Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (11 page)

Sad to say, the BBC’s paper-pushers were probably right to deny the
Goons their billing of choice, at least at first. After all, the national communications corporation was about to unleash the Goons on an unsuspecting public, and it would take some time to make the show popular.
The word
Goon
could only come to mean what the Goons wanted it to
mean
on the air
. Even when the series was a big enough hit that the stars
were granted their own famous title the following year, the four men who’d
named themselves after a species of cartoon morons were
still
faced with at
least one clueless BBC planner who asked the question that continued to
remain on many listeners’ minds. What exactly was this “Go On” show
about, anyway?

• • •

Peter was very much employed between the recording of the
Crazy People
pilot in early February and the first program’s broadcast in late May. He
was busy making movies.

Penny Points to Paradise
(1951) came first. Despite its obscene-sounding
title, it was little more than a tentative, practically undirected effort to
provide employment and exposure for Sellers, Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine. (Also appearing were Alfred Marks, Bill Kerr, and Felix Mendelssohn
and His Hawaiian Serenaders.) The 77-minute
Penny
was an insignificantly
small movie even by the standards of bilge-budget British independent filmmaking in 1951, and it nearly achieved the supreme ignominy of never
even earning a
bad
review let alone a mediocre one. But by virtue of its
stars, a term one must use loosely since none of them actually shone at the
time,
Penny
survived to become a rare and important bit of Goon juvenilia.

In the film, Spike tells Sellers about some scheme, using a hip slang
reference to cash. “Spondulix!” the befuddled Sellers cries. “Dreadful disease!” Spike: “No, major, the
spondulix!
” Spike makes the universal gesture
for money-grubbing, prompting Sellers to reply, “In the fingers?! Worst
place you can have it! It travels straight up the brain and crumbles the arm!
No, no, it travels up the arm and crumbles the brain. Yes!”

We see Sellers doing a pratfall over a garden wall; we see him grasping
a rifle being shadowed by an Angel of Death figure in a black shroud; we
see him swinging his arm around and rapping Harry Secombe straight
across the face.

Peter emerges in a shower cap and towel: “This is a bathroom and not
a confounded beehive!” he explains, only to return to the same business a
little later and declare, “Madame, this is a bathroom and not a nursery!”
(In both cases the towel threatens to slip off, and one notices that David
Lodge’s description of the youngish Peter was substantially correct: He
was
big, and he was hairy, too, with great tufts of the stuff on his shoulders.)

Sellers shows up again as a fast-talking American salesman, complete
with chewing gum: “I represent my friend the Wonder Atomic Aspirin
Company, our product is guaranteed to banish
any
headache, take two of
these red pills and your headache will vanish, but your hair falls out. [Conspiratorial giggle.] Don’t worry though, take two of these green pills and
your hair grows again and your eyebrows fall off. . . .”

“It was an awful film,” Harry Secombe once said with a hearty laugh,
and he’s probably right, though Secombe’s claim is difficult to prove. Only
snippets of the movie have ever been screened since its brief release in the
late spring of 1951 to no attention whatsoever.

• • •

More noteworthy if only by degree is
Let’s Go Crazy
(1951), a short-subject
cabaret show with Peter in the center spotlight. He does five good impersonations in the course of the half-hour film, but singers, tumblers, and a
comico-musical group called Freddie Mirfield and his Garbage Men keep
breaking in. “Moderate variety filler” was
Today’s Cinema
’s seen-it-all-before
assessment, though Peter’s subsequent superstardom now provides the spark
the film lacked when Peter actually made it. It’s riveting to see brilliance in
the making. In one characteristic skit he’s Giuseppe, the cabaret’s broadly
Italian maître d’, who sports a huge handlebar mustache. Giuseppe laboriously attempts to talk a wealthy diner into ordering something Italian,
but all the man wants is boiled beef and carrots. Giuseppe weeps.

Even better is Peter’s delightful Groucho Marx—not a caricature at all
but an appreciative and subtle rendering. Groucho asks the waiter (Spike)
if the restaurant serves crabs. Receiving an affirmative response, he hands
over a crab and introduces it as his friend.

