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8 unusual facts about The Goon Show


Get to Know Your Rabbit

Much of the comedy has its roots in the traditional British absurdist sense of humor associated with the likes of Monty Python and The Goon Show.

Good Ship Venus

When a ship was required in The Goon Show it was often named the "Good Ship Venus" or "HMS Venus", one of several references to dirty jokes the Goons managed to get past the 1950s BBC censors.

Guild of One-Name Studies

The decision to call it a guild was partly inspired by the notion that medieval guilds had encouraged professionalism along with mutual aid, as well as by a whimsical desire to create the acronym GOONS, evoking a popular British radio humorous show, The Goon Show, and making a self-mocking comment on the quixotic nature of one-name studies.

Johnny Fourie

A short while after this, Johnny Fourie auditioned for the Ray Ellington Quartet of The Goon Show fame.

Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes

The 1950s BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show often made reference to the NAAFI in scripts, mostly by Peter Sellers' character, Major Dennis Bloodnok.

Ninfield

Ninfield was once featured in an episode of the classic comedy The Goon Show entitled The Nadger Plague and first broadcast by the BBC in October 1956.

Penny Points to Paradise

The film was the feature film debut of the stars of The Goon Show, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers.

Six Charlies in Search of an Author

Six Charlies in Search of An Author is an episode of the classic radio comedy, The Goon Show.


Alice the Goon

Spike Milligan was a fan of the Popeye cartoons and took the name of The Goon Show from Alice and her tribe.

Beyond the Fringe

Humiliation of authority was something only previously delved into in The Goon Show and, arguably, Hancock's Half Hour, with such parliamentarians as Sir Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan coming under special scrutiny — although the BBC were predisposed to frowning upon it.

Peruvian migration to the United Kingdom

The Peruvian community in the United Kingdom has produced the actors Michael Bentine and Henry Ian Cusick, who found fame in The Goon Show and Lost respectively.

The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn

Along the way he meets characters not dissimilar to Eccles, Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister from The Goon Show.


see also

James Moriarty

Count Jim Moriarty, fictional character from the 1950s BBC Radio comedy The Goon Show

Larry Stephens

Stephens was probably at his busiest during 1955 and 1956, during which time, apart from co-writing The Goon Show, he also supplied the story and helped shape the screenplay for The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn (1956), and made countless last-minute re-writes of various comedians' scripts, innumerable gags for a wide range of variety shows and quite a few unofficial edits of troublesome television scripts.

According to a BBC Radio 4 programme on Stephens' life, it was while working on the second season of The Goon Show that Stephens, doubling both as a key contributor and as Milligan's agent, began to drink so heavily it affected his work.

Max Geldray

After The Goon Show series finished in 1960, he settled in the US, where he worked as an entertainer in the Reno casinos alongside the likes of Sarah Vaughan and Billy Daniels.

The Fear of Wages

Like many of The Goon Show titles, it was a parody of a contemporary film, The Wages of Fear (1953).