OK, Boomer: The Goon Show

What is this 'Go On Show'?

From Monty Python to Spike Lee, from Prince to Wolf Hall, Boomers blew it all up and have been congratulating themselves ever since. In ‘OK, Boomer’ we cast a sulky Gen X eye over the Boomer canon and ask: why did you make us listen to this?

OK, Boomer: The Goon Show (1951—60)

The Goon Show was the hit British radio comedy of the 1950s, and made the careers of Light Ent stalwart Harry Secombe, movie-star-to-be Peter Sellers and comedy genius Spike Milligan. (Co-founder Michael Bentine left the show after the second series and so got to be merely a cult hero, rather than a national treasure.) Mostly written by Spike Milligan, it was essentially a variety show featuring loosely-plotted comedy plays interspersed with musical turns. It relied heavily on Sellers’ ability to do a wide range of silly voices, producing a host of recurring characters with audience-pleasing catchphrases.

The legend

The story goes that the suits at the BBC didn’t like The Goon Show. Milligan partly attributed his various breakdowns and worsening mental health to the fact that he had to fight the BBC every step of the way to get the programme made.

The suits mostly didn’t like it because they didn’t get it. One producer was absolutely mystified at the raucous audience response to a character called ‘Hugh Jampton’. The producer didn’t know that in Cockney rhyming slang, ‘Hampton’ = ‘Hampton Wick’ = ‘dick’; Milligan had just introduced a character called ‘Huge Penis’ on prime time BBC radio.

There’s also the legend of a BBC manager peering quizzically at a broadcasting schedule and asking what this ‘Go On Show’ was. It was the most popular comedy show in the country, and high-ups didn’t even know its name.

‘Goon’ was wartime slang. Like ‘Jeeps’ and ‘Wimpy Bars’ the coinage came from the Popeye comic strip, in which ‘goons’ were weird lumpen creatures. The term soon got applied to German soldiers and then became an all-purpose term for idiots. And so a group of ex-Forces comedians and twits who gathered in Jimmy Grafton’s pub on Strutton Ground in post-War London started calling themselves Goons.

The BBC hadn’t got this memo either, and tried to insist that the first series of show went out under the title ‘Crazy People’; ‘The Crazy Gang’ had been the most popular pre-War British comedy troupe and the BBC were hoping to ride their coat-tails. But, in just one of those many fights with management, Milligan put his foot down and won.

This nomenclature struggle is significant, and points to one reason that the Goon legend was so readily embraced by the children of the ‘70s and ‘80s. ‘The Crazy Gang’ were the great comedians of their time; but their time was the 1930s, when everything was in black and white and the map was Imperial pink all over. The Goons were were a product of the jet-powered, technicolour and increasingly post-Imperial 1950s. They were separated by less than two decades, but the psychological gulf was enormous. I mean, look at them in the early photographs: the trad-jazz tweeds and the long hair, Bentine with his Beatnik beard. They were hipsters. They were instinctively anti-Establishment, determinedly revolutionary.

This, then, is the legend: The Goon Show was the origin point, the Big Bang of post-war British comedy. Michael Palin described hearing it as like hearing ‘Elvis singing “Heartbreak Hotel”’. The BBC manager’s mispronunciation was oddly prophetic: the Goons encouraged a generation of weirdos ‘go on’. You are not alone, they said; there are other twits out there just like you. You can even do your own silly voices. Then you can see if there’s anyone at Oxford or Cambridge interested in doing silly voices with you. This is the Apostolic Succession of British comedy, from The Goon Show to Beyond The Fringe to Monty Python to alternative comedy to a bunch of shouty stand-ups on a panel show where silly voices stand in for actual jokes.

I probably first heard it when it was repeated on BBC Radio 4 in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It reappeared just as a whole new generation was discovering the joy and power of poking fun at the suits (in silly voices); it was the perfect spoken word accompaniment to the punk and New Wave music over on Radio 1 and The Young Ones on BBC2.

Milligan was born and grew up in India, the son of an Irish Sergeant Major in the British Army, and didn't actually come to Britain until he was in his early teens. He was a member of the Young Communist League and a gifted jazz trumpeter. He was bipolar and struggled with his mental health all his life. He was — by circumstance, character and conduct — an outsider. Like any good surrealist, he looked at ‘real’ life with a detached eye and then described it as he saw it: absurd and often hilarious.

And this was the final key part of the legacy and legend of The Goon Show: that comedy should be anti-establishment. Not least because the establishment was anti-it.

The reality

Or was it? Hang on to your skeleton because you are about to cringe harder than you have ever cringed before.

A clip from a Channel 4 documentary featuring a home movie made in 1973 by the then Prince of Wales in which he does Goon voices while on military service

I’m not sure you can really claim that something is anti-establishment when its biggest fan is the fucking King.

Now, I wish to be clear. The reason that this clip is embarrassing — so embarrassing, in fact, that I have still not been able to watch it all the way through — is not because the-then heir to the throne is doing silly voices. I’m generally in favour of kings doing silly voices. Being a king is a pretty silly thing; being a king in a 21st-century democracy is even sillier. Charles should do a silly voice. It would add much to the gaiety of the nation. Although, to be fair, he kind of does.

No: the reason why the clip is embarrassing is that it is not funny. Charles is doing silly voices instead of being funny; he thinks the voices are the jokes, rather than the actual, beautifully constructed lines that Milligan wrote and Peter Sellers read out. Albeit in a silly voice.