It’s not the gag itself that makes it work;
Let’s Go Crazy
’s writing is
about as inspired as an elbow. (The waiter appears a little later and bumps
a diner. “That was a close shave!,” the diner says, whereupon the waiter
begins to shave him—a Loony Tunes shave complete with seltzer in the
face.) It is instead the warm precision of Peter’s style that connects, the odd
sort of painterly quality he lends to what is essentially a cheap burlesque.
Countless other mimics have been drawn irresistibly to Groucho routines
over the years—the stooped, leggy walk; the black Brillo eyebrows; the
inevitable cigar incessantly flicked—but, being lesser talents, they tend to
out-Groucho Groucho. Peter underplays him, and out of it emanates the
essential spirit of Marx.

Peter’s Groucho is an aficionado’s pleasure, but he could also play to
the raucous mob. Toward the end of
Let’s Go Crazy
there’s an all-too-brief
appearance by the proud and robust Crystal Jollibottom. Wearing an absurd
boa, she sits on a flaming celery stick. It’s the best moment in the film.

• • •

May and June 1951 were bustling months for Peter Sellers. On Monday,
May 7, Peter began an eight-week run at the Palladium. Since his last
Palladium gig he’d played several other London houses—Finsbury Park,
Balham, the Prince of Wales, the Hippodrome. He was by that point a
proficient stand-up comedian, impressionist, and crowd pleaser. But as the
theater management report pointed out, his audiences’ responses were
largely if not entirely dependent on their familiarity with radio characters—others’ as well as Peter’s own—because those were the voices upon which
Sellers played.

The manager also noted a certain tendency in Peter’s onstage demeanor,
one that his friends had been noticing in his private nature: “I think that
this act is getting better with each visit and could be exceptionally good if
only there was a little more personality.”

• • •

On Sunday, May 27, 1951—less than halfway through his run at the Palladium—Peter, along with Spike, Harry, and Michael, showed up at a small
studio on Bond Street to record the first official episode of
Crazy People
. It
aired the following day at 6:45
P
.
M
. Sixteen more programs followed in the
first series, one per week, over the course of the next four months.

As disjointedly manic as
Goon Show
s were in the years to come, the
first year of the series was even more so. Each
Crazy People
program was
composed of staccato, essentially unrelated comedy skits interspersed with
irrelevant jazzy musical numbers—irrelevant to the comedy, that is. The
Ray Ellington Quartet, a singing group called the Stargazers, and Max
Geldray on the harmonica provided a form of musical relief from the comedy, though apparently the Stargazers weren’t relieving enough because they
got bounced in the middle of the second series.

Despite the show’s chaotic nature, certain themes began to develop.
Druggy in a world before drugs,
Crazy People
was irreverent, illogical, and
not a little cynical. Authority was skewered, logic dismembered. The show
was a triumph of facetiousness in the service of pointlessness—a philosophical statement. Even its title was inconsistent. BBC program listings
called it
Crazy People
for the whole first series, but the Goons themselves
insisted on referring to it on the air as
The Goon Show
.

Goon comedy is a mix of pa-dum-pum jokes—Q: “Do you mind if I
take a gander ’round the shop?” A: “As long as it’s house trained.”—with
centrifugally disintegrating plots and significantly dumb noises. Like the
poetic play of Lewis Carroll, ’twas brillig in a profoundly British way; it
was
Alice in Wonderland
after the Great Depression and two devastating
world wars. What held it together, increasingly so as the series progressed,
was a group of recognizable if distinctively unrounded characters. For Spike,
these creations erupted out of the bogs of his emotional landscape. For
Peter, they gave a distinct if malleable structure to what had previously been
merely feats of impressionism. Milligan later insisted that Sellers’s Goon
characters were “the boilerhouse of his talent.” Spike brought out Peter’s
loyal side; Peter, he was quick to say, “was instrumental in getting me into
the BBC. He was very kind like that.” This particular kindness entailed a
certain risk on Peter’s part. Max Geldray, for instance, reports that Spike
stormed into the staid BBC “with all the panache of a walking unmade bed.”

As for Peter, he credited Spike with shaping him into a work of art: “[I
was] just a vase of flowers,” Sellers once said, “and Milligan arranged me.”

