Spike Milligan, who died on February 27th aged 83, was once talking about Eccles, his favourite Goon Show character. "Eccles represents the permanency of man, his ability to go through anything and survive. They are trying to get off a ship on the Amazon and lower a boat. When they get to the shore Eccles is already there.
" 'How did you get ashore? Ho hum, I came across on that log. Log . . . that's an alligator! Oh. I wondered why I kept getting shorter.' "
That brief exchange, recognisable instantly as something only Spike Milligan could have written, does tell us something about this troubled, gifted man, with his unique mind and puzzled pity for humanity.
Jimmy Grafton, who co-wrote many of the early shows, maintained that Eccles was the nearest thing to Spike Milligan's own id - a very simple, uncomplicated creature who doesn't want to be burdened with any responsibility and just wants to be happy and enjoy himself. "Spike achieved a reputation for eccentricity and has become, by his own choice, a sort of court jester. You begin to wonder to what extent in some circumstances the eccentricity is involuntary and to what extent it is deliberate. He can always get out of trouble by going a little mad."
Spike Milligan never achieved Eccles's simple dream of happiness, and comedy is richer for his failure. He lived his life at the end of his mind's tether and was always a man of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions: an anarchist with a passion for conservation, a vulnerable and acutely sensitive exhibitionist, a sophisticated person who preferred to retain a vision of childlike purity.
He was often distinctly unsettling, both offstage and as a writer/performer. The writer and jazz singer George Melly, while admitting that Spike Milligan was not the sunniest person all the time, added that his was "the greatest mind in what is loosely called comedy".
George Orwell's assertion that "whatever is funny is subversive" was never truer than in the case of Spike Milligan. He didn't invent surrealistic radio comedy - nor did he ever claim to - but he opened up the medium with his uncluttered anarchic vision, and his influence since the early 1950s has been vast.
Spike Milligan was born to Leo and Florence Milligan on April 16th, 1918, in Poona, India. His father, who was from Sligo, was in the Royal Artillery. The holder of an Irish passport, Spike Milligan's Irishness, was represented by his contempt for authority and a free-wheeling humour - reminiscent of Flann O'Brien - always ran through his work.
His father was a frustrated entertainer who did impressions of G.H. Elliott, the "Chocolate-Coloured Coon" at camp concerts, but never had the confidence to turn professional. Spike Milligan appeared at such concerts from an early age.
"I wasn't consciously aware of it," he said, "but I had had enough of the British empire. The Goons gave me a chance to knock people my father and I had to call 'Sir'. Colonels. Chaps like Gritpipe-Thynne with educated voices who were really bloody scoundrels".
Spike Milligan was educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Poona, and, after his father was posted to Rangoon in 1929, at the Brothers de La Salle; the family stayed in Burma until 1933 and then returned to England to what Spike Milligan described as a fairly impoverished life and where his education continued at the South-East London Polytechnic.
He worked in a nuts and bolts factory, but had already decided to become an entertainer, and learned to play the ukulele, guitar and trumpet. At one point he won a Bing Crosby crooning competition at the Lewisham Hippodrome.
When the war broke out he joined his father's old regiment and served in north Africa, where he first met Harry Secombe. He began to organise music and comedy shows for the armed forces entertainment organisation ENSA with Secombe and others, and was wounded in Italy. His war experiences later formed the basis for a number of best-sellers, including Adolf Hitler, My Part In His Downfall (1971), Monty, My Part In His Victory (1976) and Mussolini, His Part In My Downfall (1978).
Back in civvies in 1946, he formed a trio and started the weary round of agents and audition rooms. The act failed to generate any enthusiasm, and when it broke up he "sort of wandered around". It was during these wanderings that he renewed his friendship with Secombe, who had been struggling along as a comic at London's Windmill Theatre. He also made the acquaintance of another young hopeful, Peter Sellers, and the wild-haired and equally anarchic Michael Bentine.
All gravitated to Jimmy Grafton's pub in Westminster, where they would do turns in the back room to entertain each other. And it was there that the seeds of The Goon Show were sown.
Grafton was writing jokes for the radio comedian Derek Roy and, impressed by Spike Milligan's unique view of the world, asked him to co-write some material. In this way Spike Milligan wrote for several top comics of the day - Bill Kerr, Alfred Marks and even Frankie Howerd. He also wrote for Secombe and Sellers, who had started to become established, in a modest way, as radio performers.
Sellers had the best contacts and first put the idea for The Goon Show to the BBC ("Goon" came from a strange being in the Popeye cartoons which Spike Milligan loved).
The BBC was lukewarm, but agreed to give the show - starring Sellers, Spike Milligan, Bentine and Secombe - a trial run under the title Crazy People. Thus it began in May 1951, swiftly changing its title and losing Bentine, whose surreal style clashed with Spike Milligan's. It ran, with 26 shows a year, for nine years.
Spike Milligan, with or without Grafton or Larry Stephens, wrote all the shows, with Eric Sykes drafted in to help on occasion. Although the show could hardly have existed without Spike Milligan's participation, his difficult behaviour kept him at constant loggerheads with the BBC. However, it was when the programmes ended - at Spike Milligan's instigation - in 1960 that his personal demons started to dominate his private and professional life.
"When the Goons broke up I was out of work," he said. "My marriage ended because I'd had a terrible nervous breakdown - two, three, four, five nervous breakdowns, one after other. The Goon Show did it. That's why they were so good."
Because of the "difficult" label, he almost had to beg for work, and the first to respond was the actormanager Bernard Miles, who asked him to play Ben Gunn in Treasure Island at the Mermaid Theatre in London. It was during its successful run that Spike Milligan and John Antrobus wrote the bleak comedy The Bed-Sitting Room, which was set in the aftermath of the third world war. It, too, opened at the Mermaid, in 1963, with Spike Milligan appearing as a sort of disruptive "chorus". In 1970, the play was made into a film.
His next piece, Oblomov, was just as successful, opening at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, in 1964. It was based on the Russian classic by Ivan Goncharov, and gave Spike Milligan the opportunity to play most of the title role in bed. Unsure of his material, on the opening night he improvised a great deal, treating the audience as part of the plot almost, and he continued in this diverting manner for the rest of the run, and on tour as Son Of Oblomov.
In the 1960s he did a number of television series, notably the World Of Beachcomber and Q5. He also became a favourite on TV chat shows, although it was with some trepidation that the host would introduce him. Spike Milligan rarely had much of an inkling of what he was going to do, even at far more formal, scripted occasions. "I turn up on the day," he said. "They point me at the audience and I do it."
He also turned his attention to the cinema. His films included The Magic Christian (1971), The Devils (1971), The Three Musketeers (1973), The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977) and Monty Python's Life Of Brian (1978).
Spike Milligan seemed to mellow in later years, but there was always a hint of the dangerous spark that had brought him to the brink of despair so many times and lit beacons of laughter to cleanse us all. In 2000, to a clutch of awards was added an honorary knighthood.
His first marriage, to June Marlowe, ended in divorce. His second wife, Patricia Ridgeway, died in 1978. He is survived by his third wife, Shelagh Sinclair, whom he married in 1983. He leaves two daughters and a son from his first marriage, and a daughter from his second.
Terence Alan (Spike) Milligan: born 1918; died, February 2002