Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [41]
Peter Eton was scarcely humorless, but it wasn’t easy to make him laugh. It took work and self-restraint. As a result, this new, tough audience of one was therefore able to exercise some control over what Wilmut calls the Goons’ “tendency toward self-indulgence.” It was not an easy task, though the Goons themselves grew to appreciate the beneficial effect Eton had on them. Harry Secombe credited Eton as being the program’s best producer. Before he came on board, Secombe noted, The Goon Show had little in the way of shape, and in Secombe’s description, the characters all spoke so fast that “it was a gabble.” Eton, though, “was great. He used to get quite choleric [and] go all red and shout, ‘You bastards sit down!’ Peter Sellers would say, ‘I’m pissing off,’ and Eton would just say, ‘Well, go then.’ ”
Still, Max Geldray declares, no matter who was producing the program, “it was Spike who was the manic and inventive driving force behind every detail of the production.” Spike, of course, could also be “one of the most annoying people you could meet.” The BBC executives loved the show’s success, but as the months went by they grew to despise Milligan, who, as Peter once remarked, had a wonderful knack for explaining the simplest things in such a way that nobody could possibly understand them.
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The end of the second series signaled the departure of Michael Bentine. Creative differences were cited. He and Spike were seeing eye-to-eye less and less. According to Secombe, “Only when Michael Bentine left did The Goon Show really begin—really take shape.” It was also becoming legendary, not only with the average bright Briton, but with the next generation of satirists, comics, and puckish intellectuals.
For instance, the physician- turned- comedian- turned- avante-garde- opera- and- theater-director Jonathan Miller remains a dedicated fan. “The Goon Show really is the best thing Sellers ever did,” Miller declares. “He did some films that are interesting, and of course Dr. Strangelove has some nice jokes, but I think the characters that everyone in England remembers, and will remember all their lives, were from The Goon Show. At its best it was as good as Lewis Carroll.”
Does the director of such works as Leoš Janáček’s Katya Kabanova at the Metropolitan Opera really think that The Goon Show is art? Dr. Miller is insistent: “Unless it’s printed, people don’t think it’s literature, but actually, at its best, The Goon Show is on a par with Alice in Wonderland. I don’t think people have registered the importance of Milligan’s imagination; Milligan is an important writer.
“It’s a series of pastiches of English boys’ literature of the ’20s and ’30s, which they grew up on—The Lives of the Bengal Lancers and that sort of thing. People in England of my age, people in their fifties, can still speak to each other in very detailed Goon Show voices—particularly Bluebottle and Bloodnok and Grytpype-Thynne.” Miller proceeds to prove the point.
“There’s a session between Bluebottle and that sort of Mortimer Snerd–like figure called Eccles. They’re soldiers in a trench, and Bluebottle says, [in perfect imitation of Bluebottle’s nasal squeal] ‘What time is it, Eccles?’ Eccles says [again in impeccable imitation], ‘I don’ know, but I’ll tell you sumthun’—last night a very kind gen’leman wrote down the time on a piece of paper for me.’ And Bluebottle says, ‘Show me that. Hey! This piece of paper is not working!’
“It’s such a brilliant, logical joke, that. Carroll would have given his eyeteeth to have made a joke of that quality.
“These characters are a brilliant gallery of British social life. That wonderful character Sellers plays—Major Bloodnok, a sort of drunken, gin-shaken, shortly-to-be-cashiered English major living on the northwest frontier and afflicted, obviously all the time, with catastrophic attacks of Indian diarrhea.” Dr. Miller