Goon Show Archiving
The Goon Show was a popular and influential British radio comedy programme, originally produced and broadcast by the BBC from 1951 to 1960 on the BBC Home Service. This article discusses the episodes that survive and the history of their broadcast.
Lost Episodes
Many of the earliest radio episodes no longer exist. Only two episodes from series 2 (1951-2) survive, and no episodes from either seasons one or three survive. Only selected episodes from series 4 were selected for preservation in the BBC Sound Archive, and some exist only as off-air copies made by fans at the time of the original broadcast.
Surviving Episodes
Commencing with the start of series 5 (1954), BBC Transcription Services began making copies for overseas sales, and even commissioned re-recordings of some key series 4 episodes for the "Vintage Goons" series, which was mainly intended for overseas markets.
Rather than making copies from the broadcast tapes, Transcription services made their own recordings simultaneous with the broadcast recordings in order to obtain the best possible sound quality. The TS copies were then edited to match the producer's cut of the broadcast tapes.
The Transcription Services versions were then cut to remove topical and parochial material and anything that might be potentially offensive (and the Goon Show did feature quite a lot of politically incorrect humour, much of it sneaked under the noses of BBC censors). Later TS releases had further cuts for timing purposes. For many years these abridged versions were the only surviving copies of many episodes, but in recent years the BBC has done a huge amount of research to find and restore the missing footage, often literally from the cutting room floor.
To date, the BBC has released 23 CD sets of these remastered episodes, containing 92 shows, plus The Last Goon Show of All and Goon Again. Another 12 shows had been previously issued by EMI, but for contractual reasons these were all heavily cut to remove musical interludes and other music cues, and to this day they are the only commercially available versions of those particular episodes.
Broadcasting
Episodes of the Goon Show are still occasionally repeated on BBC Radio 2 or Radio 4 in the UK. More recently the show has become a regular feature on the digital radio station BBC 7, which features both new material (much of it recognisably in a Goonish tradition) and archives from several decades of BBC comedy and drama.
The ABC Radio National network in Australia has regularly broadcast the Goon Show since the 1960s. For many years, the series was broadcast every Saturday afternoon, just after the midday news bulletin. More recently, it was broadcast twice a week, on Friday mornings and Sunday afternoons. The network attempted to retire the series in January 2004, feeling that it might have at last worn out its welcome; but a huge listener response proved them wrong, and broadcasts of the show resumed in the Friday timeslot in June of the same year. The ABC's broadcasts of the series have made the Goon Show one of the most repeated and longest-running of all radio programs.
The programme has also been broadcast in the United States. Terry Gilliam of the Goon-influenced Monty Python comedy troupe recalled first hearing The Goon Show broadcast on FM radio in New York City in the 1960s.[1] When Vermont Public Radio signed on the air in 1977 (as a single station which has since evolved into a statewide network), the first program ever to air was an episode of The Goon Show.[2] VPR described it as a "madcap radio comedy classic."[3]
References
- ^ "The Goon Show Site - Tributes - Terry Gilliam" (HTML). Pythonline Daily Llama. Retrieved 2006-06-02.
- ^ "Vermont Public Radio 25th Anniversary Site" (HTML). Vermont Public Radio. 2002. Retrieved 2006-05-29.
- ^ "Vermont Public Radio ::: 70s Timeline" (HTML). Vermont Public Radio. 2002. Retrieved 2006-06-03.