Lighthouse Keeping Loonies

Lighthouse Keeping Loonies is an episode of The Goodies. It is also known as "The Lighthouse Men", "A Little Light Housekeeping" and "Lighthouse Loonies"

Plot
The Goodies take charge of a lighthouse.

Summary
The Goodies enter the Jolly Rock lighthouse aboard a flying fox contraption (with Bill pegged inside a pair of oversized bloomers as his harness) and Graeme apologises to the others as he has misread an advertisement which he thought was for "a little light housekeeping" Bill immediately gets grumpy at the thought of being "stuck out here, 25 miles offshore, for five years in an overgrown lamppost!", while Tim rapidly decides to assume control ("On a lighthouse, you've got to have discipline."), appoints himself as "number one" and orders "number two" Graeme upstairs to tend the lamp. Although Graeme initially stalks off up the stairs in a huff, he soon enjoys the peace and quiet of the lamp room and reads his book before he provides an excellent evening's entertainment of shadow puppets along the shoreline Meanwhile Bill complains about being hungry (as Tim provides a flashback to the previous episode with a northern-accented "Hoory oop with me sooper, ee bah goom!" in mocking response) but has to wait for Tim to get a bite on his fishing line. Tim's special bait of "rancid halibut giblets" succeeds immediately and "catches a whopper", but the rod is dragged out to sea before Tim can reel in the fish. Bill goes balmy over everything in the lighthouse being round in shape (even the chessboard, oddly enough), before he feels "curiously better" after he creams a fleeing Tim in the face with a round lemon meringue pie. A pie-caked Tim tells Bill "You've gone loony", while Bill suggestively remarks "You know, strange things happen to men when they're cut off." (to which Tim's response is "Yeah, look what happened to Michael Parkinson!", who had recently had a well-publicised vasectomy at the time!) A panicky Graeme races back down the stairs and refuses to return to the lamp room as the "ruddy moths" up there have eaten huge holes in his clothes. Bill opens up 'The Bumper Book of Sea Shanties for Lively Lighthouse Keepers' and finds that there is a song about the Jolly Rock lighthouse in it, which the Goodies sing with a wonderful mix of gusto (for the chorus) and dread (for the awful things that are predicted to happen there in the other verses) before they realise that they are liable to catch mumps there. Tim cops a dose of the mumps almost immediately and is banished upstairs into isolation (after Bill firstly holds the door open and tells him "Go on, go find another light!"), while Bill and Graeme play a quiet game of (round) cards, oblivious to Tim's bellowing about being stuck up there on his own ("Hey fellas, can I come down now please? One side's nearly better!") The shipping forecast announcer tells Graeme and Bill that high seas, hurricanes, water spouts and various other assorted wild weather is imminent near the Jolly Rock lighthouse (with a camp "So take care pets!" at the conclusion) despite waters being calm everywhere else in the North Sea! However they cannot activate the lamp because Bill has thrown out the "great big barrel" of oil after Graeme complained when served up chips that had been cooked in it (to which Graeme, after an initial complaint, acknowledges "As long as you've got a good excuse!") Graeme asks "Now what are we going to use for fuel?", to which Tim innocently replies "I've got some baby oil!" (prompting suspicious glances from Bill & Graeme and a coy look from Tim himself), but Graeme grumbles "That's not enough to run a 10 million candlepower lamp!" This gives him an idea of sorts and he gets Bill to walk around the lamp room in circles with one candle strapped to the top of his head! Tim also has a bright idea to launch a rocket to warn the ships ("You're not the only one to have brains around here, Grae!"); however he makes the mistake of lighting the wick while the rocket is still inside the lighthouse, much to Graeme's horror. After Graeme and Tim have tried desperately to get rid of the rocket (including Graeme finally flinging it out the door after battling a gale force wind and frantically doing up all of the locks, only to find that the rocket has already blown back inside to Tim, who lobs it at him anyway!), Tim takes off out the window while still hanging onto the rocket and is eventually dumped back onto the glass roof of the lamp room after being caught up in a spectacular fireworks display. Graeme produces a foghorn, which works well initially until it won't switch off and is smashed to bits (with Graeme ending up eating the offending component in desperation!) The fog soon closes in and the ships come ever closer to the lighthouse (despite Graeme's megaphone warnings out the window of "There is a lighthouse here, so mind you don't bump into it."), as Tim, whose mumps have gotten worse ("I look like a flippin' hamster now!") gets rather stressed, relaxes a little ("Calm down, down, down boy, woof, down, down, deeper and down …"), has another fright from the very noisy (and very close) Britannia, and manages to get closer to the Queen than ever before as she gives a royal wave through the lighthouse window. Graeme tells a jumpy Tim that all is well and that the lamp will be lit again as soon as they find an alternative source of fuel. Bill manages to tunnel several hundred feet underground in the space of ten minutes using a hand drill in search of fuel, but he is in a rather militant mood ("Don't push the workers!") and doesn't want "fat bloated capitalists like (Tim)" to cream off the wealth that he has "earned by my own gristle, blood and sweat" (drawing expressions of revulsion from Tim and Graeme.) Bill wants a fifty percent share of the profits from what he has found (which proves to be "nothing", prompting Tim and Graeme to yell at him to "get back down" the hole.) Shortly afterwards, Bill finds lumps of coal and then strikes oil for the lamp (which splatters Tim in the face as it gushes out of the hole), so he and Graeme start to enthusiastically celebrate their find ("Black gold, Texas tea …!") Bill tells Tim (who is feeling a bit left out) to go and have a "nice hot bath" (before uttering "big fat pansy!" when he thinks that Tim is out of earshot!) and Graeme uncorks the shaft (only to cop a spray of oil in the face himself, then delightedly remarking "By gum, you know, that's five star, hey hey! There's one in the eye for the greasy Arabs …!") Bill then makes a major mistake and lights a candle underground to see where he is going, before he crawls out of the shaft (amid much rumbling and a big plume of smoke from underground) with a contrite "Graeme, I shouldn't have lit my candle, should I?". Graeme sits with his fingers in his ears and performs a countdown as the Jolly Rock lighthouse soon has liftoff into space with a huge tail of flame that spurts out from underneath it. A BBC News bulletin reports UFO sightings by various people (who have been promptly locked up!); the discovery of a new comet, much to Patrick Moore's delight in trying to spot it in the night sky ("Up a bit, down a bit, across a bit, left a bit, right a bit …"), with the sheepish newsreader sprung trying to follow Moore's rapid-fire directions when the camera pans back to him. The news bulletin also reports of the disappearance of the Jolly Rock lighthouse during a thick fog (complete with unsavoury photofits of two prime royal suspects who were seen in the area at the time!) Meanwhile Bill and Graeme initially marvel at the thought of being the "first men to put a lighthouse on the moon", but then reconsider and try to turn the lighthouse around back towards Earth. After some initial panic, Bill and Graeme eventually succeed in turning the lighthouse sideways so that it orbits the Earth instead of continuing its journey to outer space (while giving Tim and his rubber duck a rather rocky ride in the bathtub from all of the to-ing and fro-ing.) Tim eventually gets tipped out of his bath and runs out panicking that "The sea is gone! ... A ship's hit us, hasn't it?! We're all going to drown!" Graeme's calm explanation that "It's very unlikely that a ship can hit us, it's very unlikely that we'll drown, simply because we're now orbiting the earth at a height of 150,000 feet" freaks Tim out completely (and he madly runs around on the spot, causing the lighthouse to spin like a hamster's wheel, with Bill spinning around in the background) The lighthouse soon uses up all of its rocket fuel and plummets back to Earth, landing bang on top of Lord Nelson's pigeon-infested statue in Hyde Park. Tim's mumps are finally cured (as he has given them to Bill and Graeme, who tell him to "Shut up!") but a loud siren blast soon jangles his nerves again as a huge battleship cruises through the nearby streets of London.

