Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [45]
“There were quarrels from time to time,” Wally Stott admits. “I don’t think Harry was ever involved in those things. They were between Peter and Spike. I never knew what they were about, but there would be certain weeks when I’d realize that all was not well.” But the Sunday recording sessions were generally merry—at least when Spike wasn’t suffering one of his spells—so much so that rumors of on-air drunkenness began to surface. Max Geldray dismisses these reports as absolutely false, though he does acknowledge that the Goons sometimes seized the opportunity afforded by Geldray’s harmonica interlude to swig a little brandy out of milk bottles. It was a smuggler’s trick. Wouldn’t you know it? The BBC banned alcohol on the premises.
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Goon art was evolving. Under Peter Eton’s supervision, the show’s structure really began to cohere in the fourth series (1953–54), though Spike and Larry Stephens still weren’t developing single story lines for the duration of each half hour. But by the fifth series (1954–55), with scripts by Milligan and Eric Sykes, each episode began to feature a self-contained plot, albeit in a Milliganesque way. These plots, such as they were, might be steered as much by the sound of the words as by character motivation or narrative drive—hence the subsequent comparisons to Carroll and James Joyce.
And they were often bleak. Modernist disaster abounded. In “The Phantom Head-Shaver (of Brighton),” for instance, the charming seaside resort is thrown into chaos by a goofy terror: a lightning-fast, hair-obsessed criminal wielding a razorblade. The story makes no sense, but it’s a story, and its governing principle is that no one is ever safe. The episode features the shrieking Prunella Dirt (Sellers), whose husband is rendered bald by the eponymous villain; the broadly Jewish Judge Schnorrer (Sellers); Major Bloodnok (Sellers); Professor Crun (Sellers); and Willium, a dopey window cleaner (Sellers).
And it was rude. British humor, even on the BBC, was even less culturally sensitive than American comedy was at the time. “The Phantom Head-Shaver” episode features this breathtaking introductory remark: “Tonight’s broadcast comes to you from an Arab Stench–Recuperating Centre in Stoke Poges.”
“Hitler—there was a painter for you.” A Peter Sellers World War II joke.
Spike’s longtime assistant and editor Norma Farnes has observed that each of the Goons had suffered military service during World War II, and it was this direct experience of the armed forces, not to mention their experience of the war itself, that made them so skeptical of authority. They were also morbid by nature. In an episode called “The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill-on-Sea),” Seagoon and Crun are standing on a beach during a blackout. Crun insists that no Nazi could never see “a little match being struck,” so Seagoon strikes one. They’re instantly hit by an exploding shell. “Any questions?” Seagoon asks. “Yes,” Crun responds. “Where are my legs?”
Wally Stott ties one of the Goons’ ruder, lewder jokes directly to the war: “Sometimes there was material that the boys tried to get away with, which the BBC wouldn’t allow. There was a lot of British-Army coarse language that they tried to get through. I mean, there was a character called Hugh Jampton!”
The American interviewer falls silent. “You don’t understand that? Well, Hampton is a crude word for penis. So Hugh Jampton would be a very big one, wouldn’t it? Of course anybody who’d been through the war in Britain would know.”
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On the home front, Michael Peter Anthony Sellers was born on April 2, 1954. He was a cute baby with his mother’s light complexion and twinkling eyes. They called him Pooh.
Now Peter had a son to go with the train set, and Anne had a real infant to go with her husband. Peg was overjoyed. She was Anne’s first visitor at the hospital, the arrival of Pooh having reduced her to grandmotherliness.