It is June 1970. Ted Heath is days away from becoming British Prime Minister. Mungo Jerry are riding high at the top of the charts. And popular television personality Simon Dee's career is just about to collapse in a spectacular fashion. How ironic then that Dee should co-star in the film we're discussing this week, playing a popular television personality! Doctor In Trouble was the last of the Doctor film series, which by 1970 had fully committed to aping the Carry Ons. As well as Dee,...

"All trams have been melted down and made into melted-down trams." In 1952 London's last tram rolled into the depot. Two years later the Goons decided to mark the occasion with a show - better late than never! At the London Pleasure Transport Board, Redundant Tram Department, Inspector Ned Seagoon receives a phone call informing him that there’s still a tram at large on the Highgate-Kingsway route, and, indeed, the tram map still has one flag pin stuck in it, for a number 33....

"In ye year of Grace, Mary and Uncle Fred, 1190, Wallace Greenslade, an itinerant announcer, was bounde for Nottingham when ye coach was stoppd inne Sherwood Forest by Robin Hood who did persuade himme to join hys bande as second sackbuttist and part-time dustman. Greenslade did don Lincoln Green and did assiste ye outlaws in their recklesse adventures." (Radio Times listing for 'Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest', December 1954) This week Tyler and guest Chas Early look at the Robin...

"One small brown pot containing... another small brown pot." With its memorable cover, photographed by Angus McBean and voted Number 25 in the NME's list of Genuinely Disturbing Record Sleeves, Milligan Preserved was released in late 1961 and featured a series of songs and sketches written and performed by Spike Milligan, with assistance from the likes of Valentine Dyall and Graham Stark. It was produced by George Martin and as such our guest this week is Jason Kruppa, host of Producing...

This week's guest is a man more used to asking the questions - the writer and broadcaster Clive Anderson. A former barrister, Clive turned to comedy and wrote for the likes of Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones before gaining radio & television fame as the host of top improvisational comedy series Whose Line Is It Anyway? He then went on to present a series of chat shows and interviewed some of the biggest stars on the planet, including Spike Milligan, and it's this that we take as our...

"Excuse me, what is the price of sliced ham per portion?" And so this enigmatic enquiry opens the first episode of Series 7 of The Goon Show - and to launch the new series of Goon Pod Graeme Lindsay-Foot returns to talk about it! Broadcast in October 1956 as the situation in Suez was worsening, it was a busy period for the Goons - The Ying Tong Song was riding high in the Hit Parade, Son Of Fred was showing on ITV and Harry had a song in the charts. Producer Pat Dixon was too busy to...

Comedian Rory McGrath is this week's guest and he freely admits that it was the Goons that got him into comedy. The conversation ranges hither and yon and among other topics we talk about: The creation of Chelmsford 123 Peter Cook The genius of Phil Pope Rory's falling out and eventual reconciliation with Jimmy Mulville Who Dares Wins and Tony Robinson letting it all hang out Barry Cryer - aka 'Lord Crap' They Think It's All Over and Lee Hurst's departure Three Men In A Boat with a...

Mark Cousins, Mike Haskins & Sean Gaffney join Tyler for a very special New Years Eve bonus episode! Earlier this year listeners to Goon Pod were asked to nominate their favourite Peter Sellers films and they didn't disappoint - hundreds of people responded and thus a Top Twenty list emerged. The chaps count down the list and although most of Sellers' more notable movies appear there are a few surprises! The maddening suspense as our guests await Ghost In The Noonday Sun is palpable!...

As it's Christmas this week we wanted to shake things up and try something a little different... so we decided to talk about a British comedy film which doesn't feature a Goon! A change is as good as a rest and anyway, the film is a cracker. In 1986 John Cleese starred in a Michael Frayn-scripted comic farce called Clockwise, in which he plays headmaster Brian Stimpson who needs to get to far-flung Norwich in order to deliver a speech. Having missed the train, Stimpson enlists the help...

This week our very special guest is John Lloyd, much admir'd comedy producer and writer, whose credits range from The News Quiz and Quote Unquote on the radio, to Not The Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder, Spitting Image and much much more. At the height of his career he could boast of more BAFTAs than Dame Judi Dench yet so much success took its toll and John freely admits to having suffered a form of mid-life crisis in his forties. Having spent most of the nineties directing highly-acclaimed...

Emmy-winning screenwriter, author, cartoonist and performer Andy Riley is this week's guest - and rather appropriately, given the time of year, we're talking about the classic series six Goon Show episode The International Christmas Pudding. In a far-ranging conversation Andy and Tyler talk about his history with the show and some of the topics this specific episode raises - such as the old-fashioned notion of British prestige abroad. It was also the show in which Peter Sellers got into...

In 1963 a film was released which, had its original casting remained intact, would probably be barely remembered today - The Pink Panther, directed by Blake Edwards. With Peter Ustinov as a sure-footed and dependable French police inspector on the trail of a notorious jewel thief it would doubtless have made respectable money and garnered warm reviews but would hardly have spawned a slew of spin-offs - while in fact, the follow-up film, A Shot In The Dark, came out a mere three months after...

