Free David Jason: My Life by David Jason Page B

hooked. There was Dick Barton, Special Agent , too, although my interest in that was mostly in the galloping theme tune. But the big and lasting passion, above all of those, was The Goon Show . That was the number one. The sheer madness in the show’s sense of humour, and the general sense of chaos from which the programme appeared to rise, completely got to us – me, Micky Weedon and Prince Charles alike. ‘Why don’t they make them like that any more?’ the three of us would no doubt shake our heads and ask each other.
    At the end of the show, the BBC’s continuity announcer would regularly say, ‘And if you would like tickets to see The Goon Show …’ and give out an address you could write to. And, extraordinarily, these tickets were free – yours for the priceof a stamped addressed envelope. So I sent a letter, assuming that pretty much the whole world would be doing exactly the same, so my chances were non-existent. But in fact the whole world must have been doing something different because two tickets for a recording duly arrived.
    This was a pretty sophisticated night out for Micky Weedon and me, who had been known, when we were nine or ten, to entertain ourselves, of a winter’s evening, by getting the cheapest return fare from Woodside Park for the London Underground and then spending the whole evening down there. You could run around the system, changing trains and switching lines, without ever emerging above ground at any point. Somehow, whole hours would happily pass in this manner, with us chatting, people-watching, generally mucking about and not getting up to very much at all. Then eventually we would make our way back to Woodside Park and surrender the return portion of the ticket to the guard at the barrier, who little suspected that we had made something like a thirty-mile round trip for three hours in the meantime, as the guests of London Transport. Talk about budget entertainment. It was perfectly warm down there too, even in winter, at no extra cost, increasing the bargain element. Who needed the internet?
    But now we were grown-ups. We took the Underground from Woodside Park and rose to the surface at Camden Town, where we had to find our way to the Camden Town Theatre – not somewhere we had ever been before. And once there, we queued up in the street and then were finally let into the auditorium – the first time I had set foot in a proper theatre. Obviously, at this point it was set up for a radio recording, but it had once been a music-hall theatre and it seemed kind of musty and yet vividly grand to me.
    We were buzzing with anticipation. The Goons lived in the radio, as far as we were concerned. We knew what Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe looked like, but we had a lessclear image of Peter Sellers. To watch them doing the show was therefore going to be revelatory in all sorts of ways. I remember things starting with Milligan and Secombe bringing on a large sign saying ‘The Goon Show’ and placing it carefully on the stage. Of course, it was upside down, which set the tone. Milligan was in an old sweater, Secombe was in a sports jacket and trousers. There seemed to be no sign of Peter Sellers at that point. The Ray Ellington Quartet struck up the music and then the show started. It began with Secombe, as Neddy Seagoon, pretending to spot a figure off in the distance and saying, ‘Who would be stupid enough to stand right on the edge of a cliff?’ And at this point a slim man in an immaculate suit stepped forward from the rear of the stage and, script in hand, said, ‘Hellew, my dellings.’
    Here, finally, was Sellers. And it was such a contrast – this ridiculous, high-pitched comic voice coming out of this elegantly dressed, sophisticated man. And it’s still one of the most impressive entrances I’ve ever seen in a theatre. The interplay between the three of them from that point on was magical. One of them would come across a joke and corpse. (‘To corpse’: theatrical