UN SUNDAY NIGHT I attended a recording of 'The Goon
Show,' a BBC programme to which, something tells me, not every reader of the Spectator listens with regularity. It took place in a charming old theatre in Camden Town before an audience who were mostly in their twenties or thirties. Though non- sense has always been an ingredient of English humour, the Victorians were the first to separate it from the other ingredients and serve it neat. The Goons dish it out with a frenzied inconsequence which makes the Snark and the Pobble look as conventional and obvious as stuffed ptarmigan in a fishing hotel. Secombe, short and plump in a dinner- jacket and vaguely resembling the present Lord, Tennyson. is the only one of the three who looks like a comedian: Sellers—larger, pale and dark—might be almost anything from a promising young scientist to a highbrow bookseller: Milligan is the eccentric Sapper subaltern. I learnt with sorrow that the brilliant imitation of the Prime Minister (I think done by Sellers) which Goon-addicts will remember from a recent edition will not be heard again, an embargo having been put on it by, oy anyhow through, the BBC. This seems to me rather illiberal: but 1 suppose that if you let one comedian mimic Sir Winston on the radio yqu would have to let them all do it, and a policy of laissez faire would lead, in the end, ad nauseant.
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