Writer and host of Comfort Blanket podcast Joel Morris joins Tyler this week to talk about Monty Python's Life Of Brian, released in 1979 to howls of impotent rage from those who refused to accept it for what it was but considered by everyone else as just a really funny film. In some ways a satire on the nature of organised groups, be they politically or religiously motivated, the film centres around the character of Brian (Graham Chapman) in 33AD Judea, who although briefly seized by...

In 1973 Richard Lester's rollicking romp The Three Musketeers was released - subtitled 'The Queen's Diamonds' (The Four Musketeers was filmed at the same time and followed a year after) the movie starred Michael York as D'Artagnan, Oliver Reed as Athos, Frank Finlay as Porthos and Richard Chamberlain as Aramis. Perhaps most memorable was the pairing of Raquel Welch with Spike Milligan, as Monsieur and Madame Bonacieux - she the close confidante to the Queen of France and he an easily-bought...

Comedy writer, novelist and playwright Jon Canter joins Tyler this week. He talks about Spike Milligan and some of the people he's had the pleasure of working with over the course of his career, including Miriam Margolyes, Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie, Douglas Adams, Lenny Henry, Richard Wilson, Mel Smith & Griff Rhys-Jones and John Lloyd. They also discuss Margaret Thatcher trying comedy and Prince Charles dancing to Hot Stuff. It's a packed show folks!

“Don’t you see? If I’d had a barrister who’d asked questions and made clever speeches then I’d be dead as mutton! Your artfulness paid off! The artful way you handled it, the dumb tactics, it saved me!" Released in America as Trial & Error, The Dock Brief starred Peter Sellers as Wilfred Morganhall, a long-in-the-tooth barrister whose career has been blighted at every turn by a lack of opportunities. One day, however, his hopes are answered when he is appointed Defence Counsel to...

This week Tyler is joined by the delightful Katy Secombe, who talks warmly about her dad Harry and reveals what it was like growing up as the daughter of a Goon. They discuss Harry's career and family life: how he met Katy's mum Myra under rather inauspicious circumstances; his alter-ego Neddie Seagoon; health issues in the 1980s; his relationship with the other Goons and various leading figures of British light entertainment; his general disapproval of boyfriends; female admirers;...

Comedy writer Andrew Marshall is this week's special guest. Andrew, along with former writing partner (and Goon Pod guest) David Renwick, wrote for Spike Milligan in the eighties but is perhaps best known for the television programmes 2.4 Children, Alexei Sayle's Stuff, Whoops Apocalypse (and its film spinoff), Hot Metal and The Burkiss Way for radio. More recently he and Rob Grant have created the Quanderhorn series for Radio 4. He talks about the relationship he and David developed with...

"Happens to all of us y'know... being born." Between 1970 and 1975 Peter Sellers made films which mostly fell flat commercially, and some of which didn't even get released, but there was the odd little gem and The Optimists of Nine Elms, directed by Anthony Simmons and based on his novel, is perhaps one of Sellers' most personal films. The task of embodying Sam, a washed-up old music hall entertainer, prompted Sellers to channel both his father and his great hero Dan Leno and look back to...

This week writer and journalist David Quantick on Ned's Atomic Dustbin. As someone who spent time with the band while writing for the NME and a former member of the GSPS, David was the ideal person to tackle NAD. The band took their name from a Goon Show episode, with band member Jonn Penney suggesting it after flicking through the More Goon Show Scripts book. The Goon Show itself was from the 9th Series in 1959 and contained vague Cold War themes as well as digs at BBC censorship and...

October 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Telegoons, a television spin-off of The Goon Show which ran for two series and 26 episodes between 1963 and 1964. Each fifteen-minute show was adapted by Maurice Wiltshire from an earlier Goon Show episode, many of which were firm fan favourites such as Napoleon's Piano, The Canal and Lurgi Strikes Britain, with new soundtracks specially recorded by Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and, straight off Dr Strangelove, Peter...

2023 is the centenary of Larry Stephens, writer and collaborator with the Goons and Tony Hancock, a unique comedy creator whose life was cruelly cut short in 1959. To celebrate Larry's contribution to British comedy this year, as part of the Birmingham Comedy Festival, the team who previously breathed new life into the Goon Show by restaging a handful of classic episodes has come back together for one night only to perform two shows which Larry co-wrote with Maurice Wiltshire: The Moriarty...

"Mrs Wilberforce..? I understand you have rooms to let." And so we are introduced to the sinister and mysterious Professor Marcus, performed with brio by Alec Guinness as a sort of unhinged Alastair Sim grotesque, in Alexander McKendrick's sublime 1955 Ealing comedy The Ladykillers. The film – described by McKendrick as a film about Britain in subsidence - was the first major film role for Peter Sellers, after a string of low budget and mostly forgettable little comedies. Although his role...

In 1977 BBC Records released Goon Show Classics Volume 4. It became one of their biggest sellers and no wonder: on the A-side was the episode considered the greatest Goon Show of all time (as voted for by people of impeccable taste, breeding and judgement - Goon Pod listeners) - Napoleon's Piano; on the B-side was the show we're talking about today: The Flea. You heard her back in January talking about The Greenslade Story and back by popular demand is Donna Rees, trying to get her head...