Writers: Larry Stephens and Maurice Wiltshire
Director/Producer: Dave Freak
Original Music: Jim Wynn
Devotees of early childhood radio anarchy, The Goons, will be familiar with its creator, Spike 
Milligan, together with his conspirators in mayhem. There’s the comic genius of a thousand characters, but never comfortable in his own, Peter Sellers as well as the splurging voice from the valleys, Harry Secombe, whom Spike had met during WW2 when he witnessed his one-man disaster-area attempts at anything resembling soldiering such that clandestine plans were made to get him captured by the Germans, comfortable in the knowledge they would surrender within days begging for him to be taken back. Michael Bentine was a one-time, high-profile Gooner/co-founder. Spike, well, Spike’s troubled genius goes without saying – but Black Country man, Larry Stephens? Doesn’t immediately trip off the tongue, does it?
Together with early Goons co-writer Maurice Wiltshire, tonight celebrates two of their ‘forgotten’ scripts from 1958. It’s just as well they did because the creative manic workload would take a massive emotional and physical toll on dear Spike in later years. Stephens is credited with bringing coherence and at least some form of narrative structure to Spike’s tsunami of surrealities. It is recorded that when Stephens’ heavy drinking became so chaotic the BBC terminated his contract, Spike arranged to take him on as a salaried freelancer himself.
Biographer Julie Warren takes issue with his Wikipedia entry and asks why so few know of Stephens’ work. Essentially, he died comparatively young (35), Spike didn’t and took, some might robustly claim, deservedly, the lion’s share of any credit. It’s a tough gig, comedy.
Part of The Birmingham Comedy Festival, there’s a cosy upstair mezzanine setting for two performances of the 1958 scripts featuring the drastic antics of Neddie Seagoon’s memoirs being written on a piano and then set alight in Min and Crun’s bedsit, oddly, previously having been filled with water for a relaxing bath. Come on – it was 1958, there was still rationing and bomb sites littered the city landscapes like rotten teeth. You got your laughs where you found them. Clearly, the Pythons’ parents had liberal attitudes towards their children’s radio listening habits.
There are relished apparitions featuring the likes of Eccles, Bluebottle, Grytpype-Thynne, and Count Moriarty. The vocal characterisations are suitably engaging, the performers being listed as Richard Usher (Sellers), Mark Earby (Milligan) and Jimm Rennie (Seagoon), with Special Guest Ian Danter (Announcer/Greenslade) and original music by Jim Wynn. The near-inchoate sound effects are astonishing, how they were contrived in the days when tape was only just making its debut and cosy, humming valves were still king is worthy of a documentary alone. Two years later the heroine of embryonic Electronica, Delia Derbyshire joined the BBC. It’s all very silly and noticeably scattered with de-mobbed irreverent barbs at the military mindset: these chaps had been through a dreadful conflict. Julie Warren notes that as a Commando in, then, Burma Stephens, like so many of his generation, suffered life-changing experiences. It took its toll.
The www.thegoonshow.org.uk flier neatly encapsulates the essence, or the reek, as The Establishment would have most likely ranted – ‘Inspired idiots talk themselves into a nonsense of knots’. Of its time, nostalgia not being what it used to be, tonight’s homage is a celebration of bonkers bohemian comedic originality that was the vanguard of the shape of things to come: more than likely nurtured in a fervent crucible of Jazz, corned beef, Spam and powdered-milk. A zimmer-frame ramble down rose-tinted lanes with lashings-of-ginger-beer goggles. Record producer, George Martin, had nefarious dealings with Goon people but somehow got distracted by some upstart, mop-topped Scousers. You had to laugh – especially when you’d forked out something like 6/4d for a 45rpm Goon single.
Bluebottle: I can’t open the door! Voice: Turn the knob on your side. Bluebottle: (Vexaciously) I don’t have a knob on my side!
Reviewed on 8 October 2023
