebottle instead choose to rely on two words on a piece of paper to tell the time. The child whom Piaget questioned about elephants and Milligan’s childlike characters (including, but by no means limited to, Eccles and Bluebottle) share a naïve realism in which “thoughts, images, and words, though distinguished to a certain degree from things, are none the less situated in the things” (Piaget 1977: 151–152). Through its tendency to give physical substance to the abstract, this realism incorporates a transformative component: “There is magic participation between thought and things when the child is under the impression that reality can be modified by a word” (Piaget 1977: 158). 3

A Child’s Garden of Goon-Sense: Milligan as Children’s Author and Perpetual Child

Milligan’s body of work leaves little doubt that he was a writer familiar with the child’s perspective on the world. He “produced the daftest nonsense plays, stories, poems, and drawings for children available in the United Kingdom” (de Rijke 2002: 227), a corpus which extends from nursery rhymes to fairy tales to Goonish reimaginings of staples of family literature such as Black Beauty and Treasure Island. British educator Victoria de Rijke argues that the asides, non sequiturs and quicksilver slips of lateral thinking that define Milligan’s style are far from being beyond the grasp of children. Indeed, these features of style furnish a great deal of his work’s appeal: “Children devour the detail in Spike’s sketches and relate directly to his literal humour” (de Rijke 233). It is not going too far to suggest that Milligan was more comfortable viewing life from a child’s perspective than from an adult’s. Scudamore offers the observation that (h)e has undoubtedly spent many of his most rewarding hours with children. He can re-enter the child’s world, by his writing, by his unstinted clowning and by his capacity for losing himself utterly in a child’s mind. This rare ability probably springs from a genuine childish curiosity and interest which has somehow never grown up. (1985: 180) Scudamore also relates that Milligan began to seek out the world of childhood as a refuge from the adult world, even as he was poised between one world

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and the other. In his late teen years, Milligan continued to retreat to the attic of the family home with his brother Desmond, seven years his junior, to enact adventures in an imaginary country peopled with figurines, small toys and other bric-a-brac: “The ease with which [Milligan] left the unappealing world of his contemporaries to lose himself in childhood imaginings with his younger brother is interesting” (Scudamore 1985: 44), to say the least. The Milligan brothers’ adventures in the attic of the family’s Depression-era London home were the continuation of a world of play which had begun half a world away in India. Desmond Milligan’s recollections point to the epic quality of these pretend wars, and the influence that this quality would have on Spike’s writing for The Goon Show, both in his choice of subject matter and in his ability to extend the physical scale of the undertaking well beyond the ordinary bounds of boys’ make-believe: We would have battles in the bits of jungle and three lakes that surrounded us. We made a flag and called ourselves ‘The Lamanian Army.’ […] It was here that the fun started, the lampooning of people and places where Spike’s stretching of reality began. He decided we needed a proper trench. We dug a big one right in the middle of Mum and Dad’s garden. My God, we were reprimanded. farnes 2010: “Desmond Milligan”

The mock battles against make-believe foes masked the real battle being fought with an “unappealing” enemy called adulthood. There is ample evidence that Milligan did not simply adopt a child’s point of view in order to facilitate creativity while writing. His entire adult life was marked by a selective approach to maturity, which manifested itself in outbursts of childish behaviour. Longtime friend and collaborator Eric Sykes recalls that, like an errant child, “Spike was ‘driven by his whims’ and could be unreliable” (Farnes 2010: “Eric Sykes”). One aspect of Milligan’s unreliability which other adults found difficult to deal with was his propensity for combining childlike innocence with childish selfcentredness. Sykes recounts a story of one Christmas with Milligan which began in an atmosphere of playfulness and fun: His wife had left him and rather than spend a lonely festive season we invited him to spend Christmas with us…The four children, two of ours, Kathy and Susan, and his two, Laura and Sean, got on like a house on fire. They were all the same age, five or six years old. Spike was the sole organiser […] speaking through a tube from the Hoover, through a little gap in the curtains, he said ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! This is Father Christmas speaking. Now where exactly are you staying tonight?’

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and they were all whispering they’d heard Father Christmas himself and he was coming to see them. farnes 2010: “Eric Sykes”

When Christmas morning came, the fun-loving side of Milligan had disappeared. In fact, Milligan was absent altogether: As usual on the Christmas morning Edith [Sykes’ wife] and I, and the four children, were up early and we were all unwrapping our presents […] but where was Spike? What had happened? Had he left? We went up and searched all the rooms. He wasn’t anywhere. […] About 11.30 in the morning a rejuvenated Spike came into the room. He had locked himself in the attic and spent the night there so he wouldn’t be disturbed. I thought he had missed the best time of a child’s life, when they are opening their presents. It was rather typical of the man. farnes 2010: “Eric Sykes”

The undercurrent to Milligan’s puzzling Yuletide no-show seems to be his need to be the centre of attention in all social situations. Playing Santa (even as a disembodied voice) makes one a natural candidate for the spotlight; being an adult in a room full of children opening Christmas presents would (and should) relegate one to the background. What also emerges from this anecdote, and others in a similar vein told about him, is the sense that Milligan felt more at ease being regarded by children as an overgrown fellow child at play than as a grown-up authority figure, no matter how benign or lax his application of authority may have been. Milligan’s son Sean confirms this, saying that “(h)e was reliving the innocence of his childhood, because he couldn’t bear the world” (Carpenter 2004: Ch.14). Milligan frequently referred to the adult world as something to be approached with caution, and avoided whenever possible. In a letter to another friend, the author and poet Robert Graves, Milligan sounded off on the effects of the regimentation devised by adults for children in the education system: I’m not sure that adults should be putting such ‘measures’ on, as yet, immature young people, we impose adult measures on children, and of course they grow up like us—is that a good thing? scudamore 1991: 112

Marked as it is by a dearth of these “adult measures”, The Goon Show starts with a childlike outlook as a kind of ‘default setting’. Seagoon’s strangulated

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cries for help are reminiscent of a lost boy calling for his mother. Bluebottle is forever referring to his current endeavour, regardless of the degree of responsibility it entails, as a “game”. His protestations and refusals to play the game in question are often overcome with the sorts of bribes reserved for children: SEAGOON. Come, come, little two-stone Hercules—tell me if you saw two men and you can have this quarter of dolly mixture. BLUEBOTTLE. Cor, dolly mixture—thinks—with those-type sweets I could influence certain girls at playtime—that Brenda Pugh might be another Rita Hayworth. milligan 1972: 166

In The Goon Show, childishness takes on an infectious quality. Although not a fictional creation, Wallace Greenslade is frequently given lines to read which display as much sulky pettishness as any of Milligan’s characters. For example, in the 1955 episode “The Six Ingots of Leadenhall Street”, Greenslade discards his professional tone, replacing it with petulant disdain for the story he is forced to introduce: [GREENSLADE]. The Six Ingots of Leadenhall Street Part 2, or the Two Ingots of Leadenhall Street Part 6, whatever you like, I don’t care. Mr. Grytpype-­Thynne has sent Herr Moriarty with the six gold bars to a smelting shop. And now they are about to be melted down. Good-bye. milligan and sykes 1955g: 7

Later on, his disdain turns to a contempt apparently bred by familiarity: “Why, if it isn’t The Six Gold Ingots of Leadenhall Street Part 4, or The Four Ingots of Leadenhall Street Part 6, whichever you like, I don’t care” (Milligan and Sykes 1955g: 13). The episode concludes with an exasperated “Oh, I don’t care at all!” from Greenslade, after Bluebottle has accidentally “deaded the cast” and thus short-circuited the ending of the story (Milligan and Sykes 1955g: 16). The plots of more than a few entire Goon Show episodes rely on the audience adopting a child’s viewpoint in order to understand the central premise. 1955’s “The Fireball of Milton Street” presents the series’ most outstanding example of this. Three related childlike ideas drive the narrative: (1) the discovery that “the sun is on fire”; (2) the supposition that the fire can be extinguished with “a barrel of water”; and (3) the hope (against hope) that water taken up in “a wooden rocket” to douse the flame would neither dissipate in the vacuum of

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space nor be consumed (along with the rocket and its crew) in the intense heat of the sun (Milligan and Sykes 1955f: 5, 6, 8, 12, 14). What identifies the use of each of these ideas as childish is the combination of its validity within a specific frame of reference and its application to a different frame of reference than the one in which it is valid. First of all, the type of combustion referred to by the word ‘fire’ has nothing to do with the process by which the sun produces heat and light. Second, if the sun were nothing more than some sort of campfire in the sky, and moreover one small enough to be extinguished with a bucket of water, it would have to be very close indeed to illuminate the earth and keep it warm. In that case, however, it is hardly likely that a rocket would be required to reach it. Seen from this perspective, Bluebottle’s plan to “prove that the sun is not on fire” by climbing a ladder and holding out a piece of bread to see if it toasts (Milligan and Sykes 1955f: 9) makes as much sense as any plan involving rockets made of wood. Sensible or not, it turns out, for the purposes of this one Goon Show episode at least, that one can indeed “put out the sun” (Milligan and Sykes 1955f: 14) with water carried in a wooden rocket. 4

Putting Together Pieces from Different Puzzles: Children, Goons and Cognitive Constructivism

Faulty though it may be, a form of logic underlies this cosmology. Moreover, it is a logic which bears a strong resemblance to processes of world-building identified by cognitive scientists. Ernst von Glasersfeld has proposed a mechanism which he labels ‘re-creation’ to explain how the mind integrates memories of direct experience and second-hand information into models for assimilating new phenomena. As von Glasersfeld states in “Abstraction, Representation, and Reflection”, “Focused attention picks a chunk of experience, isolates it from what came before and from what follows, and treats it as a closed entity” (2007: 180). All such entities become entries in a mental catalogue which can be called up on demand: “Any element in the present stream of experience may bring forth the re-presentation of a past situation, state, activity or other construct” (von Glasersfeld 2007: 185). Working with these raw data, the process of re-presentation then “coordinates them as ‘content’ into a new ‘form’ or ‘structure’…the resulting new products can be taken as initial ‘givens’ by a future process of structuring, relative to which they then become ‘content’” (von Glasersfeld 2007: 187). The process of re-creation offers a flexible toolbox for organizing phenomena into stable, yet flexible schemata for ordering experience. Through this

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process, new data can be incorporated into an existing schema, or can be used to modify that schema to produce a paradigm applicable to a different set of circumstances. Even granted this flexibility, cognitive schemata are not constructed at random: cognitive development is marked by an increasing ability to assess the relevance of data to schemata, as well as to one another. With a nod to Piaget, Von Glasersfeld goes on to say that (t)he child’s cognitive career has an unquestionable beginning, a first stage during which the infant assimilates, or tries to assimilate, all experience to such fixed action patterns (reflexes) as it has at the start…Except for their initial fixedness, these action patterns function like the schemes which the child a little later begins to coordinate on the basis of experience. (2007: 188) The cognition displayed in The Goon Show is still in the trial-and-error phase of its career. It takes the first “chunks” of previous experience it can find with relevance to the “present stream of experience” and coordinates them into a new structure, with little regard for its soundness. To take just one of many similar examples, in “The Hastings Flyer”, Seagoon and Eccles are standing next to a wall, and need to be at “Pevensey Bay Station” (Milligan 1972: 164). A tricycle is also next to the wall, but Eccles’ statement that “the tricycle ain’t mine” (Milligan 1972: 164) rules it out as a mode of transport. Milligan takes the ideas of ‘wall at current location’ and ‘desired destination of Pevensey Bay’ as initial ‘givens’, adds the related idea that travel is necessary to reach the destination, tosses in the concept that theft is unthinkable (for Eccles and Seagoon at least), but does not scan his memory banks for other plausible means of acquiring transport. Instead, his solution runs as follows: GRAMS. SERIES OF MAD SOUNDS PLAYED AT SPEED TO SOUND LIKE SOME KIND OF COMBUSTION ENGINE. [GREENSLADE]. The sound you are hearing is Neddie and Eccles driving a wall at speed. We thought you ought to know. milligan 1972: 164

Moments like this, as well as providing Wallace Greenslade with an opportunity to earn his announcer’s fee by describing the indescribable, are consistent with “Milligan’s own system of logic, which usually involved leaving out several essential steps of reasoning on the way to a conclusion that seemed correct if inexplicable” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 74).

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Preoperational Perceptions of Time and The Goon Show

Milligan’s omission of steps of reasoning parallels findings by cognitive researchers investigating the perception of time among children. Jacques Montangero has found that primary-school-age children are capable of ­establishing relationships between two variables with reference to the passage of time, but falter when a third variable is introduced (1985: 279–287). He postulates that “In 5- and 6-year-old children, understanding of duration…[is] limited to the relations between pairs of ‘meanings’ ” (Montangero 1985: 285). The ability to integrate more than two variables into a consideration of duration, however, does become present “at least for certain types of problems, in children of 8 years and older” (Montangero 1985: 281). This appears to concur with the findings of Viviane Pouthas that “when asked to reproduce or estimate intervals, 8-year olds respond accurately while younger children perform erratically” (1985: 100). Basing his research framework in part on Piaget’s division of the years between infancy and adolescence into preoperational and operational phases, one of the conclusions Montangero reaches is that “One specific aspect of children’s time judgments is their great variability” (1985: 279). There is considerable variability as well in the time judgements of Milligan’s characters in The Goon Show. The 1956 episode “Drums Along the Mersey” is rife with erratic estimations of time intervals. Inheriting a million pounds from a relative, Baron Seagoon, but told that he cannot spend the money “till yur hundredth birthday”, Neddie Seagoon, whose year of birth is given as 1921, appears to be two-thirds of a century short of cashing in (Milligan 1956d). However, a loophole is presented to him by Minnie Bannister, in the form of an “ancient Peruvian calendar stone” by the reckoning of which Seagoon would “be a hundred years old now” (Milligan 1956d). In order to take advantage of this method of measuring time, Seagoon embarks on a Kon-Tiki-like expedition to prove that his Welsh forebears originally hailed from Peru. As well as introducing the idea that time can pass at different rates based not only on one’s location but one’s ethnicity, this episode takes a cavalier attitude towards the exactitude of calendar dates. Seagoon’s expedition begins “On February” (Milligan 1956d), which is precise enough to eliminate 337 days out of any given year from consideration as the actual one of departure, but narrows it down no further.1 The time scales measured by calendars are not the only ones which get utterly confounded in this episode. While portaging their raft across South 1 At least he made it this much easier: since February is the month that adds a day every leap year, the number of non-February days in a year is a constant.

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America in the Peru-to-Wales leg of their journey,2 Seagoon and Bloodnok become confused about the proper technology for measuring hours and minutes: SEAGOON. […] Wait a minute! This compass: What’s the time by your watch? BLOODNOK. East-nor-nor-east. SEAGOON. Just as I thought. This compass is slow. It says twenty past two. BLOODNOK. Great brown nutted nurglers! Those villains! They’ve switched the compass for the wristwatch. SEAGOON. Gad! And not being men of the sea, we don’t know which is which! milligan 1956d

Later on, the principals in “Drums Along The Mersey” continue to grope, as children in the preoperational phase might, towards being able “to connect the relative orders of succession of events to be able to grasp the concept of duration” (Montangero 1985: 280). In pursuit of Grytpype-Thynne, who has double-crossed them and taken the money, Neddie Seagoon, Bloodnok and the very much alive Baron Seagoon “swam steadily for a week. Then another week, in that order” (Milligan 1956d). It may seem odd that the precise ordering of successive seven-day spans would need to be enumerated, but in the world of this particular episode, even the most trustworthy representatives of authority have trouble placing the duration of time within its proper context: ECCLES. MANAGER. ECCLES. SEAGOON. ECCLES.

Hello my good man, what’s going on ‘ere? Are you a policeman? Yep, wanna know the time? Just a minute. That right! It’s just a minute past. That’s right.

milligan 1956d

Eccles’ estimate offers a one in twenty-four chance of a correct guess, which is about on a par with the roughly one in twenty-eight-and-a-quarter odds3 2 Milligan’s notoriously eccentric sense of geography is good enough in this episode to recognize that the shortest distance from Peru to Wales involves a fair bit of overland travel, raft or no raft. 3 Since the year is never stated, leap years thus become fair game, reducing the odds for a correct guess from a still annoyingly imprecise one in twenty-eight.

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provided by Wallace Greenslade for those wishing to figure the exact start date of Seagoon’s trek. All things considered, though, it is hard to imagine how anything other than a confused and conflicting reckoning of time could be expected from an episode which begins with the announcement that “There will now be thirty minutes of, including several and also one or two” (Milligan 1956d). 6

“And this is where the story really starts”: The Preoperational Mind at Work in Milligan’s Construction of Narrative

Milligan’s approach to storytelling reveals both a preoperational outlook and the expectation that his audience will share this outlook when following the sequencing of his narrative. The straight-ahead, linear arrangement of events which Milligan favours when crafting his Goon Show tales conforms to a standard pattern of story structure abstracted from studies of folktales by Russian formalist Vladimir Propp (1971: 119–125), and summarized by Nancy Stein and Christine Glenn as follows: Setting ↓ Initiating event ↓ Internal response ↓ Attempt ↓ Consequence ↓ Reaction (1982: 273) Stein and Glenn’s researches indicate that “children…exhibit knowledge of story sequences similar to that proposed in the grammars” (1982: 265) for narrative structure offered by Propp and other theorists. However, the ability to recapitulate story structure definitely develops over time: “Even when story events contained cohesive markers, sixth-grade children constructed story sequences that conformed more to the canonical order than did second graders” (Stein and Glenn 1982: 277). The extreme rarity of analepsis, prolepsis, and other temporal disjunctions in Goon Show narratives means that these narratives, for all the sophisticated use of wordplay and sound effects within them, can be easily followed by schoolchildren without any need for rearranging the events

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within them. At least one contemporary press report offered the ­opinion that “if…the Goons are an acquired taste, then it has been acquired by…listeners under eighteen”, corroborated by the assertion by one eight-year-old that “I always listen, and like all my friends I collect their records” (Pedrick 1958: 7). The use of this specific age—eighteen—as a dividing line between segments of The Goon Show’s audience is particularly telling. A goodly amount of The Goon Show’s appeal derives from the challenges which Milligan’s disrupted sense of narrative linearity offer to the criteria for ‘sense’ and ‘nonsense’ which we are expected to acquire in our progress towards adulthood. Britons born after the start of World War ii found something in The Goon Show which set them apart from their parents’ way of making sense out of the world around them. Monty Python member Michael Palin, who was born in 1943, offers a well-observed encapsulation of this experience: “My father would look at the [radio] set as though there was something mechanically wrong with it… he would walk out, leaving me to think , ‘this is mine,’ you know—‘this is all mine.’” (Loose Canon). As well as furnishing an overall narrative framework which puts younger audiences on an equal footing with adults, Milligan often appears to have left his inner child alone behind the typewriter. Milligan’s abrupt jumps in logic are consistent with Stein and Glenn’s finding that “Some children tell stories that do not contain all of the components of an episode or a problem-solving sequence” (1982: 271). The sequences that Milligan invents for his characters to puzzle through compound this problem by throwing in extraneous components to make up for the missing ones. The following solution for finding an entire calendar year which has gone missing contains five lateral leaps of reasoning in its eleven lines: MP2. …where are we going to start looking for this nineteen fifty six? That’s what I want to know. SEAGOON. Let me see, it’s nineteen fifty six AD. MP2. So? SEAGOON. ‘A’ and ‘D’ are the first and fourth letters of the alphabet. MP2. Yes. SEAGOON. One, four… MP3. Er, one for the road. SEAGOON. There are many roads. MP1. Cecil Rhodes. MP3. He lives in Africa. SEAGOON. That’s where I’ll look for it—Africa! milligan 1955e

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Milligan’s sprint-to-the-finish, devil-take-the-hindmost method of ending his stories, and the way in which his story endings jettison continuity and consequentiality, also show a strong similarity to the conclusions of stories as recapitulated by children in the preoperational phase of development. Among the other hypotheses that Stein and Glenn draw from their findings, two are of particular relevance to The Goon Show. One is the idea that “younger children assume that the knowledge of their audience is synonymous with their own knowledge” (Stein and Glenn 1982: 280). It is reasonable to assume that the use of a consistent stable of characters throughout the full-­episodelength stories of The Goon Show would lead Milligan to assume that his audience was familiar with the essentials of the program’s format. As the series wore on, Milligan was increasingly wont to play games with the program’s well-established catchphrases, on the assumption that the audience had heard them enough to know they were coming under given circumstances. In “King Solomon’s Mines”, Little Jim, a falsetto Milligan-voiced creation whose primary function is to intone the words “he’s fallen in the wa-ter” at appropriate junctures, finds out how the other half lives: GRAMS. Splash LITTLE JIM. He’s fallen in the water. SEAGOON. Next. Hup… GRAMS. Splash BLOODNOK. Seagoon. Swallow me thuns, I saw you throw little Jim into the water. SEAGOON. Yes. I thought the change would do him good. BLOODNOK. I warn you Seagoon. If Little Jim is not back for next week’s catch phrase I shall say it myself. Allow me to try; He’s fallen in the water. Un un nn nng…No. It’s no good. I can’t do it. milligan and stephens 1957q

In addition to postulating the assumption of an audience’s familiarity with story material, Stein and Glenn hypothesize that preoperational children’s retellings of stories tend to lose coherence and structure as they progress because an overabundance of details “might overtax the working memory of young elementary school children” (1982: 278). Milligan’s hasty endings, like those of the second-graders observed by Stein and Glenn, can also be seen as the result of mental fatigue. A production schedule that involved Milligan taking six full working days, plus whatever time he needed after a Sunday of rehearsal and recording, to ensure that “the new script [for the following episode] would

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a­ rrive on the Monday morning” (Lewis 1995: 218) would seem to be calculated to produce exhaustion. This exhaustion, in turn, can be seen as the main cause of moments like this one which concludes one of Milligan’s two Robin Hood tales from The Goon Show: SEAGOON & BLUEBOTTLE & ECCLES. (sing) Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen. Robin Hood, Robin Hood with his band of men. Feared by the good, loved by the bad, Robin Hood, how’s your Dad?… (fades into drunken singing) FX. clomp of footsteps [GREENSLADE]. Oh! I do believe they’ve finished. Well, I must be off, catch the bus, you know. Goodnight. milligan and stephens 1956n

7

Time, Task Completion, Preoperational Cognition and The Goon Show

The vagaries of task-related time in The Goon Show also demonstrate a link with preoperational cognition. In her studies of preschoolers, Sylvie Droit has found that “children cannot correctly evaluate the duration of events as adults do until the age of 6” (1998: 178). This, and her related finding that children in “the age range between 1 and 5 years […] move gradually from knowledge about the duration of certain events or activities, acquired through specific personal experiences, to abstract knowledge which allows them to identify the temporal parameters of a variety of situations” (Droit 1998: 186) appear to be very much in line with the tendency of Goon Show characters to stick with their appointed tasks until the bitter end, even if their estimates of when that end will come are a little on the fuzzy side. Having tracked and cornered the missing year 1956 in the episode “The Lost Year”, Seagoon, Bluebottle, Eccles and Bloodnok “waited in the bush for a year. And by then of course the year had gone” (Milligan 1955e). Failure to understand that some tasks have clearlydefined time limits allowed this particular task to remain unaccomplished… or, viewed another way, to accomplish itself. In either case, anyone who has ever baby-sat someone whose age is measured in single digits can attest that limits such as ‘bedtime’ are temporal parameters whose abstract and concrete properties are both considered open to negotiation.4 4 My parents unwittingly opened these negotiations in our household by allowing me to watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The program itself aired after my prescribed bedtime, but the

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The Goon Show and Preoperational Modes of Spatial Cognition

8.1 Childlike Spatial Readings of Objects and Locales With reference to spatial relationships, The Goon Show presents a preoperational cognitive framework very similar to its framework for the cognition of time. As with its temporal schema, the most saliently preoperational feature of The Goon Show’s overall schema for organizing space has to do with its division of space into discrete frames of reference. The inability of these frames of reference to link with one another in a consistent or coherent fashion to allow for smooth conceptual transitions between spatial scales signals the similarity between Milligan’s spatial schema and the workings of the preoperational mind. The childlike nature of Milligan’s reading of space reveals itself not only through the manner in which spatial frameworks are presented in The Goon Show, but also through the context in which these spaces are presented. As a rule, The Goon Show employed a limited subset of the full range of techniques commonly used to move between implied scenic areas in radio theatre. Rattigan situates most of these techniques on the control board, rather than in the writer’s imagination: “(t)he volume fade (fade-in, fade-out, and cross-fade) performs the same types of function in sonic terms as the curtain(s) and lighting cues do in the theatre and the picture dissolve in television and video production” (2002: 211); he also highlights the ways in which music, whether faded in, out, across, or not at all, is frequently “used for scene breakers and as a pointer to new actions or events” (2002: 191). Music is definitely used to separate The Goon Show’s scenes from one another, but it rarely fades in any direction; like the rest of the program’s structural devices, it functions to establish distinct, often abrupt, cuts between places and spaces. It also takes a secondary role in doing so. In spite of the many dramaturgical devices available for signalling a change between conceptually different spaces on radio, Milligan almost exclusively chooses to jump the listener from one locale to another by means of narration. For instance, in “Drums Along the Mersey”, bridging music with a stirring maritime motif and a background of waves and seagulls are used to herald the passage of the story from dry land to the high seas (‘Drums’ recording: 13:50–14:03). In itself, this is easy enough to follow, but Milligan has something up his sleeve to follow it. The trick is revealed when Seagoon informs the audience that “we left the coast of Peru, and using Moriarty’s special map and tempered compass carried

clocks giving the time in cities around the world which were a prominent feature of the main newsroom set gave me the idea that it was always going to be not quite bedtime somewhere.

