If you were missing The Goon Show in 1963 but you were not particularly inclined towards the clattering canal-dredged puppet shenanigan restagings of The Telegoons, then thankfully you did not have to look particularly far to find the erstwhile Geldray-haranguers up to their usual variety of comic mischief. Peter Sellers scored an impressive and impressively close run of acclaimed box office hit comedy movies with The Wrong Arm Of The Law, Heavens Above! and his inaugural turn as Inspector Jacques Clouseau in The Pink Panther, and also found time to join Anthony Newley and Joan Collins in the Profumo-lampooning top ten album-inspiring topical revue Fool Britannia. Spike Milligan published his surrealist novel Puckoon, staged the first presentation of the full-length version of satirical absurdist masterpiece The Bed Sitting Room, and wrote and performed in the first series of the BBC Home Service comedy show The Omar Khayyam Show. You could probably be forgiven for thinking that Sir Cumference himself Harry Secombe would not have been up to comparatively particularly much outside of variety shows; in fact, however, he was taking the lead in an enormous West End smash that must have had Sellers and Milligan seething with affectionate envy as they made bawdy double entendres about the Common Market and pretended to turn into a fireguard in adjoining venues.

It is difficult to get across now just how massive a sensation Pickwick was throughout pretty much the entire sixties – although the fact that the majority of you will have automatically guessed that this was what was being referred to in the previous paragraph should arguably be testament enough to that – but at a time when theatre and radio were still just about as big as if indeed not actually bigger than television, stage smashes brought a degree of fame and popularity that it is difficult to relate to from this distance and invariably afforded their stars lucrative touring productions – and that’s not even getting started on the coach parties that would descend from across the nation to see shows that they had heard excitable reports about – and original cast recordings that hung around in the hit parade for years on end. Pickwick would define Harry Secombe for a decade and beyond in the same manner that a certain Sunday evening magazine show hinged around him singing to blacksmiths about how his lord was his saviour and also his chum would also later come to do so. It inspired a top twenty hit single – the instant standard If I Ruled The World – in addition to the hansom cab-load selling soundtrack album and a lavish BBC television adaptation right at the end of the decade, and frankly none of this should be too surprising. Somehow finding a coherent narrative in Charles Dickens’ jovial travelogue about an assortment of aspirant social historians, Pickwick is not only crammed with effervescent wit and decorated by rousing musical numbers, it also put on about as big a show for the audience as it possibly could, with one early production reputedly incorporating an on-stage ice rink. Sadly there is no reliable documentary record of Harry’s on-skate progress, though we can be fairly certain he gave it a go in Highway.

Lacking the reputation for comic invention of Spike and Peter, poor old Harry tends to get left a little behind these days, which is why I was only too happy to join Tyler Adams on Goon Pod for a chat about Pickwick and just why a production that was arguably simply the right show for the right moment still enjoys a lofty reputation of its own even now where so many of its more overpromoted bill-sharing contemporaries have been all but forgotten. As well as diverting into our usual esoteric areas of obsession from BBC Schools Radio and Monty Python’s Flying Circus to alliteration-crazed Radio 4 stalwart Tom ‘Fat Man’ Vernon and the logistics of making a programme for a black and white television service that is about to switch to colour in about a fortnight, we also discuss the casting of productions of which next to nothing now remains, try to work out which songs propelled the soundtrack album towards very nearly outselling With The Beatles, delve into the making of the BBC version and what the various cast members did beforehand and afterwards, and most importantly proudly fly the flag – or if you prefer wave the cardboard cut-out – for Harry Secombe, and explain why despite not outwardly doing anything as prominent or inventive as his erstwhile Goon compatriots, he was always a welcome presence on chat shows and, sometimes, a little more subversive than you might credit…

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Buy A Book!

You can find much more about Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe’s adventures on spinning vinyl in Top Of The Box Vol. 2, the story behind every album released by BBC Records And Tapes. You can get Top Of The Box Vol. 2 in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. With a magnum of extra strength for Mr. Samuel Weller!

Further Listening

You can hear me on Goon Pod chatting about Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren’s George Martin-produced comedy album Peter And Sophia here, the 1959 album The Best Of The Goon Shows here and the 1966 all-star comedy movie The Wrong Box here. You can also find me on Goon Pod Film Club talking about Billy Liar here.

Further Reading

There’s more about some of the sixties stage hits that were not captured so extensively for posterity, from Mrs. Wilson’s Diary to Curse Of The Daleks, and why they are so elusively fascinating now in Plays For Yesterday here.

© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.