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Spike Milligan
Article first published on fish.co.uk, March 2002.
Spike Milligan seemed to embody many showbiz clichés:
the tragic clown, the tortured genius, the private life
sacrificed to his art. He was also uniquely funny.
His best lines seem to open up a whole surreal philosophy of life.
Seagoon:
What are you doing down there?
Eccles: Everybody's got to be somewhere.
It's nonsense that makes perfect sense, and that contradiction sums up a lot about Milligan. Much of his comedy came from the fact that he saw the absurdity of the things we say and do, and saw the sense in idiocy. And yet it was this same vision of the world that seems to have made him desparately unhappy quite a lot of the time.
His comedy made great play of the absurdities of our language, for example. In one Goon Show, Neddie Seagoon is paid £5 (and in 1955, £5 really was £5) to move a piano from one room to another.
Seagoon:
This is money for old rope.
Grytpype-Thynne: Is it? I'd have thought you'd have bought
something more useful.
(As it turns out, one of the rooms is in Paris.)
And this one is unmistakable Milligan:
For ten years Caesar ruled with an iron hand. Then with a wooden foot, and finally with a piece of string
He was equally fascinated with the absurdities of dramatic conventions. His characters threaten to kill each other with recordings of explosives. Bluebottle often reads his own 'stage directions' and complains if he doesn't like the way his role is going this week:
Bluebottle: Right, Captain, quick - jump into this cardboard box. (Hurriedly wraps captain in brown paper parcel labelled 'Explosives' and stuffs him through headquarters letter box. Jumps onto passing dustcart and exits left.) Thinks: That wasn't a very big part for Bluebottle.
The medium of radio let this surreal streak thrive. Going back to the piano story, Seagoon is having trouble getting the grand piano out of the room.
Seagoon:
I have an idea. We'll saw the legs off. Eccles? Give me that
special piano leg saw that you just happen to be carrying.
Thank you... now.
FX: [sawing, followed by clatter of leg on floor,
x4]
Seagoon: There! I've sawn off all four legs.
Eidelburger: Strange. The first time I've known of a piano
with four legs.
Eccles: Hey! I keep fallin' down!
Try doing that on TV.
As well as the absurdities of radio and language, Milligan was exercised by the general absurdity of human beings. This is from the children's story The Bald Twit Lion:
Men kept coming to the jungle looking for gold, diamonds gas and oil. Whereas simple animals could live without such tings, brilliant man couldn't, in fact he'd forgotten how to. One thing he never forgot was how to have wars and say, 'Oh dear, how sad,' when children were killed by bombs. The animals left these things called men alone. In return for this kindness man killed them, cut off their skins and put them on the floor; cut off their heads and stuck them on the walls. But if an animal killed a man, it was in ALL the newspapers.
This vision of the absurdity of war, hunting, and eco-wrecking turned him into a campaigner. But, though it made Milligan laugh, could also deeply depress him.
He suffered no less than ten nervous breakdowns. The first four came during the Goon Show years, and the fact that he had to come up with a 30-minute script once a week for more than six months of the year for a decade must bear much of the blame. It also claimed his first marriage.
His story has made me think about the religious idea of sacrifice. On the one hand, how desparately sad and wrong it is have sacrificed one's family and so much oneself on the altar of work/celebrity/call it what you will. The failure of his marriage was the greatest regret of his life.
And yet, when you look at it the other way, how much Milligan went through himself for the sake of others, how much he suffered to bring a bit of laughter into people's lives. It reminds us that so much of our most treasured art and entertainment seems to come from broken lives, from Mozart to Tony Hancock, and I think there is something noble about that kind of sacrifice.
So you can't help feeling grateful for what Spike suffered. But the BBC should still have given him more holidays.
The last word should go to his humour though, and I think this is a wonderful moment:
Moriarty: You have stolen my dentures! I challenge you to a duel! Choose your weapon!
Grytpype-Thynne: Teeth!
Moriarty: Aaargh, I've lost!