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the raft inland” (Milligan 1956 d). The net effect of going to all this trouble to have a sound effect establish a locale, only to have the spoken word contradict it, is to reduce the sound effect to the level of a stage convention (and an unreliable one at that). It also reinforces the position of language—particularly language employed in diegesis—as the central element of the mise en scène. In The Goon Show, scenes can be thought of as clicking from one to the next in the manner of a slide show, rather than transitioning smoothly and gradually through actual or implied movement in space. In no episode is this more apparent than in 1956’s “The Nadger Plague”, whose main running gag is the presentation of objects, characters, and settings as a series of lantern slides (Milligan and Stephens 1956g). In fact, the episode itself is introduced by Wallace Greenslade as “the first colour slide” in the lantern (Milligan and Stephens 1956g). The idea of The Goon Show as a slide show (albeit one shown on a projector with a bulb that keeps winking on and off) brings with it the idea that the program is staged in an implied picture plane with only two dimensions, or with an incomplete representation of three. This “flattening” of The Goon Show’s world appears to be consistent with a model of childhood cognition which remains influential on studies in the field. John Eliot notes that “(i)n their initial study, Piaget and Inhelder found that subjects between five and six years of age tended to select a viewpoint comparable to their own viewpoint for all pictures” (1987: 107). The Goon Show often features sophisticated elaborations on the central premise of this perceptual model. After selecting a single viewpoint, and building a ‘flat world’ around it, Milligan rapidly shifts points of view, each time flattening the surrounding frame of spatial reference. To pay another visit to the pillarbox of 1954’s “The Great Bank of England Robbery” (since there’s no danger of those inside it having gotten out since our last visit), one of Seagoon and Eccles’ failed escape attempts involves the listener visualizing a series of intercut “tight two-shots”, as the two men use each other to climb towards the mail slot. The plausibility of this situation holds until its sheer impossibility is pointed out: GREENSLADE. Listeners, may I draw your attention to this problem. Seagoon gets on Eccles’s back, and Eccles, half-way up a wall, stays where he is while Seagoon mounts on his back and so on. What’s the distance between Seagoon, Eccles, and the ground? I’ll tell you, it’s, um… [SEAGOON] AND ECCLES. Wahhhhh! (Crash) GREENSLADE. …exactly. ECCLES. Why don’t you keep your big mouth shut? milligan 1954d

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It is no accident that this suspension of the law of gravity until someone acknowledges it sounds like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. A parallel to The Goon Show’s preoperational and subjective use of spatial framing and implied linear perspective, as well as a potential source of inspiration for it, comes from the animated cartoons which first ran on movie screens during Milligan’s youth. Late silent-era and early sound cartoons, restricted by tight schedules and even tighter budgets, generally left perspective-altering scenic effects to the artist’s pencil, rather than the camera’s lens. More well-equipped than most, the studio in which Pat Sullivan produced the “Felix the Cat” series during the mid-to-late 1920s still had to make do with a rostrum camera which “was stationary; movements in and out of the camera field were mechanically impossible and had to be drawn” (Canemaker 1991: 106). Making a virtue of necessity, “Felix often three-dimensionalizes an action by dynamically bringing it from a far distance to close range” (Canemaker 1991: 106) through a series of progressively larger drawings. However, when the situation calls for it, Felix discards the need to enlarge the drawings, and retains a background object’s original scale from his point of view when importing it into the foreground. To take one example of what happens when Felix does this, “the door of a faraway house could be used, regardless of perspective, as a hatch in a blank wall” (Bendazzi 1994: 57). Felix’s purpose for obtaining the distant object is likely to involve rearranging its basic graphic components into something necessary to his purposes. Sometimes, this task involves combining objects from different distances while retaining their initial pictorial scale: in Arabiantics, Felix pulls the setting sun and two palm trees which frame it from the horizon, and fashions them into a banjo which he uses to serenade a harem (Arabiantics). This form of perspective-swapping is just one of many effects in The Goon Show’s arsenal of cartoony spatial gimmickry. An extended riff on this basic concept forms the meat of the 1957 episode “The Moon Show”. GrytpypeThynne and Moriarty’s claim that “at the end of the last century, during the anti-Moriarty riots in Paris, the dear Count was forced to flee to England, bringing the moon with him”—and “in the daytime, disguised as the sun” no less— appears to be just another of their transparent confidence tricks on Seagoon. However, their hypothesis of lunar portability is given credence by astronomers Eccles and Bluebottle,5 who find the moon “inside de telescope” they are using to view it (Milligan and Stephens 1957c). The confusion as to which is 5 This is one of the duo’s few appearances during The Goon Show’s entire ten-season run which shows them holding jobs which require either of them, much less both, to display any perceptible degree of intellectual functioning.

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the genuine moon is solved, for simpler minds at least, by another a­ pparent ­Grytpype-Thynne-and-Moriarty swindle. Holding a jam jar up to the sky, Grytpype-­Thynne has no trouble at all in convincing Seagoon that the moon is now “in the jam jar” (Milligan and Stephens 1957c). Con job or not, the closing line of narration tells us, with no trace of irony in Wallace Greenslade’s voice, that this is “how Mr Seagoon brought the genuine moon back to England” (Milligan and Stephens 1957c). In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the specific fictional world of this episode must then be assumed to have multiple moons which can be detached from the sky and trapped by those who dare to believe in such things. The retention of the original scale of an object through distances in an implied pictorial field in The Goon Show is more than simply a reminder that “multiple frames of reference must be coordinated” (Cohen 1985: 5) in the learning of tasks involving spatial cognition. It also provides another link between preoperational cognition and Milligan’s Goon Show writing. Both the variability of container-to-object ratios and the conflation of spatial scales in The Goon Show display similarities with the ways in which children in the primary grades depict their world. One recent study of spatial scales in children’s drawings found that, regardless of the size or configuration of the ground in which to draw figures, “7-year-olds…showed some habitual, average figure size in drawing that did not differ between drawing conditions” (Lange-Küttner 2009: 923). The author of this study, C. Lange-Küttner, notes that, in contrast to the children in older age groups, the seven-year-olds “would draw a figure in a size that was independent of how much available area there was in each space system. In other words, the figures were not yet projections in space” (2009: 923). Figures in The Goon Show appear not to have attained the status of projections in space, either. Instead, they are conceived as being close at hand or off in the distance, increasing or diminishing in scale only on those infrequent occasions which demand it. The rest of the time, the confines and constraints of the space around Goon Show characters seem to matter as much to Milligan as they might to one of Lange-Küttner’s seven-year-old subjects. Of course, a space is more than just so much emptiness: “As Sauvy and Sauvy (1974) put it, our actions define our spaces and, in turn, our spaces are defined by our activities” (qtd. in Eliot 1987: 103–104). In The Goon Show, however, any activity at all may suddenly commence without warning; therefore, every space depicted must be scaled to fit any activity. Milligan was constantly making his audiences wonder what hidden depths lay in London’s trash cans for those bold enough to explore them:

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SEAGOON. [on] Curse—trapped inside a dark, donk dustbin. But wait—[slowly]—there’s somebody in the dustbin with me! … [in a whisper] He’s coming over… I’ll—I’ll pretend I haven’t seen him. GRAMS. rapid, echoed footsteps approach from far distance and eventually stop ECCLES. [smacks lips] Hellooooo. [draws applause] Ta, ta, ta SEAGOON. It’s the famous Eccles. ECCLES. It’s the famous Eccles. SEAGOON. How did you get in this dustbin? ECCLES. I’ve got influence. I know the man at the door. milligan and stephens 1956j

It is fitting in this case that Eccles, The Goon Show’s unreconstructed man-child, has found his way into the dustbin first. This is the same Eccles, after all, who helps Seagoon “to stack at least fifty to a hundred chairs” (Milligan 1972: 68) to reach the window of a prison cell which up to that very moment had contained nothing other than Seagoon and Eccles themselves (Milligan 1972: 66). Mental age and sophistication, however, are no barriers to the occupation of what appear to an outside observer to be cramped quarters. Two of The Goon Show’s more ‘grown-up’ characters, Seagoon and Grytpype-Thynne, are regularly introduced to one another under circumstances similar to the following exchange of pleasantries in a seventeenth-century London coffeehouse: SEAGOON. Now, with whom can I make gossip, this chilly morn? I see nobody, though, and nobody sees me. What a coincident, egad, spon, to be sure, hern hern, hi diddle dee, needle nardle noo, splin splan splon, ying ton iddle-i-po. And remember, you’ve got to go owwwww! GRYTPYPE-THYNNE. How very interesting that was. SEAGOON. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you standing in that coffee pot. GRYTPYPE-THYNNE. I know, we had the lid down. milligan and stephens 1956l

The incongruity of the violation of spatial scales is merely the surface of the joke just quoted. In order to enter into the spirit of the joke, the listener must adopt a preoperational mode of thinking, and conceptualize a space which contains an object which contains a space of its own. Instead of u ­ nderstanding a space

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contained by an object to be of necessity smaller than the space containing the object, this mode of thinking grants all spaces equal status, until experience proves otherwise. When asked to create a mental picture from scratch, the preoperational mind says ‘a space exists here’ and ‘a space exists there’, and without any further checking of relative dimensions or l­ocation, proceeds to place people in these spaces, and scales the spaces to fit the people. “It must be a drowning cartoonist”6: Other Childlike AnimationBased Spatial Reconfigurations in The Goon Show Several of Milligan’s other devices for distorting space have antecedents in Felix the Cat cartoons. A Goon-like use of telecommunications to transmit the messenger as well as the message shows up in 1924’s Felix Doubles for Darwin: looking for a quick way to get to Africa, Felix crawls inside a transatlantic telegraph cable. At his destination, he emerges from a telegraph key in the form of a series of dots and dashes, which rearrange themselves, first into the word “FELIX”, then into Felix himself (Felix Doubles). With Felix, as with The Goon Show, language has both a physical and a symbolic presence. Felix’s status as a creature of a visual medium, however, grants him a different degree of license when giving physical form to the symbols from which language is made. In The Non-stop Fright, Felix comes across a discarded newspaper. To give himself greater comfort while reading the paper, Felix repurposes the numbers in a nearby road sign, transforming the numeral 4 in “478 Miles” into a chair, the 8 into a pair of pince-nez spectacles, and the 7 into a pipe (Non-stop Fright). In common with other American animated cartoons of this period, the silent Felixes employ language as both an aural and a visual symbol. Following the tradition established by newspaper comics around the turn of the twentieth century, sound effects were written out onomatopoeically, their letters often distorted by animation for greater impact. The Goon Show is also heir to this tradition: even with the panoply of pre-recorded effects and live sound effects materiel at his disposal, Milligan often opted to use cartoony onomatopoeia instead. Bluebottle claims the privilege of speaking his own sound effects at every opportunity, delivering them with the gusto of a schoolboy at recess reading The Beano aloud to his chums: 8.2

6 This piece of information is offered by Bloodnok as an explanation for why the word “Helpppppppppp!” can be seen emerging from the English Channel in a “thinks-type bubble” during the 1958 episode “The String Robberies” (Milligan 1975: 103).

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BLUEBOTTLE. Do you think you can take Bluebottle alive? Fixes Moriarty with hypnotic gaze—toot toot toot… milligan 1975: 129

Bluebottle’s proficiency with cartoonish sounds extends beyond the invention of sounds for actions such as hypnotism which make no sound at all—it also allows him to convert verbs with no sonic component into onomatopoeia by using them as sound effects: BLUEBOTTLE. I don’t like this game. I don’t like all these hairy Germans, they hitted me. Hitttt…Hitttt…Hitteeeeeeee, they went. milligan 1975: 130

Bluebottle is not the only Goon Show character who speaks his own sound effects. Willium is so prone to being rendered hors de combat by sneak attacks that the onomatopoeia becomes his personal shorthand for explaining what has befallen him: WILLIUM. Well sir, it’s like this, you see; at twelve thirty, a monster lorry pull up outside, ten men jump out and wallop me on the ‘ead. I turn round to see who it was, and “wallop, wallop” on my ‘ead again. I stood up, you see, ‘ave a quick vada, no one there, and “wallop, wallop, wallop” all on my ‘ead. As I took out me notebooks, all official like, “wallop, wallop, wallop” on my ‘ead, all wallops, all over my ‘ead. ‘Missing Number 10’ recording: 4:49–5:16

Sometimes, onomatopoeia becomes a matter of necessity, as in the case of the underequipped town crier in “Robin Hood (and his Mirry Mon)”: JIM SPRIGGS. Ding-dong! Clang! Clang-ding-dong-dang-dang! Hear ye! Ding-dang! Stolen—one bell! ‘Mirry Mon’ recording: 2:06–2:19

Another aspect of the cartoon and comic strip legacy in The Goon Show which traverses the boundary between language as a conceptual and a material entity is Milligan’s use of a pictorial convention which would seem superfluous, to say the least, on radio: speech and thought balloons. Milligan’s specific uses of speech and thought balloons are another way in which The Goon Show parallels the silent Felix cartoons. Following a convention already established

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in American animation, the speech balloons in the Felixes functioned as in-­ picture title cards, pausing the action long enough for the audience to read the dialogue without distraction. Although similar to other silent cartoons in this respect, the Felix the Cat series had a significant difference which came to define it: the extent to which the metalinguistic conceptual and emotional content which appeared in place of thought balloons became concretized as part of the physical environment. Felix’s ingenious handicraft using the question marks and exclamation points which appeared above his head became one of his trademarks. The more prolonged its use by Felix, the more likely the converted punctuation was to shed all trappings of its original symbolic function, and become a fully integrated part of the physical environment. In Two-Lip Time, an exclamation point which has been serving as a paddle for a wooden shoe Felix uses as a canoe loses its solid black coloration and characteristic shape and appears as a black-outlined canoe paddle, its blade now tapering to a narrow shaft, by the time Felix beaches his improvised watercraft (Two-Lip Time). On occasion, however, pictorially-expressed mental activity could turn against Felix: in Forty Winks, he falls asleep in a pair of pants hanging from a clothesline; the saw cutting through a log which emerges in a cloud from his head as a metaphor for sleep continues cutting through the clothesline, dropping Felix to the ground and waking him (Forty Winks). In The Goon Show, characters express their thoughts in balloons which not only have a recognizable physical form, but are subject to whatever conditions prevail in their surroundings: SEAGOON. (slightly muffled) Hello, folks. Hello, folks. I’m speaking to you now from inside the tiger skin. From now on, I shall only speak in think bubbles so that the Bengal tiger will not attack me. ECCLES. (slightly muffled) Hullo? Hullo? Dat you, Neddie? SEAGOON. (slightly muffled) Thinks… yes, it’s me, Eccles. ECCLES. (slightly muffled) Then, why don’t you answer me? SEAGOON. (slightly muffled) Thinks… because I only talk in thinks bubbles. ECCLES. (slightly muffled) Oh, well, how can I see thinks bubbles when I’m inside this Bengal tiger? SEAGOON. (slightly muffled) Thinks… Well, open the window. milligan and stephens 1957m

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Eccles’ inability to read Seagoon’s thought balloons is due, not to the immateriality of their content, but to the incontestable fact that it is too dark inside a tiger to read anything at all. “I have got a Boy Scout street map of Shanghai”7: Childlike Geography in The Goon Show It can be tempting to dismiss the preoperational method of mapping space, and Milligan’s comic recreation of it, as “wrong” or “incomplete”. A note of caution has been sounded against this line of thinking by cognitive scientist Roger Downs:

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…consider children’s graphic representations of space. A typical set of judgments would suggest that these representations are arbitrary, inconsistent, and inaccurate. […] Specifically, the basis for these judgments is the use of…multiple perspectives, and multiple scales within the same representation. (1985: 332) Downs’ view is that such judgements are based on canons of aesthetics rather than absolutes, and that many apparently childish representations of space are “a creative response to some fundamental problems of representation—the problem of continuity and the problem of simultaneity” (1985: 332). Regardless of how sophisticated our techniques and technologies for mapping space become, the understanding that one cannot perceive two discrete spaces from the same perspective at the same time forms the core of our understanding of “the vast difference between the world as described through scale geometry and the world as experienced” (Treib 1980: 10). Rather than being primitive, untutored and erroneous, children’s representations of space can thus be seen as “a creative, sophisticated effort to come to terms with this difference, with multiple scales and perspectives as one possible graphic response” (Downs 1985: 333). This is worth keeping in mind any time a child, or a Goon, presents us with something like this: EIDELBURGER. […] Now, Neddie, here is a map-plan of the Louvre and the surrounding streets. F.X. LONG UNFOLDING. SEAGOON. You take one end. 7 This statement represents one of Bluebottle’s rare offers of actually useful help: the map in question leads Seagoon to the diabolical mastermind of 1957’s “Emperor of the Universe” (Milligan and Stephens 1957a).

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F.X. UNFOLDING. THE MAP BEING UNFOLDED CONTINUES FOR A WHOLE MINUTE. SEAGOON. It’s big, isn’t it? EIDELBURGER.  (in the distance) Yes, it is! This bit here shows the Rue de la Paix. SEAGOON.  Good heavens, you’re miles away—walk straight up that street—take the second on the left—I’ll be ­waiting for you. F.X. TAXI PULLS UP. EIDELBURGER. I took a taxi—it was too far. milligan 1972: 107

To borrow a term from cartography, the key to the comedy in this sequence is the conceptual substitution of the map for the actual space it represents. As Marc Treib notes, “Because it is a conventionalized form, the map imposes a structure on the world, rather than merely describing it” (1980: 6). Descriptive convention can be hard to separate from reality: it is easy enough at the best of times to get lost in a map; losing oneself becomes all the easier when the map’s apparent scale approaches 1:1. As conceived by Milligan, space can also be mapped by conventionalized structures used in other fields of human endeavour. Seagoon’s crew furnishes a tidy solution to the vexing question of how to navigate at sea when one is set adrift on a piano: BLOODNOK. Ohhh—Seagoon—take over the keyboard, I can’t steer any more. SEAGOON. Eccles? Take over the keyboard. ECCLES. I can’t. I haven’t brought my music. SEAGOON. You’ll have to busk for the next three miles. milligan 1972: 110

The necessity in radio of using sound on its own to describe space which can only be navigated in the ‘real world’ using visuals already implies a multiplicity of perspectives in spatial mapping. Employing notation used to denote specific frequencies of sound in order to map a sonically-conceptualized space is a solution so intuitively obvious, and so elegantly simple, that a child could have come up with it. The notion that, in the absence of sheet music, improvisation will suffice to find one’s way through unknown spaces is a variation on this theme. Viewed from the perspective of a child, the overall world map of The Goon Show also begins to make a bit more sense. In a survey of the research literature

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on children’s construction of cognitive maps, Alexander Siegel and Jennifer Cousins8 summarize the findings of a number of researches as follows: As children travel, they encode social information in their maps. They learn where different behavior settings are, where to go to find things, people, personal involvements, or help. […] They develop normative expectations about social life and social forms. (1985: 360–361) Extrapolating this idea to the journeys taken by the characters in The Goon Show transforms Milligan’s naïve anglocentrism into this kind of normative expectation. No matter where Neddy Seagoon’s travels take him, his primary contact is with other Britons. In the preponderance of cases, this restriction of acquaintanceship is the by-product of Seagoon’s travels being at the behest of British civilian or military authority. The need to involve the other members of The Goon Show’s stock of regular characters is another contributing factor to Seagoon’s tendency to associate primarily with British colonies of expatriates, diplomatic missions and military garrisons when abroad. This tendency, which parallels the extension of London municipal services to the four corners of the earth described in the previous chapter, also helps to extend The Goon Show’s cognitive world map from a purely spatial to a social and conceptual dimension. British social and power structures can take hold any place on earth, simply by virtue of one Briton’s presence there. Major Bloodnok in particular has the ability to crop up anywhere and everywhere, offering no justification for his presence, and acting as if he has as much right to be wherever he is as the local flora and fauna. In “The Africa Ship Canal”, which recounts events purporting to take place in 1957, Bloodnok is a district commissioner somewhere in the “Congo jungle” (Milligan and Stephens 1957h: 5). Since no part of the Congo basin was ever British territory, it is hard to say whether his presence as an official of the Colonial Office would have come as a bigger surprise to the French or Belgians who did control the area at the time, or to the Congolese themselves. Not only does The Goon Show portray Britons as the ‘natural’ inhabitants of anywhere in particular, it also foregrounds this attitude’s corollary: all indigenous people, in the presence of a single Briton, are automatically relegated to the status of landmarks, useful in establishing the setting, but little else. The idea that non-Britons function chiefly as elements of the background, to be deployed only when absolutely necessary, in the non-British parts of The Goon Show’s world recurs throughout the series; in no episode, however, is this 8 No relation to the present author, to the best of his knowledge.

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­ otion made more explicit than in “Shangri-La Again”. After being chased out n of Peking by invading Japanese forces, Seagoon, Bloodnok and the remainder of the British legation make a startling discovery in their peregrinations to the fabled valley of Shangri-La: Asia, it would seem, is running dangerously low on Asians. This is as good an explanation as any for the fact that the elite of the valley are the decidedly Caucasian “head Lama” Henry Crun, his likewise Caucasian companion and consort Minnie Bannister, and his equally non-Oriental heir apparent Bluebottle (Milligan 1955c). After Seagoon’s group’s arrival, the only remotely Asian character heard for the rest of the episode is a “Shangrioo-la-la girl” voiced for one short line by Sellers (Milligan 1955c). The Goon Show never leaves Britain in a conceptual sense, which is probably just as well, since, no matter where their travels take them, Milligan’s characters have a knack for unexpectedly winding up smack-dab in the heart of Britain. In “The Mummified Priest”, Seagoon’s party wends its way “for ten months” through the maze of tunnels inside an ancient Egyptian tomb, only to find themselves in the same cellar in the British Museum where Henry Crun had been left to “starve to death” earlier in the episode (Milligan 1958d). It would be all too easy to stop there, as “The Mummified Priest” does, and simply say that Milligan plays at being a child for the purposes of having his audience play at being children, and thus, like many an episode of The Goon Show, declare the destination reached by default. No matter how tempting it is to see the return to childhood as an end in itself, the fact remains that The Goon Show was conceived with an adult audience in mind. Any regression on the part of Milligan, and by implication on the part of his audience, must be seen as a choice informed by a world-view constructed from an adult’s perspective. The Goon Show comes across as the product of a mind which saw not only adult life, but contemporary life, and the prospects for the future, as unpredictable and threatening. A half-century and more into that future, this outlook remains relevant, and takes on an added degree of eerie prescience. The next chapter examines aspects of time, space, and narrative in the world that Milligan created for The Goon Show, and the ways in which these aspects parallel and prefigure trends and tendencies in postmodern thought.

