As a child in the late 1950s I was an avid listener to a BBC radio comedy series that broke the mould. It was the Goon Show and it would lay the groundwork for Python and many other absurdist comedies.
STARRING Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan, who also wrote the scripts, it made silliness and utter idiocy brilliantly funny, with a series of barmy characters, both male and female, getting into ridiculously improbable situations.
It made intoxicating listening. So this one-night only recreation of three of the finest episodes from the 10-year run of the show is truly magical.
To anyone under 65 it probably makes no sense at all, but as the elderly audience in Brighton on Sunday proved, to those in the know it’s a wonderful walk down memory lane.
And the actors in this reconstruction are truly lifelike. Colin Elmer is brilliantly frenetic as the zany hyperactive Spike. Clive Greenwood gets Secombe’s silly high-pitched giggles and rotund good humour to a tee, and Julian Howard McDowell is the many voiced, dry and inventive Sellers.
Tom Capper has the thankless task of being the ultra serious BBC announcer Wallace Greenslade but, the cast interact brilliantly and are albeit in character clearly having a whale of a time, ad libbing and reacting to the audience instantly.
The stories are classic Goon material – the dreaded batter pudding hurler, the theft of Napoleon’s piano from the Louvre and the rampant bald head shaver who is transplanted to Brighton for the local audience.
The glory of radio is that it is a truly visual, medium, so sound effects can easily transport us to Paris, Algiers and the middle of the English Channel.
All the favourite characters are here – the evil team of Hercules Grytpype-Thynne and Count Jim Moriarty, the complete idiot Eccles, the ancient husband and wife Henry and Minnie Bannister, Major Dennis Bloodnok an eccentric and worrying army officer, and of course Ned Seagoon, the most useless policeman in Sussex.
Musical interludes provided by the close harmony group Java Jive, Rachel Davies and Anthony Coote.
The same Apollo Theatre Company promise us re-enactments of Hancock’s Half Hour next year. I can’t wait.
The Goon Show was at the Theatre Royal Brighton and is on tour.
For details of the tour, click here:
Reviewed by Brian Butler on Sunday, October 7 at Theatre Royal Brighton
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