Spike Milligan's accordion : the distortion of time and space in the Goon show / by Rick Cousins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cousins, Rick, author.

Series:

Consciousness, literature and the arts 49.

Consciousness, literature and the arts 49

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Goon show (Radio program).

Space and time on radio.

Physical Description:

xiv, 210 pages ; ǂc 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2016]

Summary:

It's all rather confusing, really" was one of the catchphrases used by Spike Milligan in his ground-breaking radio comedy program 'The Goon Show'. In a series of mock-epics broadcast over the course of a decade, Milligan treated listeners to a cosmology governed by confusion, contradictions, fluidity and uncertainty. In 'The Goon Show 's universe, time and space expand and contract seemingly at will and without notice. The worldview featured in 'The Goon Show' looked both backward and forward: backward, in the sense that it paralleled strategies used by schoolchildren to understand time and space; forward, in the ways it anticipated and prefigured a number of key features of postmodern thought.

Contents:

1 The Accordion under Construction: The Origins of Spike Milligan's Comedic Style, and of The Goon Show 10

1 Portrait of The Milligan as a Young Goon: haying the Groundwork for a Personal Vision of Comedy 10

2 "Well, that's the end of that corny routine": The Goon Show's Sketchy Beginnings 22

3 New Producer, New Approach: Peter Eton and the Transformation of The Goon Show 23

4 The Goon Show's 'Classic' Format: Dramatic Structures Mature in the Service of Comedic Immaturity 26

5 Little Cardboard-and-String Heroes: The Goon Show's Regular Cast of Characters 29

6 "This is the BBC": The Goon Show vis-à-vis Mainstream Practices in Contemporary Radio Drama 33

6.1 "What is this Go On Show?" The BEC'S Official Narratives and The Goon Show's Place in Them 33

6.2 "Meantime, back in the BBC torture room": The Goon Show's Deviations from BBC Radios Dominant Aesthetic for Dramaturgy and Performance 36

7 "Who are you, Ben Lyon?": The Goon Show's Thematic Links to Popular Culture between the Two World Wars 40

2 The Accordion Beating Time: Temporal Distortions in The Goon Show 51

1 Looking Backward to Look Forward Again: The Goon Show's Narrative Framework 51

2 One Narrative, Many Narrators: The Goon Show's Democracy of Diegesis 53

3 The Fragmentation of Time-Frames in The Goon Show and Its Effects on Narrative 64

4 That Sabrina Sure Gets Around: The Free Flow of Anachronisms in The Goon Show 67

5 Musical Interludes in The Goon Show: Interruptions in Narrative Flow and Opportunities for Temporal Distortion 69

6 The Ageless Aging Process of The Goon Show's Characters 71

7 "I'm for the dreaded deading this week alright": The Impermanence of Death in The Goon Show 74

8 The Passage of Time and the Completion of Tasks: Two Sides of the Same Coin 75

9 Sounds and Their Effects on Temporality 80

Interruption 1 Milligan's Laws of Time 84

3 The Accordion Stretching in All Directions: Spatial Distortions in The Goon Show 86

1 Setting the Scene: A Few Words on the "Landscape" of Radio Theatre 86

2 Mise en Scène as Mise sans Scene: The Goon Show as 'Black Box' Theatre for Radio 88

3 Contents Not Necessarily to Scale: The Variability of Container Capacity in The Goon Show 89

4 "My Lord, a piece of junk being found on the King's Highway, it is declared treasure trove": The Appearance of Objects Exactly When, and Exactly Where, They Are Needed 91

5 The Conundrum of Self-Duplication and Rapid Spatial Displacement, or, Being in Two Places at Once is Easier When You Don't Know It Can't be Done 92

6 Perceptual Fields Forever: Milligan's Use of Simultaneous Multiple Perspectives within the Same Scene 95

6.1 The Perception of Doors 95

6.2 Getting That Long-Distance Peeling-Telephones as Dlsruptors of Spatial Integrity 101

6.3 The Use of Pre-Recorded Voices and Effects to Establish Additional Spatial Frames 102

7 All the World's a Soundstage: The Recording Studio as Determinant of Spatial Frameworks 104

8 When Mental Maps Suffer Breakdowns: Around the World (and Back Again) with The Goon Show 106

Interruption 2 Milligan's Laws of Space 113

4 Children Teach Lessons on the Accordion: Preoperational Cognitive Strategies in The Goon Show 115

1 "Hello, folks, this is Neddy Seagoon speaking, folks": The Spoken Wrord as Stage Manager of Radio Theatre 115

2 Suffer Little Children to Come unto Metonymy: The Preoperational Substitution of Words for Things 118

3 A Child's Garden of Goon-Sense: Milligan as Children's Author and Perpetual Child 120

4 Putting Together Pieces from Different Puzzles: Children, Goons and Cognitive Constructivism 124

5 Preoperational Perceptions of Time and The Goon Show 126

6 "And this is where the story really starts": The Preoperational Mind at Work in Milligan's Construction of Narrative 128

7 Time, Task Completion, Preoperational Cognition and The Goon Show 131

8 The Goon Show and Preoperational Modes of Spatial Cognition 132

8.1 Childlike Spatial Readings of Objects and Locales 132

8.2 "It must be a drowning cartoonist": Other Childlike Animation-Based Spatial Reconfigurations in The Goon Show 137

8.3 "I have got a Boy Scout street map of Shanghai": Childlike Geography in The Goon Show 140

5 The Accordion Plays a New Tune before Anyone Can Write It Down: Anticipations of Postmodernism in The Goon Show 144

1 Pipping Them at the Postmodern: Milligan the Advance Scout 145

2 Milligan's Deconstructions of History and Historical Fictions 148

3 The Goon Show as Reductio ad Absurdum of the Metanarratives of Scientific Thought 157

4 Breaking Causal Chains Causes Causal Chain Reactions: Indeterminacy in The Goon Show 162

5 Postmodern Geographies, Thirdspace, and The Goon Show 164

6 Superspace-the Final Frontier: The Goon Show's Universe of Multiple Universes 167

7 The Goon Show Hits a Heisenberg, but Doesn't Sink: Milligan and the Uncertainty Principle 173

8 Disorder as a Creative Force in The Goon Show 175

9 Chaos in The Goon Show. Not So Much a Theory as a Way of Life 176.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9789004323704

9004323708

OCLC:

958876436