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The Accordion Plays a New Tune before Anyone Can Write It Down: Anticipations of Postmodernism in The Goon Show In The Goon Show, Spike Milligan created a fictional world where time and space are inconstant. The changeability and inconsistency which mark this world are best negotiated using cognitive strategies which most of us abandoned in our primary-school years. It is one thing to posit a world like this; it is another to return to it over a hundred times to tell its continuing story, as ­Milligan did. As with any creator of an ongoing fictional world in a broadcast series, Milligan had a choice each time he returned to the world of The Goon Show. He could stick to paths well-travelled and familiar to himself and his listeners, or he could strike out and blaze new trails. In his writing for The Goon Show, Milligan displayed a desire and a tendency to do the latter. Milligan’s voyages of discovery landed him on conceptual terra incognita that looks strangely familiar to us today. Even so, much of what Milligan unleashed upon the British public every time The Goon Show was broadcast may have seemed to his contemporaries to be calculated to produce the reaction attributed to a possibly apocryphal figure—a “psychiatrist who asked if he might attend a rehearsal. He listened unattentively and unmoved to the end, rose and left the studio, saying ‘Thank you. I’ve had enough’” (Bennett 1955: 9). Nearly twenty years after the broadcast of the last Goon Show episode, someone put a name to what had overwhelmed the good psychiatrist, without knowing that he had even done so. With an esprit d’escalier which Milligan might appreciate, Jean-François Lyotard summed up his impressions of many recent ­cultural developments which resembled The Goon Show’s “weekly outpouring of ­surreal laughs and explosions” (Sale 2011), using a single, newly-minted word: postmodernism. The word ‘postmodernism’ has come to mean so many things to so many people that a return to first principles is necessary, as a reminder of what Lyotard was trying to convey when he wrote The Postmodern Condition in 1979. The key to understanding Lyotard’s motivation for coining the term ‘­postmodernism’ is that he sought to describe, not a movement nor an historical period, but a state of mind. In ‘postmodernism’, then, “The ‘post-’ indicates something like a conversion: a new direction from the previous one” (Lyotard 1993: 76). For Lyotard, the postmodern can be found in any attitude which ­self-consciously © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004310704_009

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and purposively calls into question the accepted wisdom which sets the current limits of progress for any area of human understanding: The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia of the unattainable; but which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. lyotard 1984: 81

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Pipping Them at the Postmodern: Milligan the Advance Scout

Two aspects of this general idea are particularly important in giving a sense that Milligan’s writing in the 1950s bore a distinctly postmodern stamp. First off, Milligan’s style and sense of humour served to interrogate normative ­patterns of construction and discourse within the craft of comedy writing, as they existed when he entered the field in earnest around 1950. Second, and just as importantly, this interrogation was not the accidental by-product of an innate, inexplicable knack, but the result of Milligan’s conscious desire to be a force for change in his chosen field. A “search for new presentations” in ways which consistently “denied itself the solace of good forms” was one of the most striking features of The Goon Show, for those who first encountered it as listeners. This, after all, was the program that “sloughed off all resemblances to other radio shows, and, indeed, to normal human activities” (Bennett 1955: 9). Whether the medium was radio, television or film, Milligan’s writing was noted for its tendency to “take the mickey out of a host of stock…situations” (Hutchinson 1955: 11). Eight years into The Goon Show’s run, the Radio Times, house organ of the same bbc which broadcast both Milligan’s mickey-taking work and the stock situations which were its targets, offered the assessment that “Broadcasting has never recovered from” the program’s “farrago of inspired nonsense which is a talking point in classrooms, clubs and colleges” (‘Sound and Laughter’). If the official voice of official broadcasting took some little time in conferring a degree of legitimacy on Milligan’s experiments, his colleagues were ­rather  quicker to recognize how startlingly original Goon humour was. This recognition, in many cases, was a pivotal factor in making them choose to work  with him. Eric Sykes’ association with Milligan as a co-writer began with  an uncharacteristic step he took as a result of listening to The Goon

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Show: “I did ­something which I would never normally have done and wrote to Spike Milligan to tell him how much I had enjoyed the programme” (Farnes 1997: 159). For his part, Harry Secombe speaks of his time with The Goons in terms redolent of the sense of mission and esprit de corps shared by the entire group: We were against the established form of presentation [in comedy]. At the time we began, the profession was full of stand-up comics who came on and told a string of jokes and finished with either a song or a dance. Our approach was different. farnes 1997: 20–21

It is important not only to see The Goon Show as the outcome of an ‘approach’ which questioned the status quo ante in comedy, but to see this approach as a deliberate and calculated one. Over and above displaying a pattern of trailblazing in his work that was noted by others, Milligan expressed an awareness that he was setting forth into new areas. For Milligan, laughter was not a bang-bang Pavlovian response to simple, unchallenging stimuli. Comedy writing, therefore, was not merely a question of salting a script with the types of jokes and references that others had used to get laughs: “what I try to do is to do what the patrols do, I try to go out into enemy territory where nothing has happened before” (Scudamore 1985: 282). The military metaphor is more than a colourful turn of phrase pulled out of the air: Milligan knew who the enemy was, and what their tactics looked like: I’ve always had to fight my way through the Benny Hills in the wilderness. They are like the main bunch of the army, they know the obvious, and what they think the audience wants—bums, knockers, tits, funny double-entendre jokes, things like that. scudamore 1985: 282

If comedy reconnaissance forays amid barrages of tit-and-bum banalities were risky, Milligan made it clear that he viewed taking the safe road as a virtual death sentence. His description of the fate of a fellow comedian who did so is particularly telling: A new ‘star’ whom [Milligan and Jimmy Grafton] wrote for has appeared on Variety Bandbox, Robert Moreton, a droll, who told ‘Merry Japes’ from his Bumper Fun Book; he was like a lot of five-minute wonders, as soon as he’d been aired enough, he would be gently left off the bbc star list.

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Not finding work, he committed suicide, no one from the bbc was at his funeral, still he was, and that’s what mattered. milligan 1991: 214

Milligan had a strategy to avoid becoming collateral damage in the houseto-house fighting that constitutes mass media laugh-making. The following ­description of it is an apologia for his preferred working method, and an explanation of why that method involved constant experimentation: I try out new characters, new techniques, partly because I get bored very quickly. A comic is always the first person to laugh at his own joke and it’s difficult to enjoy something when you’ve heard it before. behan 1988: 142

A low threshold of boredom is not shed easily; neither is a low opinion of the human race. Just as “Milligan managed to distance his best work from tired narrative forms” (Barnes 2002: 208), he distanced himself intellectually and emotionally from those he perceived as producing them. His uncompromising views of the mission of the true comedian led him to pass summary judgement even on his most stalwart comrades. Eric Sykes was dismissed by Milligan as “middle of the road—he was covered in tyre marks” (Farnes 1997: 53). As noted earlier, Milligan delivered a similar verdict of dereliction of duty to originality in comedy on his mentor and original writing partner Jimmy Grafton: “I was obviously writing superior comedy to him…I used to make up jokes and he’d say I’ve never heard that joke’, and I’d say, ‘well, I make them up’” (Behan 1988: 134). Larry Stephens, enough of a writer to share a credit with Milligan on forty-two episodes of The Goon Show “was never really a writer, I suppose. Larry would occasionally think of an idea, but by then the show was over” (Farnes 1997: 53). Milligan’s assessment of his own comedy career before The Goon Show is no less damning, tinged though it is with expressions of a desire to excel. His first paying writing job, acquired under Grafton’s aegis, was “writing for a piss poor comic called Derek Roy who was as funny as a baby with cancer. I thought that original material that wasn’t begging the laughs would be so much better” (Behan 1988: 134). Milligan appended the first such script he contributed to, for a 1949 episode of Derek Roy’s radio program Hip Hip Hoo Roy,1 to his volume of reminiscences entitled Peace Work (1991: 219–237). His purpose in doing so was twofold: he included the entire script “to show what level comedy was in forty 1 This title should tell you everything you need to know about how good it must have been. The script appended to Peace Work removes most of the residual doubt.

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years ago”, but “underlined some of the jokes that were mine” (Milligan 1991: 218) to demonstrate that he already knew how to rise above it. The advance knowledge that he was entering a field that was ripe for change makes some of Milligan’s later statements about the impact of The Goon Show come off as more than a little disingenuous: “In retrospect, I now realise that it was a breakthrough on a major scale in British humour, the like of which was hard to follow” (Farnes 1997: 61). There is no retrospect about it: the man knew that he was after breakthroughs all along. 2

Milligan’s Deconstructions of History and Historical Fictions

The Goon Show offers a catalogue of breakthroughs in a variety of fields of endeavour: Everest is climbed from the inside; dustbins are made which can not only withstand the ravages of nuclear warfare, but travel up Niagara Falls while doing so; a dry canal is cut across Africa, not for shipping, but as a conduit for air travel; a lunar expedition is mounted by fitting rockets to the Albert Memorial. There is more to this list of silly ‘firsts’ than meets the eye. Whenever an episode of The Goon Show features such a discovery, it hijacks the real-world accomplishment which inspired it, and spirits it far away from its original destination. Guided by parody and hyperbole, Milligan effects “an internal erosion of the legitimacy principle” (Lyotard 1984: 39) by which the initial undertaking was judged to be a successful attempt within existing discourses of human enterprise and discovery. Among the best-known of Milligan’s concentrated exercises in ironically interrogating unjustifiably grandiose human endeavour is the 1956 episode “The Jet-Propelled Guided naafi”. For no other reason than to show it can be done, “strolling Prime Minister of no fixed address” Neddy Seagoon has a servicemen’s cafeteria with the attributes of an intercontinental ballistic missile “Shot to Malaya and set up in seven seconds” (Milligan 1956a). Impressive as this accomplishment is, it brings with it a further challenge. Not only is the newly-launched soldiers’ caff untold miles from the nearest British soldier, but it is awash with fresh tea—“ten thousand cups”, to be precise, brewed by the naafi manager upon touchdown, presumably as part of a pre-programmed launching protocol (Milligan 1956a). In a spectacular feat of Cold War-era brinksmanship, Seagoon rises to the challenge by ordering a covert military operation to the trouble spot: “Twelve hundred planes, ten thousand men. All pledged to avert tea-wastage” (Milligan 1956a). As a demonstration of the lengths that officialdom will go to in order to avoid being caught out in an error of judgement, “The Jet-Propelled Guided naafi” is rivalled only by a 1957 special episode of The Goon Show entitled “The

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Reason Why”, which purports to chronicle the 1876 acquisition of an Egyptian obelisk by the British Government to fill an empty space in the Thames ­Embankment. Although the monument can supposedly be gotten for free, the expenses incurred in transporting it to the port of Alexandria, raising it when it sinks to the bottom of the harbour, ransoming Seagoon from a tribe of Bedouins who have captured him for no reason deemed worth explaining, chartering “a squadron of Arab dhows to scour the seven seas” when the obelisk (now encased in a “buoyant wooden jacket”) comes loose from the rope towing it, and finally erecting the recovered obelisk in London, come to the grand total of “a hundred and eighty thousand pounds, eight shillings” (Milligan and Stephens 1957k). The closing narration of “The Reason Why” identifies Milligan’s poke at ­extravagance in the name of penny-pinching as “perhaps…the authentic story of Cleopatra’s Needle” (Milligan and Stephens 1957k), the name popularly given to the obelisk referred to in the episode. Although Milligan deliberately calls the veracity of the events just related into question by identifying his historical consultant as “Professor Toynbee, that is Professor Jim Toynbee of Hyde Park Railings” (Milligan and Stephens 1957k), their validity, from at least one postmodern point of view, is beyond reproach. Historian Hayden White lays bare the mechanism through which historiography creates its own sense of validity: Many modern historians hold that narrative discourse, far from being a neutral medium for the representation of historical events and processes, is the very stuff of a mythic view of reality, conceptual or pseudoconceptual “content” which, when used to represent real events, endows them with an illusory coherence and charges them with the kinds of meanings more characteristic of oneiric than of waking thought. (1987: ix) As well as possessing many of the contours of oneiric thought, Milligan’s i­nterrogations of grand narratives in The Goon Show possess Hayden White’s “­illusory coherence”, in that they describe occurrences which, no matter how far-fetched and outré, feature behaviour that seems believable, if human ­nature is viewed as being essentially irrational. A Goon Show story which took its basis from a first-hand account of World War Two espionage furnishes an excellent example of Milligan elaborating on the already surreal nature of actual events to create something out of a fevered dream. “I Was Monty’s Treble”, from 1958, signals in its announced ­on-air title that it intends to outdo the exploits related by M.E. Clifton James in his ­autobiographical I Was Monty’s Double by at least fifty percent. The main plot, in fact, begins with three versions of Viscount Montgomery in the field

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(or field marshal) of play, in the form of “John Mills…Richard Attenborough [and] ­Anthony Steele” (Milligan 1958i). The idea that portraying a given personage on film (as each of the above-named actors had) entitles someone to embody that personage retroactively in real life is a deliberate appropriation by Milligan of what Hayden White describes as “the confusion of historical individuals with the kinds of ‘characterization’ of them required for discursive purposes” (1998: 1199). The subsequent judgement by a Goon Show Wehrmacht officer that “some casting director has blundered” (‘Monty’s Treble’ recording: 5:25–5:28) in the choice of Steele as Montgomery demonstrates that discursive do purposes have their limits, though. From there on in, dream-logic declares martial law on this episode, e­ nforcing its will in ways that go beyond even Milligan’s usual degree of strangeness. ­Determining that they require a minimum of “forty thousand Monty’s doubles” to keep the Germans guessing, The War Office leaps into action, manufacturing the ersatz generals at a rate that soon induces something well beyond confusion in the enemy (Milligan 1958i). Foiled in their attempts to abscond with either “the original” Montgomery or “the plans of an original Fred Montgomery”, German agents do at least manage to destroy a marble “statue of Monty’s future movements” (Milligan 1958i). Their moment of triumph is short-lived: what they destroyed “was in fact only a statue of John Mills and Richard A ­ ttenborough’s future movements” (Milligan 1958i). Thwarted by the fragmentation of a historical individual by means of his subsequent cinema characterizations, the Germans still have one more trick up their sleeves. The Battle of El Alamein, won by the British, turns out to be “a fake” in the form of “Alamein’s double, played by Eccles”—a revelation which surprises Eccles no less than anybody else (‘Monty’s Treble’ recording: 26:59–27:06). Milligan’s ability to exceed the strangeness of historical truths that appeared stranger than fiction had done a previous World War ii tour of duty in The Goon Show. The 1956 episode “The Man Who Never Was”2 shares its title with Ewen Montagu’s book detailing British Intelligence’s deception involving a corpse and bogus plans for an Allied invasion of Sicily. This is about all it shares with it. Turning the tables on history, Montagu’s account of it, and everything else in sight, Milligan instead has planted intelligence wash ashore in Britain, secreted in the hollow heel of “an uncooked German Army boot” (Milligan 2 This episode was remade in 1958, under the same title, with a few alterations by Milligan and Larry Stephens to their original script. One of these alterations involved inserting a line of dialogue to spell out the payoff to the episode. Originally, this had simply been a string of sound effects, but it must have come across ambiguously enough for an explanation to be deemed necessary in the remake.

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and Stephens 1956e). The microfilm found inside the boot heel is discovered to contain “plans of a secret German weapon” (Milligan and Stephens 1956e). In order to give the Germans the vital misinformation that they haven’t got the plans, the British Army comes up with a masterstroke of counter-intelligence: “we put a copy of German microfilm in the pocket of a man dressed up as a German Naval officer and float him ashore from a submarine onto the enemy coast” (Milligan and Stephens 1956e). The choice of the still-very-alive Eccles for this mission begs the question of whether Eccles is considered to be the next best thing to a corpse, or somehow an improvement on one. This stratagem is abandoned, however, at Bluebottle’s announcement that Woolwich A ­ rsenal3 has “gotted ready the secret German weapon, which they have builded from the microfilm plan” (Milligan and Stephens 1956e). Tested in secret, behind a “forty inch, anti-gamma-ray, lead-lined wall” (Milligan and Stephens 1956e), the secret weapon proves to be among the most fiendish ways ever d­ evised for bringing an episode of The Goon Show to an abrupt, nonsensical end: “A barrel organ” (Milligan and Stephens 1958).4 It is no accident that Milligan’s versions of two events which are painted by history as victories for Britain and its allies instead have this side getting the worst of it: The Goon Show is a chronicle of Britain in moments of defeat. By fixing his gaze on moments traditionally portrayed as triumphs of British valor and ingenuity, and reimagining them as idiotic failures, Milligan uses for the purposes of comedy an idea that would be taken up by Lyotard, Hayden White, and other postmodern critics of one-dimensional, hegemonic readings of history. In “The Sign of History”, Lyotard argues that the “pretensions to universal validity in terms of historico-political reality” of ideologically-governed beliefs can be interrogated by a close reading of the same historical events which ideologies use to justify themselves (1989: 394). For Lyotard, all readings of h ­ istory 3 Given Milligan’s propensity for introducing F.A. match results into odd moments of his scripts, it comes as rather a surprise that the frequent mentions of the word ‘arsenal’ and ‘Woolwich Arsenal’ (the original full name of the club now referred to by the shorter generic title for an armoury) lead to not a single non sequitur with a football reference. The aggregate score over the course of the two legs of The Goon Show’s encounter with “The Man Who Never Was” is Arsenal 10, Milligan nil. 4 This is the payoff referred to in an earlier footnote. The ‘topper’ to this version of the payoff is also a little stronger, not to mention more surreal. Rather than having British High Command run away from the barrel organ, screaming (Milligan and Stephens 1956e), Milligan and Stephens use their second attempt to give Bloodnok the following exhortation: “Don’t waste it! Eccles! Up on the top and start scratching. Secombe, the tin mug and off we go!” The sound of a “coin dropped in a tin mug” (Milligan and Stephens 1958) is proof of the efficacy of this change of tactics.

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are supplied with their plots, characters, and themes by metanarratives, that is to say, “accounts offering a way of bringing all rules of justification into one overall justification” (Williams 1998: 32). Metanarratives, however, are convenient fictions which lack empirical value: “As for the philosophy of history which cannot even be considered in critical thought, it is an illusion born of signs being a semblance of examples or schemes” (Lyotard 1989: 408). The Goon Show applies its own form of critical thought to the philosophy of history governed by the illusion that a run of good fortune constitutes a pattern of manifest destiny. The idea that, in the not-so-distant past, there existed an inherently superior, inherently ‘British’ way of doing things is one of Milligan’s favourite targets. His disgust at the chauvinism which still seemed to cloud the mid-twentieth century British view of the world emanates from moments such as this one from “The Terrible Revenge of Fred Fumanchu”: PATSY HAGEN [played by Peter Sellers]. My lords, ladies and gentlemen—we come now to the concluding ­ round of the world’s international heavyweight saxophone contest—from the Orient, with his bamboo saxophone—Fred Fumanchu! GRAMS. Slight Clapping. […] PATSY HAGEN. And on my right, representing the Empire, and wearing the kilt, a shamrock, four leeks and a thistle, with a turban made out of our glorious Union Jack—Major Denis Bloodnok—an Englishman! GRAMS. Furore. Cheers milligan 1975: 78

It takes a hometown crowd with an overly-developed sense of national superiority to embrace Bloodnok, whose “usual” definfing trait is “(c)owardice” (Milligan and Stephens 1956d), as one of its own. It also takes an overweening sense of national superiority to admit freely and unabashedly that “(b)y the merest chance…Major Bloodnok’s name is already engraved on” the trophy for the contest before it starts (Milligan 1975: 78). Milligan’s close reading of the self-justifying metanarrative of Britain’s “mighty empire of restrictive practices” (Milligan and Stephens 1956a) extends beyond such provocatively-announced episode titles as “Insurance— the White Man’s Burden” (Milligan and Stephens 1957g). An animus towards the fictions of empire is particularly noticeable when Milligan presents the rationale for undertakings on a historically grand scale as being unique to a ‘British’ way of thinking. When, for example, Grytpype-Thynne protests to

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Parliament that the proposal to dig a “dry canal for aeroplanes” across Africa is ­impracticable on the grounds that Seagoon, the author of the scheme, “knows nothing about canals”, one of Those Members Present moves “that as it is customary in our beloved country England, a man so totally unsuitable for the job, should be given the contract” (Milligan and Stephens 1957h: 4). In this particular episode, unsuitability appears to be the main criteria for all jobs, no matter how important. During a casual conversation, the distinctly unstatesmanlike duo of Eccles and Bluebottle reveal that each of them has, at various times, been Prime Minister (Milligan and Stephens 1957h: 9). In the postmodern view, anyone is potentially suitable for the job of interrogating hegemonic ideologies that govern popular perceptions of history. As far as Lyotard is concerned, all it takes is the ability and willingness to ask searching, even embarrassing, questions: the meaning of history…does not only show itself in the great deeds or misdeeds of the agents or actors who became famous in history, but also in the feeling of the obscure and distant spectators who see and hear them and who, in the sound and fury of the res gestae, distinguish ­between what is just and what is not. (1989: 401–402) Milligan uses his vantage point as an obscure and distant spectator to lob canisters of laughing gas at the baggage train of thought whose cargo is the idea that Britain’s colonial history was an unending succession of heroic victories in the face of overwhelming odds. The first full-episode-length instance of this in  The  Goon Show came in 1954, with “The Siege of Fort Knight”.5 ­Recorded at the end of the program’s fourth season, this tale sees a relief column sent “­thirty thousand miles away,6 in the very liver of Africa” (‘Fort Knight’ 5 The recording used as a reference for this story is a version of the original 1954 script “­reworked for the ‘Vintage Goons’ series” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 139) and broadcast in 1958. The transcription to be found at thegoonshow.net is widely and frequently at variance with this recording. Assuming that the discrepancies are not due to ineptitude on the part of the anonymous transcriber, the transcription may be derived from any combination of the following sources: a recording of the original 1954 episode, an unedited recording of the 1958 broadcast, an original script or fragment thereof for either episode, or a reconstruction from memory. Although “the amount of reworking applied to [original 4th series scripts] varied” (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 72) when remounting them for the “Vintage Goons” series, evidence from those episodes for which 1954 and 1958 transcriptions are extant indicate that such reworkings had no effect on these episodes’ stories or main plot devices. 6 Milligan’s tendency to overestimate the circumference of the earth, or propose taking the long route to get to a destination, is clearly fully-formed, even this early in the series’ ­full-episode-length story format.

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r­ ecording: ­0:22–0:28) to supply a beleaguered colonial outpost with not fresh troops or  ammunition, but a waterproof gas stove to see them through the monsoon season.7 Upon their arrival, the troops bearing the impermeable oven are greeted, not by their grateful comrades, but by a butler. The major domo is somewhat discomfited at having to serve dinner to both them and the fort’s current guests, “the enemies of the Queen” (‘Fort Knight’ recording: 23:04–23:06). The ease with which Her Majesty’s gallant men in uniform (or at any rate, their household staff) have acquiesced in the face of danger is not the last blow to British pride in this episode. Mounting a last charge to liberate Fort Knight, Seagoon and his cohorts storm the fort, only to discover that “there’s nobody here” (‘Fort Knight’ recording: 26:43–26:45). Milligan leaves little doubt that he wishes the listener to read this “disappointing end to the show” (‘Fort Knight’ recording: 26:49–26:51) as an indictment of the ideals of King, Country and Empire, by putting these final words into the mouth of Wallace Greenslade: “Perhaps listeners will now believe how bad things really are in the Old Country” (Milligan 1958c). As with “The Siege of Fort Knight”, any time the story of an episode of The Goon Show takes place in a fort at some far-flung outpost of the British Empire, one thing is certain: the British in this outpost will be on the receiving end of a thorough trouncing. The cycle of annihilation and humiliation to which ­colonial forces are subjected by Milligan’s pen makes it clear that the real threat to British hegemony is not Sepoys, Berbers, or Bantus, but Milligan himself. Milligan’s upbringing in an enclave of British dominance abroad bred in him a healthy scepticism towards the claims of legitimacy made by colonial dominators for their rule. A 1957 article by Philip Oakes for the magazine Books and Art hints at some of the ruefulness behind Milligan’s skewering of the ­imperial pretenses and pretensions he grew up with: He looks back, not simply in anger, but with a pained regard that shreds the imperialist trappings of his childhood and seizes on the secure values of a not-so-distant past. […] ‘My father believed in mowing down any black man who gave him trouble,’ says Milligan. ‘He was a good man. But he happens to have been criminally wrong.’ qtd. in milligan 1972: 9

7 This is not a common meteorological occurrence in Africa, much less a regular one, but then again the “Kurdish tribesmen” referred to as Fort Knight’s besiegers (‘Fort Knight’ recording: 0:37–0:39) hardly have much to do with Africa either.

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Using ridicule to undermine the mythos that justified British imperialism forms the core of Milligan’s strategy for coping with personal memories of “the terrible power that Britain had…at the beginning of the [twentieth] century” (Behan 1988: 36). Hayden White has the following to say about the type of ­self-congratulatory jingoism that Milligan tossed into the shredder: Myths and the ideologies based on them presuppose the adequacy of stories to the representation of the reality whose meaning they purport to reveal. When belief in this adequacy begins to wane, the entire cultural edifice of a society enters into crisis, because not only is the specific system of beliefs undermined but the very possibility of socially significant belief is eroded. white 1987: x

Milligan found that the most effective way to highlight the inadequacy of ­stories which legitimized British hegemony was to people his versions of them with characters who were inadequate for the roles in which they were cast. As an embodiment all the cardinal virtues of a nation’s vision of itself, Neddy ­Seagoon comes off at the best of times as a “clumsy, heavily-laboured hero” (Milligan and Stephens 1956b). In spite of all of this, Seagoon finds himself time and again at the centre of events, and moreover, in a position of authority and trust. “The Jet-Propelled Guided NAAFI” and “The Great Tuscan Salami Scandal” both see him entrenched in the high office of Prime Minister, even if in one of these cases his place of residence is given as “no fixed address” (­Milligan 1956c; Milligan and Stephens 1956a). The first instance of Seagoon as a ­British luminary that can be placed on a ‘true’ historical timeline occurs in “The Histories of Pliny the Elder”, when he ‘portrays’ a distant ancestor, “the Welsh chieftain Caractacus Seagoon”8 (‘Pliny’ recording: 12:19–12:24).9 The theme of Seagoon as a legendary champion of British liberty against 8 It should be noted in passing that this is another example of Milligan coalescing a long historical period vaguely conceptualized as ‘Roman times’ into a single smaller time frame. The one and only noteworthy Caractacus, from whom Seagoon’s character name and function for this episode derive, was the leader of native British resistance against the Romans, but in the first century a.d., and not against Julius Caesar as the episode has it. 9 I have chosen to cite the recording itself because—incredibly—the transcription of the episode to be found at thegoonshow.net contains the phonetically valid, but verifiably inaccurate, spelling “Caracticus”. Since the name is clearly a reference to a historical figure whose name is spelled otherwise in print, one has to wonder why no correction was made… especially since Harry Secombe makes two attempts in the recorded episode to pronounce “­Caractacus” the first time he says the name.

