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...

This week we look at the life and career of the late great Dick Emery (1915-1983), as Tyler and Chris Diamond talk to his son Nick. Dick worked with the Goons both collectively and individually: appearing in a number of Goon Shows, as a substitute for Secombe in The Case of the Mukkinese Battlehorn and briefly in the Sellers film The Wrong Arm of the Law, as well as working extensively with Michael Bentine on television. Nick talks warmly and openly about his father's career and personal...

Writer and film academic Graham Rinaldi joins the pod this week to discuss the much admired 1963 British comedy romp The Wrong Arm of the Law, starring Peter Sellers, Lionel Jeffries and Bernard Cribbins. Very much a soulmate of the earlier film Two Way Stretch, and featuring many of the same cast, The Wrong Arm of the Law drew upon the talents of the cream of British comedy at the time - scriptwriters Galton & Simpson (and John Antrobus), plus supporting cast including Bill Kerr,...

It's Part 2 of The A-Z of Q with Adam Leslie! We talk large noses, Costume Dept tags, Ed Welch, public lavatories, the Queen, a man inside an elephant, terminal dandruff, Neil Shand, 'the w-word', scouts, Hitler, Bob Todd in blackface and much more, plus we discuss how the comedy landscape had altered beyond recognition by the time Q9 bowed out and even include some interesting thoughts on the series by Mark Lewisohn! And there's also time to talk about when Spike interviewed Van Morrison...

The A-Z of Q - Part One! Writer & podcaster Adam Leslie joins Tyler for the first of a two-parter, examining Spike Milligan's Q series on BBC Television, from Q5 in 1969 to Q9 in 1980 (there was also There's A Lot of It About in 1982 but we don't really talk about that). It was heralded as a massively influential show, particularly upon the group which would shortly after the transmission of Q5 come together to create Monty Python's Flying Circus, yet by the end, while it was still...

This week Duncan Gray - the man behind the GSPS's brand spanking new website - joins Tyler to talk about an underrated Goon Show from Series 7 - The Sleeping Prince. Although the show may not figure highly on fans' lists of favourite Goon Shows, it contains arguably one of the funniest bits of music in the show's history - the glorious national anthem of Yacabaku! The episode was bumped from broadcast due to the Hungarian Uprising and BBC management felt some of the show's themes -...

"Things had been going too smoothly to continue as they were. It really was time we had another bout of applied chaos." In 1971 Spike Milligan published the first volume of his war memoirs: Adolf Hitler - My Part In His Downfall. The preface to it anticipates that it would be the first of a trilogy; in actual fact six further books were written over the next twenty years. Although AHMPIHD is shot through with Milligan's trademark humour there are moments of sadness and melancholy. Milligan...

Canadian comedian and writer Zach Mitchell spent an entire summer vacation listening to every existing Goon Show. While others on the beach were indulging in aquatic horseplay, flicking towels at each other or kicking sand in the faces of skinny sunbathers, Zach was on board Ned Seagoon's snow-plough, avoiding falling pianos outside London embassies and taking up the flugelhorn as a precaution against the dreaded lurgi! This week he joins Tyler to talk about his love for the show - he...

John Williams returns to talk about one of the strongest - and confusing - Goon Shows from Series 8! This episode of Goon Pod goes out literally days after Larry Stephens' centenary and Treasure in the Tower sees the debut of an enduring phrase he gifted to the Goon Show - you'll have to listen to find out! Set in the year 1600 and the year 1957, Sir Walter Raleigh brings back treasure from the New World and wants to bury it at the Tower of London while at the same time Seagoon of the...

Exactly two weeks before his first encounter with the band which was to change his life, producer George Martin, assisted by Stuart Eltham, recorded a parody of the 1957 film The Bridge On The River Kwai at EMI Studios in London. Featuring the vocal talents of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and an uncredited Dudley Moore, Bridge On The River Wye was released on LP in November 1962. The script was a revised and expanded episode of a Goon Show which had been...

What happens when one man, a criminal mastermind, who is desperate for immortality and will stop at nothing to achieve it, comes up against his greatest foe - a weary pensioner with a lawnmower fixation? As if out of a Trap, this week actors & comedians Paul Litchfield & Jeremy Limb join Tyler to hem and haw and (occasionally) howl at Peter Sellers' final film, The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu from 1980. Released two weeks posthumously, Sellers plays both the title role and that...

Comedian Pierre Novellie is this week's guest. Born in South Africa, his family moved to the Isle of Man when Pierre was turning seven and it wasn't long after this that he discovered the Goon Show - he was hooked and has loved it ever since. Pierre joins Tyler to talk about this and other influences, and the two share memories of assimilating into a culture which was instinctively familiar while being a bit weird as well! Also: is the Oxbridge Comedy Mafia not dead, only sleeping?...

