As a paid-up Member of the GSPS you would be entitled to join the video and audio libraries, whereby, for a small fee to cover postage & packing and so on, you could hire (for your own personal use only) films, tapes, cd's etc. of your favourite programs and shows. A stamped addressed envelope is all that's needed to get the listings on their way.

We have used a number of sources to produce our audio and video library. Our own off-air recordings, professional quality recordings and so on, and are continually adding more material as it becomes available. Our previous Audio Archivist, Keith Wickham, has worked on a project over the last five years or so whereby he used his professional skills to transfer the entire GSPS tape-based shows onto his computer, clean them up, de-click them etc. and store them on his hard-drive in beautiful digital quality format. Subject to copyright considerations, we hope that these will eventually be made available to the library for future use by members. (Keith is a professional voice-artist and has been in the re-make of Round The Horne in London)

A wondrous find a few years ago was a set of reel-to-reel off-air tapes of Goon Shows and in one case a copy of a  "lost" Goon Show; 'The Hastings Flyer - Robbed' was amongst them. Needless to say a full set of copies winged their merry way over to the old country and were cleaned, prepared and treated by Keith for general release to the masses.

If you have some recordings that you feel may be of the "missing" or "lost" variety, or have TS discs (yes everyone knows they are not supposed to have them but they ARE about) then please contact us. As we said above, the society archivist is currently working on a complete restoration of the episodes in our audio library archive, transferring to CD, DAT, and minidisk etc. and we are after as many off air and disc recordings as we can get so that the best quality can be obtained to produce the finished editions.

In his talk at the Brighton Goonvention, Ted Kendall, another renowned restoration expert who was responsible for the current crop of BBC cd re-issues, made comment to the efforts of GSPS in supplying some of the missing bits of various shows. Indeed, it has often been acknowledged by the BBC that we  hold one of the best & fullest compilations of Goon Shows anywhere, even more than their own archive!

The video library has many tapes of the four central Goon artistes in their various films; The Mukkinese Battlehorn, Down Among The Z Men and so on,  and many of their own individual performances. We even possess a full set of the old b/w Telegoons tv shows on professional 16mm film stock, purchased legitimately by our past Chairman, Bill Horsman, which was quite a coup...

The audio listings are in chronological show order. The video listings are in named order, ie: PS for all the Peter Sellers shows, MB for all the Michael Bentine shows (Potty Times and so on)  HS for all the Harry Secombe stuff and of course SM for all of Spike's stuff.

"Stuff" isn't really the best word to describe their appearances but it's just our way of putting down a list. We have so much available that to try and list them all here in this web page would be difficult. As a paid-up member you would be entitled to make use of the library, either for personal use where a small handling fee is made toward the running costs; or if you are a professional researcher then we would anticipate you paying industry rates for the use of our archive. (As did Pearson Television when we supplied video footage of the late Denis Main-Wilson for their tribute to him in the TV documentary for C4).

So, to become a member of the Goon Show Preservation Society would make good sense if you have a hankering to join something that means so much to so many people, and to feel a part of something worthwhile. Without a membership the GSPS wouldn't be able to continue its good work in preserving all that is best in radio comedy, making the audio & video library what it is today - The envy of the world.