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o­ ppression is taken up again when he takes the title role in The Goon Show’s two ‘Robin Hood’ ­stories.10 Seagoon crops up as a defender of the mythos of British history in other guises as well. In “The MacReekie Rising of ’74”, Seagoon protects both a legend and its physical manifestation. As one of the guards at the Tower of London, he must prevent a party of Scottish insurrectionists from storming the Tower and stealing the ravens who nest in it. The justification for this bird-loving act of self-sacrifice is the folk belief that “if the ravens leave the tower, the tower will surely fall”, and with it, England (Milligan and Stephens 1956h). In this story, British legend proves to be no match for Goonish stupidity: the ravens are never stolen by the Scots, but instead (in a way which recalls a certain nursery rhyme) baked by Minnie Bannister into a pie (Milligan and Stephens 1956h). Conveniently for The Goons, but inconveniently for those listeners who might want a definitive word on the subject, the episode ends immediately thereafter, with no news on whether England has in fact fallen. All in all, however, it is probably better that guardianship of the British mythos remain in the hands of Neddy Seagoon. The 1958 episode “The Battle of Spion Kop” ends with a remount of the battle of Waterloo, with “Eccles playing the part of Wellington” (Milligan 1974: 36). The Iron Eccles’ predictable loss to Napoleon means that “new history books” (Milligan 1974: 37) have to be printed. Replaying historical events with slightly altered lineups and getting different results puts The Goon Show a step beyond what Keir Elam refers to as “imaginatively incorporating individuals…into the counterfactual states of affairs (which may or may not reflect historical texts)” (2002: 96) which M ­ illigan puts forward. It makes Milligan an agent of postmodern deconstruction of historical texts and tropes, and as such one whose goals and methods are similar to those attributed to Jacques Derrida: “The fundamental concepts that make history possible, that is to say, orderly, are undermined…and dispersed by a discourse that confesses that it must make use of these concepts at every turn” (Kellner 1989: 299). Milligan’s rewritings of history in The Goon Show have much in common with the challenges posed to the historiographical process by postmodern scholars. What Kellner says about Michel Foucault’s readings of history in Language and Historical Interpretation: Getting the Story Crooked is equally true of Milligan’s readings: “His own fictions…are true because they

10

These are 1954’s “Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest” and 1956’s “Robin Hood (and His Mirry Mon)”. Seagoon is referred to as “Robin Hood” in both, but Harry Secombe’s portrayal of the once and future Earl of Locksley leaves little doubt as to the identity of the characterization.

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are based upon a certain reality; this reality is real, in part, because it has been figured by his fictions” (Kellner 1989: 301). History in The Goon Show is a fiction which feeds back into itself, by constantly being re-written. One of Milligan’s favourite ways of creating this historiographical feedback is to let retellings of events interrogate one another, even as the events themselves unfold. Milligan’s rules of engagement for contrasting versions of events put them not just into conflict with each other, but into open combat as well. In “The Man Who Won the War”, from 1955, Seagoon and Bloodnok hurl a barrage of references to volumes of autobiography at one another when a plan to use cardboard tanks as decoys to draw German air strikes goes awry: BLOODNOK. … see also my book ‘It Wasn’t My Idea in the First Place’— price one and nine. SEAGOON. See also my book, ‘Then Why Did Bloodnok Take the ­Credit’—price a shilling. BLOODNOK. See also It, ‘It Looked Good On Paper’—price sixpence. SEAGOON. See also ‘Bloodnok Tried To Deceive Me’—price thruppence. BLOODNOK. See also ‘Why Don’t You Shut Up’—price tuppence. SEAGOON. See also ‘How Dare You Speak to Me Like That’—a penny. BLOODNOK. See also ‘Take That’! FX. SLAP. milligan and sykes 1955k

Milligan’s obsession with war memoirs foreshadows his later emergence as a writer of wartime reminiscences, and dominates entire episodes of The Goon Show. The most notable of these is “Tales of Men’s Shirts”: in this story, “British Generals slaving away at their autobiographies” (Milligan 1975: 121) seem to hardly have the time to fight World War ii. The memoir-writing craze soon spreads to civilians, creating a unique form of collective memory: before the episode is through, Wallace Greenslade and Willium have joined Bloodnok in recounting what appears to be the same incident involving an insult spoken to General Sir Alan Brooke (Milligan 1975: 121, 130, 131). 3

The Goon Show as Reductio ad Absurdum of the Metanarratives of Scientific Thought

History is not the only subject on the curriculum which requires new textbooks after Milligan has had his way with it. A constant questioning of the validity

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of a scientific understanding of the world puts The Goon Show in line with “postmodern modes of thought that more generally question fundamental Enlightenment assumptions about human subjectivity, knowledge and progress” (Heise 2004: 136). Rationality and empiricism in and of themselves are never The Goon Show’s principal targets: Milligan levels his artillery squarely at the idea that a purely rational and empirical approach to knowledge-gathering is bound to gather knowledge that will contribute to the betterment of humankind. The nature of the scientific ‘advances’ of some of The Goon Show’s putative sponsors is likely to give pause to even the most ardent supporter of logical positivism. From the sheer pointlessness of “Footo, the Wonder Boot-Exploder” (Milligan 1954c: 1, 7, 12; Milligan and Stephens 1956d: 11, 12), to the future-­ consumer-destroying sadism of “Kiddies Head Crushing Machines, Ltd.” (Milligan 1954c: 1), not much that is dreamed up in the Research and Development departments of corporations in The Goon Show’s world seems geared towards the betterment of anyone or anything in particular. In this world, even knowledge itself has become a consumer product with about as much practical use as a pet rock, thanks to “brains, the new wonder head-filler” (Milligan 1972: 91). Brains can be used for more than just filling heads, of course. They can establish boundaries for inquiry which, if obeyed too scrupulously or too blindly, inhibit the search for knowledge rather than encourage it. Milligan reveals a skeptical attitude towards science as a self-sufficient generator of knowledge through his choice of a character to embody the scientific establishment. As The Goon Show’s resident inventor, savant, and all-around boffin, the addlepated Henry Crun is a dubious advocate for the conditions of truth in any domain of knowledge, much less any scientific one. It chills the blood to imagine someone as senile as Crun to be part of the brain trust of a nascent military-­industrial complex, as is the case in “The Giant Bombardon” from 1954.11 In spite of this, Crun is hard at work developing a nineteenth-century terror weapon in his home laboratory “in a tree in Hyde Park” (Milligan 1958e). Eccentricity among inventors is nothing new, but Crun’s grasp on logic calls his competence into question: [MINNIE]. … What’s all that other type noise down there? CRUN. I’m washing the dinner plates Min. FX. Scraping of crockery. (Continues under) [MINNIE]. But we haven’t had dinner yet, Henry. 11

1954 was the original year of broadcast of this episode, of which neither a recording nor a transcription survives. The quotes are taken from the 1957 re-recording of the story done for the ‘Vintage Goons’ series, which was broadcast in 1958.

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CRUN. Ah, but I’m washing them now so that we won’t have to wash them after. milligan 1958e

Crun’s choice of both a lab assistant and a rationale for his munitions work are also causes for concern: CRUN. You know that elephant was helping me build my giant ­bombardon in the cellar. [MINNIE]. I don’t know…I don’t know what we want a giant bombardon for. […] CRUN. Well, if you sleep in the barrel of it Min […] Sleeping in the barrel, Min, it gets rid of rheumatism of the knees you know. My uncle slept in a cannon once. [MINNIE]. What did it get rid of? CRUN. It got rid of my uncle… milligan 1958e

By working out the logistics of putting a cellar big enough to hold both an enormous cannon and an elephant into a tree,12 Crun displays a special kind of genius. At the same time, he displays a special kind of idiocy, by designing and building an artillery weapon intended solely for use as a therapeutic bed, when previous experience has shown the dangers of doing so. And yet, by one definition offered by Lyotard, Henry Crun’s scientific method is perfectly valid: “Science does not expand by means of the positivism of efficiency. The opposite is true: working on a proof means searching for and “inventing” counterexamples; in other words, the unintelligible” (1984: 54). Sleeping in a cannon may be an inefficient (and potentially deadly) method of curing rheumatism. On the other hand, by inviting the consideration of counterexamples to this particular cure, it does seem to conform to the method of trial-and-error implicit in Lyotard’s model for science.

12

The existence of a cellar in a tree in Milligan’s fictional world may not necessarily imply that this cellar is below ground level. One possible indication that Milligan intended the location of the cellar to be ambiguous is the fact that he fought shy of using the phrase ‘root cellar’—a pun which would have been consistent with his technique of free-­associating from both the lexical content and the visual imagery of any given line of dialogue in The Goon Show.

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For all his heuristic inefficiency when confronted with the basic principles of empirical inquiry, Henry Crun has occasional flashes of surprising lucidity, during which he displays an ability to comprehend highly complex theoretical constructs: GREENSLADE. Oh Mr. Crun…the sun is on fire, you say? [CRUN]. Yes, yes. GREENSLADE. If that is so, the process must have been a ceaseless inconceivable rapid motion of electrons captured by nuclei, released at a million times per sec per sec, the effect being irradiated thermulo-electrons captured and harnessed as units of liberated satellite electrons, the quantum of which, with the space quotient of 3.79 plus 10 to the power of 33 ergs per second, with a diathermic of 92735 to the power of x, is the power of 3 billion thrice upon 25 billion centigrade. [CRUN]. It’s not as simple as that!13 ‘Fireball’ recording: 7:25–7:57

As well as being a sly dig at the use of jargon for its own sake, this is also a broadside aimed at the role of specialized discourse as a barrier to the understanding of scientific principles by the general public, using “a language whose rules of functioning cannot themselves be demonstrated but are the result of a consensus among experts” (Lyotard 1984: 43). This is far from the only time in The Goon Show when the principles of scientific thought are turned inward on themselves in ways that that are reminiscent of the postmodernist aim “to undermine science in its own foundations” (­Wilber 1998: 116, italics his). The postmodern “notion that there is no truth, only ­interpretation, and all interpretations are socially constructed” (Wilber 1998: 42–43) is brought to the fore whenever Milligan uses The Goon Show to send up the ease with which unlikely theories about what prove to be even unlikelier facts are taken at face value by the general public, simply on the say-so of a member of the scientific establishment. The episode “Quatermass o.b.e.”,14 13

14

The transcript of this passage to be found at thegoonshow.net is remarkably accurate, given the pace at which Wallace Greenslade rattles through this announcer’s nightmare of meaningless polysyllabic gobbledygook. The only words which remain truly doubtful due to the quickness of Greenslade’s delivery are ‘thermulo’ and the final use of the word ‘power’, which in context comes out sounding like ‘parlum’. Also known by the title “The Scarlet Capsule”: see Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 151–2, and Milligan 1974: 91–105.

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from 1959, mocks not just what Simon Spiegel refers to as science fiction’s “central device—rendering the marvelous possible” (2008: 378), but the too-cleverby-half pseudoscience which so often acts as this device’s drive train. Seagoon,15 a mysterious “scientist and doctor of darkness”, is called to an archaeological site where a strange object “twenty foot long, red, as large as an engine boiler, with an entrance on the side and a sealed compartment at the front” (Milligan 1959b: 7) has been unearthed. A variety of methods are employed to open the capsule, from good old-fashioned brute force to state-of-the-art nonexistent devices with meaningless but impressively scientific-sounding names, among them “micro radium-tipped drills for non-porous surfaces” (Milligan 1959b: 10). The capsule is finally breached by that old scientifically factual standby, dynamite, but a solution to the mystery remains a marvel which Seagoon is unable to render possible. It is up to London Transport to supply an answer which falls decidedly short of marvelous: “the capsule was a tube train that had been shunted into a siding and forgotten” (Milligan 1959b: 18). When taking a swipe at self-serving scientific sophistry, Milligan is equally at home telling stories which are more redolent of P.T. Barnum than H.P. Lovecraft. The search for a cure to the title disease of the 1954 episode “Lurgi Strikes Britain” works equally well as a parody of the scientific method and a cautionary tale about scientific fraud. The disease and its Tourette’s-like symptoms16 are inventions of swindlers Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty, who lend credence to their story by enlisting the help of physician Neddy Seagoon, late of a Harley Street practice. Seagoon’s impassioned plea to Parliament for help in stopping the spread of Lurgi contains an explanation of the disease’s etiology that is a masterpiece of something approximating scientific reasoning: “By continuous research I discovered that all victims have one thing in common […] None of them play in a brass band” (Milligan and Sykes 1954a: 12). Since this finding is backed up by the weight of scientific opinion, no-one dares apply any conceivable test of relevance to it, including ones that could be made up on the spot. The ‘cure’ for Lurgi is, of course, as much a fabrication as the ‘disease’, but its ­endorsement by a leading man of medical science allows Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty to unload a job lot of “50 million brass

15 16

Or, as he is known in this episode to make a more obvious connection to the Nigel Kneale sci-fi television serial which Milligan ruthlessly makes sport of, ‘Ned Quatermass’. Or rather, symptom, since the only outward sign of Lurgi is a tendency to say “Eeeeeeeeh Yakka-Boo” at inopportune moments…or rather, ‘on demand’, since the only actual ‘­victim’ of Lurgi has been paid by Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty to simulate an attack of the bogus affliction at a charity concert at the Albert Hall (Milligan and Sykes 1954a: 9).

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band ­instruments”, at a cost to the government of “well over 25 million pounds” (­Milligan and Sykes 1954a: 15).17 4

Breaking Causal Chains Causes Causal Chain Reactions: Indeterminacy in The Goon Show

Even though Lurgi is revealed as a hoax, the acceptance of non-membership in a brass band as a plausible means of contracting a disease offers further insight into how The Goon Show’s characters understand their world. The laws and regularities which Milligan created for his unintelligible-seeming fictional cosmos are themselves governed by a very intelligible guiding principle, which can best be described as the discretionary suspension of the laws of causality. Simply put, in The Goon Show given causes do not reliably produce given effects. Milligan’s characters grasp this principle of indeterminacy well enough to experience moments like this without questioning them too much: MINNIE. (distant) … Who’s that down there? CRUN. I’ve lost my key, Min. MINNIE. Oh dear, nnn…I’m…I’m…. I’m coming…I’m coming, buddy… [As her footsteps begin on the stairs] (I’m coming…) FX.  [Footsteps down five flights of stairs, separated by long landings…this takes 37 seconds] CRUN. I can’t understand it, we live in a bungalow! ‘Fireball’ recording: 3:28–4:23

After making a note of this anomaly, Crun goes back about his business, w ­ ithout checking to see where the extra storeys have appeared from, or whether they are still there. For him and Minnie, the notion that space could be perverse enough to expand when, and only when, one chooses to traverse it is taken as a fact of life. As irrational as such a belief may be, it makes a rough kind of intuitive sense. The walk in fair weather along even ground that seems longer in one direction than the other is a common experience; so is the nightmare about the destination that gets farther away the faster one runs to approach it. Where experiences such as this are concerned, The Goon Show’s world diverges from ours in one important respect. In The Goon Show, these occurrences are normative 17

How Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty were able to manufacture the instruments cheaply enough that a price of ten shillings each would represent a profit is anybody’s guess.

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rather than exceptional, and have an empirical as well as an experiential component. If someone in our world says that a seventy-mile journey is ‘roughly sixty miles’, we will still have seventy miles to travel, come what may. In the world of The Goon Show, a traveller looking to shave some time off the same trip has the option to “go roughly”, secure in the knowledge that “it’s ten miles shorter” (Milligan 1958d). However, the traveller who creates this shortcut by the power of suggestion, as Seagoon does in “The Mummified Priest”, needs to be alert to the possibility that his rate of speed can be affected by changes in the rate of the passage of time. Earlier in the same episode, when Seagoon talks about his job, he mentions that “the hours were very long, seventy minutes each” (Milligan 1958d). If the hours of his journey suddenly began to take ten minutes longer to elapse (and Milligan never gives the listener any good reason to assume that this night not happen), travelling sixty miles in place of seventy at the same number of miles per hour would take one-sixth longer than expected. Time and space in “The Mummified Priest” are set on a collision course with one another, as though each were the product of one of two separate and irreconcilable domains of knowledge. Milligan’s characterization of the knowledge domains governing time and space as indeterminate creates this conflict between them; it also places them in a conceptual territory which has recognizably postmodern features. Two decades after The Goon Show, Lyotard offered the following thumbnail sketch of the postmodern conceptual landscape: Postmodern science—by concerning itself with things such as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, “fracta”, catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes—is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. It is changing the meaning of the word knowledge, while expressing how such a change can take place. It is producing not the known, but the unknown. lyotard 1984: 60

The unknown is a regular product of Milligan’s mind: characters in The Goon Show appear most at one with their surroundings when the security of contestable fact dissolves into something that is nearly, but not quite, beyond words. In “The Lost Year”, there is less consternation than might be expected when Eccles, who has been sent on a wild goose chase to the North Pole, suddenly turns up on board a ship bound for Africa, driving a dogsled, “And surrounded by his own private blizzard” (Milligan 1955e). The blizzard that Eccles brings with him is proof that he is not wrong to be driving a dogsled on a southbound

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oceangoing vessel. Instead, the ship is wrong for being an improper place to drive a dogsled. Eccles is merely rectifying the situation by bringing the proper place to drive a dogsled along with him. The idea that Eccles is perfectly right in this belief, from his point of view at least, is reinforced when he, the dogsled and the blizzard turn up later in the heart of Africa, just in time to transport a fatigue-and-thirst-weakened Seagoon and jungle-boy Bluebottle to “a British outpost” commanded by Major Bloodnok (Milligan 1955e). 5

Postmodern Geographies, Thirdspace, and The Goon Show

The idea that persisting in an activity in an inappropriate locale will bring an appropriate locale into being is yet another of The Goon Show’s challenges to conventional notions about the ways in which spatial frames and dimensions interact. The thinking behind The Goon Show’s constant tinkering with spatial frameworks and relationships anticipates a number of postmodern interrogations of the philosophy underlying the mapping of space. Such deconstructions reimagine the role and purpose of scales and distances, construing space as a function of human cognition and intent, rather than as an absolute. In the words of pioneering postmodern geographer Edward Soja, “the spatial order of human existence arises from the (social) production of space, the construction of human geographies that reflect and configure being in the world” (1989: 25). Conceptualizing spaces based on the uses people have for them is at the heart of The Goon Show’s human geography. As we have seen, this allows containers of any size to hold anything—or anyone—they have to. It shrinks and stretches distances in response to the needs of the situation. It invests space with a fluidity which challenges interpretations based on consistent scalar values. Milligan’s Goon Show universe, in which ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘near’ and ‘far’ are always potentially coequal, calls to mind Jonathan Murdoch’s claim that space and place have no determining structure; rather, structure is an effect of relations. Moreover, spatial relations reach across spatial scales, indicating that geographical scale is also an outcome of relational processes and actions. (2006: 23) As far as establishing relations with space may be concerned, Milligan’s characters are certainly part of the process; even so, they cannot always be counted to take an active part. The key difference between fully postmodern spatial mappings and those found in The Goon Show is the notion of agency and control implied by Murdoch’s use of the word ‘actions’. Although both ways

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of reading space envision it as a conceptual entity which is “(only provisionally) stabilized by heterogeneous relations” (Murdoch 2006: 4; parentheses and italics his) between the observer and his or her surroundings, Milligan’s characters can never be entirely sure that they are included in the set of the stabilizing relations for the spaces they inhabit. Not only can other characters offer ­alternative readings of space, in ways which affect all those around them, but space has a nasty habit of re-reading itself. Goon Show characters are forever showing up somewhere, only to find (as Gertrude Stein would put it) that there’s no there there. In the 1955 episode “Robin’s Post”, Seagoon turns his back on his ancestral home just long enough for it to go awol on him (Milligan 1975: 137). Dwellings have a hard time staying put in the world of The Goon Show. The residents of Seagoon, Eccles, and Grytpype-Thynne’s version of Britain awake one Christmas morning to discover that “10 Downing Street has gone” (­Milligan 1957). On another occasion, the annals of crime gain a new chapter when an entire crime scene takes flight. Puzzled by the disappearance of a stately home’s library (and the murder victim therein), Inspector Seagoon eventually discovers that “the missing room is in Paris”—not only that, it has taken up residence in a hotel (Milligan 1958f). A world where Prime Ministerial residences can go away for Christmas, manor houses can abandon their proprietors, and rooms which witnessed crimes can turn fugitive, is a world with a weak concept of the permanence of home. Homes in The Goon Show can be distinctly transitory affairs. Seagoon’s characteristic abode seems to be, not a manor house, but a garbage can: he is “taken in my dustbin to Scotland Yard” (Milligan 1958f) to solve the murder whose scene eventually relocates to Bloodnok’s hotel room in Paris. At times, even a dustbin is more than Seagoon can afford to live in. Although a practicing physician in “Lurgi Strikes Britain”, his statement that “I used to have a practice in Harley Street, but the police moved me on” (Milligan and Sykes 1954a: 1) hints that he may be living a life of vagrancy. Indigence in a prominent London district would be a step up for Eccles. Never one to stand on ceremony, he is not too proud to accept lodging in another man’s clothing if necessary. As his erstwhile landlord, Seagoon, e­ xplained in the 1958 episode “The Mountain Eaters”, “I have been forced to live with a fifteen shilling a week suit. I in the jacket, and Eccles in the trousers” (­Milligan 1958k). Although this unique interpretation of the concept of ‘letting out a suit’ is very much in keeping with the hand-to-mouth existence led by Goon Show characters, not all such combinations of wardrobe and domicile are quite so down-at-heel. In “The White Box of Great Bardfield”, Moriarty has set up housekeeping in a suit fully equipped with luxurious modern conveniences.

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Not only is there “a centrally heated brass name plate” under his shirttail, but a “button on his trousers” operates a mechanism to reveal a bookcase on a turntable or pivot (Milligan and Sykes 1955i: 4). The lack of fixity of abodes in The Goon Show can be seen as a commentary by Milligan on the arbitrary nature of social construction of space. In its own oblique way, it illustrates that living space is far less a constant than we traditionally take it to be. Edward T. Hall’s pioneering deconstructive study of social spaces, The Hidden Dimension, contains the observation that the present internal layout of the house, which Americans and Europeans take for granted, is quite recent…rooms had no fixed functions in ­European homes until the eighteenth century. Members of the family had no privacy as we know it today. There were no spaces that were ­sacred or specialized. Strangers came and went at will… (1969: 103–104) Freedom of movement presupposes freedom of interpretation, and freedom of interpretation brings with it the freedom to use self-interest as a guiding ­interpretive principle. True to their nature, characters in The Goon Show take this one step further, and use self-interest to rearrange and reconstruct space itself. This allows them to accomplish disorienting feats such as hiding ­treasure by burying it “ten feet above the ground”, deeming the likelihood of discovery a worthwhile risk: “that’s a chance we’ll have to take”, explains one of the ­treasure-buriers (Milligan 1955b). Objects which are concealed by being hidden in plain sight and rooms of houses which take up residence in hotels are worthy of note for their parallels to one particular postmodern reading of space. The library inside a hotel room can be considered as not merely a physical fact, but also as the concretization of the experience of being in one place while feeling as though one is in ­another, faraway, one. So many Goon Show spaces sit at the confluence of ­actual and conceptual elements that it can be difficult to establish whether their nature is determined more by the material or the metaphysical. In the generation following The Goon Show, these borderlands between what the observer perceives and what the observer conceives received theoretical formulation, and a name. Soja referred to this spatial grey area as Thirdspace, “a  ­creative ­recombination” (1996: 4) “of multiple real-and-imagined places” (Peet 1998: 225). Many of The Goon Show’s collisions of spatial frameworks have a thirdspace element to them. Telephones which carry bullets as well as spoken threats, and phonograph records which interact with their listeners place the actual and the virtual on an equal footing. Maps which unfold to become full-sized street

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scenes commingle representational form with represented content. Beyond such isolated examples, which have been described elsewhere in this study, The Goon Show as a whole occupies a form of thirdspace through its consistent refusal to establish and respect conceptual boundaries between the implied spaces of its enacted stories and the real space of the studio where the enactments take place. The distinction between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ means so little in The Goon Show that Milligan allows it to be overtly violated on a regular basis. These violations were such a crucial defining feature of The Goon Show that it only took a single word to signal that they were taking place: “­B RANDYYYYY!” (Milligan 1959c). This was the cue for Milligan, Sellers, and Secombe to repair backstage for a brief restorative of the thus-mentioned beverage, while either Max Geldray or Ray Ellington performed their musical interludes. As with many a call to action, what was said was less important than how it was said—in character, without a discernible break from the dialogue which preceded it. Listeners at home and the audience in the studio were left to decide for themselves whether this meant that Seagoon and Grytpype-Thynne had temporarily dropped their  ­antagonisms to share a quick snifter, or whether the actors portray­ing them had merely dropped their masks. Either way, the ambiguity rather than the activity is what helps to take The Goon Show out of the realm of clear, substantial spaces, and towards the shadowy mindscapes of postmodern thirdspaces. 6

Superspace—the Final Frontier: The Goon Show’s Universe of Multiple Universes

As a result of its continual ambiguity concerning the substantiality of the spaces where its stories unfold, The Goon Show makes one wonder how much substance there is to the concept of dimensionality in space. Relationships among spatial dimensions in The Goon Show often appear to be nothing more than convenient fictions, to be discarded whenever the needs of the narrative render them dispensable. Milligan left a clue to understanding this feature of The Goon Show’s universe on the road to Fort Knight. Once assembled, the waterproof gas stove designed by Henry Crun turns out to have the ability to repel not just moisture, but the laws of probability as well. Testing the oven by turning the temperature gauge to three different settings, Crun reveals a theatre organist playing an interlude, a railway station, and The Ray Ellington Quartet (‘Fort Knight’ recording: 13:41–17:22). This unexpected feature of Crun’s invention proves indispensable when the mission to relieve Fort Knight is hemmed

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in by hostile natives. Turning on the stove and dialing up the railway station once again, Crun, Seagoon and the relief column complete the rest of the journey “by train” (‘Fort Knight’ recording: 20:38–20:39). The break between the end of the previous paragraph and the beginning of this one ought to have provided sufficient time to ponder some question along the lines of “how did they get the gas stove inside the train when the entire train station was inside the gas stove to begin with?” The answer is simplicity itself: CRUN. […] Everybody get into the gas stove and then bring it in after us. I’ll get in first…come on, Seagoon. Eccles—hand me in the right side of the stove. ECCLES. Okay. [Straining as he passes in the side of the stove] Ow… CRUN. Now the left. ECCLES. [Straining] Ow… CRUN. Now the top and the back. ECCLES. [Assorted straining noises.] CRUN. Good, good… […] Now close the oven door from the outside and bring it in after you. ECCLES. Wait a minute. Close it from the outside…and bring it in after me…that would mean climbing through it when it’s shut and not opening it till I get through. [ponders the situation] Oh-ho-ho-ho… SEAGOON. Eccles—what are you waiting for? ECCLES. I don’t know how to do it. ‘Fort Knight’ recording: 20:57–21:43

After taking a moment to recover from the shock of Eccles’ first-ever admission of not knowing how to do the impossible,18 Seagoon offers him a solution: “We’ll take the rest of the oven by train, while you can get the oven door and go ahead on foot” (‘Fort Knight’ recording: 21:45–21:48). All of this bears a superficial similarity to the endless sequence of doors revealing unexpected places displayed in “The Yehti”; at the same time, it contains a vital elaboration on the thinking behind it. Whereas “The Yehti” involved the concept that a door in a determined space could open onto an indeterminate space, the gas stove intended for Fort Knight constitutes a s­ elf-contained and apparently determinate space which can open into a ­multiplicity of 18

This is covered by the studio audience freely supplying laughter which has a tone that can best be described as a mixture of bemusement, bewilderment, and stunned disbelief (‘Fort Knight’ recording: 21:43–21:44).

