Pick a word, any word -- Bill Kirton
It’s highly probable that only older readers will remember the success of The Goon Show . In school, the day after the latest adventures of Harry Seagoon, Eccles, Bluebottle and the rest had been broadcast, we repeated them to one another, quoting the best bits (of which there were unfailingly many), doing the voices, and laughing all over again at the genius Spike Milligan’s imaginings. A quarter of a century later most of those same readers would probably have been part of the audience demographic for Monty Python’s Flying Circus , and joined by thousands of adherents less advanced in years. There were predecessors, of course, all bringing a world view that was mildly anarchic, certainly surreal, and whose principal aim was to entertain or, put more crudely, to provoke unreasoning, energising laughter. Then, later, when I’d fooled enough people enough of the time to get a job in a university, part of my good fortune was to give lectures and tutorials on, among other thing...