Peter Sellers was an English actor and comedian. He first came to prominence performing in the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show. Sellers featured on a number of hit comic songs, and became known to a worldwide audience through his many film roles, among them Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther series.
Terence Alan "Spike" Milligan was an Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright and actor. The son of an English mother and Irish father, he was born in British Colonial India, where he spent his childhood before relocating in 1931 to England, where he lived and worked for the majority of his life. Disliking his first name, he began to call himself "Spike" after hearing the band Spike Jones and his City Slickers on Radio Luxembourg.
The Goon Show is a British radio comedy programme, originally produced and broadcast by the BBC Home Service from 1951 to 1960, with occasional repeats on the BBC Light Programme. The first series, broadcast from 28 May to 20 September 1951, was titled Crazy People; subsequent series had the title The Goon Show.
William Topaz McGonagall was a Scottish poet. He gained notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work.
Eric Sykes was an English radio, stage, television and film writer, comedian, actor and director whose performing career spanned more than 50 years. He frequently wrote for and performed with many other leading comedy performers and writers of the period, including Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper, Peter Sellers, John Antrobus and Johnny Speight. Sykes first came to prominence through his many radio credits as a writer and actor in the 1950s, most notably through his collaboration on The Goon Show scripts. He became a TV star in his own right in the early 1960s when he appeared with Hattie Jacques in several popular BBC comedy television series.
Valentine Dyall was an English character actor. He worked regularly as a voice actor, and was known for many years as "The Man in Black", the narrator of the BBC Radio horror series Appointment with Fear.
Graham William Stark was an English comedian, actor, writer and director.
John Bluthal was a Polish-born Australian actor and comedian, noted for his six-decade career internationally in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. He started his career during the Golden Age of British Television, where he was best known for his comedy work in the UK with Spike Milligan, and for his role as Manny Cohen in the television series Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width. In later years, he was known to television audiences as the bumbling Frank Pickle in The Vicar of Dibley. At 85 he played Professor Herbert Marcuse in the Coen brothers' film Hail, Caesar! (2016).
Joseph McGrath is a Scottish film and television director and screenwriter. He was born in Glasgow and studied at Glasgow School of Art in the late 1940s and early 1950s where his energy and talent was admired by his contemporaries.
Ghost in the Noonday Sun is a 1974 British comedy film directed by Peter Medak starring Peter Sellers, Anthony Franciosa and Spike Milligan. The film suffered a difficult production due to Sellers's erratic behavior and was not theatrically released. Medak described the film as "the biggest disaster of my life" in 2016.
The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins is a 1971 British sketch comedy film directed and produced by Graham Stark. Its title is a conflation of The Magnificent Seven and the seven deadly sins. It comprises a sequence of seven sketches, each representing a sin and written by an array of British comedy-writing talent, including Graham Chapman, Spike Milligan, Barry Cryer and Galton and Simpson. The sketches are linked by animation sequences overseen by Bob Godfrey's animation studio. The music score is by British jazz musician Roy Budd, cinematography by Harvey Harrison and editing by Rod Nelson-Keys and Roy Piper. It was produced by Tigon Pictures and distributed in the U.K. by Tigon Film Distributors Ltd.
Brian Todd, known professionally as Bob Todd, was an English comedy actor, mostly known for appearing as a straight man in the sketch shows of Benny Hill and Spike Milligan. For many years, he lived in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
Clifton Jones is a Jamaican actor known for his roles in British television.
Down Among the Z Men is a 1952 black-and-white British comedy film directed by Maclean Rogers and starring the Goons: Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine and Harry Secombe.
Let's Go Crazy is a 1951 British short comedy film directed by Alan Cullimore, written by and starring Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan playing multiple roles.
The Magic Christian is a 1969 British satirical farce black comedy film directed by Joseph McGrath and starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, with appearances by John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Raquel Welch, Spike Milligan, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough and Roman Polanski. It was loosely adapted from the 1959 comic novel The Magic Christian by the American author Terry Southern, who co-wrote the screenplay adaptation with McGrath. The film also features pre-Monty Python appearances of John Cleese (credited) and an uncredited Graham Chapman, who had jointly written an earlier version of the film script. It also features an uncredited appearance by Yul Brynner performing “Mad About the Boy” as a drag artist.
Michael Peter Anthony Sellers was a British builder, car restorer, author and the son of actor Peter Sellers. He also had small parts in a couple of his father's films. He was often interviewed by the media about his relationship with his father. Despite a tenuous and troubled relationship with his father, he frequently defended him and his legacy.
Tons of Trouble is a 1956 black and white British comedy film directed by Leslie S. Hiscott and starring Richard Hearne, William Hartnell and Austin Trevor.
Man About the House is a 1974 British comedy film directed by John Robins and starring Richard O'Sullivan, Paula Wilcox, Sally Thomsett,Yootha Joyce and Brian Murphy. It is a spin-off of the TV sitcom of the same name, starring the same main cast.
Julian Chagrin, also credited as Julian Joy-Chagrin, is a British-Israeli comedy actor. He is the husband of actress and comedian Rolanda Chagrin.