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­ on-related, but still clearly determined, spaces. This interlinking of frames n of reference in “The Siege of Fort Knight” represents a conceptual broad jump from a phenomenological view of spatial frames as a product of perception and experience to a theoretical view of space as fixed, immanent, substantial, and yet to some degree ineffable. Without being aware of it, Milligan thus hit upon one of the postulates of post-Einsteinian physics: “an imaginary mathematical structure which envisions situations in which there exist more than three dimensions”, sometimes referred to by the term “superspace” (Hope 1991: 36–37). Murry Hope, a populariser of cutting-edge and avant-garde ­science, explains the concept as follows: “Superspace contains points in much the same way as ordinary space does, only each point in superspace marks the location of every object in a whole universe” (1991: 37). The idea that everything can be potentially everywhere at once is a highwire act of mental gymnastics involving some very complicated mathematical formulae. The basic idea behind it all can be explained in the straightforward terms theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking used during a 1999 lecture: “­according to Quantum Theory, the universe doesn’t have just a unique single history. Instead, the universe has every single possible history, each with its own probability” (1999). The catch (as theoretical physicists understand it so far) is that all these possibilities and probabilities cannot overlap, which, as Hawking jocularly put it, “would explain why we haven’t been over run by tourists from the future” (1999). Unfortunately for theoretical physics, ‘cannot’ is a concept which cannot be expressed in The Goon Show. The point in space represented by Fort Knight’s gas stove becomes a gateway to a matrix of trans-dimensional possible universes, through a property that Milligan adds to the worlds contained within the stove. Not only is at least one of these spaces larger than the presumed capacity of the stove that serves as its container, but it has the ability to serve as a container for the stove itself, once the stove is disassembled. By virtue of being able to open onto a larger space, and subsequently to be packed back into that space, the spatial frame bracketed by the gas stove demonstrates the flexibility and mutability of a cosmos composed of a theoretically infinite number of intersections of individual super-space points. Using the central hypothesis of (for want of a better term) the infinite number of possible infinities which ­governs this paradigm, the web of space and time can be conceived, not as a static array of coordinates that can be easily plotted on a graph, but as “a ­complex and ever-changing labyrinth of perpetual motion” (Hope 1991: 41) The labyrinth of space in The Goon Show’s universe can change to such an extent as to be fully collapsible. One of the neatest demonstrations of this phenomenon occurs in the 1956 episode “The Treasure in the Lake”: running from

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the police, street buskers Seagoon and Willium duck into a nearby house and improvise a novel method of evading capture: SEAGOON. There, now help me fold up the walls, [strains over FX] FX. Squeaking SEAGOON. That’s better, now get the floor into this sack. [strains with Willium] FX. Thud SEAGOON. Ah, ha ha, he won’t find this house here anymore. WILLIUM. Mate, the floor’s stuck, mate. SEAGOON. Fool, you’re standing on it. FX. Sliding object, thud, knock on door WILLIUM. Aeoough, he’s at the door, mate. SEAGOON. Hurry, let’s put the door up at the ceiling where he can’t reach it. milligan and stephens 1956b

There seems to be no end to the lengths that Milligan’s characters will go to bend the already-pliant laws of the Goon Show universe, if the need arises. However, this only works if no-one else is trying to bend the same law in the opposite ­direction. Differences of opinion between Goon Show characters concerning the way the universe works often take on the appearance of legal ­disputes, in which the laws of time and space are taken to be conventions of discourse rather than abstract concepts independent of language. The situations Milligan creates for The Goon Show call attention to the same ­compromises and limitations that Lyotard identifies as inherent to the use of language as a medium for transmitting conceptually-based knowledge. The best that language can offer, through the principles of rhetoric and structured argument, is “a horizon of consensus” about the verifiability of hypotheses and postulates (Lyotard 1984: 24). There is a catch to this: if verifiability involves the use of language, and the use of language implies at least some degree of ambiguity, then verifiability can become whatever you make of it. Lyotard is content to point to this hole in conventional discourses of knowledge; Milligan prefers to put his fist right through it, as with this example from “The Man Who Never Was”: GREENSLADE. Grabbing his flying jacket as it flew by him, Captain ­Seagoon strode swiftly up the wall, across the crowded ceiling, pushing aside the other members, who were hurling themselves to the floor below with cries of…

Anticipations of Postmodernism in The Goon Show

SEAGOON. BLUEBOTTLE. SEAGOON. BLUEBOTTLE. SEAGOON. BLUEBOTTLE.

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Fools! You shouldn’t be up here! And you! No, don’t throw me down! I’m always up here! Are you a member? No, I’m a Bluebottle. What’s that you’re reading? A flypaper. Ehee!

milligan and stephens 1956e

Disregarding its use of self-consciously bad puns, this sequence takes Lyotard’s assertion that “Scientific knowledge requires that one language game, denotation, be retained and all others excluded” (1984: 25) to the nth degree, and ­raises it to an unknown exponential power. Keeping in mind that “A s­ tatement’s truthvalue is the criterion determining its acceptability” (Lyotard 1984: 25), the occurrences in the sequence are acceptable, in that they obey the following statements which are linguistically, if not empirically or logically, true: 1. Seagoon has a flying jacket; since the present participle ‘flying’ denotes that the noun it modifies is something capable of flight, then Seagoon’s jacket can fly. 2. Used as a noun, ‘fly’ denotes an insect not only capable of flight, but of walking up walls and on ceilings. Assuming that the noun and verb ‘fly’ have the same derivation, then ‘fly’ can just as easily denote ‘to do what a fly does’ as ‘fly’ denotes ‘an insect which flies’. Therefore, it is possible for anything that is ‘flying’ to be doing anything a fly does. So, with a ‘flying’ jacket on, Seagoon can walk up a wall and on a ceiling. 3. The name ‘bluebottle’ denotes a specific species of fly; denoting someone by the name ‘Bluebottle’ therefore denotes that this person possesses the attributes of a bluebottle fly. Hence, it is only natural that Seagoon in his ‘flying jacket’ encounter Bluebottle, the ‘human fly’, on the ceiling. This substitution of attributes between different denotations resembles the postmodern deconstruction of language that Jacques Dérrida describes as “the instantaneous displacement that substitutes a “new object”…gradually producing the forgetting [of the original object]” (1998: 200). One of the most striking features of Milligan’s use of language in The Goon Show is the way it leaves the listener unable to fix the relative positions of signifier, signified and referent when conceptually mapping any given word. Uncertainty concerning where to orient one’s analysis of signification is a product of more than just the multiplicity of meanings which Milligan

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puts in play around his words. It also stems from the movement of the words ­themselves. The constant flow and motion of sounds in a radio broadcast means that “The risks of ambiguity or communication failure are high” (Crisell 1994: 4). They become astronomical when a writer like Spike Milligan deliberately introduces ambiguity and communication failure as the building blocks of jokes such as this one from “The Affair of the Lone Banana”: SEAGOON.  (aside) Curses—I must think quick. Little does he know I suspect him of foul play. MORIARTY. Little does he know I’ve never played with a fowl in my life. SEAGOON. Little does he know that he has misconstrued the meaning of the word foul. The word foul in my sentence was spelt F O U L not F O W L as he thought I had spelt it. MORIARTY. Little does he know that I overheard his correction of my grammatical error and I am now about to rectify it— aloud. (Ahem) So, you suspect me of foul play spelt F O U L and not F O W L. milligan 1972: 65–66

The elaboration on the pun at the heart of this gag sequence is one of the few examples in The Goon Show where Milligan unfolds the thought processes ­behind his sense of humour. The catch to this, however, is that the elaboration itself is a crucial part of both the thought process and the humour. Jokes in The Goon Show frequently give the impression of being works-in-progress, amending themselves even as they are being told; the payoff to a joke told this way may have more to do with apparently spontaneous insertions into the buildup than with the originally-intended subject matter: Typical of this is the banter and bickering which Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister engage in whenever visitors come calling. “The Vanishing Room” offers an example of this, courtesy of a one minute and thirty-seven second sequence in the midst of which are scattered fragments of a main joke lasting nine seconds in total and taking four lines to complete: FX. […] [MINNIE]. […] [MINNIE]. [CRUN]. [MINNIE].

Door knocker knocking on door I heard a knock on the door, Henry Answer it, Henry I can’t find it, Min Oh dear, where did you leave that door last?

‘Vanishing Room’ recording: 3:35–5:12

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The attendant result of all the course corrections and adjustments in Goon Show dialogue is that Milligan’s jokes can be a little hard to track while still in flight. The delayed audience reaction to jokes which is so often heard in The Goon Show appears to come from listeners not knowing whether to concentrate on the journey or the destination when they board Milligan’s train of thought. So does the tendency for laughter among The Goon Show’s live in-­studio audiences to come at places in the performance which can be hard to predict from scripted or transcribed dialogue. The sequence quoted from above is punctuated by ripples of laughter which cut across the stream of written lines and ad-libs delivered by Milligan and Sellers as Minnie and Henry. The sparseness of the laughter which greets what should have been the routine’s punchline makes it clear that (for this group of listeners at least) the humour derives less from the incongruity of misplacing a doorway than the nonsensical badinage which led to the discovery that the doorway has been misplaced. 7

The Goon Show Hits a Heisenberg, but Doesn’t Sink: Milligan and the Uncertainty Principle

Even if Henry Crun can remember the last known location of his missing door, there is no guarantee that he will find his door still there. Crun lives in a ­universe where things can instantaneously appear in view; it is therefore ­reasonable to assume that things can just as easily disappear when not viewed. The metaphysics (if not the physics) behind this notion are familiar enough to us in the early twenty-first century. In the 1950s, the uncertainty principle still seemed as outré to the average mind as it had been in the 1920s, when it was first articulated by Werner Heisenberg: “Prior to observation, the properties of a particle are indefinite, as it covers, or fluctuates over a range of positions or velocities simultaneously” (Hope 1991: 143). “In other words,” as Hawking puts it in A Brief History of Time, “the more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurately you measure its speed, and vice versa” (1998: 57). “The uncertainty principle has profound implications for how we view the world. Even after more than seventy years they have not been fully appreciated by many philosophers, and are still the subject of much controversy” (Hawking 1998: 57). The uncertainty principle’s implications have spread far beyond the specialized field of particle physics, and have come to influence a world-view characterized by a loss of faith in the explanatory power of cause and effect. ­Summarizing what Lyotard identified as the crux of this Weltanschauung,

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Niels Brügger notes that previous causality-based “narratives of legitimation ­supporting both science and social bonds functioned satisfactorily, but for Lyotard they have become untrustworthy; indeed, the postmodern context is this untrustworthiness” (2001: 78). William Demastes identifies “issues of unpredictability and uncertainty” as central to an understanding of the postmodern mindset, and argues that this mindset’s “choice to recognize and ­concentrate on such phenomena should be conceived of as something of an appropriate choice” (1998: 8). Milligan’s own set of choices frequently involve letting his characters find their own solutions to the challenges posed by their unpredictable, untrustworthy world. An acceptance that time and space are moulded by a principle of uncertainty is on display every time a character in The Goon Show opens his mouth. When Henry Crun’s missing door in “The Vanishing Room” finally turns up, Crun never says that the door is in the last place that he left it. He simply says that “I found the door” (Milligan 1958f). To accomplish this, Crun appears to have made an unspoken assumption which would have been quite familiar to Heisenberg: like an electron in a quantum field, the missing door had a limited range of locations in which it can be expected to turn up. All Henry Crun needed do when searching for the door was to position himself in one of these locations, secure in the knowledge that the door would eventually manifest itself there. Even so, Milligan never concedes that anything in The Goon Show is necessarily meant to be taken as a cause or effect of anything else. When the 1954 episode “The Affair of the Lone Banana” opens with nearly a minute of the William Tell Overture, progressively sped up and quick-mixed into a crash of glass, metal and assorted junk, it does not herald the appearance of William Tell, Gioachino Rossini, The Lone Ranger, The Lone Banana,19 or anyone (or anything) in particular. All the listener ever gets by way of explanation, when the crashing noises stop, is Harry Secombe saying “and why not?” (‘Lone Banana’ recording: 0:00–0:54). Coming as it does right off the top of the episode, this simple question can be read as a direct challenge by Milligan to anyone who might dare to impose conventional logic on the unpredictability and disorder inherent to The Goon Show’s universe.

19

A lone banana does feature as a plot device in this particular episode: it is a vital clue to the whereabouts of disappeared laundry heir Fred Nurke. Nurke himself is only heard near the end of the episode for a brief ten seconds over the telephone (‘Lone Banana’ recording: 29:59–30:09). As Harry Secombe might reiterate, “and why not?”.

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Disorder as a Creative Force in The Goon Show

‘Disorder’ is, of course, a relative term. It says as much about the observer’s need to put things in a certain order as it does about the orderliness of the things themselves. When Hawking speaks of entropy as “a form of Murphy’s law: things always tend to go wrong” (1998: 149), he paints a picture of a ­universe that is gradually falling into a disarray that will result in its ultimate dissolution. Milligan depicts the universe in quite different terms: in his cosmology, disorder can become a system’s main creative force, introducing, if not exactly predictability, then a degree of repeatability to seemingly singular occurrences. “The Great String Robberies”20 features Minnie and Henry using their house as a vehicle which makes the sound of an “Old Car Banging & Honking” (Milligan 1975: 96), first to drive to the police station, then later to pick up the ­hitch-hiking fugitives Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty21 (Milligan 1975: 105). Soon after this second encounter, it becomes apparent that other edifices have taken up the practice of locomotion, as a “photographer’s dark room” conveniently pulls up to allow Seagoon and Bluebottle to develop ­pictures of the escaped criminals (Milligan 1975: 105). A sudden craze for driving domiciles (or parts thereof) is one of numerous instances in The Goon Show when “unexpected and significant events occur as a result of minute deviations in a cause” (Demastes 1998: 65). “Scradje”, for example, features first a hockey stick factory, then a pyramid, used as transport (Milligan and Stephens 1956d: 3, 11). At other times, however, the same (or similar) deviations occurring have no guarantee of producing events of any kind. Eccles chauffeuring Seagoon on a wall in “The Hastings Flyer” is a unique occurrence for that episode; Seagoon’s and Crun’s theatre-organ time trials in “The Mighty Wurlitzer” do not cause one another, but are conditioned by the previous existence of a land-speed record for the instrument in question. By varying the methods through which the progression from relative order to relative disorder will be manifested in an episode of The Goon Show, ­Milligan creates a system where entropy works towards renewal, rather than decay. While unravelling the mystery of “The Great String Robberies”, canny Inspector Seagoon of Scotland Yard demonstrates that the disorder introduced into a system can produce an order of its own: 20

21

This is the title under which the episode referred to in other places (including compilations of Goon Show recordings) as “The String Robberies” is published in The Book of the Goons (Milligan 1975: 91–106). This is also a case of necessity being the mother of invention: Minnie has to drive the house because Henry is “not allowed [to go] out [of doors]” (Milligan 1975: 96).

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[SEAGOON]. So that’s what a missing piece of string looks like. Where’s it gone? Oh, but wait, can’t you see…Someone’s cut that string in the centre, and pulled the pieces in opposite directions, giving the impression that a piece has been removed from the middle. milligan 1975: 95

This, however, is just a provisional theory. A little more collegial discussion provides what is agreed upon as the actual state of affairs: [SEAGOON]. …Now I see what happened. What cunning! The criminal cut a piece off each end, then cut across the middle, and pulled them apart, making the string look its original length. milligan 1975: 95

This conclusion, and the subsequent quest to recover missing string that may only have been called into existence by the postulation of its absence, are both object lessons in how “Retrospection can produce an illusion of linear causality, can work backward to produce a forward-looking possibility of predictability” (Demastes 1998: 79) in an inherently disordered system. 9

Chaos in The Goon Show: Not So Much a Theory as a Way of Life

Prediction through retrospection is always a stone’s throw over one’s shoulder from the post hoc fallacy; it is the intellectual equivalent of people “walking backwards with their boots off, carrying gas-stoves above their heads” (Milligan and Stephens 1956d: 8) to prevent their boots from exploding while on their feet. Yet Milligan’s universe is defined by the regular and systematic use of such chaotic forms of logic. In fact, the logic that governs The Goon Show is the logic of chaos theory, which rather appropriately “does not have a precise definition but rather loosely denotes a number of up-to-date research fields in the natural sciences” (Weingart and Maasen 1997: 467) designed for the express purpose of coaxing regularities out of systems with no fixed outcome. The power of chaos theory as a metaphor which defines current discourse in the humanities has been widely noted: sociologist Peter Weingart is of the opinion that “Most [such] discourses deem it important to refer to chaos” (1997: 518), regardless of the references’ grounding in pure or applied science. One such recent discourse forms the main thesis of William Demastes’ Theatre of Chaos. Stating that “Chaos theory…describes the general nature of events…but…can’t provide information that can anticipate and control n ­ ature”

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(1998: 160), Demastes identifies a tendency in postmodern English-language dramaturgy which, “like the chaotics of science…espouses a vision of dynamic interaction leading to orderly disorder” (1998: xvi). The manipulation of time and space found in The Goon Show puts the program very much in line with Demastes’ assertion that “As the chaos paradigm grants unpredictability within a determinist frame, it also allows for any number of directions in its move to regain order out of a destabilized condition” (1998: 145). Whenever possible, Milligan moves in more than one direction at once; the resulting order can best be described as a stalemate among numerous potentialities which have been simultaneously actualized. As we have seen, Bluebottle can be deceased, and still alive enough to complain bitterly about his latest “deading”; Eccles can be a drill team unto himself, or a one-man choral group; and the phrase “person-to-person call” can take on an entirely new meaning: FX. Phone rings. MORIARTY. [ with ‘telephone distort’ effect, speaks over phone ringing] Secombe? SECOMBE. Yes? MORIARTY. Pick up the telephone. SECOMBE. Why? MORIARTY. I want to speak to you on it! SECOMBE. Right! FX. Phone ringing ends SECOMBE. [Blows on receiver] Hello? MORIARTY. Is that you, Secombe? SECOMBE. Yes. MORIARTY. I’m glad you were in!22 ‘Bank of England Robbery’ recording: 2:03–2:15

In keeping with a chaos model of reality generation, this and countless other moments in The Goon Show put the lie to seemingly rational assumptions such as this one: “Classical logic insists that an object can only be “here” or “there”, never “here” and “there” ” (Demastes 1998: 29). There is no telling how many

22

For those who are wondering why “Secombe” has not been replaced by “[Seagoon]” in this instance, a quick explanation. The character played by Harry Secombe had not yet been regularly designated as “Neddy Seagoon” when this episode was originally recorded in 1954. Although no different in any significant respect from Seagoon, the character is referred to as “ “Fingers” Secombe” during the episode (Milligan 1954d).

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‘heres’ and ‘theres’ one can occupy, in a world where an interchange like this is possible between a live person and a recorded one: GRAMS—MORIARTY. This is Moriarty speaking on a record. Now listen mon ami, here are your instructions. Have you reached the end of the tunnel? SEAGOON. Yes! GRAMS—MORIARTY. Good! Now, I’ve got some notes written here, so strike a match. SEAGOON. We haven’t got any. GRAMS—MORIARTY. Never mind, I’ll nip out and get some. Taxi! GRAMS. Taxi approaches. Door closes, taxi accelerates away. milligan 1958g

Not long after this, Moriarty phones Seagoon to tell him that a blunt phonograph needle has laid him up “In hospital, badly scratched” (Milligan 1958g). If such a contretemps can befall a pre-recorded voice in the here and now, it not only calls into question any certainty concerning ‘here’ and ‘there’, but any certainty concerning ‘now’ and ‘then’. These uncertainties are, ironically, easiest to sort out when Milligan is not on the top of his game as a writer. Admittedly, Milligan at his best often allows loose ends to sit with their gaps exposed, waiting for the listener (or Inspector Seagoon) to imagine the missing piece of narrative string that would connect them. The episode “Queen Anne’s Rain”, however, features so many unaddressed lapses in temporal and spatial continuity that it accidentally interrogates its own discourse about time and space. Greenslade’s story-opening narration that “The scene is a certain place, at a certain time, in a certain year” (Milligan 1958l) sets the tone for the welter of uncertainty that follows.23 Not long afterwards, it is revealed by Minnie and Henry that the story is set in 1880; references to “the River Seven”24 (‘Rain’ recording: 5:50–5:51) and a “bridge to 23

24

And if it doesn’t, then Milligan (as himself) saying “we’re not giving anything away tonight, folks” (Milligan 1958l) is more than ample warning that the inexplicable and the unexpected will be even more in evidence than is usual for The Goon Show. Referred to in the transcript to be found at thegoonshow.net as “the River Severn” (Milligan 1958l). The confusion is understandable, given the way that the line is read by Peter Sellers as Henry Crun. Since the entire line, “The River Seven has risen foot inches” is clearly meant to be the payoff to a ‘rearrange the words’ gag which is set up by the line “The River Foot has risen seven inches” (Milligan 1958l) , it is more likely that Milligan wrote ‘Seven’ and not ‘Severn’. Either way, it refers to a river which is nowhere near the town which is eventually revealed to be the site of the action.

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London” (Milligan 1958l) leave clues, but nothing more, about where the setting of the story might be, and where it is definitely not. Almost two-thirds of the way through the episode, we finally find out where the setting actually is: the ridiculously-named, but altogether real and verifiable, village of Upper Dicker (‘Rain’ recording: 19:34–19:36). Here is where the gaps in continuity begin to open wide, for all to see (or hear). Upper Dicker is in East Sussex; the River Seven is in North Yorkshire;25 the floods mentioned earlier in the episode on the river in question would not affect travel from the village in question to London. A familiarity with Milligan’s body of work would suggest at this stage that the Upper Dicker of “Queen Anne’s Rain” is best understood as being capable of shifting its location, or of existing in at least two places at once. Familiar as it may be to Goon Show aficionados, this explanation does nothing to alleviate the doubt cast by the steady stream of conflicting anachronisms and unacknowledged time-shifts which plague this episode. Apart from the reference to 1950s British pinup girl Sabrina26 which is such a common Goon Show feature that it passes virtually unnoticed, “Queen Anne’s Rain” stubbornly refuses to lock on to any one time period in particular. The year 1880 is mentioned only once in passing, by Minnie and Henry, not the most reliable of sources at the best of times. An Upper Dicker local who has yet to be formally introduced to the concept of homophones later confuses the situation by attributing the torrential downpours that have been causing local flooding to a piece of national news: “I read in the paper that it’s Queen Anne’s reign” (Milligan 1958l). The listener is now forced to choose between accepting a historical impossibility—Queen Anne is still on the throne in 1880—or a time-jump back to the early eighteenth century, making a newspaper report27 about Queen Anne quite possible. What would not be historically possible, in 1880 or the early eighteenth century, is Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. Yet there he is in the very next scene, taking questions in the House of Commons, and taking the news that “The village of Upper Dicker has accused Queen Anne of reigning too long” 25

26

27

And, for the sake of thoroughness, the River Severn, which flows through Shropshire, Worcestershire, and Gloucestershire, before emptying into the Bristol Channel, is clear off on the other side of the island from both Upper Dicker and the River Seven. Whose name, coincidentally, is derived from the Latin name for the River Severn. It’s enough to make one wonder if she slipped into this episode through a form of subconscious auto-suggestion on Milligan’s part…a less obvious one than the one which would be normally imagined to be in operation, that is. Quite likely in the Daily Courant, the first successful English-language newspaper printed in Britain, whose years of publication run from 1702 to 1735.