This is how most of my generation first became aware of The Goons: grown men — tedious, unfunny, worrying grown men — repeating decontextualised catchphrases in not-quite-silly-enough voices. They did it with Monty Python too. It’s an extraordinary feat, to take this thing of exquisite joy and laughter and reduce it to mechanically-recovered punchline. And it is testament to just how popular The Goon Show was. It was one of the highest rated radio shows of its time, and in the 1950s that was a very big deal. Only a third of the country had televisions; the Home Service, which later became Radio 4, was the mainstream.

The silly voices and catchphrases became part of the country’s conversation. Just as Monty Python later came to replace the Church of England as the national religion, so, before them, like a Jan Hus of silly voices, The Goons gave the country a new liturgy with which to supplant the Book of Common Prayer. Every baptism in the country was accompanied by a chorus of uncles squeaking ‘he’s fallen in the water’.

As that joke about Hugh Jampton suggests, part of the ‘anti-establishment’ sense of The Goons was that they were just talking like almost everyone else did — but, crucially, not like the other people on the BBC. As Secombe put it, most of their laughs came from the punchlines to army jokes, the feed lines of which were too rude to broadcast. It didn’t matter; a good deal of the country had all been in the army together for half a decade and knew all those jokes already. Part of what made The Goons central to the national conversation was that they sounded like the nation.

By the time I was discovering the Goons through the repeats on Radio 4, they were just part of the background noise. Hearing the shows was like seeing Hamlet for the first time and discovering that it's made entirely of quotations. And, because all those dirty set-ups had been cut to make it acceptable for the ‘50s nation, it was also perfectly acceptable for ‘70s children. It is so often the fate of the revolutionary art of one generation to become the light entertainment of the next, just as the riotous jazz of the ‘20s became the easy listening tootling that filled the music breaks of The Goon Show.

We had a radio station at school. I mean, we didn’t, of course. The school had a tannoy system which, some afternoons, we were allowed to take over and operate as a radio station. And one of those things we broadcast were ‘performances’ of Goon Show scripts. I too have been one of those people parroting catchphrases, not really understanding the jokes but finding the silly voices perfectly amusing enough.

Is it ok?

Ah, but those jokes. Here’s a sublime bit of business from The Mysterious Punch-up-the-Conker (1957):

Bluebottle
What time is it Eccles?

Eccles
Err, just a minute. I, I've got it written down 'ere 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
Well, umm, if anybody asks me the ti-ime, I ca-can show it to dem.

Bluebottle
Well then, supposing when somebody asks you the time, it isn't eight o'clock?

Eccles
Ah, den I don't show it to dem.

Bluebottle
Well how do you know when it's eight o'clock?

Eccles
I've got it written down on a piece of paper!

It is beautiful, spiralling nonsense, with Eccles’ illogical logic being wielded persistently and consistently to the ends of absurdity. But as so often in Milligan’s comedy, it has a sliver of deeper truth to it.

After all, our conception of time is itself absurdly arbitrary. ‘The time’ in Bluebottle’s question, clock time, doesn’t exist; the hours and minutes are a purely human abstraction. Eccles’ piece of paper is only slightly more ridiculous than a wristwatch in a world where there are stars in the sky. One really close, and very bright, a near infinite number of much dimmer, further away ones, all ticking past in a celestial clockwork.

In some medieval time systems there were 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night, no matter the season, which meant that summer daytime hours were really long and night time hours much shorter, squeezing and stretching to keep up with the sun. But is that any more or less ridiculous than arbitrarily dividing everything up in units of 60, just because that’s how Sumerian astrologers counted? Is it any more ridiculous than Eccles’ bit of paper?

It is customary at this point to refer to Milligan’s mental health and make some fatuous correlations between madness and genius. But I think it’s true that part of his genius was for pointing out the madness of ‘sanity’. Having been born in India he later had to apply for British citizenship, which was refused, partly because he would not swear allegiance to the family of his biggest fan. Because of the relentless mechanisms of the law, this hero of British comedy — who had, like his father, fought for this country — had to be officially Irish. To be rational in a continually irrational world is to practise that definition of madness: repeating the same action and expecting different results.

Also, though, some of Milligan’s mental health issues may have been exacerbated by arguing with studio technicians over the increasingly complex sound effects he wanted. Listen to the sound effect at the start of that skit: ticking, chiming, clanging, crowing. All that just to set up the ‘what time is it?’ joke.

The Goons was also beautiful, spiralling sound. Radio is key to understanding a great deal of British comedy. At the time The Goons was broadcast radio was the mainstream, but for decades after the rise of TV radio retained a key role as a cheap medium in which to break new talent. It became part of the clichéd profile of a certain kind of comedy career: Footlights, Edinburgh Fringe, Radio 4 show, BBC2 series, national treasure status.

Radio prioritises speech. This is handy for English, which is already at least three other languages in a trenchcoat and contains a lot of material with which to muck about, especially for an Irish man who grew up in India. But it also provides freedom from the literal. Without visuals, space and time can be easily bent and reconfigured. The imagination of the writer can run free of the fetters of the real, which means that so too can the imaginations of the audience.

This was perhaps why it resonated so much with us as children that we felt compelled to re-perform it ourselves. This is, after all, the experience of a child; to be endlessly confronted with inexplicable rituals and customs, trying to understand the arbitrary and absurd behaviour of adults, and having to construct one’s own context and explanations, which seem equally absurd from the outside.

This is also why Jonathan Miller, alumnus of Beyond The Fringe and Britain's foremost pretentious intellectual, compared Spike Milligan to Lewis Carroll and called him a ‘major imaginative artist of the twentieth century’. Because within those army punchlines and elaborate sound effects was a refreshing and encouraging challenge not just to the establishment, but to established consensus reality.

And also some very silly voices indeed.

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Speaking of silly voices, Monty Python weren’t adverse to doing them either: