In the 1950s a radio play called the Goon Show was aired in Britain and around the British Commonwealth. Written predominantly by Spike Milligan it featured, amongst others, Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Seacombe. It was half an hour of silly voices, ridiculousness and outright insanity as it drifted between the absurd to the sublimely brilliant. It ran for more than 240 episodes over ten series between 1951 and 1960 with such wonderful episode titles as “The Ghastly Experiments of Dr. Hans Eidelburger”, “The Great Ink Drought of 1902”, “The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill-on-Sea)” and “The Great Tuscan Salami Scandal”. Re-runs During the next two decades ensured that the show had a fan base that was deeper than the original ten year run of the programme. For my American readers, who have probably never heard of this, it can best be described as the radio version of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and twenty years earlier.
So what is my point with this opening? Well of the many thousand lines of script that were written one stuck in my mind today. It is a superb piece of Milligan nonsense (delivered by the character Major Bloodnock voiced by Peter Sellers) playing on the name of Eartha Kitt, whose popularity as a performer was at its peak in the 1950s, and ran something like “...tropical kit...my God I loved that woman...” And still you are searching for my point, right?...well it is because the Brazilian infantry unit shown below is presented in tropical kit. I know it is a tenuous link to an obscure line from a 1950s radio play, but I am stuck at home alone in lockdown and having to deal with work problems on my unpaid day off, so my frazzled brain is making all kinds of weird connections.
So here they are, in their tropical kit, the second battalion of Brazilian infantry.
I really like look of these guys, but the white uniforms took a lot of work to get right.
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