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(Milligan 1958l) altogether too seriously, given the temporal impossibility of the entire situation. Just when the listener has almost adjusted to this latest paradox, good old Wallace Greenslade tosses another monkey wrench into the already jammed-up works by back-announcing Churchill’s words as part of a “Today in Parliament” broadcast, thus strengthening the claim for any year during Churchill’s two terms of office as another contender for the title of Most Probable Time Period for this episode. The sudden unmotivated announcement at the end of the episode that “Queen Anne’s stopped reigning” (Milligan 1958l) means that the title is likely to forever remain vacant. The chopping and changing of locale and time frame in “Queen Anne’s Rain” show Milligan’s strategies for distorting time and space in The Goon Show stretched beyond their ordinarily tolerable level of absurdity. The episode’s relative incoherence is also a reminder that no matter how far Milligan sometimes appears to plumb the depths of madness while he turns time and space inside out and back again, the usual method behind it is equally deep. As Philip Oakes noted in the magazine Books and Art after viewing The Goons in action: “‘Lunacy is our planet,’ says Spike Milligan. But it is lunacy of a purging and purposeful kind that both reveals and releases” (qtd. in Milligan 1972: 9). As Milligan plays cat’s cradle with the laws of the universe for our entertainment (and for his), he reveals to the listener that, as Eccles already has discovered, conventional notions of time and space, and the rationales behind them, are merely things written on pieces of paper. In this way, The Goon Show releases any willing listener from preconceptions based on received knowledge about perceived experience; these are the very ideas which the program’s seminal producer Peter Eton understood to be part of “the “standing order” ” (Farnes 1997: 119) which Milligan aimed to undermine one joke at a time. Sapping the foundations of what things are supposed to mean, or as Lyotard would put it, “incredulity towards metanarratives” of knowledge (1984: xxiv), is the very essence of the postmodern outlook. A generation before the postmodern era, but faithful to the way Lubomir Doležel describes the postmodern spirit, The Goon Show twisted the universe of time and space into “a wonderland where each thing can morph into another, a ludic world free of conventions, rules, and traditions” (2010: 4–5).

Conclusion: The Accordion is Packed Away The initial aim in using the word ‘Accordion’ in this book’s title was to provide the reader with a compact visual metaphor for the processes of temporal and spatial distortion in The Goon Show. Although he was an accomplished musician, Spike Milligan did not play the accordion. Metaphorically speaking, however, he is a master of this particular instrument. Like an accordion virtuoso, he varies the rhythms and cadences with which he squashes and stretches temporal and spatial frames of reference, in ways that frequently test the limits not only of time and space, but of any metaphor for them. The distortion of time and space in The Goon Show obeys its own accordionlike logic of push and pull. Over the course of an episode, degrees of indeterminacy are gradually introduced into an apparently fixed and coherent frame of temporal reference, while degrees of determinacy are gradually introduced into a spatial frame that begins as something of an unknown quantity. Time in an episode of The Goon Show is always moving forward, but it is also looking in several directions at once. Even as the story unfolds in an eternal present, moving in a linear fashion through a sequence of events, it does so while continually referring to this story in the past tense, through narrations by its own characters. At the same time, characters in the story acknowledge the time flow of the radio broadcast which serves as the framing device for the story proper; they also interpolate themselves into the broadcast, even while the staff announcer, orchestra, and musical guests in that same broadcast regularly take part in the enactment of the story. Time flows in even more mysterious ways than this in The Goon Show. It can speed up, slow down, or stand still without warning. Generally, it does so with reference to whatever activity is currently going on. When the task to be accomplished is easy or straightforward, time can stretch out to inordinate lengths; the more difficult or potentially time-consuming the activity, the more likely time is to move with incredible speed. This part of Milligan’s conception of time also has a habit of making a nonsense of calendars, as months on end get crammed into the space of mere days whenever the situation warrants it. In certain episodes in particular, and for certain characters in general, time seems not to be an issue at all: the processes of aging and decay go on hiatus, allowing decades, even centuries, to pass without having any appreciable effect on whichever members of The Goon Show’s repertory company happen to be thus blessed by their creator. Likewise, death is far from an equal-­opportunity destroyer in Milligan’s scheme of things: some of his characters are nearly

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004310704_010

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i­mpossible to kill, while others simply refuse to stay dead if it means losing a chance for extra lines of dialogue. In short, there is very little about Milligan’s writing for The Goon Show that can be grasped by viewing time as a universal construct. Almost no consensus about the essence of time emerges from what Milligan’s characters say; even less emerges from what they do. Instead, the flow of time is demonstrated to be experiential, highly subjective, and to some extent subject to the will of whichever character is describing his or her experience at any given moment. Space in The Goon Show is also depicted as the product of personal experience. With only sounds, music and voices at his disposal, Milligan’s conception of space in each of the ‘staging areas’ in a Goon Show story comes across as far more impressionistic than literal. The impression the listener most frequently receives from this fictional world is a sense that there are no transitions between places; spaces which would flow into one another as one passed through them in the ‘real world’ are instead separated by conceptual barriers. The Goon Show’s characters have the ability to traverse great distances instantaneously: if they stand still for too long, the narrative they belong to has a tendency to whisk them in a heartbeat to some distant locale, or to bring them face-to-face with multiple, and irreconcilable, frames of spatial reference. In such a world, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘near’, and ‘far’ become matters of opinion, rather than absolutes. Depending on the requirements of an individual joke, or of the story as a whole, things and places which would ordinarily be close at hand are unattainably far off, while ones vastly beyond the range of human perception are within easy reach. Distances and scales for travel are nearly impossible to reckon accurately: the planet Milligan has created allows for straight-line journeys greater than the circumference of the Earth between countries and continents in the same hemisphere. Many of these treks end up being much shorter than expected, however, since all places in The Goon Show’s world can be a stone’s throw from Central London at a moment’s notice. ‘Inside’ and ‘outside’ are also highly problematic concepts in The Goon Show’s fictional world, and are open to considerably more negotiation than they are in ours. Once they get ‘in’ and ‘out’ sorted out (and in), Milligan’s characters encounter a further problem: the interior and exterior dimensions of enclosed spaces are rarely in agreement with one another. Not only can Seagoon, Eccles, and the rest of The Goon Show’s dramatis personae enter mailboxes, garbage cans, and similarly cramped quarters without possessing the talents of a contortionist, but once inside, they often find the accommodations spacious beyond even their admittedly wild expectations. No matter what space they find themselves in, characters in The Goon Show must be constantly alert to the perils posed by deceptively simple means of

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d­ emarcating space. Doors are never to be trusted: even well-used doors in safe, familiar places can open without warning onto strange and threatening new vistas. Fortunately for all concerned, Milligan equips his characters with a built-in defense mechanism against such traps. If the space one finds oneself in is too dangerous, or ceases to suit one’s purposes, it can simply be dismantled and reassembled, in whole or in part, somewhere else. The ability to reconfigure space on demand is part and parcel with The Goon Show’s status as a radio program. Milligan’s choice to open each episode of the program in the undefined space of the recording soundstage is an admission of that status. The concomitant choice not to open a Goon Show broadcast in the first locale of that week’s featured story is a further admission of a belief that space is inherently indeterminate, and can be conceptualized and re-­ conceptualized, as the occasion calls for it. Milligan most often chooses to create these changes in his conceptual framework of time and space by literally calling them into existence. The spoken word is by far the most important mode of communication used to create the content and context for an episode of The Goon Show. Milligan’s style of storytelling deliberately leaves a considerable degree of ambiguity concerning the time frame for the telling of his stories. A Goon Show story gives the impression of being two stories at once: it is a series of events taking place in an implied past which are narrated in the present; but it is also a series of events taking place in an implied present which are narrated as they unfold. Ironically, there is very little ambiguity concerning the power of words in The Goon Show to bring tangible concrete form to abstractions such as ‘time’ and ‘space’. Although Lubomir Doležel sets an outer limit for human knowledge by referring to “the impossibility to utter magic performatives…language that, when uttered, produces an actual-world entity” (2010: 9), Milligan’s writing involves the constant use of this form of sorcery. Moreover, this type of magic is one recognized as being valid by those among us whose age and experience do not yet allow them to distinguish reliably between the actual ability of words to note the nature and existence of things, and the wish that words alone can make things appear. Milligan’s narrative approach and strategies have strong parallels to those of primary-school-age children. The Goon Show’s characters tell their stories in ways which are often easiest to follow if the listener discards ‘adult’ notions about consequentiality and possibility, and accepts with childlike faith that any event is a possible consequence of any other event, if someone says that this is so. Such faith disrupts the logic inherent to hierarchies for the organization and classification of knowledge. Disruptions such as these, particularly if they involve humour, are calculated to cause discomfort with an understanding of the

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world based solely upon the empirical. Playing the role of the child who points out that the empirical has no clothes, Milligan makes a number of observations which have an affinity with a general outlook that would later be labelled as ‘postmodern’. It is easy to spot the seeds of postmodernism in the work of Milligan’s contemporaries who wrote for the legitimate stage: part of the appeal of Beckett and Ionesco for scholars and theorists lies in their enigmatic inaccessibility, and the seriousness of their own theoretical writings. When one sets out to make enigmas accessible by making them funny, as Milligan did with The Goon Show, one’s efforts can be dismissed as frivolous. Peter Barnes notes that since “Comic talents are seldom, if ever, given as much weight as merely sombre ones” (2002: 206), Milligan “has not got the cachet of a literary reputation” (2002: 210) of the kind that other writers and practitioners of his generation have received. A persistent irony that continues to haunt Milligan’s reputation is that he was passed over for inclusion in a new literary genre by someone with enough experience in radio to have understood how well The Goon Show fit into it. It is hard to say whether Martin Esslin was aware of the existence of The Goon Show during the program’s years on the air, since he was working for the bbc’s European Service at the time. It is just as difficult, however, to know what to make of the fact that The Goon Show receives not even a passing mention in Esslin’s genre-defining work The Theatre of the Absurd: by the time of the book’s publication in 1961, Esslin had transferred to bbc Radio Drama in London, and was in a good position to find out about Spike Milligan’s brainchild from those most familiar with it. This, of course, may have been a factor which contributed to its exclusion. Milligan rarely had an easy relationship with anyone further up the bbc hierarchy than The Goon Show’s current producer.1 The period during which The Theatre of the Absurd was being prepared for publication showed Milligan at his most obstreperous. As negotiations to revive The Goon Show for an eleventh season of programs dragged on through 1960, recriminations began to fly back and forth between Milligan and the bbc (Carpenter 2004: ch.14). Talk of bringing back The Goon Show eventually petered out; talk among bbc administration of Milligan as an unmanageable enfant terrible likely lasted rather longer.

1 At any given time, Milligan did not necessarily have the warmest of feelings for whoever was producing The Goon Show, either. In at least one instance, the animosity was mutual. One of the three men who produced the program’s eighth season, Tom Ronald, “frankly did not like The Goon Show” or its principal writer (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 68).

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It may be that Esslin was simply reluctant to include radio in his survey of popular culture which informed absurdist theatre. After all, other British and American radio programs with stars who were less temperamental than Spike Milligan had featured elements of the absurd—The Band Waggon, itma, The Jack Benny Program, The Fred Allen Show, Fibber McGee and Molly, the various incarnations of Bob and Ray, Educating Archie, and The Chase and Sanborn Hour with Edgar Bergen,2 to mention only a few. Stranger still, even though Samuel Beckett’s work features prominently in The Theatre of the Absurd, his writings for radio, some of which Esslin worked on as a producer, are not mentioned at all. Perhaps the oversight was simply an accident of timing. The Goon Show had just finished its broadcast run, and could not then have been seen as time-­ tested to the same degree as the films of the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, whom Esslin cites as progenitors of the absurdist style (1980: 336). Milligan also had yet to establish himself as a writer for performance settings which were more established and ‘respectable’ than variety theatre, radio, and television. He did so in 1963, with the dark, absurd, and very Goonish stage play The Bedsitting Room. This work’s “jarring, dream-like scenes and Dada dialogue” (Barnes 2002: 208) prompted director Peter Brook to single Milligan out for praise in his influential work of theatre theory, The Empty Space. Brook places Milligan in the company of the Surrealists, and their artistic predecessor, Alfred Jarry, citing the way in which his “imagination, freed by anarchy, flies like a wild bat in and out every possible shape and style” (1968: 69). The Empty Space was published in 1968; a revised edition of The Theatre of the Absurd came out in 1980. Milligan and The Goon Show are no more in it than they were in the 1961 original. In the final analysis, it may be fruitless to speculate about what prompted the continued omission. Regardless of Esslin’s reasons for not including Milligan’s work as an example of the genre he first classified, The Goon Show is clearly an heir to the “age-old traditions that the Theatre of the Absurd displays”, among them “clowning, fooling, and mad-scenes”, “verbal nonsense”, and “(t)he literature of dream and fantasy” (1980: 328). Although his writings may not have been canonized in the same way that Beckett’s and Ionesco’s have been, Milligan’s own words about his work reveal a clear intention to experiment with new ways of making people laugh. The new comedic techniques on display in The Goon Show involve new ways of looking at the world, ones which became familiar to Milligan’s audiences, but remained for the time being nameless. Labels for the sorts of things Spike 2 On the subject of these last two programs, which featured the same basic performative device: there can scarcely be any concept more absurd than ventriloquism on radio.

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Milligan was doing during the 1950s would come later, and would be applied to the work and ideas of people with more apparently serious intentions. With the emergence of an artistic and critical outlook that would be labelled ‘postmodern’, terms such as ‘close reading’ began to gain common currency outside academic circles, and among a broad general public. This term, along with much of the vocabulary of postmodern criticism, encapsulates (albeit retroactively) Milligan’s plan of attack on all forms of accepted knowledge. In The Goon Show, a great deal of what had appeared certain to Britons for at least a century came under interrogation. Britain’s historical status as a great and resilient empire was questioned, found questionable, and held up to ridicule on a regular basis; the ability of scientific discourses and logic to explain, predict and control the workings of the universe was put to a severe stress test which used nonsense as its source of pressure. In order to emphasize the limitations of predictability and control as discursive and cognitive strategies for understanding our place in the grand scheme of things, Milligan exaggerated the degree of control which two crucial elements of our perceptual landscape have over us. In The Goon Show, time and space are granted powers which make their properties difficult to predict from one moment to the next; these powers operate with a crude but effective form of agency which follows its own perverse agenda, sometimes aiding, but just as often thwarting, the aims and ambitions of Milligan’s characters. The indeterminacy which is a defining feature of The Goon Show’s world is not readily observed at everyday scales of time and space. It is, however, the very essence of matter that comes in parcels which are too small to perceive, and which move too quickly to track, without highly sophisticated apparatus. The Uncertainty Principle and quantum theory have not replaced Newtonian mechanics as descriptions of the behaviour of objects we can see and touch, but these models have furnished a flexible and adaptable metaphor for systems based on human interaction. The Goon Show’s introduction of uncertainty into an otherwise Newtonian framework of time and space problematizes the assumptions of regularity and predictability upon which this and other frameworks of knowledge are based. Challenges to knowledge-claims involving certainty are so deeply woven into the fabric of Milligan’s writing that The Goon Show can be seen as a systematic rejection of conventional structures of epistemology. Knowledge can only ever be of a provisional nature in a world where even the impossible is open to degrees of discussion such as the following: MINNIE. Who ever heard of a bald-headed man with hair on, eh? CRUN. Well, I have— MINNIE. Who? Eh? Go on, tell me, who?

Conclusion: The Accordion is Packed Away

CRUN. MINNIE. CRUN. MINNIE. CRUN. MINNIE. CRUN.

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Mnk…no—I’m not going to tell you. That’s because you don’t know anybody with a hairy bald head. Yes I do, Minnie. No you don’t. …yes I do. Who, who? Go on, tell me who? I don’t see why I should.

milligan 1972: 49

The entire argument takes up nearly two-and-a-half-minutes of air time; finding words to be inadequate as weapons, Henry and Minnie augment their verbal arsenals with swords and pistols, before Minnie storms out, only to carry on the dispute by telephone immediately thereafter (‘Head-Shaver’ recording: 12:32–14:55). Henry Crun is more certain of the impossible ‘fact’ that a bald man can have hair on his head than he is of the probable ‘fact’ that, if such a man existed, he would have a name. Even if this man’s name were written down on a piece of paper, as ‘eight o’clock’ is for Eccles, Crun could be no surer than Eccles is of having the right answer on hand more than twice a day. The next step in gaining a better appreciation of Spike Milligan’s uniquely warped world-view, and how it fits into the transition from the modern to the postmodern era, is not yet written down on paper for Eccles, or anyone else, to consult. It would involve a thorough study of The Goon Show’s deconstruction of epistemological strategies, and the ways in which this may have influenced the postmodern understanding of knowledge as a work-in-progress, rather than a finished product. For the time being, one thing that is clear about The Goon Show is that, in the world Spike Milligan created, all knowledge about time, space, and everything else is slippery. The Goon Show serves as a reminder that our supposedly set-in-stone measurements of time and space are pretty slippery things themselves: they tend to ooze into one another, in both a conceptual and an actual sense. There is no more striking example of this in our non-Goon world than the International Date Line, a geographical convention which skips time forward a full day as a traveller crosses it. That’s how it works for us, anyway; when Seagoon attempts to cross the International Date Line in 1883(a year before it was formally proposed as a mapmaking and timekeeping construct), his journey inadvertently shoots time all the way forward to World War i3 (Milligan and Stephens 1957f). 3 Seagoon doesn’t seem surprised at all by this turn of events, and with good reason—he’s making the trip in a zeppelin, a method of transportation which won’t make its first a­ ppearance until 1900. All this is in the interest of getting one day older than Moriarty in order to win

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No matter where in time or space their adventures (and misadventures) take them, Neddy Seagoon, Henry Crun, Eccles, and the rest of Milligan’s cast of characters constantly struggle to get a handle on what should be the simplest facts of life. Facts, however, are even more stubborn things in Milligan’s fictional world than they are in real life: their obstinacy derives from their protean ability to assume new forms at the drop of a line of dialogue. Where the transitory nature of facts about time and space in The Goon Show are concerned, the listener does well to keep in mind a catchphrase Milligan often spoke out of character, after a protracted sequence of sounds left the question of when and where the current action was taking place uncomfortably unresolved: “well…we shall see”.

a bet. Given that fact, he should have paid better attention to the musicians at the London gentlemen’s club where the wager was laid. They’ve apparently crossed the International Date Line the 25,000 times or so it would take for them to skip forward far enough to discover rock and roll (Milligan and Stephens 1957f). Then again, since the “rock and roll” they happen to be playing is actually more like bebop (and bebop of a fairly tame nature, at that), maybe they only had to cross something like 22,000 times (‘Eighty Days’ recording: 0:14–0:30).

Sources Written Word Goon Show Transcripts

Milligan, Spike. 1954a. ‘The Kippered Herring Gang’. (transcribed by Kurt Adkins). On line at: http://www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011). ———. 1954b. ‘The Greatest Mountain in the World (1954 version)’. (transcribed by Kurt Adkins). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s04e23 _the_greatest_mountain_in_the_world (Consulted 27.08.2010). ———. 1954c. ‘The Internal Mountain’. On line at: http://www.hexmaster.com/ goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011). ———. 1954d. ‘The Great Bank of England Robbery (1954 version)’. On line at: http:// www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s04e29_the_great_bank_of_england _robbery (Consulted 27.08.2010). ———. 1954e. ‘The Whistling Spy Enigma’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s05e01_the_whistling_spy_enigma (Consulted 28.04.2011). ———. 1954f. ‘The Canal’. (transcribed by Kurt Adkins). On line at: http://www.hex master.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 14.02.2011). ———. 1955a. ‘The Lost Emperor’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=s06e03_the_lost_emperor (Consulted 17.05.2011). ———. 1955b. ‘Rommel’s Treasure’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=s06e06_rommels_treasure (Consulted 23.05.2011). ———. 1955c. ‘Shangri-La Again’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=s06e08_shangri_la_again (Consulted 20.05.2011). ———. 1955d. ‘The International Christmas Pudding’. On line at: http://www.thegoon show.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s06e09_the_international_christmas_pudding (Consulted 17.05.2011). ———. 1955e. ‘The Lost Year’. (transcribed by Tony Wills). On line at: http:// www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s06e13_the_lost_year (Consulted 23.05.2011). ———. 1955f. ‘The Greenslade Story’. (transcribed by Debby Stark). On line at: http:// www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 12.05.2011). ———. 1956a. ‘The Jet-Propelled Guided naafi’. (transcribed by Alan Dicey). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s06e19_the_jet_propelled _guided_naafi (Consulted 24.05.2011). ———. 1956b. ‘Tales of Old Dartmoor’. (transcribed by Reed Hedges). On line at: http:// www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s06e21_tales_of_old_dartmoor (Consulted 23.05.2011).

190

Sources

———. 1956c. ‘The Great Tuscan Salami Scandal’. (transcribed by Alan Dicey). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s06e23_the_great_tuscan _salami_scandal (Consulted 27.05.2011). ———. 1956d. ‘Drums Along the Mersey’. (transcribed by John Koster). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s07e02_drums_along_the _mersey (Consulted 30.05.2011). ———. 1957. ‘The Missing Number 10 Downing Street’. On line at: http://www.thego onshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=svge03_the_missing_no10_downing_street (Consulted 27.07.2011). ———. 1958a. ‘Ten Snowballs That Shook the World’. On line at: http://www.thegoon show.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s08e20_ten_snowballs_that_shook_the_world (Consulted 20.06.2011). ———. 1958b. ‘The Evils of Bushey Spon’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s08e25_the_evils_of_bushy_spon (Consulted 14.02.2011). ———. 1958c. ‘The Siege of Fort (K)night’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=svge13_the_seige_of_fort_night (Consulted 02.08.2011). ———. 1958d. ‘The Mummified Priest’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=svge01_the_mummified_priest (Consulted 27.07.2011). ———. 1958e. ‘The Giant Bombardon’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=svge04_the_giant_bombardon (Consulted 27.07.2011). ———. 1958f. ‘The Vanishing Room’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=svge06_the_vanishing_room (Consulted 29.07.2011). ———. 1958g. ‘The Great Bank of England Robbery (“Vintage Goons” version)’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=svge11_the_great_bank_of _england_robbery (Consulted 01.08.2011). ———. 1958h. ‘The Sahara Desert Statue’. (transcribed by Debby Stark). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s09e01_the_sahara_desert _statue (Consulted 15.07.2011). ———. 1958i. ‘I Was Monty’s Treble’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=s09e02_i_was_montys_treble (Consulted 15.07.2011). ———. 1958j. ‘The Pam’s Paper Insurance Policy’. On line at: http://www.thegoon show.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s09e04_pams_paper_insurance_policy (Consulted 19.07.2011). ———. 1958k. ‘The Mountain Eaters’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s09e05_the_mountain_eaters (Consulted 19.07.2011). ———. 1958l. ‘Queen Anne’s Rain’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=s09e08_queen_annes_rain (Consulted 20.07.2011). ———. 1959a. ‘The Spy, or Who is Pink Oboe?’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow .net/scripts_show.asp?title=s09e11_who_is_pink_oboe (Consulted 22.10.2011). ———. 1959b. ‘Quatermass, o.b.e.’. (transcribed by Paul Webster and Peter Olausson). On line at: http://www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 16.10.2010).

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———. 1959c. ‘The Gold Plate Robbery’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s09e16_the_gold_plate_robbery (Consulted 21.07.2011). ———. 1959d. ‘A Christmas Carol’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=s10e01_a_christmas_carol (Consulted 25.07.2011). ———. 1960. ‘Ned’s Chinese Legs’. (transcribed by Steve Dale). On line at: http://www .thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s10e03_the_chinese_legs (Consulted (25.07.2011). Milligan, Spike, and Larry Stephens. 1952. ‘The Crazy People, episode 3’. (transcribed by Kurt Adkins). On line at: http://www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 04.12.2009). ———. 1956a. ‘The Choking Horror’. (transcribed by Tony Wills). On line at: http:// www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s06e22_the_choking_horror (Consulted 27.05.2011). ———. 1956b. ‘The Treasure in the Lake’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s06e24_the_treasure_in_the_lake (Consulted 26.05.2011). ———. 1956c. ‘The Fear of Wages’. (transcribed by Debby Stark). On line at: http:// www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 14.05.2011). ———. 1956d. ‘Scradje’. (transcribed by Peter Harris). On line at: http://www.hexmaster .com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011). ———. 1956e. ‘The Man Who Never Was (1956 version)’. (transcribed by Christopher P. Thomas and James H.G. Redekop). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s06e27_the_man_who_never_was (Consulted 26.05.2011). ———. 1956f. ‘The Nasty Affair at the Burami Oasis’. (transcribed by Christopher P. Thomas). On line at: http://www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011). ———. 1956g. ‘The Nadger Plague’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=s07e03_the_nadger_plague (Consulted 30.05.2011). ———. 1956h. ‘The MacReekie Rising of ’74’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s07e04_the_macreekie_rising_of_74 (Consulted 02.06.2011). ———. 1956i. ‘The Great Bank Robbery’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s07e07_the_great_bank_robbery (Consulted 02.06.2011). ———. 1956j. ‘The Mystery of the Fake Neddie Seagoons’. On line at: http://www .thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s07e09_the_mystery_of_the_fake_neddie _seagoon (Consulted 07.06.2011). ———. 1956k. ‘The Telephone’. (transcribed by Tony Wills). On line at: http://www.the goonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s07e11_the_telephone (Consulted 29.04.2011). ———. 1956l. ‘The Flea’. (transcribed by Christopher P. Thomas). On line at: http://www .thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s07e12_the_flea (Consulted 16.06.2011). ———. 1956m. ‘Six Charlies in Search of an Author’. (transcribed by Josh Hayes). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s07e13_six_charlies _in_search_of_an_author (Consulted 06.06.2011).

