Too silly

It’s also thanks to Spike Milligan.

In 1972, aged fifteen, I acquire a book of Goon Show scripts.

I was only three years old when the original radio broadcasts came to an end, so The Goons are a sort of mythical entity to me in 1972. Mythical in the sense that I know they existed but I’ve never really heard them. I know what they are – an anarchic group of comedians doing a kind of absurdist radio sitcom with musical interludes. But we don’t have the internet, or iPlayer, and even cassette tapes don’t really take off until the mid-seventies, so I’ve only ever heard vague clips.

Then, in October 1972, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers reconvene to make ‘The Last Goon Show of All’. This is broadcast on Radio 4 and on the telly a few weeks later, though the TV show is just a couple of cameras filming them as they make the radio show. It’s a bit self-congratulatory to be honest, and I now know it wasn’t their best work, but it ignites a spark in fifteen-year-old me.

There’s quite a lot of hoo-ha about it, and a book of scripts is published to cash in on this sudden interest. I buy the book and take it back to Uganda with me for the Christmas holiday.

Dad doesn’t like it. Spike Milligan’s humour is too lowbrow for Dad. And he doesn’t like Welshmen, so that’s Harry Secombe out. I’m not sure what he thinks of Peter Sellers, but Dad likes to assert his highbrow credentials by looking down on popular culture in general. As a family in Uganda we go to watch Carry On Camping at the cinema in Jinja. When Barbara Windsor’s bra pings off during the exercise routine Dad stands and says ‘right, we’re off’, and we file out of the cinema.

Like Graham Chapman’s army officer character in Monty Python, Dad takes a look at the book of scripts and pronounces them ‘too silly’. He says those actual words.

‘They’re too silly, Adrian.’

When the family returns to England several years later he won’t let me watch Monty Python for the same reason.

‘Too silly.’

Dad has an account with the Folio Society – a publishing business whose aim is to produce the most beautifully bound editions of the world’s greatest literature. Every three months a new book arrives, like The Brothers Karamazov or Don Quixote or The Odyssey. They each come in their own decorative slip case, the spines are lavishly tooled and inlaid with gold leaf, and they look very lovely on the shelf. Whether he ever gets round to reading them all, I don’t know.

My book of Goon Show scripts is not beautifully bound. It’s printed on cheap paper and the covers are just thick cardboard. There is no intricate tooling or gold leaf, just a mess of scrawly cartoon figures scribbled all over it which hint at the anarchy within. I love it.

We don’t have telly in Uganda, and we have to listen to the BBC World Service on long wave, which is basically white noise with some voices that sound like they’re half a mile away shouting into a storm. We try going to the cinema again to watch The Italian Job but my brother Matthew gets car sick watching the initial car sequence through the Alps and we have to file out once more. So we spend a lot of time making our own entertainment. I hide myself away and read the Goon Show scripts over and over again. It’s like the Bible. Like a mantra. I’d have become a very good evangelical Methodist if the Bible was funnier.

Seeing jokes written down is very different to hearing them being performed. Each rereading opens up another insight into how they work. How they’re constructed.

I’ve only seen ‘The Last Goon Show of All’ once, and heard a few clips of the radio programme at this stage, so I don’t know exactly what all the different characters sound like. To help get a feel for them I make recordings of the scripts on Dad’s old Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder. I have to do it fairly quietly because I fear Dad’s ridicule should he hear me doing it, but I do all the voices. And they’re my voices, not copies of Spike, Harry and Peter’s voices – I invent the characters anew.

Some years later when I get to hear the original programmes of these particular scripts I’m profoundly disappointed, because the voices sound so wrong. They aren’t the proper voices. They’re not the funny ones I invented. They’ve spoiled it.

Cunts.