Goon with the Win
This is a wonderful rarity. As part of one of the TV series that Harry Secombe starred in, this is from a 1966 episode of Secombe and Friends. And it reunited his Goon Show compatriots – Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan (who wrote pretty much all the Goon Show episodes, which ran from 1951 to 1960) – as they recreated one of the old radio broadcasts for television. As such, it’s not great television (in fact, the full episode they did got edited down for broadcast, interspersed with interviews), but nonetheless, the nine minutes here are a treasure to have a record of.
Also reunited is Ray Ellington, who was the singer on the show, but here he fills in as the announcer. One other change – in the original Goon Show, the character that Harry Secombe played was named ‘Neddy Seagoon,’ but here they call him ‘Harry Seagoon.’ The characters who the other two play won’t mean as much to those who don’t know them from the radio. But much of the humor should come through. And a bit odd, too, that the script they chose to do doesn’t give Spike Milligan much to do (at least in this segment), other than sort of direct the others and joke around – though we get to seem him do his beloved character ‘Eccles,’ who was always referred to as The Original Goon, a sort of ‘Goofy’-like character, whose catchphrase upon entering the first time was usually, “How’s yer old dad?”
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