Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [35]
Despite the show’s chaotic nature, certain themes began to develop. Druggy in a world before drugs, Crazy People was irreverent, illogical, and not a little cynical. Authority was skewered, logic dismembered. The show was a triumph of facetiousness in the service of pointlessness—a philosophical statement. Even its title was inconsistent. BBC program listings called it Crazy People for the whole first series, but the Goons themselves insisted on referring to it on the air as The Goon Show.
Goon comedy is a mix of pa-dum-pum jokes—Q: “Do you mind if I take a gander ’round the shop?” A: “As long as it’s house trained.”—with centrifugally disintegrating plots and significantly dumb noises. Like the poetic play of Lewis Carroll, ’twas brillig in a profoundly British way; it was Alice in Wonderland after the Great Depression and two devastating world wars. What held it together, increasingly so as the series progressed, was a group of recognizable if distinctively unrounded characters. For Spike, these creations erupted out of the bogs of his emotional landscape. For Peter, they gave a distinct if malleable structure to what had previously been merely feats of impressionism. Milligan later insisted that Sellers’s Goon characters were “the boilerhouse of his talent.” Spike brought out Peter’s loyal side; Peter, he was quick to say, “was instrumental in getting me into the BBC. He was very kind like that.” This particular kindness entailed a certain risk on Peter’s part. Max Geldray, for instance, reports that Spike stormed into the staid BBC “with all the panache of a walking unmade bed.”
As for Peter, he credited Spike with shaping him into a work of art: “[I was] just a vase of flowers,” Sellers once said, “and Milligan arranged me.”
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Sellers believed, as any performer must, that his characters actually had blood and muscle. “To all of us, they absolutely lived,” he claimed. His personalities became British legends.
He was Major Denis Bloodnok, English military man par infériorité, whose dimness was only outpaced by his flatulence. (The name stemmed from Peter’s use of “nok” to describe a nose; he’d call someone with a pointy proboscis “Needlenok.”)
He was Henry Crun, an elderly gentlemen with a crackly, halting voice who forever bickered with Spike’s magnificent, equally doddering Minnie Bannister.
He was Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, a devil of an aristocratic villain who harbored a sly, insinuating voice and, in Spike’s off-air written descriptions at least, an insistent taste for other men. (Spike writes of Grytpype-Thynne’s shady background: “Subject of a police investigation on school homosexuality”; “subject of a military police investigation on homosexuality”; “subject of a prisoners’ investigation on homosexuality”; “implicated in homosexuality with a Masai goat herd”; and “recreations: homosexuality.”)
And he was the young and endearingly unlovable Bluebottle, who tended to arrive late in the proceedings of whatever muddled story Spike had concocted that week, injecting himself into the midst of the chaos with a high-pitched, nasal, and truly hellish whine: “Cap-i-tan, my Cap-i-tan, I hear my Cap-i-tan call me!” Bluebottle was not a bright boy. He tended to read his own stage directions. “Wooky wooky wooky!” Bluebottle might shriek, after which Peter would squeal, in the same voice, “Make funny face, wait for applause!” And as Sellers told it—and the basic scene has been confirmed by the man himself—Bluebottle actually did live!
Peter: “This fellow came over one evening, I’ll never forget it. He was tall and wide—he wasn’t fat, but he