Word: milligans
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...Until the late '50s, popular British humor came from the working class. Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, the Goons whose wild radio comedy enthralled all classes (Prince Charles was a particular fan), had never gone near a university. That changed with Beyond the Fringe, a comedy revue written by and starring four recent graduates from Cambridge (Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller) and Oxford (Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore). Quite a few shapers of the national smile over the next decade or so were Oxonians, like the creators of the influential satirical magazine Private Eye, who had first convened...
...goon" line is not just a clever ad-lib on John's part. It shows that Champagne is attentive to the arcana of the Beatles' biography. In their youth they were fans of BBC Radio's The Goon Show, whose stars, including Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, all recorded comedy albums produced by George Martin. It was his connection to the Goons, not his work on jazz albums, that first endeared Martin to John and the others. Another number in the show, "Eleanor Rigby," which takes place in the wreckage of postwar Liverpool, has a cratered, post-nuclear look reminiscent...
...British Commonwealth, the 50s was a decade of great achievers: Sir Edmund Hillary, Roger Bannister, the Goons. The weekly radio show starring Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers defined silly comedy for postwar England, influenced the Beatles and Monty Python, and made me laugh when I listened to the shows on CD last year for a column on Sellers. Puns, outlandish narrative detours and other foolery are wildly evident in Milligan?s scripts. In the ?Ill Met by Goonlight? episode, the Goons land on Crete. Sellers: ?Ooh, this beach is hard.? Secombe: ?Then we must be on con-Crete...
...Circus, which launched on Oct. 5, 1969 with a skit about sheep nesting in trees, should have so captivated viewers. There are precious few clues in the book, which is a hexagonal feat of memory, not self-analysis, though they rightly pay tribute to comic forebears such as Spike Milligan. The launch of Python was certainly a tribute to the laissez-faire latitude of the BBC's comedy department, which cheerfully commissioned 13 shows from John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin and Terry Jones - Oxbridge graduates working on the hit satirical shows...
...study last year at Adelaide's Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science showed no increased cancer risk - contradicting a damning earlier study from the Royal Adelaide Hospital - the industry breathed a billion-dollar sigh of relief. "It may be reasonable to ask if we are like tobacco," says Michael Milligan, secretary-general of the European industry's representative group, the Mobile Manu- facturers Forum. "But the most important thing for us is that while the World Health Organization has always been very strongly against the tobacco industry, they've been very involved with mobile phones and their view is very...