Goon but not forgotten

It’s probably fair to say that most people reading this won’t be as familiar with the Monty Python comedy team of the 1970s as they might be with, say, The League Of Gentlemen or Vic and Bob. However, it’s doubtful if either of those latter outfits would have come into existence without the influence of the ‘Pythons. What is certain is that the Pythons would never had existed were it not for a young John Cleese regularly tuning in to The Goon Show on BBC radio in the mid 1950s, and the goons, essentially, were Spike Milligan and friends. His death earlier this month, marks the passing of a man who more than any other deserves the title Father of Alternative Comedy.

Terence Alan Milligan was born in India in 1918 where his father, Leo, was serving with the British Indian army as a Regimental Sergeant Major. The family had moved from Donegal a generation before and had strong military ties that Terence would be obliged to follow. In early life the family moved back to the UK, where he displayed some talent for music, playing the trumpet as well as the guitar, piano and double bass. For a time, he was a professional musician with Tommy Brittell’s New Ritz Revellers. The advent of the Second World War cut his music career short as Milligan joined the 56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery in 1939. Initially stationed at Bexhill-on-Sea and by now known to friends as Spike, he was a leading light of the regimental battery’s band and also began to perform comedy routines for the amusement of his comrades. Coincidentally, Bexhill-on-Sea was home to one Eddie Izzard almost 30 years later, a comedian who has named Spike Milligan as his foremost influence.

Milligan later wrote of his time in the seaside town in the hilarious Hitler: My Part In His Downfall, the first volume of his war memoirs. In January of 1943 Milligan’s battery shipped out to North Africa, where the tide of war had turned against General Rommell’s Africa Korps. Although he was again to write amusingly of his experiences during this period of his life, in Rommel: Gunner Who?, it is documented that Milligans unit saw heavy fighting and this, along with later combat service in the gruelling campaign in Italy where he was wounded and invalided out of the line, may well have contributed to his mental health problems in later life.

After the war he returned to a musical career, eventually hooking up with fellow ex-servicemen Harry Secombe, whom he had met during the war, Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine. The quartet established a regular residency in the Grafton Arms pub in London’s Victoria where they began to develop the anti-authoritarian, surreal style of comedy that would later be the hallmark of The Goon Show.

First aired in 1948, by the mid 1950s the show was among the most popular on the BBC. Written mainly by Milligan though featuring much ad-libbing and comic input from the rest of the team, particularly Sellers, characters like Eccles, Bluebottle and Huntington Minge both delighted and scandalised a Britain that was eager to forget the austerity of the war years.

Milligan began writing for publication with Puckoon in 1963, a collection of jokes grouped around a tale of poverty striken Irish peasantry. Milligan had become interested in his Irish heritage after the British passport office refused to issue him a passport, citing his Irish parentage. Milligan applied for and was granted a Republic of Ireland passport, which he carried until his death.

Milligan was awarded a CBE in 1992, the award an honorary one due to his Irish citizenship, as was his KBE in 2001. A favourite of the Royal Family he once famously declared that that Prince Phillip was “fucking lucky to marry the Queen”, and upon being presented with a lifetime achievement award in 1994 by Prince Charles, he answered the Prince’s gushing introduction with the immortal words, “You grovelling little bastard”. Perhaps only Milligan could have got away with that.

Following Spike’s death, British comedians Phil Kay and Jack Dee both spoke in memory of the influential comic as they performed on Dublin stages. Irish comics also were united in paying tribute to one of Ireland’s keenest wits.

Kevin Gildea remembers first encountering the work of Spike Milligan as a small boy when he discovered the children’s book Milliganimals.

“I was only about ten,” he remembers, “and I remember reading the story of The Bald Twit Lion. And I went from smiles to tears of laughter in the space of time it took to read the story and I thought ‘There’s something going on here’. When I got into my teens I read his war memoirs and I fell in love with the absolute anarchy in them, like Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, almost. And his abandonment of the rules and including cartoons with speech bubbles, it was little things like that that made me think that there were different ways you could be funny. The other thing was that I’d read official histories of the war and to hear someone making jokes around this terrible event was kind of exciting. I realised that you could be funny about anything.”

Eddie Bannon remembers Spike Milligan chiefly through his chat show appearances: “He was the dream chat show guest and I can vividly remember Michael Parkinson and Gay Byrne both being helpless with laughter when Spike appeared on their shows. I think there was a sort of desperation about him, in the way that he had probably seen people at their very worst, at their most inhuman and he realised that if we can’t laugh at that we’d all end up screaming.”

Joe Rooney confesses that his favourite ever true comic story came from Spike: “I heard him relate the tale of a businessman friend of his that was suffering from an upset stomach and left work to take an early train to go home to bed. It’s summer and the guy’s wearing a bowler hat and suit, but no overcoat. Walking to the station he feels a rumble in his stomach and to his acute embarrassment he fouls his trousers with a sudden attack of diarrhoea. Mortified he rushes into the nearest department store. As people near him wrinkle up their noses in disgust he grabs a pair of trousers off the rack and goes to a checkout to pay. Again the assistants and the people in the queue can just about look at him and he stares at his feet as the assistant takes the money and wraps the trousers. He grabs the package and rushes out of the shop to the station. As he arrives onto the crowded platform the commuters part to allow his stinking form through and puce-faced he finally arrives at the train’s lavatory. Taking off his sodden trousers he throws them out of the window and rinses his underpants under the sink and attempts to wipe himself clean before also tossing them out the window. He then unwraps the packaged trousers only to discover a pink baby’s cardigan. He’s picked up the wrong package!

“Although I was in stitches at this point a friend tells me that the story finishes with the guy putting his legs through the arms of the cardigan and putting his bowler down the front with the crown acting as a sort of cod-piece. He then walks home. That story is so absurd that I believe it’s got to be true. And if Milligan invented it, then surely he’s the most inventively funny man who’s ever lived. He’ll be missed.”