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radio broadcasts. He’d been on Variety Bandbox any number of times, Stump the Storyteller and Speaking for the Stars, too, not to mention the comedian Ted Ray’s hit show Ray’s a Laugh. (Late in his life, Sellers credited Ray with teaching him the crucial art of comic timing.) But group Goonishness held a powerful appeal, one that his solo gigs failed to satisfy. Playing four or five separate characters by himself was no longer enough; he needed to multiply voices in collaboration with others—an artistic hunger as well as an appetite to work with a team of good friends. Talk at the Grafton Arms continued to revolve around ways to crack the BBC together.

Because Peter was on the best professional footing at the time, Jimmy Grafton wrote a spec script featuring Peter as the centerpiece, with the other Goons in supporting roles. In fact, the program was called Sellers’ Castle, and it focused on the stately but broke “twenty-second [a gunshot, a scream] I beg your pardon, the twenty-third Lord Sellers” and his schemes to keep his dilapidated residence from being taken from him. The four comedians recorded what they considered the best moments—Bentine and his mad scientist routine, Harry singing, and Spike filling in a bunch of outlandish voices—and through Grafton’s agency they got their pilot-of-a-pilot to the BBC producer Roy Speer, who liked what he heard and quickly gave the go-ahead for a full-scale pilot to be recorded. But in a decision worthy of the military, the BBC decided not to assign Speer himself to produce the program but, instead, an inadvertent clown named Brown.

With wisdom born of instinct (comedians are born, not made) and stand-up experience (comedians may be born, but they die repeatedly until they learn what works), the Goons themselves knew that Sellers’ Castle required the zip of a live, laughing audience. But despite the group’s insistence, Jacques Brown felt that, no, a studio audience was not at all necessary for this particular comedy recording, and so Sellers’ Castle was taped in isolation and consequently fell flat. The BBC brass, whom Bentine later described as “a moribund collection of interfering knighthood aspirants,” was decidedly underwhelmed by the pilot of Sellers’ Castle. They found it nutty and incomprehensible and scotched the program, thereby returning the Goons to the morose state with which they were most familiar.

Secombe described their situation coolly: “There was this terrible sense of humor that nobody else really understood.” Grafton likewise, though with drier wit: “Spike was still searching for the right formula in between bouts of depression and withdrawal, alternating with occasional music hall appearances.”

Enter Larry Stephens, a coscriptwriter for Spike. Grafton, whose memoirs display a sparkling knack for nailing the spirit of things without showing off his insightfulness, describes Stephens as “an ex-commando captain who had seen some tough service in the Far East. He had a natural flair for comedy scriptwriting.” Having gone through the war, Stephens understood the Goons. Sellers, Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine possessed the core anarchic attitude; what they lacked was anarchic structure, and Stephens supplied it. “When we first met up we had this thing inside us,” Sellers later said. “We wanted to express ourselves in a sort of surrealistic form. We thought in cartoons. We thought in blackouts. We thought in sketches.” Stephens helped make this nascent style cohere—to a point.

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In early 1951, the producer Pat Dixon pitched yet another new comedy series to the BBC. It was to be a series of bizarre sketches broken up by musical interludes. The comedians would do funny voices, make funny noises, and generally act strange, and then a jazz band would come on. Dixon was young and driven, and along with Larry Stephens he perceived the coherent incoherence behind Goon humor, the inchoate sense behind the nonsense. Perhaps more important than his appreciation for the Goons’ sense of humor, Dixon had earned himself enough of a reputation at the BBC that he could