The Goon Show - Impact On Comedy and Culture

Impact On Comedy and Culture

In the Britain of 1950, humour was derived from three main sources: print, film and radio, and despite the advent of television, throughout the 1950s radio remained the dominant source of broadcast comedy. In this period, two radio comedy shows exercised a profound influence. The first was Take It From Here, with its polished professionalism. The other was The Goon Show, with its absurdity, manic surreality and unpredictability."

On the influence of The Goons, Eric Sykes wrote that in the post-World War II years, "other shows came along but 'The House of Comedy' needed electricity. Then, out of the blue...The Goons...Spike Milligan simply blew the roof off, and lit the whole place with sunshine. At a cursory glance, The Goon Show was merely quick-fire delivery of extremely funny lines mouthed by eccentric characters, but this was only the froth. In The Goon Show, Spike was unknowingly portraying every facet of the British psyche".

Sykes and Milligan, along with Ray Galton, Alan Simpson, Frankie Howerd and Stanley ("Scruffy") Dale, co-founded the writers cooperative Associated London Scripts (ALS), which over time included others such as Larry Stephens. In his book Spike & Co (2006, pp. 344–345), Graham McCann states "the anarchic spirit of the Goon Show...would inspire, directly or indirectly and to varying extents, Monty Pythons Flying Circus, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Young Ones, Vic Reeves Big Night Out, The League of Gentlemen, Brass Eye and countless other strange and bold new comedies". Other ALS-related comedies such as Sykes and A..., Hancock's Half Hour, Steptoe and Son, Beyond Our Ken, and Round The Horne influenced their own genres of comedy.

Eddie Izzard notes that The Goons and Milligan in particular "influenced a new generation of comedians who came to be known as 'alternative'." In Ventham's (2002, p. 151) compilation, John Cleese notes that "In comedy, there are a very small number of defining moments when somebody comes along and genuinely creates a breakthrough, takes us into territory where nobody has been before. The only experiences to which I can compare my own discovery of the Goons are going to see N F Simpson's Play One Way Pendulum...or, later on, hearing Peter Cook for the first time. They were just light years ahead of everyone else."