• Miss Minnie Bannister, spinster, a sexy senior citizen who plays the saxophone and regularly breaks out in song or dance. She lives in sin with Henry Crun, but whenever Major Bloodnok comes on the scene it's made clear that they were lovers in the past. (Milligan got the quaver in her voice by pinching the skin on his neck and wobbling it about as he spoke her lines.)
  
• Count Moriarty, French scrag and lackey to Grytpype-Thynne, who usually introduces him and attributes to him some outlandish title or record that he holds ("Has played the male lead in over 50 postcards"). Delightfully wretched in his poverty and degradation.
  

• Wallace Greenslade, announcer. He opened and closed each show, did continuities within them, and often took brief speaking parts. When not doing the Goon Show, he was in fact a news announcer at BBC. The Goons took great delight in mocking his proper, trained accent -- and his noble girth.
  
• Ray Ellington, drummer, singer whose quartet played one of the two musical interludes in each show. He also took speaking parts in many shows, most often as African Chief Ellinga or as Bloodnok's old Arab nemesis, the Red Bladder. [The plethora of jokes linking Ellington to Ghana sprinkled throughout the Goon Show led me in an earlier version of this page to state that he was from that country. I have since learned that he was the son of a black American father and a Russian Jewish mother. If anyone has more biographical info about him I would love to receive it.]
  
• Max Geldray, jazz harmonica player from Holland. Backed by the house band, he plays the first musical interlude in each show and occasionally takes speaking parts in a thin, accented voice.
  
• Wally Stott Orchestra, the house band. Stott made a great contribution to the show with cleverly written themes and comedic musical bits.
  

Goon-ology
    continued…

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