"... Must admit he was very funny. I laughed. I laughed a great deal. Thought I was going to cry. I did."

A Visit to Swansea was the fourth episode of the second series of Hancock’s Half Hour and was originally broadcast on 10th May 1955, two days before Tony Hancock’s 31st birthday.

It was long considered one of the missing Hancocks until it was discovered last year by Richard Harrison of the Radio Circle and came from the same collection of recordings as The Marriage Bureau – the only episode of HHH to feature Peter Sellers and one we covered on Goon Pod previously with the guys from the Very Nearly An Armful podcast.

It’s intriguing as this is another formerly missing show to feature a Goon – in this case Harry Secombe in a cameo, and it followed on from the three previous episodes of HHH in which Secombe stood in for Hancock who had undergone some sort of breakdown and gone off to Italy.

Naturally it warranted an evaluation on Goon Pod and who better to talk all things Hancock than friend of the show Scott Phipps, host of such shows as Reel Britannia and the Talking Pictures podcast.

"Being the account of the hole, the wonderful way it was filled, and with what. Written for the wireless by Spike Milligan."

On the 12th August 1957 a Daily Mirror reporter encountered Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan larking about around Cleopatra's Needle on London's Embankment:

""This is 1887!" yelled Spike Milligan, standing on the base in a pair of rust corduroy trousers, green shoes, a tail coat - and a topee.

""We've just brought this back from Africa, a well-known place."

"Alongside him were Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers in tail coats and toppers. Harry screeched (and ducked): "Look out - pigeon!" then started to sing a song about "Lord Palmerston I love you..."

"Having all convinced themselves that they had just brought the needle back across the seas, Harry announced: "I now declare this needle well and truly threaded!"

"Then they sang: "There'll always be an England" and gave three hearty cheers for the Empire."

Some three years after the interesting experimental edition of the Goon Show called The Starlings which was performed more as a radio play without an audience, in August 1957 the Goons reconvened ahead of the 8th series to record The Reason Why in a similar fashion. It purported to tell the story behind the transportation of Cleopatra's Needle from Alexandria to London but through a typically Goonish filter.

Produced by Jacques Brown and also featuring Goon Show rep company player Valentine Dyall, The Reason Why was not quite as successful in its execution as The Starlings, but still a fascinating curio and this week Phil Shoobridge joins Tyler to talk about it.

In 1972 a film was released which is generally regarded as one of Peter Sellers' weakest films - Where Does It Hurt - and joining Tyler to kick it around for an hour or so are Jeremy Limb & Paul Litchfield.

Sellers plays administrator Albert T. Hopfnagel at Vista Vue Hospital, described by Sellers' biographer Roger Lewis as being like “every over-the-top insurance salesman and fraudulent television evangelist you pray you’ll never meet…. He’s a streak of brown lightning… he appears happy and comprehensively spurious as a minor Richard III, bribing and threatening.”

From the outset the film adopts a cynical framing of the US medical system.

When laid-off construction worker Lester Hammond arrives at Vista Vue seeking a routine check-up he gets more than he bargained for – Hopfnagel runs the hospital like a racketeer, where the age-old medical maxim “First do no harm” has been downgraded to “First bleed them for every dime they’ve got”.

As well as comprehensively trashing the film the chaps turn to other matters of import, such as My Mother The Car, Derren Nesbitt, Doctor Who, the Carry On films and Dick Emery.

10-4!