Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [33]
A pilot was recorded before a live audience on February 4, 1951. Spike recalled the experience: “The audience didn’t understand a word of it. God bless the band. They saved it. They all dug the jokes.”
The pilot was successful enough that the knighthood aspirants approved the production of a full-fledged series of comedy programs featuring Sellers, Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine, with scripts by Milligan and Stephens as edited by Jimmy Grafton. But with their fingers firmly on the pulsebeat of the bureaucrat in the next office, the BBC executives drew the line at the proposed title. The Goons, needless to say, desired that their series be called The Goon Show. The BBC declined, insisting that nobody would know what it meant. The first replacement title proposed was The Junior Crazy Gang, but the Goons refused it, citing not only its demeaning blandness but also its pointless reference to an already-existing comedy troupe, the Palladium’s Crazy Gang.
The BBC’s second idea was revealing: They suggested Crazy People. In their own dull way, these executives knew who they were dealing with. This group’s comedy really was evidence of mental illness.
Sad to say, the BBC’s paper-pushers were probably right to deny the Goons their billing of choice, at least at first. After all, the national communications corporation was about to unleash the Goons on an unsuspecting public, and it would take some time to make the show popular. The word Goon could only come to mean what the Goons wanted it to mean on the air. Even when the series was a big enough hit that the stars were granted their own famous title the following year, the four men who’d named themselves after a species of cartoon morons were still faced with at least one clueless BBC planner who asked the question that continued to remain on many listeners’ minds. What exactly was this “Go On” show about, anyway?
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Peter was very much employed between the recording of the Crazy People pilot in early February and the first program’s broadcast in late May. He was busy making movies.
Penny Points to Paradise (1951) came first. Despite its obscene-sounding title, it was little more than a tentative, practically undirected effort to provide employment and exposure for Sellers, Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine. (Also appearing were Alfred Marks, Bill Kerr, and Felix Mendelssohn and His Hawaiian Serenaders.) The 77-minute Penny was an insignificantly small movie even by the standards of bilge-budget British independent filmmaking in 1951, and it nearly achieved the supreme ignominy of never even earning a bad review let alone a mediocre one. But by virtue of its stars, a term one must use loosely since none of them actually shone at the time, Penny survived to become a rare and important bit of Goon juvenilia.
In the film, Spike tells Sellers about some scheme, using a hip slang reference to cash. “Spondulix!” the befuddled Sellers cries. “Dreadful disease!” Spike: “No, major, the spondulix!” Spike makes the universal gesture for money-grubbing, prompting Sellers to reply, “In the fingers?! Worst place you can have it! It travels straight up the brain and crumbles the arm! No, no, it travels up the arm and crumbles the brain. Yes!”
We see Sellers doing a pratfall over a garden wall; we see him grasping a rifle being shadowed by an Angel of Death figure in a black shroud; we see him swinging his arm around and rapping Harry Secombe straight across the face.
Peter emerges in a shower cap and towel: “This is a bathroom and not a confounded beehive!” he explains, only to return to the same business a little later and declare, “Madame, this is a bathroom and not a nursery!” (In both cases the towel threatens to slip off, and one notices that David Lodge’s description of the youngish Peter was substantially correct: He was big, and he was hairy, too, with great tufts of the stuff on his shoulders.)
Sellers shows up again as a fast-talking American salesman,