Radio Show Review – The Goons – The Fear Of Wages

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1956 BBC Radio The Goons were legends of radio comedy, and included Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers in their surreal Marx Brothers outrageous nonsense. This 1956 broadcast, which I recently heard repeated, takes its title as a pun on the movie Wages Of Fear about truck drivers moving volatile nitro-glycerine through dangerous jungle roads. In the Goon Show the heroes are still fighting the Japanese army in Burma twelve years after WW2 ended. Their enemy amounts to a handful of enemy soldiers stuck in a tree. The British have not been told the war is over because a war office unit in London is still fraudulently collecting their wages, hence the title. As the truth comes out, the war office embezzlers insist they bring home all their equipment including a lorry full of nitro and any captured Japanese Saki they have too. Naturally the explosive nitro and Saki get mixed up with predictably explosive results. Funny but rather dated and the cod-Japanese accents provided by Spike Milligan would not be deemed politically correct nowadays. Arthur Chappell