Gone Goon

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 870, 6 April 1956, Page 26

Gone Goon

MAY have a rather eccentric sense of humour, but I thought the first broadcast of The Goon Show one of the funniest things I’ve heard on radio. What a delight it was to encounter something which breaks away from the clubsandwich formula or even the best BBC comedy prograrnmes-introductory patter, musical number, sketch, musical number, parody-and which goes on developing a mad story in its own alogical way, giving us only the first bars of musical interludes. Here at last is a radio equivalent of the Marx Brothers, an explosive universe in which a gunshot and galloping horses represent a telephone ringing, in which you climb out of windows to open doors, and, as in film cartoons, you set off dynamite without actually getting killed. This is indeed "pure radio," which depends for its impact upon not ‘seeing the insane world conjured up in the imagination by dialogue and sound effects, Something like a combination of a top-class Varsity revue, Addams’s cartoons, ITM\A, Edward Lear and Wilbur Schmutz, but adding up to authentic goonery, one single Goon Show made me a convert, a gone goon, avid for the promised solution of the mystery of the Marie Celeste.