Goon Pod

On the occasion of Kenneth Williams’ 100th birthday it seemed an ideal opportunity to introduce people to the glories of Goon Pod Film Club.

Inspired by Mr Fiddler in Carry On Camping (episode out next week) membership to GPFC has dropped to £1 a month for all existing and new members. That will give you a new full-length discussion about a classic British comedy film every month plus access to the GPFC archive of over twenty shows and growing: episodes include Without A Clue; Steptoe & Son Ride Again; Shaun Of The Dead; Kind Hearts & Coronets; A Hard Days Night; School For Scoundrels; Paddington 2 and many more!

We also have some fine guests including David Quantick, David Renwick & Andrew Marshall, Tim Worthington and Jon Canter.

This is a special 2-hour edition of Goon Pod highlighting some of the many conversations we’ve had on GPFC over the last 18 months.

Remember: head over to Patreon.com/GoonPod and subscribe for just £1 a month (you can also buy individual episodes for £3 each if you don’t wish to subscribe)

Let's go out with a bang as we count down Listeners’ Top 20 British Sitcoms of All Time – as voted for by you.

In total 73 different shows were nominated - some of the very greatest and most popular, others quite obscure or forgotten. But which ones made the final list? In this show we find out, with very special guests Chris Diamond and Donna Rees.

Whether your tastes run towards the communal warmth of classic ensemble shows, the brittle awkwardness of suburban frustration, or the fragmented edges of sitcom storytelling, there’s plenty here to argue about.

We talk about why some comedies endure, why others divide opinion and how shifting zeitgeists shape what people laugh at. Expect nostalgia, rediscovery and the occasional raised eyebrow or disapproving 'tut' as we move through the list.

Will the obvious favourites dominate, or will a few unexpected titles sneak in? Expect a few surprises!

This week, for Christmas, a heart-warming festive treat full of joy, goodwill and Peter Sellers at his cuddliest.

ONLY JOKING.

Actually, it’s Carol for Another Christmas, Rod Serling’s bleak, angry, Cold War reworking of A Christmas Carol . Conceived as the opening salvo in a run of UN-friendly TV specials, the film is a full-throated warning against isolationism, nuclear brinkmanship and the idea that minding your own business ever ends well. Xerox paid for it, ABC aired it ad-free on 28 December 1964, viewers and critics were divided about it, and it then disappeared for nearly 50 years.

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Cleopatra) in his only television outing, the film stars Sterling Hayden as Daniel Grudge, a wealthy American industrialist who hates foreign aid, diplomacy and the United Nations in equal measure. On Christmas Eve he clashes with his liberal nephew Fred (Ben Gazzara) and is hauled through a series of visions featuring war dead, nuclear devastation and, most memorably, Peter Sellers as “Imperial Me” – a cowboy-Santa demagogue preaching radical individualism. It was Sellers’ first screen appearance after his near-fatal heart attack earlier that year.

Also featuring Eva Marie Saint, Robert Shaw, Steve Lawrence, Pat Hingle, Britt Ekland and music by Henry Mancini, the film is verbose, didactic and relentlessly grim – and all the more fascinating for it.

Joining Tyler is Tilt Araiza (The Sitcom Club / Jaffa Cakes for Proust), drawing parallels with Planet of the Apes, The Prisoner and unpacking Serling and the social and political climate just one year after after the assassination of JFK... looking at how things came together to produce this Christmas curio.

“You call this a life?”

This week we dip into the big red book and examine Spike Milligan’s two famously chaotic appearances on This Is Your Life — first in 1973 at an army reunion in Bexhill and again in 1995 in the wake of Spike’s infamous crack at Prince Charles at the British Comedy Awards. From bungled surveillance operations and surprise reunions to war memories, old squeezes, secret sons and unresolved tensions, these programmes offer an occasionally revealing — and sometimes unsettling — portrait of Spike at two very different points in his life.

Joining Tyler this week is co-host of World Of Telly John Williams and the pair try to navigate the uneasy compression of a vast, contradictory life into television-friendly fare.

Along the way we encounter Peter Sellers in Nazi garb, Robert Graves refusing retakes because “the milkman is part of life”, Harry Secombe on VT, Eric Sykes restoring some semblance of order to proceedings, Michael Bentine getting a warm reception, Roger McGough falling a bit flat and a surprise appearance from a reclusive billionaire. We also examine the differing styles of Eamonn Andrews and Michael Aspel – the former being all awkward and lacking spontaneity; the latter oozing affable charm and keeping the show on the rails.

These two programmes, separated by 22 years, chart not just Spike Milligan’s public career but his private fractures — family divisions, emotional debts, and the limits of nostalgia. They also expose the clumsy mechanics of This Is Your Life itself: a format built for uplift struggling to contain a life defined by contradiction, pain, brilliance and refusal to behave.

Tyler welcomes comedy writer David Quantick to celebrate the 1965 film One Way Pendulum starring Goon Show alumnus Eric Sykes.

Adapted by NF Simpson from his own 1959 Royal Court play and directed by Peter Yates (fresh off Summer Holiday, soon to make Bullitt), Eric plays suburban dad Arthur Groomkirby, who is quietly building a full-scale Old Bailey in his living room while his son Kirby (Jonathan Miller) teaches speak-your-weight machines to sing the Hallelujah Chorus in the attic. Meanwhile, daughter Sylvia (Julia Foster) obsesses over her arms and Aunt Mildred (Mona Washbourne) witters endlessly about transport. Rounding out the madness are Peggy Mount as the food-dispatching charlady and George Cole, Graham Crowden & Douglas Wilmer in a superb hallucinatory courtroom sequence.

The comparisons to the Goon Show are obvious.

David – who met Simpson – explains how his very British absurdism (Lewis Carroll meets Kafka with actual laughs) cloaks the bizarre inside the banal which none of his characters question. The humour is in the mismatch between the bland domestic surroundings and the offbeat conversations therein.