The nicer side of Spike

by Bob Eggington
BBC News Online

Milligan was best known for The Goons

The first major biography of comic Spike Milligan since he died last year is published in the UK.

The late Spike Milligan was a national treasure. For more than 50 years he was a prominent, even dominant figure in British comedy.

BBC News Online users voted him Funniest Person of the Millennium in September 1999.

Like such figures as Bobby Charlton, Henry Cooper, Elton John and the late Princess Diana, he was so popular as to be beyond serious criticism.

This creates obvious difficulties for a biographer, trying to produce a balanced account of a man who was frequently nasty, jealous, unforgiving, mean to colleagues, racist, anti-Semitic and sometimes violent.

Click here to review the book yourself

Milligan was a manic depressive and given to suicidal and even homicidal impulses. Of course, he had his good points too - but the dark side was pretty big, and pretty dark.

How can you describe this man's life, with his many undoubted failings, without alienating his millions of fans - who, after all, are the people most likely to buy the book?

Humphrey Carpenter gives it a try in his new biography, Spike Milligan. He writes with the fond and forgiving tone of a lifelong Milligan admirer.

He can forgive Spike almost anything, because he was so funny.

Like most of the truly dedicated Milligan fans, Carpenter's admiration is rooted in the Goon Shows. These were broadcast on BBC Radio from 1951 to 1960.

Carpenter (born in 1946) goes so far as to say that the Goon Shows were "the cleverest use anyone has ever made of radio." Hmm - what about The War of the Worlds (1938)?

But the Goon Shows were certainly Spike Milligan's most famous achievement. He sometimes embraced this fact, calling the shows his "life's work". And sometimes he resented it.

"People still insist on digging this thing up. Ex-Goon, that's what the newspapers call me, as if I'd never done anything else," he said in 1991.

There was plenty else, of course, including TV and movies, plays, novels, poetry and stand-up comedy. The comedy was, as Jenny Abramsky, head of BBC Radio said, "unmatched".

The person was another story, and one that is carefully and engagingly told in this biography. As Carpenter suggests, perhaps it is better to separate the humour from the man.

Or, as his scriptwriting partner John Antrobus put it: "The reason Spike has remained so popular and beloved by the public is that they don't know him."

What we all knew was the spontaneous, hysterical wit. Almost everyone who bumped into him has an example.

The BBC correspondent Kevin Ruane, now retired, told how he was rushing out of the newsroom one night to catch his train. The only people in the large foyer of Broadcasting House at that late hour were the doorman - and Spike Milligan.

As Kevin hurried across the marble floor, Milligan shouted to the doorman: "Quick! One of them's getting away!"

That is the Spike Milligan we want to remember.

Spike Milligan by Humphrey Carpenter is published by Hodder and Stoughton.

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