The Goon Show

Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe turned the BBC Home Service upside down from 1951 to 1960, and no show uses sound itself as the joke quite like this one. Explosions, impossible footsteps and voices that could only exist on radio carry stories that collapse into glorious nonsense, written by Milligan with help from Larry Stephens and Eric Sykes. There are 231 episodes across ten series, so start in the middle years rather than the scrappier early shows. Some period jokes and accents have dated badly, and the musical breaks from Max Geldray and Ray Ellington will test the impatient, but the comic invention still feels decades ahead of its time.