After 50 Years, Knees Are Still Ridiculous
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday March 1, 2002
FIFTY years on, The Goon Show's anarchy and wordplay has been so absorbed into our culture that it is hard to remember the impact it once had. I was won over at the age of 11 by a single line on the radio. Neddy Seagoon, the show's dim hero, was relating how there were no oars in his lifeboat, ``but luckily we found two outboard motors and we rowed with them".
It's obvious there was some ancient vein of humour in Milligan's family, which had long been in the military in India. Milligan recalled his father as ``a bit of a clown" who entertained the troops during the war in India.
Part of the humour sprang out of World War II. In 1940, Milligan joined the British army as a gunner a period he went on to recall in a series of books beginning with Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. (``At Victoria Station," he wrote, ``the RTO gave me a travel warrant, a white feather and a picture of Hitler marked, `This is your enemy'... I searched every compartment, but he wasn't on the train ...")
Demobbed, he began to write scripts. Eventually, through his connection with Harry Secombe, a friend from army days, he was asked by BBC producer Pat Dixon to do a new radio comedy. The first broadcast was on May 28, 1951, under the title Crazy People, and its stars were Michael Bentine, Milligan, Secombe and Peter Sellers. In June 1952 it was renamed The Goon Show. Bentine left soon after, but the weekly show continued, with Milligan the enginehouse of most of the scripts, until January 1960.
The show was characterised by an anarchic humour: episodes had names like ``The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill on Sea)" and ``The Affair of the Lone Banana". Silly voices, madcap sound effects and barely restrained giggles were a hallmark.
Milligan played Eccles, a particularly dim innocent, and Minnie Bannister, the ``companion in honour" of Henry Crun.
Turning out scripts every week took a huge toll on his mental health and his marriage: he carried on writing scripts even from a mental home.
Milligan's humour was fast and unpredictable and untethered by the music-hall conventions of the prewar years. Not all the jokes worked, but when they did there was a vein of pure, timeless humour running through them. The fact that Prince Charles became a devoted fan probably did him no favours, but it is no understatement to say that Milligan changed the course of British comedy.
Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and many who came after owe him a debt of honour, and his influence remains evident even in modern shows such as The League of Gentlemen.
I asked him for his autograph in the 1970s, when he was in Australia to star in a This is Your Life on his mother: the autograph came back: ``This girl is being returned in good condition." I treasure it still.
When I interviewed him in February 1998 in Woy Woy, he said he had just heard an episode of The Goons. ``I haven't heard it in years," he added, but he swung into the voices effortlessly.
Bluebottle: Eccles, what time is it?
Eccles: Well, um, my piece of paper says 1.20
Bluebottle: Oh, that's funny. My piece of paper only says it's twenty past 12.
Eccles: Oh then, your piece of paper must be slow.
Milligan then mused: ``There are no jokes there. Just ideas. No jokes."
I asked him if he thought there were some things that were inherently funny. Yes, he replied, ``knees, and Nazis, and kilts and wigs".
``Knees seem ridiculous things. They're halfway down your body, they don't really help you at all except when you want to kneel down. If you didn't have them, there'd be no Christianity."
The Goon Show plays on Radio National at 3.30pm on Sundays and 5.30am on Fridays. The station will play The Last Go-On Show in the Big Ideas slot at 5pm this Sunday (to be repeated on Tuesday at 1pm).
© 2002 Sydney Morning Herald
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