Spike Milligan's people

Graham McCann
SPIKE AND CO
Inside the house of fun with Milligan, Sykes, Galton and Simpson
438pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £20.
978 0 340 89808 6

Norma Farnes, editor
THE UNPUBLISHED SPIKE MILLIGAN BOX 18
254pp. Fourth Estate. £18.99.
978 0 00 721427 3
 
 

The joke was old by the time of the New Comedy. Older than that: as old as the first half-ape who fell out of a tree with the purpose of making his friends laugh, and learned that a long face was the best accompaniment to a joke. The whole routine bombed, the proto-clown discovered, if you boasted about the good time you had at NewMoonPig or how bravely you had fought. But tell people how you didn’t get any of the pig but a handful of bristles, and show them how you ran away and hid, and you would be rewarded with a few moments of that strange but uplifting cachinnation. (The noise was perhaps a newly redundant alarm: “sabretooth coming”, it had once meant, before we trapped and speared the last of them – so jest and panic were close from the beginning.) With any luck the audience would offer you a bit of bellymeat they had to spare, “tell us again how you fell arse-upward in the swamp”.

This concentration on their own catastrophes is what makes the best of clowns the worst of company. The red-faced gossiprags have prepared us, Woody Allen has demonstrated, in films and out of them. We could guess, without being told, the tantrums and despairs, the days of the black dog, the inevitability of missed deadlines, work started and abandoned, the all too brief phases of manic output. We also know that there must have been positive times, though they regularly (or irregularly) failed these lucky darlings of the gods. No matter how battered by hysteria or despair, they would have remained mute and inglorious if they did not also possess the unmanic patient virtues: self-discipline, sitzfleisch, sticktoitivity.

And so in this attempted mass-biography, Spike and Co, we get a brief life history of Milligan with stress on the traumas, from infantile bed-wetting, through a privileged Indian childhood (son of the Sergeant-Major), too soon exchanged for poverty in Catford, to a thighful of shrapnel in the Italian campaign. We also get to know the Years of Struggle, with appropriate anecdotage: tours of US airbases, auditions at the Windmill (thrown out when he apologized for turning up in clothes). One wonders at which pole of his bipolar disorder Milligan was in 1954, when he dropped in on Eric Sykes – already a busy, well-organized and productive scriptwriter for Frankie Howerd, working in a top floor office over a greengrocer’s in Uxbridge Road – and asked (“as Milligan would recall”, warns Graham McCann), “why don’t we form what is desperately needed in this country, a writers’ commune?”. “The proposal did not come out, in reality, quite as quickly or as coherently as that”, comments McCann drily.

Sykes had all the even-tempered stubbornness needed, and his own burden of childhood grief. His mother died giving birth to him and he was fostered out, then reclaimed by his father, only to be handed over to a stepmother. Grown up, he came to believe his mother’s spirit guarded and guided him. Evidently she approved of the writers’ commune, an idea unsuccessfully tried by Ted Kavanagh, scriptwriter to Tommy Handley’s ITMA (a funny-voices-based weekly half-hour thought, at one time, to have contributed substantially to the Allies’ victory over the forces of humourless Nazism).

The other two founder-members of the commune were Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. True to comic form, they had many years of suffering, in their cases physical: “before Galton and Simpson met, neither had been expected to survive beyond his teens”. Both had tuberculosis, exacerbated by the winter of 1946–7, which had very nearly claimed Eric Sykes as well. (A collateral benefit of penicillin, it appears, was its role in preserving cold and hungry comedians.) By 1954 Galton and Simpson were writing for Tony Hancock, and had taken over Frankie Howerd from Eric Sykes, who was busy writing for Archie Andrews, a wooden puppet. (Has anyone explained the wireless appeal of unseen marionettes?)

Associated London Scripts (as the commune shyly called itself) acquired an all-purpose secretary, producer, manager and house mother, Beryl Vertue, who kept the show on the road for a dozen years or so, and a managing director, “Scruffy” Dale, who nearly scuppered the whole enterprise by misappropriating funds into various doomed projects of his own. Frankie Howerd introduced Johnny Speight, who had been writing for the hard-left Unity Theatre (of Mornington Crescent). Speight repaid the hospitality with fifty episodes of the astonishing, paradigm-shifting Till Death Us Do Part.

Out of this rich mix the Goons precipitated. More and more performers came around in search of a regular supply of material, bringing with them new levels of egotism, depression and paranoia. There was Tony Hancock, self-condemned, self-punished; John Antrobus, described as “a Jekyll and Hyde character” by Milligan, a pretty experienced mood-switcher himself; and Peter Sellers, who already rates a thousand-page case history. It’s worth recording that, if it hadn’t been for Britt Ekland, Sellers might have played Alf Garnett, with unguessable consequences for race relations, and for the current Prime Minister.

McCann covers this vast territory with aplomb, sometimes with something approaching desperation: “the scripts that went out of this house would help further the comedy careers of [twenty-five names] to name but a few”. This list is followed by twenty programme names, ending with Dr Who. “Meanwhile, in a back-to-back in Leeds, where Alan Bennett was already getting quietly desperate, and at St Paul’s School in London, where Jonathan Miller was still growing up . . .”. The book has scholarly apparatus, a chronology, endnotes, and an audiography, from which I learned with some horror that eighty of the first hundred Goon Show tapes have been wiped: “The Saga of HMS Aldgate”, “Operation Bagpipes”, and “The Building of Britain’s First Atomic Cannon”, all gone into the dark, unless some Goonophile in Wellington or Ouagadougou has a tape.

There is some evidence of indecision in this massive undertaking. We are promised more about Speight and Till Death in “chapter nine”: but there is no chapter nine, the book’s contents being arranged instead by the room number of the occupant (with other sections called “the front door”, “the output”, and “the exit”: consequently it’s quite hard to find the endnote you want, in the absence of page references). On the other hand, there is an excellent psychiatrist joke, sourced to Spike, on page 48. This makes up for the problem with the notes, but not for the repellent photograph (used three times on the dust jacket) which displays four comic geniuses gathered round Ms Vertue. They have evidently been told, for some reason, to “act crazy”, and for some reason have consented.

The Unpublished Spike Milligan Box 18 would be better named Barrel 18. The sound of scraping overpowers. There was an eighteenth box, subtitled “Ideas”: “an extraordinary title”, explains Norma Farnes, “but then Spike was an extraordinary man”. But the ideas here are mainly stillborn. There is a poignancy about the pictures of box-files labelled and relabelled, Spike striving after an orderliness he could only dream of. The pages of his appointments book are leavened by the occasional outburst: “Fuck the System it KILLS if you aren’t a bureaucrat or a capitalist”; a few months later the engagements cancelled: “TO ILL TO DO IT” and “I’M SO LONELY”. An unwilling intruder, I turned to a series of letters to, and from, the furniture department of Harrods, Spike demanding compensation, Harrods demanding payment, and Spike, fairly evidently, in the wrong. There are campaigning letters, for Greenpeace, against the Pope, in favour of mallards, setting Tony Blair straight: “Whilst you are doing so much for the human race would you spare a thought for those fur-bearing animals”. The letter is dated July 1997, before the full range and depth of the PM’s philanthropy was known. The PM’s response is not available.
 
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Eric Korn is an antiquarian bookseller in London.