The Goon Show
From Muppet Wiki
The Goon Show was a radio comedy series which was broadcast over the BBC Home Service from 1951 until 1960. The series was developed by Spike Milligan, who was the primary writer and starred alongside Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. Michael Bentine was involved in the early shows but left following the second season.
An unusual mixture of sketch comedy and oddball storytelling, the three Goons developed a roster of rather bizarre continuing characters, who each week would engage in surreal adventures across time, space, literature, and sanity. Among the people they influenced included both the Monty Python troupe and the Muppets who proved to be The Goon Show's spiritual successors for the television medium.
Secombe played the protagonist, the dim Ned Seagoon, and occasional minor parts, while Sellers and Milligan between them populated the rest of their audio world. Sellers played the villainous Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, cowardly army man Major Bloodnok, cheeky child Bluebottle, decrepit old Henry Crun, Willium "Mate" Cobblers, and showbiz agent Lew (modeled after Lew Grade), among others, while Milligan played "The Famous Eccles," Grytype-Thynne's associate Count Jim Moriarty, Henry's spinster companion Minnie Banister, Little Jim, and more.
These odd characters were complemented by an even odder range of running jokes and catchphrases, from Little Jim's "He's fallen in the waa-ater" and Henry Crun's "You can't get the wood" to the nonsensical "Needle nardle noo!" (most often spoken by Seagoon). The offbeat characters, surreal happenings, music hall variety elements, and "show within a show" aspect later had a pronounced influence on The Muppet Show, which featured both Milligan and Sellers as guests.
References
- "The Ying Tong Song" was a nonsense tune written by Spike Milligan and based on a Goon Show catchphrase, "Ying tong iddle i po." It was performed on The Muppet Show episode 520.
- The catch phrase "Needle-nardle-noo!" appeared in a "Consonant Sound" cartoon on Sesame Street, recited by a lion.
- The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss episode "Oh, the People You'll Meet" featured a character named Mr. Moriarty Seagoon Eccles, who takes his name from three different Goon Show characters. Mr. Eccles is also a teacher of a martial art known as "Goon-fooey."
- In a 2009 issue of The Muppet Show Comic Book: The Treasure of Peg-Leg Wilson, a group of dwarfs ask their expert, Topaz, for his opinion of Miss Piggy's jewels. He responds with a poem in the style of William J. McGoonagall, a character from The Goon Show who recites terrible doggerel in a portentous, dramatic manner. McGoonagall, a Milligan character (and sometimes played by Sellers) began his recitations with a drawn-out "Oooooohhhhh...", before launching into rhyming couplets that broke the typical conventions of rhythm and good sense. McGoonagall was a spoof of a famously bad Scottish poet, William Topaz McGonagall, whose 1879 poem The Tay Bridge Disaster reminded the world that "the stronger we our houses build / the less chance we have of being killed." The closing lines of Topaz's poem are worthy of McGoonagall, or even McGonagall himself -- "Let us no more allow ourselves to be distracted / By gaudy baubles worn upon a pig whose roles are without exception terribly acted."
