I’m a big fan of the Goon Show (helps drown out my corkers chattering, and they’re funny), but I’ve always wondered about the comments commonly made about Ray Ellington’s skin color. For example, from wikipedia:
[ul]
[li]In “The Greatest Mountain In The World”, Eccles picks up a stick of dynamite, thinking it to be a cigar, and it explodes in his face. Henry Crun comes along, mistakes Eccles for Ellington, and when Eccles corrects him, Henry says, “Oh yes - yours rubs off, doesn’t it?”[/li][li]When Seagoon narrates in “Under Two Floorboards”, “At the mention of the police, we all turned white”, Ellington responds, “Get me a mirror!”[/li][/ul]
I’ve a fair idea of what life for Ray Ellington would be like in the US during the 50’s, but in 1950’s Britain, was there any animosity in these comments, or was it just good clean fun for all involved? How did Ray feel about these barbs in his direction?
How are they barbs? They are purely jokes about the actual colour of his skin, which is simply a neutral fact. There’s no suggestion he’s inferior or anything. They could equally (in some re-worked fashion) involve someone with red hair. Heck, if anything the second joke implies he’d be worried about being white, which would be reverse racism.
I am not kidding, I had no idea. I grew up listening to my dad’s tapes of the Goon Show and never realised. I remember my disappointment as a child on discovering he wasn’t the same person as Duke Ellington, and thereafter assumed he was a boring white Englishman.
I will say that, having read most of what he’s written, there’s a lost casual racism in Spike Milligan’s work, borne of his time - using words like “wogs” and making Irish jokes (he was second-generation Irish) and Jewish jokes and so on - but I feel that it was never malicious. My granddad said the same sort of things, but never acted in a racist manner.
It seems to me that they made some allusion to his color literally every time he appeared in the story line–usually with Ellington himself making the reference. It all seems pretty good-natured. I actually find the repeated references to the size of Max Gelbray’s “conk” (sometimes allied with an explicit reference to his being Jewish) more worrisome.
They’ve also referred more than once to the sound of a cash register as “a Jewish piano.” It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder about them, but since Ray was part of the group my question was directed towards him, and I truly don’t know what life was like for a black man in Britain at the time. I like to think that their scripts just reflected comments of the time, but I lack data.
I’ve been a fan of the Goons since the mid-1960s, and have listened to every single episode many times. As Princhester notes, this, and virtually every other such reference to Ellington that I can recall in all eight extant seasons of Goon Shows is merely a comment on the color of his skin.
In the context of American society this would inevitably be seen as racist. But once you hear a few of these gags in the Goons, you realize that they are entirely unaccompanied by any sense of disrespect or any hint of the negative stereotypes that were more common in the U.S. in the 1950s.
I didn’t live in the U.K. in the 1950s, so I can’t comment on attitudes towards people of color there back then. But I have read that many black Americans who traveled in Europe in the first half of the 20th century found far less prejudice there than at home.
So I think it was “good clean fun,” and I doubt Ellington took it badly or found it unpleasant. After all, he did it for eight or nine years. (And he got to play all the chieftains of the African tribes Major Bloodnok was always running away from.)
I don’t recall any references to Geldray being Jewish. Could someone remind me of one?
As was Peter Sellers. The whole show parodied every aspect of British society. Nothing was spared. There were also lots of Welsh (and fat) jokes about Harry Secombe…