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———. 1956n. ‘Robin Hood (and his Mirry Mon)’. On line at: http://www.thegoon show.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s07esp_robin_hood (Consulted 13.06.2011). ———. 1957a. ‘Emperor of the Universe’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s07e14_emperor_of_the_universe (Consulted 06.06.2011). ———. 1957b. ‘The Rent Collectors’. (transcribed by Peter Harris). On line at: http:// www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 15.05.2011). ———. 1957c. ‘The Moon Show’. (transcribed by Kate Wilson). On line at: http:// www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s07e18_the_moon_show (Consulted 20.06.2011). ———. 1957d. ‘The Mysterious Punch-Up-The-Conker’. (transcribed by Kurt Adkins). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s07e19_the _mysterious_punch_up_the_conker (Consulted 15.06.2011). ———. 1957e. ‘The Sleeping Prince’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=s07e06_the_sleeping_prince (Consulted 16.06.2011). ———. 1957f. ‘Round the World in Eighty Days’. On line at: http://www .thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s07e20_round_the_world_in_80_days (Consulted 07.06.2011). ———. 1957g. ‘Insurance—The White Man’s Burden’. On line at: http://www.thegoon show.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s07e21_insurance_the_white_mans_burden (Consulted 07.06.2011). ———. 1957h. ‘The Africa Ship Canal’. (transcribed by Kurt Adkins). On line at: http:// www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 15.05.2011). ———. 1957i. ‘The Missing Boa Constrictor’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s07e24_the_missing_boa_constrictor (Consulted 11.06.2011). ———. 1957j. ‘The Histories of Pliny the Elder’. (transcribed by Debby Stark). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s07e25_the_histories_of _pliny_the_elder (Consulted 20.06.2011). ———. 1957k. ‘The Reason Why’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=s07esp_the_reason_why (Consulted 20.06.2011). ———. 1957l. ‘The Junk Affair’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show .asp?title=s08e02_the_junk_affair (Consulted 20.06.2011). ———. 1957m. ‘The Great Regent’s Park Swim’. (transcribed by John Mathews). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s08e04_the_great_re gents_park_swim (Consulted 20.06.2011). ———. 1957n. ‘The Treasure in the Tower’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s08e05_the_treasure_in_the_tower (Consulted 20.06.2011). ———. 1957o. ‘The Red Fort’. (transcribed by Duncan Gray). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s08e07_the_red_fort (Consulted 20.06.2011). ———. 1957p. ‘The Missing Battleship’. (transcribed by Kate Wilson). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s08e08_the_missing_battle ship (Consulted 20.06.2011).

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———. 1957q. ‘King Solomon’s Mines’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/ scripts_show.asp?title=s08e10_king_solomons_mines (Consulted 09.11.2010). ———. 1957r. ‘African Incident’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=s08e14_the_african_incident (Consulted 20.06.2011). ———. 1958. ‘The Man Who Never Was (1958 version)’. (transcribed by Christopher P. Thomas). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s08e21 _the_man_who_never_was (Consulted 20.06.2011). Milligan, Spike, and Eric Sykes. 1954a. ‘Lurgi Strikes Britain’. On line at: http://www .hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 04.05.2011). ———. 1954b. ‘The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (Solved!)’. On line at: http://www .hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 05.05.2011). ———. 1954c. ‘The Spanish Suitcase’. On line at: http://www.hexmaster.com/goon scripts/ (Consulted 06.05.2011). ———. 1954d. ‘Dishonoured’. (transcribed by Paul Webster). On line at: http://www .hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011). ———. 1954e. ‘Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest’. (transcribed by Kurt Adkins). On line at: http://www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011). ———. 1955a. ‘1985 (First version)’. (transcribed by Kurt Adkins). On line at: http:// www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011). ———. 1955b. ‘China Story’. (transcribed by Simon Rushbrook). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s05e17_china_story (Consulted 11.05.2011). ———. 1955c. ‘Under Two Floorboards’. (transcribed by Steve Dale). On line at: http:// www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011). ———. 1955d. ‘1985 (Second version)’. (transcribed by Russell Street). On line at: http://www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011). ———. 1955e. ‘The Sinking of Westminster Pier’. On line at: http://www.hexmaster .com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 09.05.2011). ———. 1955f. ‘The Fireball of Milton Street’. On line at: http://www.hexmaster.com/ goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011). ———. 1955g. ‘The Six Ingots of Leadenhall Street’. On line at: http://www.hexmaster .com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011). ———. 1955h. ‘The Yehti’. (Transcribed by Kurt Adkins). On line at: http://www.hex master.com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 29.04.2011). ———. 1955i. ‘The White Box of Great Bardfield’. On line at: http://www.hexmaster .com/goonscripts/ (Consulted 10.05.2011). ———. 1955j. ‘The End’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show .asp?title=s05e26_confessions_of_a_sennapod_drinker (Consulted 11.05.2011). ———. 1955k. ‘The Man Who Won the War’. (transcribed by Digby Green). On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s06e01_the_man_who_won _the_war (Consulted 16.05.2011).

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———. 1955l. ‘The Secret Escritoire’. On line at: http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts _show.asp?title=s06e02_the_secret_escritoire (Consulted 16.05.2011). Sykes, Eric, and Spike Milligan. 1954. ‘Forog’. On line at: http://www.hexmaster.com/ goonscripts/ (Consulted 30.04.2011).

Books Adamson, Joe. 1973. Groucho, Harpo, Chico and sometimes Zeppo: A History of the Marx Brothers and a Satire on the Rest of the World. New York: Simon and Schuster. Barrier, Michael. 1999. Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. New York: Oxford University Press. Behan, Dominic. 1988. Milligan: The Life and Times of Spike Milligan. London: Methuen. Bendazzi, Giannalberto. 1994. Cartoons: one hundred years of cinema animation. Bloomington, in: Indiana University Press. Briggs, Asa. 1965. The Golden Age of Wireless. (The History of Broadcasting in the ­United Kingdom vol. ii) Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1979. Sound and Vision. (The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom vol. iv) Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1985. The bbc: The First Fifty Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brook, Peter. 1968. The Empty Space. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Canemaker, John. 1991. Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World’s Most Famous Cat. New York: Pantheon Books. Carpenter, Humphrey. 2004. Spike Milligan: The Biography. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Kobo edition. Coase, R.H. 1950. British Broadcasting: A Study in Monopoly. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Cornwell, Neil. 2006. The Absurd in Literature. Manchester, u.k.: Manchester ­University Press. Crisell, Andrew. 1994. Understanding Radio. 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. An Introductory History of British Broadcasting. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge. Crook, Tim. 1999a. Radio Drama: Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Demastes, William W. 1998. Theatre of Chaos: Beyond Absurdism, into Orderly Disorder. Cambridge, u.k.: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Of Grammatology. (tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) (Corrected ed.) Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press. Doležel, Lubomir. 2010. Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage. Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press. Douglas, Susan J. 2004. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Elam, Keir. 2002. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge. Eliot, John. 1987. Models of Psychological Space: Psychometric, Developmental and Experimental Approaches. New York: Springer Verlag. Esslin, Martin. 1971. Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre. Garden City, ny: Anchor Books. ———. 1980. The Theatre of the Absurd. 3rd Ed. Harmondsworth, u.k.: Penguin Books. Farnes, Norma (ed.). 1997. The Goons: The Story. London: Virgin Publishing. ———. 2004. Spike: An Intimate Memoir. London: HarperCollins. Kobo edition. ———. 2010. Memories of Milligan. London: HarperCollins. Kobo edition. Fleischer, Richard. 2005. Out of the Inkwell: Max Fleischer and the Animation Revolution. Lexington, ky: University Press of Kentucky. Hall, Edward T. 1969. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City, ny: Doubleday. Hawking, Stephen. 1998. A Brief History of Time. Updated and expanded tenth anniversary Ed. New York: Bantam Books. Hobsbawm, E.J. 1968. Industry and Empire. Harmondsworth, u.k.: Penguin. Hope, Murry. 1991. Time: The Ultimate Energy. Shaftesbury, u.k., Element. Kellner, Hans. 1989. Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked. Madison, wi: University of Wisconsin Press. Kenner, Hugh. 1994. Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press. Leslie, Esther. 2002. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the AvantGarde. London: Verso. Lewis, Roger. 1995. The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. London: Arrow Books. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (tr. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1989. The Lyotard Reader. (ed. Andrew Benjamin) Cambridge, ma: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1993. The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985. (tr. Don Barry, et al.) (ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maltin, Leonard. 1987. Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. Revised Edition. New York: New American Library. McInerney, Vincent. 2001. Writing for radio. Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press. Milligan, Spike. 1965. Puckoon. London: Penguin Books. ———. 1972. The Goon Show Scripts. London: The Woburn Press. ———. 1973. Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. Harmondsworth, u.k.: Penguin. ———. 1974. More Goon Show Scripts. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ———. 1975. The Book of The Goons. London: Corgi Books. ———. 1980. Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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———. 1991. Peace Work: Peace/War Autobiography Vol. 7. London: Michael Joseph. Milligan, Spike, and John Antrobus. 1975. The Bedsitting Room. London: Tandem. Murdoch, Jonathan. 2006. Post-Structuralist Geography: A Guide to Relational Space. London: sage. Palmer, Jerry. 1994. Taking Humour Seriously. London: Routledge. Peet, Richard. 1998. Modern Geographical Thought. Oxford: Blackwell. Pegg, Mark. 1983. Broadcasting and Society 1918–1939. London: Croom Helm. Piaget, Jean. 1977. The Child’s Conception of the World. (tr. Jean and Andrew Tomlinson) St. Alban’s, u.k: Paladin. Pownall, David. 2010. Sound Theatre: Thoughts on the radio play. London: Oberon. Propp, Vladimir. 1971. Morphology of the Folktale. (2nd Ed. 1968) (ed. Louis A. Wagner) (trans. Laurence Scott) Austin, tx: University of Texas Press. Rattigan, Dermot. 2002. Theatre of Sound: Radio and the Dramatic Imagination. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Rozik, Eli. 2011. Comedy: A Critical Introduction. Brighton, u.k.: Sussex. Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. 1991. A Social History of British Broadcasting. Vol. 1: 1922–1939: Serving the Nation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Scudamore, Pauline. 1985. Spike Milligan: A Biography. London: Grafton Books. ———. 1991. Dear Robert, Dear Spike: The Graves-Milligan Correspondence. Phoenix Mill, u.k.: Alan Sutton. Shingler, Martin, and Cindy Wieringa. 1998. On Air: Methods and Meanings of Radio. London: Arnold. Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical S­ ocial Theory. London: Verso. ———. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, ma: Blackwell. Telotte, J.P. 2010. Animating Space: From Mickey to Wall-E. Lexington, ky: University Press of Kentucky. von Glasersfeld, Ernst. 2007. Key Works in Radical Constructivism. (ed. Marie Larochelle) Rotterdam: Sense Publications. White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilber, Ken. 1998. The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion. New York: Broadway Books. Williams, James. 1998. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy. Cambridge, u.k.: Polity Press. Wilmut, Roger, and Jimmy Grafton. 1977. The Goon Show Companion. London: Sphere Books.

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Zinder, David G. 1980. The Surrealist Connection: An Approach to a Surrealist Aesthetic of Theatre. Ann Arbor, mi: umi Research Press.

Journal Articles Barnes, Peter. 2002. ‘“An Uncooked Army Boot”: Spike Milligan, 1918–2002’ in New Theatre Quarterly 18(3): 205–210. Brügger, Niels. 2001. ‘What about the Postmodern? The Concept of the Postmodern in the Work of Lyotard’ in Jean-François Lyotard: Time and Judgment. Spec. issue of Yale French Studies 99: 77–92. de Rijke, Victoria. 2002. ‘I told you I was ill (Spike’s preferred epitaph): In honour and in memory of (Terence Alan) Spike Milligan, 1918–2002’ in Children’s Literature in Education 33(4): 227–245. Fitch, W. Tecumseh, and Andrew J. Rosenfeld. 2007. ‘Perception and Production of ­Syncopated Rhythms’ in Music Perception 25(1): 43–58. Frattarola, Angela. 2009. ‘The Modernist “Microphone Play”: Listening in the Dark to the bbc’ in Modern Drama 52(4): 449–468. Friberg, Anders, and Andreas Sundstrom. 2002. ‘Swing Ratios and Ensemble Timing in Jazz Performance: Evidence for a Common Rhythmic Pattern’ in Music Perception 19(3): 333–349. Gray, Frances, and Janet Bray. 1985. ‘The Mind as a Theatre: Radio Drama since 1971’ in New Theatre Quarterly 1(3): 292–300. Keller, Peter E., and Bruno Repp. 2005. ‘Staying offbeat: Sensorimotor syncopation with structured and unstructured auditory sequences’ in Psychological Research 69: 292–309. Lange-Küttner, C. 2009. ‘Habitual Size and Projective Size: The Logic of Spatial Systems in Children’s Drawings’ in Developmental Psychology 45(4): 913–927. Repp, Bruno H. 2005. ‘Sensorimotor synchronization: A review of the tapping literature’ in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 12(6): 969–992. Spiegel, Simon. 2008. ‘Things Made Strange: On the Concept of “Estrangement” in ­Science Fiction Theory’ in Science Fiction Studies 35(3): 369–385. Stanton, William. 2004. ‘The Invisible Theatre of Radio Drama’ in Critical Quarterly 46(4): 94–107. Treib, Marc. (ed.) 1980. Mapping experience. Special issue of Design Quarterly 115. Weingart, Peter, and Sabine Maasen. 1997. ‘The Order of Meaning: The Career of Chaos as a Metaphor’ in Configurations 5(3): 463–520. White, Hayden. 1998. ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’ in American Historical Review 93(5): 1193–1199.

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Book Chapters and Works in Anthologies Bergson, Henri. 1974. ‘Laughter’ (tr. Arlin Hiken Armstrong) in Dukore, Bernard F. (ed.) Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston: 737–745. Cohen, Robert. 1985. ‘What’s So Special About Spatial Cognition?’ in Cohen, Robert (ed.) The Development of Spatial Cognition. Hillsdale, nj: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 1–12. Downs, Roger M. 1985. ‘The Representation of Space: Its Development in Children and in Cartography’ in Cohen, Robert (ed.) The Development of Spatial Cognition. ­Hillsdale, nj: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 323–345. Droit, Sylvie. 1998. ‘Adaptation to Duration in Preschool Children’ in De Keyser, Véronique, Géry d’Ydewalle, and André Vandierendonck (eds) Time and the Dynamic Control of Behavior. Seattle: Hogrefe and Huber: 177–188. Eton, Peter. 1975. ‘Introduction’ in Milligan (1975): 9–11. Heise, Ursula K. 2004. ‘Science, technology, and postmodernism’ in Connor, Steven (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Cambridge, u.k.: Cambridge University Press: 136–167. Jarry, Alfred. 1961. ‘Questions of the Theatre’ in Jarry, Alfred. 1961. Ubu Roi. (tr. Barbara Wright) New York: New Directions. 173–182. Montangero, Jacques. 1985. ‘The Development of Temporal Inferences and Meanings in 5- to 8-Year-Old Children’ in Michon, John A. and Janet L. Jackson (eds) Time, Mind, and Behavior. Berlin: Springer-Verlag: 279–287. Pouthas, Viviane. 1985. ‘Timing Behavior in Young Children: A Developmental Approach to Conditioned Spaced Responding’ in Michon, John A. and Janet L. Jackson (eds) Time, Mind, and Behavior. Berlin: Springer-Verlag: 100–109. Scheib, Ronnie. 1980. ‘Tex Arcana: The Cartoons of Tex Avery’ in Peary, Danny and Gerald Peary (eds) The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology. New York: e.p. Dutton: 110–127. Siegel, Alexander W. and Jennifer H. Cousins. 1985. ‘The Symbolizing and Symbolized Child in the Enterprise of Cognitive Mapping’ in Cohen, Robert (ed.) The d­ evelop­ment  of Spatial Cognition. Hillsdale, nj: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 347–368. Stein, Nancy, and Christine Glenn. 1982. ‘Children’s Concept of Time: The Development of a Story Schema’ in Friedman, William J. (ed.) The Developmental Psychology of Time. New York: Academic Press: 255–282. Suls, Jerry M. 1972. ‘A Two-Stage Model for the Appreciation of Jokes and Cartoons: An Information-Processing Analysis’ in Goldstein, Jeffrey H. and Paul E. McGhee (eds) The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues. New York: Academic Press: 81–100.

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Print and Internet Journalism Bennett, Richard. 1955. ‘Danger! Goons at Play’ in Radio Times (16 Sept. 1955): 9. Dixon, Stephen. 2002. ‘Obituary: Spike Milligan’. On line at: http://www.theguardian .com/news/2002/feb/28/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries (Consulted 15.10.2013). Hewitt, Charles H. 1951. ‘The Goons’ in Picture Post (16 June 1951): 34–35. Hutchinson, Tom. 1955. ‘Look out—Here they are’ in Picturegoer (26 Nov. 1955): 10–11. Pedrick, Gale. 1958. ‘The Goons—as others see them’ in Radio Times (31 Oct. 1958): 7. Sale, Jonathan. 2011. ‘The Goon Show must go on—60 years since its first broadcast’. On line at: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2011/may/27/goon-show-60th -birthday (Consulted 28.12.2011). ‘Sound and Laughter’ in Radio Times (pull-out supplement) (7 Nov. 1958).

Written Word Internet Sources Beck, Alan. 1999. ‘Is Radio Blind or Invisible? A Call for a Wider Debate on ListeningIn’. On line at: http://www.savoyhill.co.uk/blindorinvisible/blindorinvisible.html (­Consulted 30.11.2010). Crook, Tim. 1999b. ‘British Radio Drama—A Cultural Case History’. On line at: http:// www.irdp.co.uk/britrad.htm (Consulted 07.01.2011). ———. ‘Val Gielgud and the bbc’. On line at: http://www.irdp.co.uk/GIELGUD/ (Consulted 07.01.2011). Hawking, Stephen. 1999. ‘Space and Time Warps’. On line at: http://www.hawking.org .uk/space-and-time-warps.html (Consulted 01.03.2012).

Audiovisual Sources Sound Recordings

‘1985’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 4 Jan. 1955. Downloaded from YouTube. 25 July 2011. wav (converted from MP4). ‘The Affair of the Lone Banana’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 26 Oct. 1954. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 2 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘Drums Along the Mersey’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 11 Oct. 1956. Downloaded from thegoonshow.net. 20 Nov. 2008. MP3. ‘The End’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 22 Mar. 1955. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 2 Feb. 2012. MP3.

200

Sources

‘The Evils of Bushey Spon’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 17 Mar. 1958. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 2 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘The Fireball of Milton Street’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 22 Feb. 1955. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 2 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘The Great Bank Robbery’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 15 Nov. 1956. Downloaded from YouTube. 24 Sept. 2011. wav (converted from .flv). ‘The Great Bank of England Robbery’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 12 Apr. 1954. Downloaded from YouTube. 25 Jul. 2011. wav (converted from MP4). ‘The Histories of Pliny the Elder’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 28 Mar. 1957. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 3 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘I Was Monty’s Treble’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 10 Nov. 1958. Downloaded from thegoonshow.net. 15 Apr. 2010. MP3. ‘The Internal Mountain’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 29 Mar. 1954. Downloaded from thegoonshow.net. 5 Nov. 2010. MP3. ‘King Solomon’s Mines’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 2 Dec. 1957. Downloaded from thegoonshow.net. 3 May 2010. MP3. ‘Lurgi Strikes Britain’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 9 Nov. 1954. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 2 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘The Mighty Wurlitzer’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 3 Jan. 1956. Downloaded from YouTube. 25 Jul. 2011. wav (converted from MP4). ‘The Missing Number 10 Downing Street’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Recorded 3 Nov. 1957 for bbc Transcription Services. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads. com. 3 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘The Mysterious Punch-Up-The-Conker’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 7 Feb. 1957. Downloaded from YouTube. 12 Aug. 2011. wav (converted from .flv). ‘The Nadger Plague’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 18 Oct. 1956. Downloaded from vintagechannel.com. 26 Oct. 2013. MP3. ‘Operation Christmas Duff’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 24 Dec. 1956. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 2 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘The Phantom Head-Shaver (of Brighton)’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 19 Oct. 1954. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 2 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘Queen Anne’s Rain’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 22 Dec. 1958. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 3 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘Robin Hood (and his Mirry Mon)’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Recorded 2 Dec. 1956 for bbc Transcription Services. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 2 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘Round the World in Eighty Days’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 21 Feb. 1957. Downloaded from YouTube. 12 Aug. 2011. wav (converted from .flv). ‘Shangri-La Again’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 8 Nov. 1955. Downloaded from YouTube. 14 Aug. 2011. wav (converted from MP4).

Sources

201

‘The Siege of Fort Knight (“Vintage Goons” version)’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 1 Mar. 1958. Downloaded from YouTube. 2 Oct. 2011. wav (converted from .flv). ‘The Silent Bugler (1954 version)’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 15 Mar. 1954. Downloaded from YouTube. 24 July 2011. wav (converted from MP4). ‘The Sinking of Westminster Pier’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 15 Feb. 1955. Downloaded from YouTube. 11 Sept. 2011. wav (converted from MP4). ‘The Sleeping Prince’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 14 Feb. 1957. Downloaded from thegoonshow.net. 3 Sept. 2010. MP3. ‘The Spanish Suitcase’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 7 Dec. 1954. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 2 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘Spike Milligan: Adolf Hitler & My Part in His Downfall’. Downloaded from YouTube. 9 Feb. 2012. wav (converted from .flv). ‘The Starlings’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 31 Aug. 1954. Downloaded from oldtimeradiodownloads.com. 2 Feb. 2012. MP3. ‘The String Robberies’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 13 Jan. 1958. Downloaded from thegoonshow.net. 10 Feb. 2008. MP3. ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 9 Feb. 1959. Downloaded from thegoonshow.net. 19 July 2011. MP3. ‘The Terrible Revenge of Fred Fu-Manchu’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 6 Dec. 1955. Downloaded from YouTube. 22 Sept. 2011. wav (converted from MP4). ‘Under Two Floorboards’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 25 Jan. 1955. Downloaded from YouTube. 10 Aug. 2011. wav (converted from MP4). ‘The Whistling Spy Enigma’. The Goon Show. bbc Radio. Originally broadcast 28 Sept. 1954. Downloaded from thegoonshow.net. 3 July 2010. MP3.

Films Live Action

Marx, Groucho, and Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx. Monkey Business. Directed by Norman Z. McLeod. Los Angeles: Paramount, 1931. Marx, Groucho, and Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx. Horse Feathers. dvd. ­Directed by Norman Z. McLeod. Los Angeles: Paramount, 1932. Marx, Groucho, and Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx. Duck Soup. dvd. Directed by Leo McCarey. Los Angeles: Paramount. 1933. Marx, Groucho, and Harpo Marx, Chico Marx. A Night at the Opera. dvd. Directed by Sam Wood. Los Angeles: mgm, 1935.

202

Sources

Animated Shorts Arabiantics. dvd. Directed by Otto Messmer. New York: Pat Sullivan Studios, 1928. Dumb-Hounded. dvd. Directed by Tex Avery. Los Angeles: mgm, 1943. Felix Doubles for Darwin. dvd. Directed by Otto Messmer. New York: Pat Sullivan ­Studios, 1924. Forty Winks. dvd. Directed by Otto Messmer. New York: Pat Sullivan Studios, 1930. Happy-Go-Nutty. dvd. Directed by Tex Avery. Los Angeles: mgm, 1944. Homesteader Droopy. dvd. Directed by Tex Avery. Los Angeles: mgm, 1954. Is My Palm Read. dvd. Directed by Dave Fleischer. New York: Fleischer Studios (for Paramount), 1933. Magical Maestro. dvd. Directed by Tex Avery. Los Angeles: mgm, 1952. The Non-stop Fright. dvd. Directed by Otto Messmer. New York: Pat Sullivan Studios, 1927. Señor Droopy. dvd. Directed by Tex Avery. Los Angeles: mgm, 1949. The Three Little Pups. dvd. Directed by Tex Avery. Los Angeles: mgm, 1953. Thugs With Dirty Mugs. dvd. Directed by Fred Avery. Los Angeles: Leon Schlesinger Studios (for Warner Brothers), 1939. Tortoise Beats Hare. dvd. Directed by Fred Avery. Los Angeles: Leon Schlesinger ­Studios (for Warner Brothers), 1941. Two-Lip Time. dvd. Directed by Otto Messmer. New York: Pat Sullivan Studios, 1926.

