![]() ![]() As Sellers’s film career began to take off, The Goon Show ended. In spite of this, the Goons became a prominent fixture in the history of British comedy. Though this was the first break to disrupt his comedy career, he would battle with bipolar disorder and severe mental breakdowns the rest of his life. When he walked through a plate glass window in Sellers’s apartment brandishing a potato knife, he was arrested, sedated for weeks, and spent months recuperating. The pressures of writing and performing that much material weighed on him, and by the third series, he suffered a mental breakdown and became convinced that he had to kill Peter Sellers. Its influence on comedy both in England and abroad cannot be overstated: It introduced a level of anarchy and silliness that merged beautifully with the insubordination of the British satire boom of the early ’60s with Beyond the Fringe.īesides its popularity, the other most oft-mentioned factoid about The Goon Show is the fact that nearly all of the 250 episodes were written by Milligan - sometimes with a co-writer, sometimes not. The show’s fans are many and include the Beatles, the Pythons, and HRH Prince of Wales, who is listed as a patron of The Goon Show Appreciation Society. If you’ve heard the name Spike Milligan before, it was no doubt in conjunction with his more well-known radio show The Goon Show, which also starred Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. ![]() ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve just seen it, too.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘I thought that’s what we were going to do.’ ‘So did I,’ he replied.” “I was dismayed: It was brilliant,” he says in his memoir So Anyway… “I rang Terry Jones. ![]() John Cleese, who was in the early stages of putting together Flying Circus with the other Pythons, was enjoying an evening in and happened to catch the show. On March 24, six months before the premiere of Python, the first episode of Q5 written and performed by comedian Spike Milligan aired on the BBC. You might assume that you’ve stumbled into an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Or perhaps you’ve tuned in at a different point, and you’re watching a sketch with several performers in costume who have all elected to leave on the BBC Wardrobe Department tag. Or perhaps you tune in a little later and see a pre-taped piece in which a man sits behind a piano in the middle of a field, which then explodes. You turn on the BBC and you see a normal-looking news presenter begin his program, announce his name, and also announce exactly how much money he makes for doing the show. John Bluthal, Julia Breck, and Spike Milligan on Q6. ![]()
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