Bazonka

Terence Alan "Spike" Milligan (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002) was an Irish actor, comedian, writer, musician, poet, and playwright. The son of an English mother and Irish father, he was born in British Colonial India, where he spent his childhood before relocating in 1931 to England, where he lived and worked for the majority of his life. Disliking his first name, he began to call himself "Spike" after hearing the band Spike Jones and his City Slickers on Radio Luxembourg.

Milligan was the co-creator, main writer, and a principal cast member of the British radio comedy programme '' The Goon Show'', performing a range of roles including the characters Eccles and Minnie Bannister. He was the earliest-born and last surviving member of the Goons. He took his success with ''The Goon Show'' into television with '' Q5'', a surreal sketch show credited as a major influence on the members of ''Monty Python's Flying Circus''. He wrote and edited many books, including '' Puckoon'' (1963) and a seven-volume autobiographical account of his time serving during the Second World War, beginning with '' Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall'' (1971). He also wrote comical verse, with much of his poetry written for children, including ''Silly Verse for Kids'' (1959).

Early life

Terence Alan Milligan was born in Ahmednagar on 16 April 1918 during the British Raj, the son of an Irish father, Leo Alphonso Milligan, MSM, RA (1890–1969), a regimental sergeant-major in the British Indian Army, and English mother, Florence Mary Winifred (née Kettleband; 1893–1990). He spent his childhood in Poona and later in Rangoon, capital of British Burma. He was educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Poona, and later at St Paul's High School, Rangoon. Due to his father remaining in the Indian Army after the end of the First World War, steady promotion meant "the family's lifestyle became almost lavish"; Milligan considered that "My old man lived the life of a gentleman on sergeant's pay".

When Army cuts meant his father's position was no longer required, Milligan travelled, by sea, from India to England for the first time; he arrived on a winter's morning and was bemused by the climate, so different from India's, remembering the dock's "terrible noise, and everything so cold and grey." The Milligan family lived in England in somewhat straitened circumstances, Leo Milligan only being able to find "a poorly paid job in the Associated Press photo library"; Milligan recalled his mother "often tense and angry... a domestic tyrant" due to having to manage on "next to no income". After moving to Brockley, south east London from the age of 12 in 1931, Milligan attended Brownhill Road School (later to be renamed Catford Boys School) and St Saviours School, Lewisham High Road. Disliking his first name Terry, he began to call himself "Spike" after hearing the band Spike Jones and his City Slickers on Radio Luxembourg.

On leaving school, he worked as a clerk in the Woolwich Arsenal, played the cornet and discovered jazz. He also joined the Young Communist League to demonstrate his hatred of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, who were gaining support near his home in South London.

Second World War

During most of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Milligan performed as an amateur jazz vocalist, guitarist, and trumpeter before, during and after being called up for military service joining the Royal Artillery, in the fight against Nazi Germany, but even then he wrote and performed comedy sketches as part of concerts to entertain troops. After his call-up, but before being sent abroad, he and fellow musician Harry Edgington (1919–1993) (whose nickname 'Edge-ying-Tong', inspired one of Milligan's most memorable musical creations, the "Ying Tong Song") would compose surreal stories, filled with puns and skewed logic, as a way of staving off the boredom of life in barracks. One biographer describes his early dance band work as follows: "He managed to croon like Bing Crosby and win a competition: he also played drums, guitar and trumpet, in which he was entirely self taught"; he also acquired a double bass, on which he took lessons and would strum in jazz sessions.Scudamore (1985) pp. 52–53. Milligan had perfect pitch.

During the Second World War, Milligan served as a signaller in D Battery (later 19 Battery), 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery, as Gunner Milligan, 954024. The unit was equipped with the obsolete First World War era BL 9.2-inch howitzer and based in Bexhill on the south coast of England. Milligan describes training with these guns in part two of ''Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall'', claiming that, during training, gun crews resorted to shouting "bang" in unison as they had no shells with which to practise.

The unit was later re-equipped with the BL 7.2-inch howitzer and saw action as part of the First Army in the North African campaign and then in the succeeding Italian campaign. Milligan was appointed lance bombardier and was about to be promoted to bombardier, when he was wounded in action in the Italian theatre at the Battle of Monte Cassino. Subsequently, hospitalised for a mortar wound to the right leg and shell shock, he was demoted by an unsympathetic commanding officer (identified in his war diaries as Major Evan "Jumbo" Jenkins) back to Gunner. It was Milligan's opinion that Major Jenkins did not like him, because Milligan constantly kept up the morale of his fellow soldiers, whereas Jenkins's approach was to take an attitude towards the troops similar to that of Lord Kitchener. An incident also mentioned was when Jenkins had invited Gunners Milligan and Edgington to his bivouac to play some jazz with him, only to discover that the musicianship of the gunners was far superior to his own ability to play "Whistling Rufus".