Television Programs Milligan, Spike. Interview with Clive Anderson. Clive Anderson Talks Back. Channel 4. 1 Dec. 1995. ‘Spike Milligan’. Heroes of Comedy. Channel 4. 2 Mar. 2002. Spike Milligan: A Loose Canon. Dir. Dagmar Charlton. bbc. 18 Apr. 1998. Tales of Men’s Shirts. Writ. Spike Milligan. Perf. Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and John Cleese. Dir. Joe McGrath. Thames. 8 Aug. 1968. ‘The Goons’. Heroes of Comedy. Channel 4. 7 May 1997.

DVDs Monty Python: Almost the Truth—The Lawyer’s Cut. Eagle Rock Entertainment. 2009. The Last Goon Show of All. Writ. Spike Milligan. Perf. Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Peter Sellers. Prod. Douglas Hespe. bbc, 1997.

Index Absurdism 1, 5, 43, 49, 184–186 Adamson, Joe 45n Aging, immunity of Goon Show characters to its effects 71–74, 75, 82–83, 84–85, 181 (see also Injury and death, immunity of Goon Show characters to) Anachronisms, use of in The Goon Show 64, 67–69, 84, 106, 179–180 Animated cartoons 46–48, 78, 134, 137, 138–139 see also Avery, Fred “Tex”; Betty Boop; Felix the Cat; Fleischer Brothers cartoons Antrobus, John 11, 39 Avery, Fred “Tex” 47–48 Cartoons directed by Avery Dumb-Hounded 47 Happy-Go-Nutty 48 Homesteader Droopy 48n Magical Maestro 47 Señor Droopy 48 The Three Little Pups 48 Thugs With Dirty Mugs 47–48 Tortoise Beats Hare 47 Barnes, Peter 1, 184 Barrier, Michael 47 bbc Radio 1, 21–22, 23, 33–40 Predominant aesthetic for bbc radio drama 24, 36–37 Drama department 33, 34–35, 36–37 Contrasts and conflicts between Radio Drama and Variety departments 37–39 bbc hierarchy’s relationship with ­Milligan 35–36, 145, 184 Variety department 38–39 Influence of The Goon Show on Variety department standards and practices 39 bbc internal history Role of Asa Briggs in shaping historical narratives about the bbc 33–35 Role of Lord Reith in shaping Briggs’ narratives 34 Beck, Alan 86, 117 Beckett, Samuel 1, 31, 33, 184, 185 Behan, Dominic 12, 13, 19n, 35, 44, 49, 79

Benny, Jack 54, 185 Bentine, Michael 22, 57 Bergson, Henri 25, 80 The Goon Show’s use of comedic devices first categorized by Bergson 25, 100 Betty Boop 78 Bill Hall Trio 20–21 Bray, Janet 86 Briggs, Asa 33–35 Brook, Peter 185 The Empty Space 185 Brügger, Niels 174 Cabaret performance see Variety entertainment Cardiff, David 38 Carroll, Lewis 1, 48 Carpenter, Humphrey 12, 35, 42, 43 Chaos theory 5, 176–178 Chapman, Graham 35 Cleese, John 27, 55 Cognitive constructivism 124–125 Comedy and humour, theories of 10, 25–26, 42–43, 53, 100 Containers Capacity ability to exceed capacity suggested by outside dimensions 45–46, 89–90, 92, 113, 134–137, 164, 165–166, 167–169, 169–170, 182 variability of 45–46, 89, 90, 95–96, 113, 135, 164, 167–169, 169–170, 182 Categorization of all objects in The Goon Show as either containers or objects to be placed in containers 90, 113, 169 Cornwell, Neil 20, 44 Cousins, Jennifer 142 Crisell, Andrew 49, 89, 115, 117 Crook, Tim 88 Demastes, William 5, 174, 176–177 de Rijke, Victoria 120 Derrida, Jacques 156 Disorder see Entropy

204 Distances Rapid movement through distances in The Goon Show 80, 92–95, 108–109, 182 Relative distances as products of cognitive processes 87, 95, 110–111, 134–137, 164, 166 Variability of distance reckoning in The Goon Show 4, 94–95, 106–107, 108–109, 113, 135, 140–142, 162–163, 164, 166–167, 182 Dixon, Pat 22 Doležel, Lubomir 180, 183 Downs, Roger M. 140 Droit, Sylvie 131 Elam, Keir 156 Eliot, John 133 Ellington, Ray 23, 43, 69, 70, 70n, 109, 167 Entropy 5, 175–176 Esslin, Martin 184–185 Eton, Peter 23–24, 25, 26, 39, 112, 180 Farnes, Norma 73, 79 Felix the Cat 134, 137, 139 Cartoons with Felix Arabiantics 134 Felix Doubles for Darwin 137 Forty Winks 139 The Non-Stop Fright 137 Two-Lip Time 139 Figure-ground relationships 133–137 As interpreted by children 133, 135, 136–137 Fitch, W. Tecumseh 41–42 Fleischer Brothers cartoons 46, 48, 78 Folktales, common structural elements of narrative with The Goon Show 128 Foucault, Michel 156–157 Frattarola, Angela 116–117 Friberg, Anders 41 Geldray, Max 23, 43, 69, 71, 167 Geography As constructed for social or personal purposes 140–142, 164–165, 166 Interpretations of geography in The Goon Show 106–111, 114, 140–142, 165

Index England as geographical hub of The Goon Show’s fictional world 107–108, 109–111, 114, 142–143 Effects of variable and disrupted spatial frames in The Goon Show on geography and travel 74, 108–109, 140–141, 165 Gielgud, Val 36–37, 38 Role in establishing predominant aesthetic for bbc Radio Drama 36–37 Glenn, Christine 128, 129, 130 The Goon Show Main Cast see Bentine, Michael; Milligan, Spike; Secombe, Harry; and Sellers, Peter Musical acts in see Ellington, Ray and Geldray, Max Producers see Dixon, Pat; Eton, Peter; and Ronald, Tom Origins as offshoot of after-hours entertainments at the Grafton Arms 21–22 First series (Crazy People) 22–23 Format Original sketch-based format 22–23, 24, 30, 54, 69, 112 Change to single-story-per-episode format 23–29, 30, 79 Characters (Major Denis) Bloodnok 3q, 5q, 22n, 24, 25, 30, 60, 60q, 62, 64, 66, 68, 71, 72q, 77q, 80q, 81, 89, 90q, 93, 94, 94q, 95q, 96, 96q, 103q, 105, 106, 109, 109q, 127, 127q, 130q, 131, 137n, 141q, 142, 151n, 152, 152q, 157, 157q, 164, 165 Bluebottle 29n, 31–32, 32q, 53, 57, 63, 65, 67n, 70q, 71, 74n, 75, 75q, 79, 94q, 94, 119, 119q, 120, 123, 123q, 131, 131q, 134, 137, 138, 138q, 140n, 143, 151, 153, 164, 171, 171q, 175, 177 Origins of Bluebottle 57 Eccles 1q, 5q, 32–33, 53, 61q, 62, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73–74, 81, 89, 93, 95, 95q, 97, 98, 98q, 101q, 113, 119, 119q, 120, 125, 125q, 127, 127q, 131, 131q, 133, 133q, 134, 136, 136q, 139q, 140, 141q, 150, 150q, 151n, 153, 156, 156q, 163–164, 165, 165q, 168, 168q, 175, 177, 180, 182, 187 Fred Fu-Manchu 2, 152q

Index Fred the Oyster 61–62, 61q Grytpype-Thynne 4q, 30, 37q, 58, 58q, 59, 59–60q, 66, 68, 71, 79, 80, 92, 99q, 100–101q, 123q, 127, 134, 135, 136, 136q, 152–153, 161–162, 161n, 162n, 165, 167, 175 as take-off on actor George Sanders 30 Henry Crun 31, 31q, 53, 62, 71, 76q, 77q, 97, 97–98q, 98, 98q, 99, 99q, 99– 100q, 100, 107, 108q, 143, 158, 158–159q, 159, 159q, 160, 160q, 162, 162q, 167, 168q, 172q, 173, 174, 175, 175n, 178, 178n, 179, 186–187q, 187 Hern-Hern 28 Jim Spriggs 5q, 37q, 62–63, 80q, 138q Little Jim 130, 130q Minnie Bannister 11–12n, 31, 31q, 53, 71, 96q, 99q, 99, 99–100q, 126, 143, 156, 158–159q, 159q, 162q, 162, 172, 172q, 173, 175, 175n, 178, 179, 186–187q, 187 (Count Jim) Moriarty 4q, 30, 60q, 61q, 66, 68, 71, 72, 92, 93–94q, 101q, 103q, 105q, 123q, 132q, 134, 135, 138q, 161–162, 161n, 162n, 165–166, 172q, 175, 177q, 178, 178q Decline in status relative to other characters 30 (Ned, Neddy, or Neddie) Seagoon 3q, 4q, 25, 25q, 28q, 29–30, 31, 31q, 36n, 51q, 52, 52q, 55–56, 56n, 58, 58q, 61q, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 72q, 74, 76, 76q, 77, 77q, 78q, 79, 80, 80q, 81, 82, 89, 90q, 90–91, 92, 93, 93q, 93–94q, 94, 95, 95q, 96, 96q, 97, 97q, 97–98q, 99q, 100q, 101q, 102q, 103q, 105, 106, 107, 109, 109q, 112, 122–123, 123q, 125, 125q, 126, 127, 127q, 129q, 130q, 131, 131q, 132, 133, 133q, 134, 135, 135q, 136, 136q, 139q, 140, 140n, 141, 141q, 142, 143, 148, 149, 153, 154, 155, 155n, 156, 156n, 157, 157q, 161, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 168q, 170, 170q, 170–171q, 171, 172q, 175, 176q, 177n, 178q, 182, 187 Willium 107, 138, 138q, 157, 170, 170q Episodes ‘1985 (First version)’ 40n ‘1985 (Second version)’ 36n ‘A Christmas Carol’ 42–43 ‘The Affair of the Lone Banana’ 59, 109, 136, 172, 174, 174n

205 ‘African Incident’ 94–95 ‘The Africa Ship Canal’ 92, 108, 142, 148, 152–153 ‘The Battle of Spion Kop’ 64, 156 ‘Call of the West’ 28 ‘The Canal’ 6n, 31, 158 ‘China Story’ 80, 109 ‘The Choking Horror’ 100–101, 152, 155 ‘Confessions of a Secret Senna-Pod Drinker’ see ‘The End’ ‘The Crazy People, episode 3’ 24, 26 ‘Dishonoured’ 69–70, 70n ‘Dishonoured—Again’ 70n ‘The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill-on-Sea)’ 4, 18, 77 ‘Drums Along the Mersey’ 126–128, 132 ‘Emperor of the Universe’ 2, 4, 79, 140n ‘The End’ 79 ‘The Evils of Bushey Spon’ 13, 32 ‘The Fear of Wages’ 76 ‘The Fireball of Milton Street’ 2, 70, 123–124 ‘The First Albert Memorial to the Moon’ 148 ‘The Flea’ 136 ‘Foiled by President Fred’ 107 ‘Forog’ 79 ‘The Giant Bombardon’ 158–159 ‘The Gold Plate Robbery’ 167 ‘The Great Bank Robbery’ 71 ‘The Great Bank of England Robbery (1954 version)’ 30, 81, 89, 133, 177, 177n ‘The Great Bank of England Robbery (‘Vintage Goons’ version)’ 178 ‘The Great Regent’s Park Swim’ 3, 139 ‘The Great String Robberies’ see ‘The String Robberies’ ‘The Great Tuscan Salami Scandal’ 155 ‘The Greatest Mountain in the World (1954 version)’ 73–74 ‘The Greenslade Story’ 67 ‘The Hastings Flyer’ 74n, 123, 125 ‘The Histories of Pliny the Elder’ 68, 155 ‘I Was Monty’s Treble’ 149–150

206 The Goon Show (cont.) ‘Insurance—The White Man’s ­Burden’  64, 152 ‘The Internal Mountain’ 22n, 80, 158 ‘The International Christmas ­Pudding’  97, 107 ‘The Jet-Propelled Guided naafi’  148, 155 ‘The Junk Affair’ 91n, 92 ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ 3, 62, 130 ‘The Kippered Herring Gang’  101–102 ‘The Last Goon Show of All’ (television recording) 56n ‘The Lost Emperor’ 70, 100, 109 ‘The Lost Year’ 129, 131, 163–164 ‘Lurgi Strikes Britain’ 161n, 161–162, 165 ‘The MacReekie Rising of ‘74’ 156 ‘The Man Who Never Was (1956 ­version)’ 150–151, 151n, 170–171 ‘The Man Who Never Was (1958 ­version)’ 151, 151n ‘The Man Who Won the War’ 58, 157 ‘The Mighty Wurlitzer’ 60, 93–94 ‘The Missing Battleship’ 40 ‘The Missing Boa Constrictor’ 52, 64, 106 ‘The Missing Number 10 Downing Street’ 165 ‘The Moon Show’ 134–135 ‘The Mountain Eaters’ 165 ‘The Mummified Priest’ 143, 163 ‘The Mystery of the Fake Neddie Seagoons’ 136 ‘The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (Solved!)’ 76–77, 96 ‘The Mysterious Punch-Up-TheConker’ 1, 119–120 ‘The Nadger Plague’ 68, 133 ‘Napoleon’s Piano’ 26–27, 28, 140–141 ‘The Nasty Affair at the Burami Oasis’ 78 ‘Ned’s Atomic Dustbin’ 148 ‘Ned’s Chinese Legs’ 74 ‘Operation Christmas Duff’ 56 ‘The Pam’s Paper Insurance Policy’ 55 ‘The Phantom Head-Shaver (of Brighton)’ 186–187

Index ‘Quatermass, O.B.E.’ 35–36, 160–161, 160n ‘Queen Anne’s Rain’ 178–180 ‘The Reason Why’ 148–149 ‘The Red Fort’ 28–29 ‘The Rent Collectors’ 99 ‘Robin Hood (and his Mirry Mon)’ 131, 138, 156n ‘Robin’s Post’ 3, 165 ‘Rommel’s Treasure’ 52, 166 ‘Round the World in Eighty Days’ 187, 187–188n ‘The Sahara Desert Statue’ 92 ‘The Scarlet Capsule’ see ‘Quatermass, O.B.E.’ ‘Scradje’ 152, 158, 175, 176 ‘The Secret Escritoire’ 96, 109 ‘Shangri-La Again’ 65, 71, 90, 103, 142–143 ‘The Siege of Fort (K)night’ 153–154, 153n, 167–169 ‘The Silent Bugler (1954 version)’  117–118 ‘The Sinking of Westminster Pier’ 65–67 ‘Six Charlies in Search of an Author’  6, 6n, 62–63 ‘The Six Ingots of Leadenhall Street’ 79, 123 ‘The Sleeping Prince’ 52, 111 ‘The Spanish Suitcase’ 71, 104–105, 105n ‘The Spon Plague’ 37, 55, 59–60, 102–103 ‘The Spy, or Who is Pink Oboe?’  29, 93 ‘The Starlings’ 56 ‘The String Robberies’ 5, 93, 137, 137n, 175n, 175–176 ‘Tales of Old Dartmoor’ 61 ‘Tales of Men’s Shirts’ 55, 62, 107, 138, 157 version recorded for television 54–55 ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ 42–43 ‘The Telephone’ 95, 107 ‘Ten Snowballs That Shook the World’ 42 ‘The Terrible Revenge of Fred ­Fu-Manchu’ 2, 62, 81, 93, 99–100, 152

Index ‘The Treasure in the Lake’ 155, 169–170 ‘The Treasure in the Tower’ 68–69 ‘Under Two Floorboards’ 71 ‘The Vanishing Room’ 165, 172, 174 ‘The Whistling Spy Enigma’ 72, 76, 97–98, 108 ‘The White Box of Great ­Bardfield’  75, 90–91, 165–166 ‘Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest’ 51, 156n ‘The Yehti’ 25, 26, 61, 168 Musical interludes in The Goon Show As holdovers from original varietyprogram format 69 Used to interrupt time-flow of ­narrative 69–71, 82, 167 Grafton Arms 21–22, 47 Grafton, Jimmy 21–22, 23, 32, 35, 147 Graves, Robert 49, 122 Gray, Frances 86, 91 Greenslade, Wallace 25–26, 51q, 54–56, 59, 59q, 64, 67, 70, 100, 100q, 104–105, 104q,117, 123, 123q, 125, 125q, 128, 133, 135, 154, 157, 160n, 178, 180 Hall, Edward T. 166 Hawking, Stephen 169, 173, 175 Hayward, Ruxton (real-life inspiration for Goon Show character Bluebottle) 57 Heisenberg, Werner 173, 174 Hobsbawm, Eric 16 Hope, Murry 169 Indeterminacy in The Goon Show Indeterminacy of causality 1, 2, 162–164, 173, 186 Indeterminacy of space 2, 5–6, 88, 101, 144, 181, 182–183, 186 Indeterminacy of time 2, 3, 5–6, 65, 82, 126–128, 144, 181, 186 Injury and death, immunity of Goon Show characters to 73–75, 83, 85, 177, 181–182 Ionesco, Eugene 1, 184, 185 Jarry, Alfred 111, 185 Jones, Spike 43, 48 Kellner, Hans 156

207 Linguistic symbols, concretization of 137–140 Lange-Küttner, C. 135 Leacock, Stephen 1 Lear, Edward 1, 49 Lewis, Roger 20, 23, 37, 73 Lyotard, Jean-François 5, 144–145, 151, 153, 159, 163, 170, 171, 173, 180 Lyttelton, Humphrey 62 Marx Brothers (as team) 43–46, 48, 185 Films with The Marx Brothers Duck Soup 44–45, 46 Horse Feathers 45–46 Monkey Business 45 A Night at the Opera 45 Marx, Groucho 40n, 44, 45 Marx, Harpo 44, 45–46 McInerney, Vincent 37 Metanarratives 149–162, 180 of history 149, 151–157, 186 Postmodern readings of historical metanarratives in The Goon Show 149–157, 186 of scientific and epistemological thought 157–162, 163, 173–174, 180 Postmodern readings of scientific and epistemological metanarratives in The Goon Show 157–162, 186–187 Milligan, Desmond 13, 14, 121 Milligan, Flo 12n, 16–17, 20 Milligan, Leo 11, 12–13, 14 Milligan, Terence Alan (Spike) Early life Childhood in India 11–15, 18, 108, 121 Family moves to England 15–16 Adolescence in London 15–17 World War ii Conscription into army and revitalizing effect on Spike’s life 17, 71 Stationed in England 17–18 Stationed in North Africa 18, 108 Stationed in Italy 19, 108 Shell-shock incident and ­aftereffects  19, 75 Career as musician Pre-World War ii 16–17, 41 While in military service 18, 19, 41 Postwar 19–21, 41

208 Milligan, Spike (cont.) Influence of musical career on Spike’s comedic style 21, 41–43 As comedy writer Pre-Goon Show writing 21–22 Cowriters and Spike’s relationship with them 11, 21–22, 23, 145–146, 147–148 Desire to be innovative in comedy 145–148 Relationship with and opinions about the bbc 35–36, 39, 146–147, 184, 184n As expressed in The Goon Show 36, 40, 59 Family life Marriages 72–73 Extramarital affairs 72–73 Children Relationship with children 120, 121, 122 Spike as perpetual child 120–122, 143 Class-consciousness Dislikes and ridicules British class system and imperialism 11, 13, 14–15, 152–153, 154–156 Personal identification with Irish ­heritage 11–13, 15 Influence of Indian social milieu and mode of life on Spike’s worldview  13–14, 15 Other writings Puckoon 12, 63 The Bedsitting Room 97, 105, 118, 185 Verse 120 Writings for children 120 Parodic reimaginings of literary classics 120 Memoirs 12–13n, 17–18, 19n, 147, 157 “Milligan’s Laws” of Space 113–114 of Time 84–85 Montangero, Jacques 126 Monty Python 27, 35, 55 Murdoch, Jonathan 164 Music and musicians Musicians as comedians 42–43 Jazz as influence on Milligan’s sense and style of comedy 42–43 Syncopation in 41–42 Music Hall see Variety entertainment

Index Narrators in The Goon Show Staff announcer as narrator 24, 54–56, 59, 64, 82, 104–105 Goon Show characters as narrators 28, 52, 55–56, 58, 59–60, 62–63, 82, 104–105, 117 Nonsense literature 1–2, 48–49, 120 Objects, spontaneous appearance of in The Goon Show 91–92, 113, 163–164, 165, 166, 173, 174 Palin, Michael 129 Palmer, Jerry 10 Piaget, Jean 4, 115, 118–119, 120, 125, 126, 133 Postmodernism 5, 143, 144–145, 149, 151–152, 153, 156–157, 158, 160, 163, 164, 166, 167, 170–171, 173–174, 177, 180, 184, 186, 187 see also Demastes, William; Derrida, Jacques; Doležel, Lubomir; Kellner, Hans; Lyotard, Jean-François; Metanarratives; Soja, Edward; Thirdspace; White, Hayden as defined by Jean-François Lyotard 144–145 Postmodern deconstructions of language 170–171 Pouthas, Viviane 170 Pownall, David 87 Preoperational phase of cognitive development 3–4, 115, 118–119, 120, 123–124 Preoperational perceptions of narrative 3–4, 128–131, 183 Preoperational perceptions of space 3–4, 132, 135–137 Perceptions of geography 140–142 Preoperational perceptions of time 3–4, 126–128, 131 Propp, Vladimir 128 Quantum theory 169, 174, 186 Radio theatre Dramaturgical conventions in 36–38, 51–52, 55, 115–118 Methods of suggesting three-dimensional spatiality in radio theatre 86–88, 132–133

Index Audience reception models for radio theatre 26–27, 86–88, 95, 96, 102, 104, 167, 172 Rattigan, Dermot 87–88, 116, 132 Reith, John (Lord Reith) 34 Ronald, Tom 184n Rosenfeld, Andrew J. 41–42 Rozik, Eli 57, 60 Sabrina (1950s British pinup girl) 67n, 74n, 94q, 179 Scannell, Paddy 38 Scheib, Ronnie 48n Scudamore, Pauline 14, 19n, 35, 49, 120 Searle, Ronald 37 Secombe, Harry 22, 32, 43, 55, 57, 146, 167, 174, 174n Sellers, Peter 22, 24, 28, 30, 36, 43, 55, 56, 57, 143, 167, 173 Shingler, Martin 116 Siegel, Alexander 142 Soja, Edward 164, 166 Spatial frames of reference Spatial boundaries and barriers 95–101, 113, 168–169, 182–183 Discontinuity of spatial frames in The Goon Show Competing frames of reference within the same space 93, 94–96, 101–102, 103, 104–106, 112, 113, 166–170, 182 Use of sound recording technology to establish competing spatial frames of reference 102–104, 106, 178 Disruption of spatial frames in The Goon Show By doors 25–26, 95–100, 113, 168, 172–173, 174, 183 By telephones and other communication technology 95, 100–102, 107, 113, 166, 177 Effects of discontinuity on spatial mapping and perception of ­distances  106–111, 114, 162–163, 166, 182 Expansion and contraction of spatial frames of reference 93, 106–111, 113, 181, 182 Spatial scales 106–111, 134–135

209 Sound effects 61–62, 80–81, 83, 93, 102–103, 174, 175 Spiegel, Simon 161 Spoken word as primary semiotic code of radio ­theatre 83, 115–117 transformative power of in The Goon Show 60–62, 73, 77, 83, 115, 117–118, 132, 170–171, 172–173, 179, 183 transformative power as understood during preoperational phase of cognitive development 118–119, 120, 183 Stanton, William 116 Stein, Nancy 128, 129, 130 Stephens, Larry 11, 147, 150n Stock comic characters 30–31, 38, 71 Storytelling As a key component of radio theatre 116–117 As a key component of The Goon Show 4, 52, 56, 117–118, 183 By children 128–129, 130 Suls, Jerry 53 Sundstrom, Andreas 41 Superspace 169 Concept of superspace expressed in The Goon Show 167–170 Surrealism 11, 46 Sykes, Eric 11, 66, 121–122, 145–146, 147 Task performance see Time-task ratios in The Goon Show The Empty Space see Brook, Peter Theatre of chaos 5, 176–178 Thirdspace 166–167 Time in the Goon Show Time flow in narratives of Goon Show stories 51, 52, 53, 82, 83, 128, 181 Expansion and contraction of time frames in The Goon Show 70–72, 76–77, 80–81, 84, 181 Fragmentation of time frames in The Goon Show 52, 64–67, 81–82, 84 Coexistence of multiple time frames in The Goon Show 67–71, 81–82, 83, 84, 126–128, 181 Time-task ratios in The Goon Show  75–80, 83, 85, 131, 181

210 Time in the Goon Show (cont.) Narrative and/or fictional time vis-à-vis performance time in The Goon Show 51, 69–71, 82, 84, 181 Timothy, Andrew 24, 54 Treib, Marc 141 Uncertainty principle 173–174 Variety entertainment 26, 29, 31, 38–40, 69 Vaudeville see Variety entertainment von Glasersfeld, Ernst 124–125

Index Weingart, Peter 176 White, Hayden 149, 150, 151, 155 Wieringa, Cindy 116 Wilmut, Roger 35, 39, 54 Wilson, Don 54 Wiltshire, Maurice 11