Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [36]
Harry Secombe noted that Peter didn’t merely do the voices. He became the characters: “He physically changed as he did the voice. He’d shrink for Crun, and then get very small for Bluebottle.” The comedy writer Eric Sykes put it in biological terms: “You’d be in a taxi with Peter, and he’d listen to the taxi driver talking. And when he would get out, he would be the taxi driver. But not only in words and voice. His whole metabolism would have changed.” That Peter was performing Bloodnok et al before a live audience may not have mattered to his style in the least, for like all of Peter’s characters, they were just as alive for him when he was alone.
Michael Bentine, meanwhile, played the toothy, chirpy Captain (or Professor) Osric Pureheart, a variation of the mad inventor character he’d been toying with for several years. Pureheart’s notable skill was to invent warped variations of well-known, contemporary British products—a popular new race car, for instance, or an on-the-drawing-board airplane that had been in the news that week. On one episode Captain Pureheart supervised the launch of the Goonitania. The following week he led the salvaging of the Goonitania.
As befitted his essentially good nature, Harry Secombe played the expansive Neddie Seagoon, hearty and well-meaning, dispatched on important missions he inevitably bungled, rarely comprehending much of anything but never losing hope.
And then there was Spike’s Eccles, the prototypical Goon. If Seagoon was a genial British Everydope, Eccles was an inadvertently dangerous Everycretin, a man without a mind. A press item appearing a few days before Crazy People’s first broadcast attempted to define to the average Brit in the street what precisely this outlandish-sounding Goon creature was: “Something with a one-cell brain,” it explained. Eccles was precisely that human amoeba. Armed with a voice like a Manchester Goofy, Eccles was too stupid to be malicious, too oblivious ever to be considered criminal, and for these very reasons he was terrifying. Eccles was obviously a product of Spike’s wartime experiences.
“Gradually,” Milligan reflected, “piece by piece, this chemistry of Secombe, Bentine, Sellers, and myself . . . suddenly we were like a magnet drawn toward itself, unexplainably so. We only told lunatic jokes. Everything was lunatic. It wasn’t like any other jokes you’d hear.” And strangely, week by week, audiences began to embrace them. The Goons’ comedy began as a kind of idiolect and turned into widespread slang.
From its genesis in the Grafton Arms, Goon humor was always clubby and fraternal, but thanks to the BBC, now it spread across the airwaves like a social disease, a kind of mental herpes. The Daily Graphic predicted as much: “Listeners who like it will, according to the Chief Goons, become Goons of varying degree, depending on the strength of their liking. They will be associate Goons, honorary Goons, and Goon followers.” The prophecy was fulfilled. The first Crazy People episodes attracted listeners in the 370,000 range, but by the end of the first series of seventeen weekly broadcasts the audience was up to 1.8 million.
Still, only a relative few of these listeners could possibly have realized that they were the first initiates in what would become a fanatical worldwide cult, one that would eventually destroy the minds of millions, including John Lennon, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Elton John, and Charles, Prince of Wales.
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Like children left unsupervised in an isolated orphanage, the Goons developed their own private language, only some of which they shared with their listeners. Secombe recalled the genesis of what became a classic