After hospitalisation, Milligan drifted through a number of rear-echelon military jobs in Italy, eventually becoming a full-time entertainer. He played the guitar with a jazz and comedy group called ''The Bill Hall Trio'', in concert parties for the troops. After being demobilised, Milligan remained in Italy playing with the trio but returned to Britain soon after. While he was with the Central Pool of Artists (a group he described as composed "of bomb-happy squaddies") he began to write parodies of their mainstream plays, which displayed many of the key elements of what would later become '' The Goon Show'' (originally called ''Crazy People'') with Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine.

Career

''The Goon Show''

Milligan returned to jazz in the late 1940s and made a precarious living with the Hall trio and other musical comedy acts. He was also trying to break into the world of radio, as a performer or script writer. His first success in radio was as writer for comedian Derek Roy's show. After a delayed start, Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine joined forces in a relatively radical comedy project, '' The Goon Show''. During its first season the BBC titled the show as ''Crazy People'', or in full, ''The Junior Crazy Gang featuring those Crazy People, the Goons'', an attempt to make the programme palatable to BBC officials, by connecting it with the popular group of theatre comedians known as The Crazy Gang. p. 186.

The first episode was broadcast on 28 May 1951 on the BBC Home Service. Although he did not perform as much in the early shows, Milligan eventually became a lead performer in almost all of the ''Goon Show'' episodes, portraying a wide range of characters including Eccles, Minnie Bannister, Jim Spriggs and the nefarious Count Moriarty. He was also the primary author of most of the scripts, although he co-wrote many scripts with various collaborators, most notably Larry Stephens and Eric Sykes. Most of the early shows were co-written with Stephens (and edited by Jimmy Grafton) but this partnership faltered after Series 3. Milligan wrote most of Series 4 but from Series 5 (coinciding with the birth of the Milligans' second child, Seán) and through most of Series 6, he collaborated with Eric Sykes, a development that grew out of his contemporary business collaboration with Sykes in Associated London Scripts. Milligan and Stephens reunited during Series 6 but towards the end of Series 8 Stephens was sidelined by health problems and Milligan worked briefly with John Antrobus. The Milligan-Stephens partnership was finally ended by Stephens' death from a brain haemorrhage in January 1959; Milligan later downplayed and disparaged Stephens' contributions.

''The Goon Show'' was recorded before a studio audience and during the audience warm-up session, Milligan would play the trumpet, while Peter Sellers played on the orchestra's drums. For the first few years the shows were recorded live, direct to 16-inch transcription disc, which required the cast to adhere closely to the script but by Series 4, the BBC had adopted the use of magnetic tape.Carpenter, 2003, p. 120. Milligan eagerly exploited the possibilities the new technology offered—the tapes could be edited, so the cast could now ad-lib freely and tape also enabled the creation of groundbreaking sound effects. Over the first three series, Milligan's demands for increasingly complex sound effects (or "grams", as they were then known) pushed technology and the skills of the BBC engineers to their limits—effects had to be created mechanically ( foley) or played back from discs, sometimes requiring the use of four or five turntables running simultaneously. With magnetic tape, these effects could be produced in advance and the BBC engineers were able to create highly complex, tightly edited effects "stings" that would have been very difficult (if not impossible) to perform using foley or disc. In the later years of the series many Goon Show "grams" were produced for the series by members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a notable example being the "Major Bloodnok's Stomach" effect, realised by Dick Mills.

Although the Goons elevated Milligan to national stardom, the demands of writing and performing the series took a heavy toll. During Series 3 he had the first of several serious mental breakdowns, which also marked the onset of a decades-long cycle of manic-depressive illness. In late 1952, possibly exacerbated by suppressed tensions between the Goons' stars, Milligan apparently became irrationally convinced that he had to kill Sellers but when he attempted to gain entry to Sellers's neighbouring flat, armed with a potato knife, he accidentally walked straight through the plate-glass front door. He was hospitalised, heavily sedated for two weeks and spent almost two months recuperating; fortunately for the show, a backlog of scripts meant that his illness had little effect on production. Milligan later blamed the pressure of writing and performing ''The Goon Show'' for both his breakdown and the failure of his first marriage.

A lesser-known aspect of Milligan's life in the 1950s and 1960s was his involvement in the writers' agency Associated London Scripts. Milligan married for the first time and began a family. This reportedly distracted him from writing so much that he accepted an invitation from Eric Sykes to share his small office, leading to the creation of the co-operative agency.

Television

Milligan made several forays into television as a writer-performer, in addition to his many guest appearances on interview, variety and sketch comedy series from the 1950s to the 2000s. ''The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d'' (1956), starring Peter Sellers, was the first attempt to translate Goons humour to TV; it was followed by '' A Show Called Fred'' and '' Son of Fred'', both made during 1956 and directed by Richard Lester, who went on to work with the Beatles. During a visit to Australia in 1958, a similar special was made for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, "The Gladys Half-Hour", which also featured local actors Ray Barrett and John Bluthal, who would appear in several later Milligan projects. In 1961, Milligan co-wrote two episodes of the popular sitcom '' Sykes and a...'', co-starring Sykes and Hattie Jacques and the one-off "Spike Milligan Offers a Series of Unrelated Incidents at Current Market Value".

