
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


According to Peter Sellers: “It all started because Spike Milligan and I once said we wanted to experiment in visual humour. We got as many friends together as we could and went and found a field. That was all we had – friends, a field, a roll of film.”
What resulted was 'The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film' (1959), directed by the up-and-coming Richard Lester, a friend and collaborator of Sellers and Milligan.
The short film soon became a word-of-mouth hit and was even nominated for an Oscar. It helped pave the way for Lester to work with the Beatles several years later and Spike Milligan claimed that it was one of the very few true visual representations of Peter Sellers' sense of humour.
Although accounts vary it has become accepted that the total budget for the film was £70 (including the rent of a field) and the entire cast was made up of - as Sellers says - friends. So we see Graham Stark, Leo McKern, David Lodge, Mario Fabrizi, Bruce Lacey and Johnny Vyvyan, as well as the two Goons themselves.
This week film academic Dr Adrian Smith joins Tyler to talk about this highly influential 11 minutes of mayhem.
By Goon Pod5
1010 ratings
According to Peter Sellers: “It all started because Spike Milligan and I once said we wanted to experiment in visual humour. We got as many friends together as we could and went and found a field. That was all we had – friends, a field, a roll of film.”
What resulted was 'The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film' (1959), directed by the up-and-coming Richard Lester, a friend and collaborator of Sellers and Milligan.
The short film soon became a word-of-mouth hit and was even nominated for an Oscar. It helped pave the way for Lester to work with the Beatles several years later and Spike Milligan claimed that it was one of the very few true visual representations of Peter Sellers' sense of humour.
Although accounts vary it has become accepted that the total budget for the film was £70 (including the rent of a field) and the entire cast was made up of - as Sellers says - friends. So we see Graham Stark, Leo McKern, David Lodge, Mario Fabrizi, Bruce Lacey and Johnny Vyvyan, as well as the two Goons themselves.
This week film academic Dr Adrian Smith joins Tyler to talk about this highly influential 11 minutes of mayhem.

2,103 Listeners

365 Listeners

292 Listeners

56 Listeners

2,700 Listeners

57 Listeners

69 Listeners

38 Listeners

233 Listeners

495 Listeners

68 Listeners

97 Listeners

871 Listeners

17 Listeners

13 Listeners