breath with random inflections. This was often parodied by Milligan, who would try to get the same effect with only three or four people, clearly intoning the word rather than mumbling. After some time, Secombe began throwing in "custard" during these scenes (for example, in "The Fear of Wages and Wings Over Dagenham", where the phrase was amended to 'flying rhubarb'). Raspberry blowing As well as being used as a comic device randomly inserted into different sketches to avoid silence, the blowing of raspberries entered the Goons as Harry Secombe's signal to the other actors that he was going to crack up; you would hear a joke from him, a raspberry, and a stream of laughter. In the Goons' musical recording "The Ying-Tong Song", Milligan performed a solo for raspberry-blower, as one might for tuba or baritone saxophone. Milligan made much use of a rather surreal Columbia 78RPM sound effects disc, catalogue number YB20, which bears the innocuous title "Donkey" on the label. Approximating possibly the most obscene and flatulent noise ever recorded, it appeared first in the show "The Sinking of Westminster Pier" as a sound to accompany an oyster opening its shell; it thereafter became known as Fred the Oyster, and appears as such in the scripts. This recording was often used as a reaction to a bad joke. Examples include The Last Goon Show of All during which Neddie shouts old jokes into a fuel tank in order to "start the show". Years later, Milligan collaborated with Ronnie Barker on The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town in which the credits read, "Raspberries professionally blown by Spike Milligan". David Jason has also claimed to have produced the sound effect and indeed was credited with this in the second segment of Ronnie Barker's LWT series Six Dates with Barker (1971). "Trapped in a piano" In several shows, one character, typically either Henry Crun or Minnie Bannister, would be found trapped in a piano. In The Mystery of the Fake Neddie Seagoon, Crun was inside a piano and his speech was accompanied by suitable piano noises. In The Jet-Propelled Guided NAAFI, Moriarty is hiding in a piano disguised as one of the strings. Grytpype-Thynne plays a "do-re-mi" scale to find him – Moriarty is "me". The "in a piano" joke was re-used one last time in The Last Goon Show of All. Other references Sometimes characters were introduced