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Anne understood Peter. She knew that he was erratic in predictable ways. He would buy a car on a whim—a used Jaguar here, a used Rolls there—and sell it equally whimsically, usually at a loss, and buy another. He piled up more and more photographic equipment and turned the kitchen into a darkroom, where his chemicals took precedence over her milk and eggs, thereby rendering the sink unusable. He was making more money than he’d ever seen, but so drastically had he always overspent his income that his accountant, Bill Wills, once attempted to put him on a severe allowance—£12 per week. Peter inevitably exceeded it, and rather than raise the rate, Wills gave up, leaving Peter to spend as freely as he wished.

Anne wanted children. She thought they might stabilize the marriage. And so it was in this rickety domestic context that in July 1953, Anne Sellers announced that she was pregnant again. Peter responded joyously. He went out and bought a £300 electric train set and began playing with it in earnest.

• • •

As cherished radio stars with bills to pay, Peter, Spike, and Harry were periodically obliged to leave London, head out to the various shires, and adapt recorded Goon broadcast comedy into live music hall routines. The more successful Peter became, the less willing he was to do it. Since he’d been holding provincial audiences in contempt since his squalid vaudeville infancy with his grandmother’s traveling water tank, his growing fame and fortune in the mid-1950s carried with it a lingering, ever-souring wrath. Late in his life, Peter described with unbridled contempt the Goons’ audiences outside London. They were Goonlike, he said, but in the worst possible sense: “You’re usually telling jokes to a crowd of people with two-thousandths of an inch of forehead.” In Peter’s increasingly lofty view, it was one thing to act like a moron but quite another to perform for one. When he looked out through the footlights at his audiences he saw a vision of hell.

Still, apart from having to face the dreaded Cro-Magnons of the hinterlands, the regularized camaraderie of The Goon Show gave Peter immense pleasure, as did the lasting comic art he was creating with his friends. That several Goons and associates lived in more or less the same neighborhood of North London wasn’t simply due to Peter’s family real estate connection; having close friends close at hand was important to Peter. He enjoyed fellowship.

When asked about his Goon Show years after they were long gone, his answer was inevitably a variation on a simple declarative statement: “It was the happiest time in my life professionally.” Beloved by its creators and its fans alike, the program provided steady employment, national fame, and bizarre comedy in equal measure. Peter craved all three.

Sellers wasn’t exactly the star of the show, but he was certainly the most vocally gifted Goon, and as a result the United Kingdom experienced a rising tide of impressionists of the impressionist. Listeners loved to do Peter’s many voices themselves—their flattery was sincere—and Sellers imitators began popping up all over the country. Wally Stott tells of his experience in the mid-fifties when he learned, surreally, to fly a plane: “My instructor used to give me my lessons in Peter Sellers’s voices. One lesson he’d be Bloodnok, another lesson he’d be Bluebottle.”

Stott fondly remembers Peter’s upbeat mood in the recording studio on Sundays: “Peter used to do a lot of clownish things. For instance, we used to warm up the audience before the show started. Harry would sing, and we would play. And Peter would go around the back of the studio and play the timpani, and put on a real show doing it. You know how timpanists, years ago, used to turn handles to tune them? Peter used to give a terrific impression of one of the old-time timpani players—playing it, listening to it, and darting his hand over it tightening the taps. And then one of the sound effects men would fire