Neddie Seagoon

Neddie Seagoon was a character in the 1950s British radio comedy show The Goon Show. He was created and performed by Welsh comedian Harry Secombe.

Seagoon was usually the central character of a Goon Show episode, with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers' many characters interacting with him and each other.

Neddie Seagoon was an affable but gullible idiot. Often chronically poor and/or part of the government (such as "The Strolling Prime Minister of No Fixed Address" or some other civil service title), Seagoon frequently falls prey to the schemes of Hercules Grytpype-Thynne (Sellers) and Count Jim Moriarty (Milligan), and needs the help of Bluebottle (Sellers), Eccles (Milligan), and sometimes even Major Bloodnok (Sellers) to rescue himself.

Neddie's appearance was based on Secombe's own likeness, exaggerated for comic effect. Thus, he was often described as very short, round and immensely fat. In "The Greenslade Story", John Snagge describes him as "a little ball of fat", while in "The Mummified Priest" Bloodnok identifies him as Seagoon on the grounds "Who else could walk under a piano stool?" He also suffers from duck's disease (short legs). He shares Secombe's tenor voice, as used to identify him in "The Mystery of the Fake Neddie Seagoons". He was also generally Welsh; in "Tales of Men's Shirts" and "The Last of the Smoking Seagoons" he is referred to as Ned of Wales, and in "The Pam's Paper Insurance Policy", Greenslade introduces him with the line "a bundle of Welsh rags suddenly becomes animate."

His fatness is a particular subject of gags. In "Dishonoured" and "Dishonoured – Again", he gives his body mass as either 17 or 18 stone (in metric, 108–114 kg or about 238–252 lbs.) and his head mass at 20 stone (127 kg or 280 lbs.), totalling either 235 or 241 kg (518 or 531 lbs.), depending upon episode. Once, upon visiting Henry Crun's house in "Tales of Men's Shirts", Crun remarks "Did you know they've sent a rocket to photograph the other side of you?" In the episode "Nineteen Eighty Five" (a parody of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell) he says, "Over the weeks that they tortured me my weight dropped by ten stone, I went down to a mere twenty stone." In "Robin Hood", Prince John (Dennis Price) and the Sheriff of Nottingham (Valentine Dyall) discuss their adversary:

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