Goons, The

Goons, The, team of British radio comedians consisting of Harry Secombe (1921-2001), Peter Sellers (1925-1980), Spike Milligan (1918-2002), and, initially, Michael Bentine (1922-1996). All four gained early performing experience during their wartime military service. They teamed up in 1951, at the instigation of scriptwriter Jimmy Grafton, in the BBC Radio comedy show Crazy People, soon rechristened The Goon Show.

Though owing something to such predecessors as the radio comedy shows ITMA and Much Binding in the Marsh, the Goons broke entirely new ground in their absurdist use of the medium. Bentine, whose intricate style of humour clashed with Milligan’s freewheeling approach, left the show after a year, but the other three complemented each other well. Sellers’s flair for characterization fed on Milligan’s cartoonish creations, while Secombe, temperamentally more stable than his colleagues, formed the solid centre of the team. The bulk of Goon scripts were written by Milligan, but major contributions were made by Larry Stephens and Eric Sykes, who lent narrative structure to Milligan’s wilder excursions.

The Goon Show plots, such as they were, often parodied Buchanesque spy stories, stiff-upper-lip imperial adventures, or gallant wartime heroics. Though direct political satire was rare, the tone was irreverent and subversive, a derisive view of a disintegrating British Empire. Goon humour was wild, alogical, and erratic, often straying into surrealism and making ingenious use of ludicrously prolonged sound effects. Secombe invariably played Neddy Seagoon, the naive young hero, while Sellers and Milligan took all the other roles.

The Goon Show ran until 1960, becoming a much-loved national institution. An attempt to translate it to television in puppet form (The Telegoons, 1963-1964) failed dismally, but its influence reached far beyond radio, especially to the films of Richard Lester, and to the whole absurdist strand of British television comedy that led to Monty Python. Secombe, Sellers, and Milligan staged a final reunion in The Last Goon Show of All in 1972.