Entertainment For Lively Minds
Bastard offspring formats
Listening to a 4 extra comedy hour last week I decided again to give The Goons another go no matter how painful, “ you know why? … it was outta respect” ( see film lines thread, Goodfellas ).
I suppose like all breakthrough shows it’s been a casualty of its own success in that it made a big splash and inspired a whole genre which in turn evolved and innovated to make the original look tired and dated.
What dawned on me as I listened was that I recognised the formula of it from The Young Ones; scripted character comedy with an unexpected musical interlude - a really good one, followed by a return to storyline. It was the same format, probably not even new then but standard stage variety fare of the time. I’m guessing it was this 'mashupyeah' that kept spotty kids glued to their wireless sets each week, as much for the latest jazz sounds as the comedy plots. Not unlike The Young Ones 30 years later.
Any more bastard offspring?
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Oasis?
.
For sure.
manchester lineage or Liverpool?
Twin Peaks
is another series that set down various TV show conventions - the fast moves from serious to comedy (see Buffy); the each episode a defined timescale (a day) (see 24 which used hours rather than days); the use of horror as a metaphor for some real life problem or issue (Buffy again) - there's probably more influences but I can't think of any at the moment
I think Family Guy
probably owes more to The Goons, via Monty Python, than say, Saturday Night Live.
Mind you Matt Groening might take issue with that ...
I see Johnny Ray, Bill Hailey
Pat Boone how you see The Goons: between them they forced opened one very big door, but they left us with little of worth after they'd passed through the next.
Barclay James Harvest
"Poor Man's...
I was nice to see John Landis's
cameo in "Psychoville". A bit of mutual admiration there, I suspect.
Music in the Young Ones
I remember Ben Elton saying that they included music just to secure a bigger budget from the BBC. If there was music in the show, it was classed as "Light Entertainment", whereas a straight comedy was just "Comedy" and was allocated a lot less money.
This was BBC policy for years. This is why The Two Ronnies had to have a singer in their show. Morecambe and Wise also had a singer, but they would often send them up (Shirley Bassey having to wear one massive gumboot mid-song springs to mind).
Ah, that makes sense...
Interesting stuff - the last new comedy programme I remember having a musical spot was one of the original French & Saunders sketch shows that had Kirsty MacColl as regular guest, doing tracks from "Kite" IIRC, which dates it at around 1989.
And The Goon Show usually had 2 music spots, one for Max Geldray (harmonica player) and the other for Ray (not Duke) Ellington. I think this was as much in the spirit of 'variety' (as in 'something for everyone'), as with BBC budgets, especially when competing with the nascent TV boom of the 50's.
And I won't have a word said against The Goons - their stock has inevitably gone down as they never had a TV equivalent (unlike Hancock, for instance) to carry the torch for them for future vision-fixated generations, and the narrative/absurd nature of the scripts makes them difficult to excerpt effectively. Today's listeners just can't picture how absolutely different The Goons were to everything (that's EVERYTHING) else on the radio at that time, and how pub and street-emptyingly popular they were, which is a shame.