"Ah, here is is Christmas Eve and still no offers of pantomime!"

One of the best-known Goon Shows ever, Dishonoured - Again went out in January 1959 and before the year was at an end was commercially released (with Tales Of Old Dartmoor) on the LP The Best Of The Goon Shows. It was subsequently repeated more frequently than most Goon Shows and its script was published in a Roger Wilmut book.

A remake (superior in every respect) of a Series 5 episode, due to Spike Milligan and Larry Stephens both being unwell and unable to produce an original script, it positively pops and the cast are clearly having a ball.

Steve Hatcher joins us this week to talk about this very fine episode which somewhat gives the lie to the lazy belief that by this late point in the show's run the team were coasting and looking to their own individual careers and future success.

As well as the episode itself they discuss Harry on stage in Large As Life, Sellers' major film commitments and Spike's rather muddled version of some tragic events.

This week we’re turning our attention to Peter Sellers’penultimate film (if we disregard those pesky ‘flogging a dead Panther’ posthumous farragoes), and the film for which he came closest in his career to carrying off a Best Actor Oscar: Being There from 1979.

Very much a passion project for Sellers, the film, directed by Hal Ashby (Harold & Maude) and based on the novel by Jerzy Kosiński, centres around the character of Chance, a gardener and late middle-aged ward of an elderly man whose death throws Chance’s entire world into disarray, if he didbut know it. Chance has the mental age of a child and is cut off from the outside world; his limited understanding of anything outside his immediate surroundings is entirely informed by what he glimpses on TV. Through a series of incidents, Chance (now rechristened Chauncey Gardiner after a misunderstanding) is thrust into the world of the American political establishment when he is invited to stay at the home of dying billionaire Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas) and his wife Eve (Shirley Maclaine). He meets the President (Jack Warden) and somehow he is assumed to be some sort of oracle, with people believing his every banal utterance to be invested with great truth and meaning.

Podcaster Antony Rotunno (host of Glass Onion podcast) joins Tyler to talk about the film and tries to work out quite why it gets under his skin.

Can you believe that for half a century student bars the length and breadth of the land have resounded to the excruciating cries of "Nii!"?

Yes, the film the Spanish call 'The Knights of the Square Table and Their Crazy Followers' turns 50 and to mark the occasion here's a bonus episode with Tyler and writer, podcaster & performer Tom Salinsky in which they talk at length about the film.

Tom thinks that Life of Brian has more to say but Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the most consistently funny of their films, with barely a moment left gagless, from the inspired opening titles to the demonic camp of Tim the Enchanter.

They discuss highlights such as the cartoonish violence of the King Arthur vs Black Knight sequence; Brave Sir Robin and his minstrel Neil Innes; Gilliam the gatekeeper of the Bridge of Death (later rented out to William Friedkin for Sorcerer?); Dennis the mud-ridden firebrand decrying systems of government; Carole Cleveland as Zoot, Mistress of Castle Anthrax; the weakly insipid Prince Herbert and his overbearing dad; the witch trial; Brother Maynard and the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch and, of course, Frank the TV historian who suffers a violent slaying.

Tom also talks of his love for the LP and compares the film to the script book – whither Brian the Wild from the final cut? – and reveals that parts of the original script were later repurposed for the fourth series of Monty Python. He also touches on Spamalot and springing from that there’s an interesting overview of the recent Dr Strangelove production starring Steve Coogan.

Also: the coconuts for horses gag – A Show Called Fred got there first! So that ticks the box marked 'Goon Content'!

Tom is co-host of Best Pick podcast: https://bestpickpod.com/