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His equipment fever didn’t stop at still photography. New movie cameras were also purchased, used, and replaced by still newer and fancier models. Off-hour Goons were a favorite subject of Peter’s cinematic eye, as were his wife and mother. As he would continue to do for years to come, he recorded his free time in the form of reel after reel of home movie footage—Harry mugging in a striped bathrobe. Peter hamming it up in a park. A glamorous-looking Anne posed in the driver’s seat of a shiny new red sports car. Spike trying to keep hold of a manic dog. A gas station attendant filling Peter’s mouth with gasoline. Anne, in a comedy skit, being served a poisoned cocktail by Peter. . . .

“We liked undercranked film,” said Harry, the manic, fast-motion effect being characteristically Goonish. And, he also adds, “We were all devotees of Buster Keaton rather than Charlie Chaplin,” by which he meant that Keaton’s dark absurdity resonated much more deeply than Chaplin’s comic ballets, not to mention the fact that Chaplin’s Victorian sentimentality had no place in the brutal, existential world of the Goons.

“He had a 16mm camera,” Spike noted a little more brusquely. “He was richer than we were—richer by 8mm.”

• • •

The second series of The Goon Show began in late January 1952. To the Goons’ great satisfaction, the title of their program now actually was The Goon Show. This victory, like many others, came at a price, one that was paid largely by Spike Milligan. “I was trying to shake the BBC out of its apathy,” Spike reflected in the mid-1970s. “And I had to fight like mad, and people didn’t like me for it. I had to rage and crash and bang. I got it right in the end, and it paid off, but it drove me mad in the process, and drove a lot of other people mad. And that’s why I don’t think I could be a success again on the same level—because I just couldn’t go through all the tantrums.” By July, when the second series finished recording, Spike was twitching in the direction of a mental collapse.

Peter, in contrast, tended to treat his Goon work precisely as the workmanlike job it was. He was always “the most serious of the group,” says Max Geldray, but then he could afford to be. Unlike Milligan, Sellers didn’t have to face the pressure of writing a hit series comedy script every week only to perform it on the weekend. Instead, Peter showed up on Sundays for the recording sessions, read the script, did the voices, and went back home. His talent, at this point anyway, wasn’t agony.

That said, the Goons’ joint ambition was, if anything, intensifying. They didn’t want to do just radio. Plans for the Goons’ first television appearance, Trial Gallop, were drawn. The program was scheduled to air in mid-February, but George VI put a crimp in the Goons’ schedule for achieving stardom by dying in his sleep at Sandringham on Wednesday the sixth. The Goons’ comedy show, which would necessarily have been in bad taste even in the best of circumstances, was canceled. Peter and the others had to wait until July 2 to make their joint television debut; they did so with the one-shot Goonreel.

And they still wanted to make a good Goon movie. Penny Points to Paradise had apparently taught them little. One can appreciate their artistic ambition, but the execution remained problematic. At the core of the issue was money. It wasn’t as though the big British studios—J. Arthur Rank, Ealing, Hammer—were clamoring for the Goons. They were, at best, interesting new radio stars, still too small to generate movie buzz. If Sellers, Secombe, Milligan, and Bentine were to make another film together, it would have to be rock-bottom cheap. And so, Down Among the Z Men (1952).

Filmed in two abrupt weeks in April in a small studio in the northwest London neighborhood of Maida Vale, and faring poorly at the box office upon its release, Down Among the Z Men takes the four Goons and, in an apparent effort to broaden their appeal, strips them of most of their Goonishness and replaces it with a low-conventional story, a pretty girl (Carole