Scenes
GUEST STARS Corbet Woodall, Patrick Moore GOODIES SONGS Song of the Jolly Rock Lighthouse
 * An initially huffy Graeme going upstairs to light the lamp, but then relaxing and listening to 'A Walk In The Black Forest' on his radio while attempting to read a book. As the lamp keeps rotating (leaving him in darkness most of the time), he decides to walk around reading in the beam, casting his imposing shadow on the shoreline cliff, then following it up with a display of shadow puppets using his hands, causing Tim to comment "Graeme's putting on a good show, isn't he?"
 * Bill's 'round rant' where he does his block about everything in the lighthouse being round, including a record, chessboard (strangely enough!), his supper of a hamburger, peas, carrots, the plate and the table ("don't tell me ... oooh, what a surprise! It's round!"). Tim's attempt to convince Bill that his favourite lemon meringue pie is square doesn't work, and Bill chases him around and around the table in circles before turning and hitting Tim in the gob with the pie, then feeling "curiously better" for doing it, even though he ends up wearing a fair bit of the pie himself.
 * The Goodies' rollicking sea shanty about the Jolly Rock Lighthouse, of which they sing the chorus lines with great gusto only to gradually realise from the other verses that the Jolly Rock is hardly the ideal holiday place, as lots of bad and unpleasant things happen there. The merry singing suffers accordingly during these lines (such as "Cos people get killed there all over the place") only to resume again with much enthusiasm when the chorus rolls around once more.
 * A number of cameo scenes including:
 * Tim banished upstairs to the lamp room and wailing that his mumps are getting better ("At the most I've only got a mump!), then repeatedly calling "Can you hear me?" while Bill and Graeme are blissfully playing cards (which are round too!) down below and marvelling how quiet Tim is ("Not a peep") until he comes crashing down the stairs and squashes Graeme, while still bellowing "CAN YOU HEAR ME?!!"
 * Graeme activating a foghorn, but then being unable to stop its deafening racket, (despite turning it off, pulling out its power lead and jumping on it repeatedly), and swallowing the noisy component of the horn in desperation, only to find it still booming away each time he tries to speak. His own career as a foghorn is short-lived as he soon sounds more like Donald Duck, but a glass of water fixes the problem just as Bill runs in frantically looking for the foghorn, only to be told that Graeme has eaten it!
 * Her Majesty's ship Britannia passing by so close in the thick fog that Tim gets a royal wave from the Queen through the lighthouse window (to which he gasps in delight "That's the closest I've ever been!") only for her wave to be quickly followed by a royal two-fingered salute from the Duke!
 * The BBC News report, with witnesses reporting the speed of the UFO as being "between 20 and 6000 miles per hour", the sighting of an alien in a Venusian space suit of "frilly pink plastic and carrying a rubber duck", the picture taken by an amateur Swedish photographer (a topless model - oo'er!) and the photofits of the two regal-looking suspects sighted near the Jolly Rock lighthouse just before it was stolen.
 * Bill and Graeme's little verbal exchange before they both go into mad panic mode in unison and then feverishly try to turn the lighthouse around in space while Tim gets a very rough ride in his bathtub in the process, and the following scenes where Tim panics at the thought of the lighthouse being in orbit, causing the lighthouse to spin around like a wheel with Bill turning head-over-heels in the background.