His first stage appearance was at
the age of six, as a clown in a school
concert in Poona. He was born in
India, the first son of an Irishborn
sergeant major in the Royal Artillery.
His father was axed in 1933, when
the British government ordered a 10
per cent cut in the armed forces.
Soon afterwards, he brought his wife
and their two small sons to England.
The four Milligans found life in
London hard on an army pension of
50 shillings a week. To bring in
extra money, Spike left school at 15
and took a series of dreary jobs,
made bearable by his love of music.
' He won a Bing Crosby singing com
petition at the Lewisham Hippo
drome, learned to play the trumpet,
and formed a small jazz band.
In 1940 he was conscripted into the
Army, seeing action in North Africa
and Italy. In late 1943, after 72 hours
of continuous duty, he volunteered
to deliver important equipment to an
operations point. While traversing
mountainous Italian terrain, he was
wounded in the leg by a mortar shell.
When he regained consciousness in
a dressing station, he was stammering, shaking and weeping uncontrollably. Until then, Milligan
had been a happygolucky soldier.
"I think I left part of myself up there
for ever," he wrote in the aptly
named Mussolini: his part in my
downfall (1978). "After the incident,
I was never the same."
During the Second World War Milligan met "a short Gunner, wearing
ironframe spectacles, a steel helmet
that obscured the top of his head,
and baggy shorts that looked like a
tea clipper under full sail". The soldier was Harry Secombe, and the two
remained friends after their demob.
While trying to get a foothold in show
business they haunted the Grafton
Arms, a pub run by Jimmy Grafton,
an exmajor who was then writing for
Derek Roy, the resident comedian in
BBC radio's Variety Bandbox. When
Roy graduated to his own starring se
ries Hip Hip Hoo Roy, Milligan helped
Grafton with the writing and appeared in the show. Moving out of the
family home in Lewisham, he slept
in an attic room over the pub, passing his days trying to write scripts.
It was Secombe who introduced
him to Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine, both late of the RAF, and possessed of a similar sense of the
ridiculous. The four resolved to pool
their anarchic talents, calling them
selves the Goons, after the hirsute
monsters in the Popeye comic strip.
Grafton persuaded the BBC to hazard a trial recording, but, performed
without an audience, the pilot show
failed to generate any interest.
On 28 May 1951, a second pilot (with
an audience) passed muster, and
three months later the first Goon Show
(then called Crazy People) boggled
the ears of the nation. The timing must
have been perfect; the programme
soon caught on, changed titles, and
grew steadily more hilarious. Elaborate sound effects such as "One thousand soldiers stand easy" and "Female
yak scratching her head" were a key
feature. In one episode Corporal
Neddie Seagoon (Harry Secombe)
is ordered by his superior, the suave
Grytpype Thynne (Peter Sellers) to
come up with a way to win the Second World War, "Eureka!" shouts
Seagoon excitedly. "The Germans
are only separated from us by the
English Channel, which is a mere 21
miles wide" The sound effects men
then produce a splash. A man swim
ming away. A pause. A man swim
ming back again; dragging himself
out of the water. After which Thynne
pants, "Twentytwo."
Five months into the series, Bentine left, giving Milligan more scope
to develop as a performer. His wail
ing crone Minnie Bannister, sinister
Moriarty and amiably moronic Eccles became as indispensable to the
Goon sagas as Secombe's Seagoon
or Sellers's Thynne, Major Bloodnok,
Henry Crun and Bluebottle.
Writing 26 Goon Shows a year
eventually took a frightening toll on
Milligan; in 1952, his first wife became
ill after the birth of their daughter
Laura. The strain of trying to meet
weekly deadlines while coping with
a sick wife and a tiny baby eventu
ally drove him to the brink. In what
must have been a desperate attempt
to call attention to his mental illness,
he nearly "deaded" Bluebottle. "One
day I was with Peter Sellers when
something inside me snapped," he
recalled. "I tried to kill him with a
potato knife. Either that or I just
wanted to peel him." He spent the
next three months in a sanitorium.
When The Goon Show finally
came to an end in 1960, after 243 pro
grammes, Milligan went through a
worrying period of unemployment
until Bernard Miles invited him to
play Ben Gunn in a stage version of
Treasure Island at the Mermaid
Theatre. So enjoyable was the expe
rience that Milligan and the inventive
John Antrobus wrote The Bedsitting
Room for the Mermaid. It opened
there in January 1963, with Milligan
starring, and then moved to the
West End. What Kenneth Tynan called
"a clearly deranged but maniacally
funny comedy" was set in a barren
England a few years after a nucle
ar war that lasted two minutes, 28
seconds, including the peace treaty.
The following year Milligan re
turned to the theatre in an adaptation
of Ivan Goncharov's novel Oblomov
at the Lyric, Hammersmith. He was
determined to play the part straight,
but the first night was a farrago of
forgotten lines, with the evening
dominated by the prompter. On the
second night, Milligan abandoned
the text again and again, improvising like the jazz musician he was. By
the end of the week, any similarity
to Goncharov was purely coincidental, and it was under the title Son
of Oblomov that this surprise Hammersmith hit transferred to the
Comedy Theatre, where it thrived.
Milligan created such innovative
television series as The Idiot Weekly,
A Show Called Fred (for which he won
the TV Writer of the Year Award in
1956) and Son of Fred, but the most
inventive was Q5, which he and Neil
Shand wrote in 1969. The future Monty
Python writer/performers found the
show liberating. "Q5 just totally
ripped up all form and shape and
there we'd been writing three minute
sketches with beginnings, middles
and ends," said Terry Jones. "Sud
denly, watching Spike, we realised
that they didn't have to be like that."
Milligan appeared in two Python
films, The Life of Brian (1979) and
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
(1980). His other films included the
awardwinning The Running, Jump
ing and Standing Still Film (1960),
The Three Musketeers (1974), The
Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977),
History of the World, Part One (1981)
and film versions of his own The Bed Sitting Room (1969) and Adolf Hitler:
My Part in His Downfall (1973).
Film work often subsidised his lit
erary endeavours. In addition to his
six funny and often terrifying war
memoirs, he poured out more than
60 books. He wrote humour during his
euphoric periods and serious verse
in the depressed stage. "I'm the manic
depressive's poet," he boasted. "Just
like Byron was for the Romantics."
He also wrote letters, mostly of
protest: one day he would be writ
ing to Mao Tsetung, telling him that
encouraging the Chinese to breed
was madness; the next to the then
Prime Minister Harold Wilson about
(and with) a leaky Biro. He published
two volumes of letters.
Name a good cause and he prob
ably championed it. He was a mem
ber of the World Wildlife Fund,
Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace,
the Green Party and the CND. In
Harrods Food Hall he once tried to
stuff 28 pounds of spaghetti down the
throat of the manager to show him
how a goose felt when being force
fed maize to make pate de fois gras.
Despite not being able to believe
in God, Spike Milligan was a lifelong
Roman Catholic. "Being a Catholic,"
he maintained, "is like a blood group
you can't change it... If there is
a Heaven, fine; I'd like to go there.
But, if Jeffrey Archer is there, I want
to go to Lewisham."
OBITUARY BY DICK VOSBURGH
Terence Alan (Spike) Milligan, actor,
writer and comedian: bomAhmad
nagar, India 16 April 1918; Hon
CBE 1992, Hon KBE 2000; married
June Marlowe (one son, two
daughters; marriage dissolved
1961), 1962 Patricia Ridgeway
(died 1978: one daughter), 1983
Shelagh Sinclair; died Rye, East
Sussex 27 February 2002.