Real movie stardom pretty much eluded Spike Milligan, although he appeared in quite a few. He was an unlikely leading man and there are only a small handful of films in which his name appears above the title - this week Jeremy Phillips of Cinema Limbo joins Tyler to mull over one of them: arguably Spike's 'biggest' film, Postman's Knock from 1962. In the early sixties Spike was signed to MGM with a view to launching him on the same road to cinematic success as his erstwhile Goons colleague...

"Good heavens! It's Evans!" Jon Auty from Behind The Stunts returns this week to discuss the 1972 fish-out-of-water comedy film Sunstruck, starring Harry Secombe as Welsh schoolteacher Stanley Evans. His romantic intentions towards a colleague stymied by a beefier rival, Stanley sees a poster offering jobs to British schoolteachers in New South Wales. Stanley applies, imagining a life of sun, sea and Sheilas, but reality brings him back to earth with a bump. Posted to remote Kookaburra...

"Who would have suspected him? I mean, nobody ever noticed him. I never did." In 1969 Canadian director Alvin Rakoff directed a big screen version of his successful television play Call Me Daddy, which had starred Donald Pleasance and Judy 'Keeping Up Appearances' Cornwell. Now renamed Hoffman, the film starred Peter Sellers and newcomer Sinead Cusack. Benjamin Hoffman, a manager at a cigarette company, blackmails one of the office girls into staying with him at his flat for a week. His...

Actor & writer Chas Early first heard the Goons when he discovered in his dad's record collection a 1967 LP called Goon But Not Forgotten, featuring Six Charlies In Search of An Author and Insurance, the White Man's Burden. It's the latter show which he discusses this week, a tremendous episode which at first appears to focus on a flannelled fool's attempt to make a fortune out of a piano-playing penguin but then swiftly pulls a handbrake turn as Ned lucklessly tries to set fire to the...

Originally formed in 1972, The Goon Show Preservation Society (GSPS) has for over fifty years championed all things Goon and achieved remarkable success in keeping the show fresh and relevant into the 21st century. One of its patrons recently got fitted for a crown so it can count among its supporters folk from the highest echelons of society right the way down to poor wretches kipping in dustbins! Over the course of Goon Pod we have played host to a number of former and current members of...

Think of all the great comic characters brought to life by Peter Sellers - Bluebottle, Clouseau, Strangelove, Percy Quill, Dr Pratt, Fred Kite and countless others - but chances are you won't think about Tommy Grando. Who? In 1972 Sellers made a surprise guest appearance in his old mate Eric Sykes' titular sitcom, co-starring the sublime Hattie Jacques. Although Tommy Grando could hardly be described as a complex three-dimensional character (Sellers plays it very broad in keeping with the...

In 2022 Spike Milligan’s family opened up his archive to selected guests – and what an archive it is! Hundreds of tapes, film rolls, scrapbooks, photographs, unpublished novels & scripts, box files and albums, much of it meticulously documented and annotated by Milligan himself, including bound volumes of family history, wartime journals and assorted paraphernalia covering his earliest childhood memories right up until his final years. Sky Arts filmed a documentary which originally...

Chris Diamond returns with the second part of our chat about 1957's The Smallest Show On Earth. We talk much more about the actual film and highlight several delightful moments, such as the scene in which the three elderly staff watch an old silent movie while the kinema is closed, and projectionist Percy Quill's evident elation following a (nearly) faultless film showing. We also ask the question: should sympathetic characters get away with committing arson? Off on a tangent, Arthur Lowe's...

Chris Diamond returns once again to examine one of Peter Sellers' most beloved earlier films, the 1957 Basil Dearden-directed The Smallest Show On Earth. As well as Sellers the film features winning turns from Margaret Rutherford, Bernard Miles and Francis De Wolff, with stolid support from the film's nominal stars, husband and wife Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna. Matthew & Jean Spenser inherit a crumbling old cinema - The Bijou Kinema (aka 'the fleapit') - and as well as the fixtures...

Mark Cousins returns to look again at the radio career of Peter Sellers, this time concentrating on the 1950s and largely eschewing his Goon Show activity. Sellers was constantly in demand, and nowhere more so than on the wireless; indeed, it wasn't until the latter half of the decade that he began to wind down his appearances behind the microphone and focus more on the silver screen. He more or less abandoned radio completely as the sixties dawned, apart from interviews or promotional...

For this 100th edition of Goon Pod writer and podcaster Tim Worthington dons a sailor's tunic with arrows printed on it and returns to discuss the classic Goon Show Tales of Old Dartmoor, which was on the first LP ever issued of Goons episodes in late 1959. We discuss the show itself and what was happening in the world around the time it was broadcast... and listeners can expect to hear us chat about Monty Python's Election Night special, Vic & Bob, a 96-year-old with a secret, a young...