The 15-minute series '' The Telegoons'' (1963), was the next attempt to transplant the Goons to television, this time using puppet versions of the familiar characters. The initial intention was to "visualise" original recordings of 1950s Goon Show episodes but this proved difficult, because of the rapid-fire dialogue and was ultimately frustrated by the BBC's refusal to allow the original audio to be used. Fifteen-minute adaptations of the original scripts by Maurice Wiltshire were used instead, with Milligan, Sellers and Secombe reuniting to provide the voices; according to a contemporary press report, they received the highest fees the BBC had ever paid for 15-minute shows. Two series were made in 1963 and 1964 and (presumably because it was shot on 35mm film rather than video) the entire series has reportedly been preserved in the BBC archives.

Milligan's next major TV venture was the sketch comedy series '' The World of Beachcomber'' (1968), made in colour for BBC 2; it is believed all 19 episodes are lost. That same year, the three Goons reunited for a televised re-staging of a vintage ''Goon Show'' for Thames Television, with John Cleese substituting for the late Wallace Greenslade but the pilot was not successful and no further programmes were made.

In early 1969, Milligan starred in brownface in the situation comedy ''Curry and Chips'', created and written by Johnny Speight and featuring Milligan's old friend and colleague Eric Sykes. ''Curry and Chips'' set out to satirise racist attitudes in Britain in a similar vein to Speight's earlier creation, the hugely successful ''Till Death Us Do Part'', with Milligan 'browning up' to play Kevin O'Grady, a half-Pakistani–half-Irish factory worker. The series generated numerous complaints, because of its frequent use of racist epithets and 'bad language'—one viewer reportedly complained of counting 59 uses of the word "bloody" in one episode—and it was cancelled on the orders of the Independent Broadcasting Authority after only six episodes. Milligan was also involved in the ill-fated programme '' The Melting Pot''.

Director John Goldschmidt's film ''The Other Spike'' dramatised Milligan's nervous breakdown in a film for Granada Television, for which Milligan wrote the screenplay and in which he played himself. Later that year, he was commissioned by the BBC to write and star in ''Q5'', the first in the innovative ''Q...'' TV series, acknowledged as an important precursor to ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'', which premiered several months later. There was a hiatus of several years, before the BBC commissioned ''Q6'' in 1975. ''Q7'' appeared in 1977, '' Q8'' in 1978, ''Q9'' in 1980 and ''There's a Lot of It About'' in 1982. Milligan later complained of the BBC's cold attitude towards the series and stated that he would have made more programmes, had he been given the opportunity. A number of episodes of the earlier "Q" series are missing, presumed wiped.

Milligan's daughter, Laura, conceived and co-wrote an animated series called ''The Ratties'' (1987). Milligan narrated the 26 five-minute episodes. He later voiced the highly successful animated series '' Wolves, Witches and Giants'', which aired on ITV from 1995 to 1998. The series was written by Ed Welch, who had previously appeared in the ''Q'' series, and collaborated with Spike on several audio productions produced and directed by Simon & Sara Bor. ''Wolves, Witches and Giants'' was broadcast in more than 100 territories, including Britain and the United States.

Poetry and other writings

Milligan also wrote verse, considered to be within the genre of literary nonsense. For example: ''"It's due to pigeons that alight; on Nelson's hat that makes it white."'' His poetry has been described by comedian Stephen Fry as "absolutely immortal—greatly in the tradition of Lear." One of his poems, "On the Ning Nang Nong", was voted the UK's favourite comic poem in 1998 in a nationwide poll, ahead of other nonsense poets including Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. This nonsense verse, set to music, became a favourite Australia-wide, performed week after week by the ABC children's programme '' Playschool''. Milligan included it on his album ''No One's Gonna Change Our World'' in 1969, to aid the World Wildlife Fund. In December 2007 it was reported that, according to OFSTED, it is among the ten most commonly taught poems in primary schools in the UK.

While depressed, he wrote serious poetry, much of which is compiled in ''Open Heart University''. He also wrote a novel '' Puckoon'' and a series of war memoirs, including '' Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall'' (1971), '' "Rommel?" "Gunner Who?": A Confrontation in the Desert'' (1974), '' Monty: His Part in My Victory'' (1976) and '' Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall'' (1978). Milligan's seven volumes of memoirs cover the years from 1939 to 1950 (his call-up, war service, first breakdown, time spent entertaining in Italy and return to the UK).

Milligan also wrote comedy songs, including "Purple Aeroplane", which was a parody of the Beatles' song " Yellow Submarine". In addition, he wrote the lyric to saxophonist/composer Duncan Lamont's "English Folk Song," heard on jazz singer Tina May

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases