Terence Alan "Spike" Milligan (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002) was an Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright and actor. The son of an English mother and Irish father, he was born in British India, where he spent his childhood before relocating in 1931 to England, where he lived and worked for the majority of his life.
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, Minnie Bannister and Count Jim Moriarty. 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 and education Terence Alan Milligan was born in Ahmednagar, India, on 16 April 1918 during the British Raj, the son of an Irish father, Leo Alphonso Milligan, a regimental sergeant-major in the British Indian Army,Encyclopedia of British Humorists vol. I- Geoffrey Chaucer to John Cleese, ed. Steven H. Gale, Garland Publishing Inc., 1996, p. 764 and English mother, Florence Mary Winifred (née Kettleband). He spent his childhood in Poona and later in Rangoon, then capital of British Burma. He was educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Poona, and later at St Paul's High School, Rangoon. His father remained in the Indian Army after the end of the First World War, steadily promoted till "the family's lifestyle became almost lavish"; Milligan considered that "My old man lived the life of a gentleman on sergeant's pay".
After 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 being "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.
After 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.. Disliking his first name, he began to call himself "Spike" after hearing the band Spike Jones and his City Slickers on Radio Luxembourg.
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 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 (whose nickname "Edge-ying-Tong" inspired one of Milligan's most memorable musical creations, the "Ying Tong Song") composed surreal stories, filled with puns and skewed logic, as a way of staving off the boredom of life in barracks. A biographer describes his early dance band work: "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." Milligan acquired a double bass, on which he took lessons and would pluck in jazz sessions.Scudamore (1985) pp. 52–53. He 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.
Milligan's unit – now equipped with four BL 7.2-inch howitzers – saw action as part of the First Army in the North African campaign (during which Milligan was appointed lance bombardier) and then in the succeeding Italian campaign. In Italy, Milligan was about to be promoted to bombardier, when he was wounded in action at the Battle of Monte Cassino. Subsequently, hospitalised for a mortar wound to the right leg and shell shock, he was demoted back to gunner by an unsympathetic commanding officer (identified in his war diaries as Major Evan "Jumbo" Jenkins).
After hospitalisation, Milligan drifted through various rear-echelon military jobs in Italy, eventually joining the Central Pool of Artists (a group he described as composed "of bomb-happy squaddies") and 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. In May 1945, shortly after VE Day, Milligan was promoted to full Bombardier in recognition of his work in entertaining the troops.After being demobilised, Milligan remained in Italy playing with the trio but returned to Britain soon after. While he was with the CPA 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 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, 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.Carpenter, 2003, p. 112. Milligan did not perform as much in the early shows, but 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.Carpenter, 2003, p. 119. He was also the primary author of most of the scripts, although he co-wrote many scripts with 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 collaborated with Eric Sykes from Series 5 (coinciding with the birth of the Milligans' second child, Seán) and through most of Series 6, a development that grew out of his business collaboration with Sykes in Associated London Scripts.Carpenter, 2003, p. 182. 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.Carpenter, 2003, p. 190.
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 (through foley) or played back from discs, sometimes requiring the use of four or five turntables 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 difficult using Foley or disc. In the later years of the series many Goon Show "grams" were produced by members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, an 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 bipolar disorder. In late 1952, possibly exacerbated by suppressed tensions between the Goons' stars, Milligan apparently became irrationally convinced that he had to kill Sellers. 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.Carpenter, 2003, pp. 136–139. Milligan later blamed the pressure of writing and performing The Goon Show for his breakdown and the failure of his first marriage.Spike Milligan, More Goon Show Scripts (Sphere Books, London, 1973, ), p. 13.
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 direct The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night . 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".