‘The godfather of alternative comedy’: Eddie Izzard, Paul Merton and more on Spike Milligan

The tortured lives of comedians form a biographical genre all of their own; there’s always an audience for the tears of a clown. No wonder Nick Newman and Ian Hislop chose Spike Milligan as the subject of their new play. Milligan, who died 20 years ago next month, is the troubled comedy genius to end them all. Shellshocked in the second world war, repeatedly admitted to hospital for mental ill health, subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, and increasingly embittered as his career failed to deliver on early promise – the Spike Milligan sad-clown drama writes itself.

“But we didn’t want to do that,” says Newman. “We wanted to ask: how did he come to create these brilliant things?” Their play – a cheerful act of ancestor-worship by by Private Eye’s editor and its eminent cartoonist – is about the first three years (1951-54) of The Goon Show, as its chief writer Milligan battles the BBC to get his vision on air. “It’s: will he survive the fallout from the war?,” says Newman, “and will he crack radio?” And, “spoiler alert!,” chimes in Hislop. “Milligan wins! We just wanted to have a play where he wins.”

Spike sustains a rich collaboration between the duo and the Watermill theatre in Berkshire, which produced their 2016 first world war play The Wipers Times, about a satirical newspaper published in the Flanders trenches. Talking at the venue while their play rehearses next door, Newman classifies Spike as “a sort of sequel” to the earlier play – because, they argue, Milligan’s comic sensibility sprang from his wartime experiences.

“When you think of the Goons,” says Hislop, “you think: how many jokes about the Naafi are there, how many reruns of war films, how many explosions and references to [fictional military stuffed-shirt] Major Bloodnok? It’s riddled with it. It’s their wartime experiences put into joke form” – and abstracted into wild sound effects, silly voices and surrealism, too. (“Shellshock on radio,” some called it.) But the BBC didn’t welcome “their finest hour” being held up to ridicule – nor Milligan’s anti-establishment airs in general. After the Goons’ coronation special, when Peter Sellers – horror of horrors! – impersonated Churchill and the Queen, “about 30 BBC managers demanded Spike be sacked for this appalling attack on the monarchy”.

That is the conflict the play dramatises: anarchy versus deference, the 60s satire boom in embryo. “What the Goons did,” says Hislop, “was channel the khaki election” that swept the 1945 Labour government to power. But it didn’t happen, at least for Spike, without a fight. “He moved from a world where people were saying: ‘Get on with it, Milligan, and stop messing about’,” says Hislop, “to another world where people said exactly the same thing.” And so, Newman joins in, “he basically carried on fighting the war, but this time against the BBC.”

The play was first conceived for television, commissioned by that same BBC to mark the 2018 centenary of Milligan’s birth. The corporation made available an archive of internal memos relating to the Goons, and all Milligan’s correspondence with the broadcaster. As many published volumes have revealed, Spike’s letters were often hilarious. But they also disclose the strain on his mental health of producing so many episodes, and the everyday peevishness of his relationship with the BBC. “You might think ‘I wonder what amazing things Spike wrote to the BBC?,’” says Hislop. “But it’s always: ‘Why haven’t I got a repeat on a Sunday? And: ‘No one listens to us in this slot!’ But that is what drives humans, and he was as human as the rest of us.”

Both Hislop and Newman can identify with Milligan’s experiences smuggling hot-potato material on air. Long before Hislop’s Have I Got News for You gig, the pair worked on ITV’s Spitting Image in the 1980s, where Hislop remembers “one election night watching the entire ITV management hugging themselves at their own bravery for broadcasting this programme – a programme that all along they’d been trying to take off the air!” He also recalls, as a rookie journalist, interviewing Milligan on Radio 4’s Midweek. “In those days, there was a bottle of champagne for the guest. I opened the bottle for Spike, very badly, and it went all over my notes. Which I’d written in felt pen.”

“Spike, who hadn’t wanted to be interviewed, suddenly warmed up and thought this was the funniest thing ever. It was anarchy, I had no questions – and so he started asking himself questions, far better than the ones I’d planned.” With their play, the pair want to introduce this wild comic sensibility to a new generation – stung by the fact that “my kids didn’t know who Spike was”, as Newman says. “Nor mine,” says Hislop. “Not a clue.”

“For a younger generation,” he goes on, “we wanted to banish the image of some very old men, one of whom was on Songs of Praise [Harry Secombe], and another who made really terrible films [Sellers].” They’re less interested, too, in the other side of Spike’s reputation – as a misanthrope, and an artist whose work (including the racist sitcom Curry and Chips) has not always worn well. Instead, Spike tells the story of a moment in time, when the artist’s creativity, his trauma and the spirit of the age came together and made sparks.

“Spike wrote 250 episodes of The Goon Show in a 10-year period,” says Newman. “In every series, there are many, many references to the war. Pretty much after that, he stops – and in his later work, hardly mentions it again.”

Related: Spike Milligan was the true father of modern satire, says Ian Hislop

“Can we recreate a period,” asks Hislop, “when these people were incredibly young, fresh out of the army, all working-class, all come up through the ranks? Can we depict this show that started off with lots of people harrumphing, and within a couple of years had audiences that television would now die for? Who thought this was the funniest programme there has ever been?” He beams. “It feels like an amazing thing to try and reignite.”

‘He was extraordinary’ – comedians on Spike Milligan

Michael Palin
It was such a liberating discovery to listen to The Goon Show. I was about 10 when a friend told me about the show. And once I listened, I was hooked. It was so unlike the rest of comedy at the time. There were no roots to what Spike did: it just took off, and went anywhere. In a half hour, he could be all over the place: that was the thrill. And as well as this wonderful, imaginative comedy, you got to hear all the chuckles, things going wrong and performers having a great time. That was new, at a time when broadcasting was very respectable. There was no one like Spike, really. No one wrote in quite the same way. And what he did gave me a sense of what I could do. I’d think: what I’m writing may be a bit odd, but it’s not nearly as odd as what I’m hearing here!

Paul Merton
There was a short-lived show called the Telegoons, in the early 60s. It had puppets performing to recorded editions of the radio show. That was my introduction to Milligan, and I was immediately struck by the surreal humour and the strangeness. He was a huge influence on me and seeing him on a chatshow was always funny. I remember one where he said “Now let me demonstrate a cheap but noisy way to travel” – then he just walked across the stage screaming his head off. When he didn’t have to worry about costume changes or rehearsal time, and just let himself be spontaneous, he was extraordinary.

AL Kennedy
I first encountered him when I was just four or five. He occupied this space that children could understand as well as adults. He was the kid at the side of the road going “yeah, but he’s not wearing any clothes!” But you could tell when he was having an off-day: he could get angry. And part of what upset him was that his productivity was horrific. When I actually looked at his output – Jesus, that would crush you! You have to write an episode of the Goons every week! It’s just: “be good at being funny, every week, any way you want. Three hundred and sixty degrees of possibility.” That would break most people. But if you can do it, and Milligan could, it’s magnificent.

Eddie Izzard
It was 1974, my dad was working for BP in Abu Dhabi, and he used to record the Goons on Radio Dubai and send it back to us. John Cleese once talked about how each episode was broadcast twice, and he would listen to the second one with the radio to one ear and a pillow to the other, to hear any jokes he had missed. I totally identified with that. Spike’s creativity was beautiful. All these weird sound effects of chickens and motor engines. He was the godfather of alternative comedy. His timing was perfect and his imagination was limitless. I absolutely recommend young comedians listen to as much of Spike’s stuff as they can.

Spike is at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, 27 January until 5 March.