Peter Sellers

Director Peter Medak Plans to Resurrect The Ghost of Peter Sellers

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It was 1973 and Peter Medak was a hot director on the rise. Following the success of The Ruling Class, which had earned Peter O’Toole an Academy Award nomination the previous year, United Artists offered him Death Wish. But when the studio insisted on casting Charles Bronson instead of Medak’s pick, Henry Fonda, Medak passed on the project.

Back in London, Medak ran into his friend Peter Sellers, who asked him to direct his next film, Ghost in The Noonday Sun, which was set to be filmed on the island of Cyprus. Somehow the idea of filming a 17th-century pirate comedy aboard real ships on the Mediterranean seemed a good idea at the time [ . . . ]

More: Director Peter Medak Plans to Resurrect The Ghost of Peter Sellers | Filmmaker Magazine

How Peter Sellers and ‘The Goon Show’ Paved the Way for the Comedy Podcast

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Celebrating Peter Sellers’s birthday by taking a look at The Goon Show’s massive impact on comedic podcasting.

In the wake of the Second World War, a small group of British comics knit the world back together with a revolutionary brand of comedy. The Goon Show—the BBC radio comedy child of Spike Milligan (the show’s primary writer), Harry Secombe, and Peter Sellers—has left a huge fingerprint on comedy as a whole. However, the most wide-ranging influence of the show can be found in the medium it was originally presented in: radio. Going further than radio, you can definitely see the influence in your favorite comedy podcast from Earwolf and other podcast networks. Seriously, what The Goon Show did for comedy broadcasting cannot be overstated.

But let’s step back. Before we see how the show has influenced the radio medium sixty years later, we have to know what the show really was. The Goon Show was a thirty-minute scripted comedy program that aired between 1951 and 1960. It was the impetus for Peter Sellers’s comedy career and many of Spike Milligan’s nervous breakdowns. The three actors would voice multiple characters throughout each episode, playing one leading character each, along with multiple background characters. In this way Sellers honed his skills in [ . . . ] More at Film School Rejects: https://filmschoolrejects.com/peter-sellers-goon-show-paved-way-comedy-podcast/#ixzz4s1WzSFdn

 

The Goon Show “The Ying Tong Song “

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by Johnny Foreigner

Here are The Goon Show’s Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Spike Milligan performing “The Ying Tong Song.” You will either forever love me or hate me for delivering you this precious British earworm.

The Goon Show was an extremely influential British radio comedy program, broadcast by the BBC throughout of the 1950s. John Lennon once said, “I could go on all day about the Goons and their influence on a generation” – high praise from a jealous guy.

Wrote NY Times in 1972 : “Goon comedy was in equal parts the harmless violence of Warner Brothers cartoons, the wordplay of James Joyce and the lowbrow japes of the English music hall.”

Monty Python’s Terry Jones has called The Goon’s Spike Milligan ”the father of Monty Python.” John Cleese called him the ”great god of us all.”