Show Notes
Join us as we march off to war wearing squeaky socks and woolly underpants, before surrendering to the twisted logic of Spike Milligan (“better looking than Peter Sellers”).
This show, one of the highlights of the Goon Show’s eighth series and released on BBC LP in 1981, has a plot of sorts: 1917 and England is at war, France is at war, while Eccles is at lunch. Grytpype and Moriarty sell German army shares to Neddie. They claim that the Germans are bound to win any war they enter. Seagoon discovers to his horror that the Germans are losing, but Major Bloodnok sells Seagoon 10,000 unused 1904 calendars. The plan is to drop the calendars on England by zeppelin, making the English think the war hasn’t even started, therefore giving the Germans an advantage. However, the British drop 1918 calendars on Berlin, and the Germans capitulate.
There’s a lot more to it than that and joining Tyler to ‘rifle’through it is Graeme Lindsay-Foot, man of a thousand voices and motorcar enthusiast. That said, he can’t hold a torch to the late Peter Sellers, whose obsession with the horseless carriage they also examine this week, as well as singing the praises of the sound effects chaps, querying quite why Secombe got given six characters to voice and asking whether this could possibly be one of Spike’s greatest performances of his career.
More from Goon Pod
The Queen in America, Eurovision, Elvis, knitting a Spon, a Russian Love Song, Harry Rocking the Town! - it's all here this week! Plus: how much do we love Moriarty, a glaring goof and Watch That Tiger!
Jet Storm, also known as Jet Stream or Killing Urge, is a British thriller directed and co-written by Cy Endfield and starring Richard Attenborough, Stanley Baker, Patrick Allen and Virginia Maskell. It is an early example of what would become the aviation disaster-film genre, preceding films such as Airport by more than a decade. Released in October 1959, it centres almost entirely on a transatlantic flight from London to New York and the psychological and moral crisis that develops among its passengers when one of them threatens to destroy the aircraft.
Broadcast on Channel 4 on 2nd December 1985, The Last Laugh Before TV-am was Spike Milligan’s attempt to bring his particular vein of humour to a new generation... although very little about it suggested that Milligan had changed his approach since the early Q series.