• • •

Sellers believed, as any performer must, that his characters actually had
blood and muscle. “To all of us, they absolutely lived,” he claimed. His
personalities became British legends.

He was Major Denis Bloodnok, English military man
par infériorité
,
whose dimness was only outpaced by his flatulence. (The name stemmed
from Peter’s use of “nok” to describe a nose; he’d call someone with a pointy
proboscis “Needlenok.”)

He was Henry Crun, an elderly gentlemen with a crackly, halting voice
who forever bickered with Spike’s magnificent, equally doddering Minnie
Bannister.

He was Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, a devil of an aristocratic villain who
harbored a sly, insinuating voice and, in Spike’s off-air written descriptions at
least, an insistent taste for other men. (Spike writes of Grytpype-Thynne’s
shady background: “Subject of a police investigation on school homosexuality”; “subject of a military police investigation on homosexuality”; “subject of
a prisoners’ investigation on homosexuality”; “implicated in homosexuality
with a Masai goat herd”; and “recreations: homosexuality.”)

And he was the young and endearingly unlovable Bluebottle, who
tended to arrive late in the proceedings of whatever muddled story Spike
had concocted that week, injecting himself into the midst of the chaos with
a high-pitched, nasal, and truly hellish whine: “Cap-i-tan, my Cap-i-tan, I
hear my Cap-i-tan call me!” Bluebottle was not a bright boy. He tended to
read his own stage directions. “Wooky wooky wooky!” Bluebottle might
shriek, after which Peter would squeal, in the same voice, “Make funny
face, wait for applause!” And as Sellers told it—and the basic scene has been
confirmed by the man himself—
Bluebottle actually did live!

Peter: “This fellow came over one evening, I’ll never forget it. He was
tall and wide—he wasn’t fat, but he was wide—and he was dressed as a
scout leader. In fact he
was
a scout leader. He had a blue briefcase and a
scout hat [and] a big red beard and red knee socks and all the insignia, you
know. He said—and I’m not kidding, this is how he spoke: [a daffy high-pitched whine, crammed through the sinuses] ‘Could I carry in for a moment, please? I have just seen Michael Bentine and he said that I am a
genius.’ ”

Harry Secombe noted that Peter didn’t merely
do
the voices. He
became
the characters: “He physically changed as he did the voice. He’d
shrink for Crun, and then get very small for Bluebottle.” The comedy
writer Eric Sykes put it in biological terms: “You’d be in a taxi with Peter, and he’d listen to the taxi driver talking. And when he would get out,
he would
be
the taxi driver. But not only in words and voice. His whole
metabolism
would have changed.” That Peter was performing Bloodnok
et al before a live audience may not have mattered to his style in the
least, for like all of Peter’s characters, they were just as alive for him when
he was alone.

Michael Bentine, meanwhile, played the toothy, chirpy Captain (or
Professor) Osric Pureheart, a variation of the mad inventor character he’d
been toying with for several years. Pureheart’s notable skill was to invent
warped variations of well-known, contemporary British products—a popular new race car, for instance, or an on-the-drawing-board airplane that
had been in the news that week. On one episode Captain Pureheart supervised the launch of the
Goonitania
. The following week he led the salvaging
of the
Goonitania
.

As befitted his essentially good nature, Harry Secombe played the expansive Neddie Seagoon, hearty and well-meaning, dispatched on important missions he inevitably bungled, rarely comprehending much of
anything but never losing hope.

And then there was Spike’s Eccles, the prototypical Goon. If Seagoon
was a genial British Everydope, Eccles was an inadvertently dangerous
Everycretin, a man without a mind. A press item appearing a few days
before
Crazy People
’s first broadcast attempted to define to the average Brit
in the street what precisely this outlandish-sounding Goon creature was:
“Something with a one-cell brain,” it explained. Eccles was precisely that
human amoeba. Armed with a voice like a Manchester Goofy, Eccles was
too stupid to be malicious, too oblivious ever to be considered criminal,
and for these very reasons he was terrifying. Eccles was obviously a product
of Spike’s wartime experiences.