Goon who lived by his wits
Milligan said his own epitaph would read: “Here lies Spike Milligan. He wrote The Goon Show and died.” There was more to Milligan than The Goon Show. To allow the apparent modesty of that imagined epitaph would be to deny Milligan’s sometimes arrogant, self-regarding and mean-spirited manner.
Milligan was a complex character whose life was filled with extremes. He battled with depression by working himself to the bone. On his good days, he was a force of nature; a ball of energy, full of ideas and ceaseless wit. When depression struck, he would often lock himself in a room for days, speak to nobody and do nothing.
Born to an English mother and a British Army officer from Ireland on Apr 16, 1918, Terence Alan Milligan spent his youth in India. It was a time he described once as “possibly the greatest experience of [his] life”.
Having grown up in vast, open spaces bathed in sunshine, it was a shock to Milligan to move back to a grey and grim-terraced house in Catford, south London, in his early teens. It was during this period that he began singing and playing bass and trumpet in various local bands. Both parents had been performers, but now his mother, Florence, simply wanted Terence to get a regular job.
“Mum was a great one at disapproving everyone who didn’t conform,” said Milligan’s younger brother, Desmond, in a 1995 television documentary.
For Milligan, the Second World War started in Jun 1940. It was a seminal period in the comedian’s life: he began to write comedy sketches for a troupe called The Bill Hall Trio.
It was also where Milligan’s depression began. Having been caught in an explosion north of Naples, Milligan was wounded in his right leg. The wound was small but he was kept in hospital suffering from ‘battle fatigue’.
While recuperating, he wrote that he began “having recurring bouts of depression, just suddenly black, black gloom”. These demons were to follow him and curse him for the rest of his life but they also informed much of his unique, dark humour.
Occasionally, the demons led to rather outlandish behaviour, such as the time he threatened to kill his most famous fellow Goon, Peter Sellers, with a potato peeler. In the end, he walked through a glass door and hurt only himself.
Years later, he shot at two teenage trespassers who, for two years, had “plagued [him] with vandalism”.
“They excreted on the steps and in my daughter’s Wendy hut,” he said in a statement to the court. “Previous incidents had been reported and I decided, as all lawful methods had failed, to try and trap them myself.” The court found him guilty of actual bodily harm but decided he had been provoked.
While dramas punctuated Milligan’s life with a frightening regularity, one thing remained consistent; his dedication to writing. In a period from 1951 to 1960, Milligan wrote 250 episodes of The Goon Show.
Over his life, he wrote and appeared in dozens of television series, including A Show Called Fred and the much-lauded Q series, which is often cited as a forerunner to Monty Python.
“Terry Jones and I adored the Q shows, which preceded Monty Python,” former Python Michael Palin once said. “They were filled with surrealism and invention and took huge risks.”
His fellow Python, John Cleese once called Milligan “the great God of us all.”
Milligan also wrote several memoirs, and Puckoon, a novel set in a fictional village of the same name which was situated on the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Milligan became an Irish citizen in 1962. He had been asked to reapply for British citizenship. This would have involved swearing an oath to the Queen. Milligan, having served in the war, felt he had proved his loyalty to the monarch. Although proud of his Irish heritage, he was never shy to use it as a license for Paddy-Whackery, which he seems to have been uncomfortably fond of.
The comedian was married three times and had four children within those relationships. He had a veracious sexual appetite and was something of a philanderer. The result of his extra-marital affairs was one son and one daughter outside of wedlock.
All six children attended their father’s funeral after he died aged 83. His coffin was draped in an Irish flag. He had requested that he “be buried in a washing machine, just to puzzle archaeologists” and that his tombstone would read ‘I told you I was ill’. The eventual compromise was the Irish translation: Duirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.
He had said the year before, when his fellow Goon Harry Secombe had died, that “he was glad Harry had died before me, I didn’t want him singing at my funeral.”
His family organised a recording of Secombe to be played at his memorial service. Doubtless, he would have enjoyed that.
Lyric FM presenter and RTÉ legend Marty Whelan had been a fan of Milligan all his life. He finally got to meet and interview him in 1993 for television show Off the Record.
“I was one of three or four boys in the playground who could imitate the voices from the Goons, so Spike was always in my mindset growing up,” says Marty. “So when he arrived to do the interview I was both gobsmacked and thrilled beyond belief to be meeting him. Unfortunately it wasn’t an ‘up’ day for Spike but after a little gentle banter, the humour lightened.”
Spike’s interview with Marty, which will be broadcast again this morning on Marty’s show, is a typical Mlligan interview; insightful, mad-cap and compulsive listening. “It’s full of World War 2 anecdotes,” says Whelan. “He sang a couple of songs and he also talked about his Irishness and his particular hatred of noise. At the time he was planning to re-write the Old Testament and this was one of a number of classic volumes which he re-wrote in the Milligan style. It’s always very special to meet a hero of yours and, in this case, the master of comedy writing.”
Marty will replay parts of his interview with Spike this morning on Marty in the Morning from 7am on RTE Lyric FM.
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