The Spike Milligan Tribute Site

By Matthew Coniam and Richard Larcombe

First published in Kettering Magazine Issue 1

“Do you know, I don’t think I even saw it once.” John Bluthal

“I can’t remember a thing about it.”Victor Spinetti

“It has a strange power.”Joe McGrath

On Monday 24th June, 2002, the London Evening Standard reported on the memorial service held that day in London in honour of a humourist and writer often cited as the most important British comedian of the twentieth century. His name was Spike Milligan.

By an interesting coincidence, a few pages later in the same edition a much smaller piece reported on another ceremony held the same day in Dundee. Here, a walkway had been unveiled in memory of a nineteenth-century Scottish writer often cited as the worst poet of all time. His name was William McGonagall.

Ironically, nobody would have been more delighted than Milligan himself by this symbolic joining in death of his name with that of the ill-fated Scottish weaver turned ‘poet and tragedian’. For McGonagall’s life and verse had long been an obsession of Milligan’s, finding frequent (and frequently irrelevant) expression in his published works, as well as taking centre stage in two full-length novels and one remarkable film. This is the story of that film.

With a body of work as generally undiscussed, misrepresented and rarely seen as Milligan’s, it may seem perverse to label The Great McGonagall (1974) as his ‘lost masterpiece’. After all, what is the Q series if not a masterpiece and (thanks to BBC neglect) to all intents and purposes lost? McGonagall, however, is buried treasure even by Milligan standards: little seen, both on release and subsequently, it is usually subject to critical derision when not ignored altogether. Financed by producers who envisaged it largely as a tax-dodge it received only a token release, and until we contacted them, even two of its principal stars, John Bluthal and Victor Spinetti, had never seen it.

Most reviews were negative (and often clearly the work of writers who, at best, had not been concentrating and in several cases appeared not to have seen it at all). When it is mentioned today, it tends to be as a footnote in studies of Peter Sellers, who contributes a cameo appearance as Queen Victoria. Often it is cited as yet another disastrous Sellers project from the era of Where Does It Hurt? and The Ghost in the Noonday Sun, or worse: as a failed off-shoot of the Goons. Certainly, Sellers’s prominence in the credits (and in the film’s minimal promotion) can be seen as a deliberate, perhaps backfiring, attempt to lure audiences to the film. (Bluthal “just couldn’t believe how much Spike was in awe of Peter.”)

This has resulted in most reviewers writing about Sellers’s few minutes of screen-time and little else. Variety’s scribe goes so far as to claim that Sellers’s scenes (“as a randy monarch”) are “chopped up and distributed haphazardly throughout the pic in a vain attempt to keep interest from flagging.” (In fact, he appears in two distinct, un-chopped up sequences.) This is wrong, and lazy, and has helped obscure for over twenty-five years the fact that The Great McGonagall is one of the strangest, most genuinely unique and fascinating British films ever made.

Though a representative (if extreme) example of Milligan’s mature comic style (made shortly before Q6 and distinguished from The Goon Show by its more uncompromising sense of iconoclastic absurdism) the film is at the same time distinct from his surrounding work in significant and stimulating ways.

At this point it may be useful to digress briefly and confirm exactly what we mean when we talk of Milligan’s mature style, since even this fundamental matter has, surprisingly, received virtually no serious critical analysis. We all know how the Goons revolutionised British comedy with their healthily irreverent childishness, absurd sound effects and funny noises, but how often are we told that Milligan progressed from this template, producing comedy through the sixties and seventies that was deeper, denser, further refined, cleverer, stranger, more intense, better and significantly different?

In a revealing (mid-eighties) interview (for the television programme Famous Last Words), Milligan claimed that he had to reign-in his comic imagination to suit the specific market he was catering to and that “when I really write comedy nobody understands it, it’s like Finnegan’s Wake.”

Re-listening to the Goons it is clear that what seemed daringly anarchic at the time is in fact Milligan at one-tenth force, and riddled with retained radio comedy conventions. All would gradually be dispensed with in the years that followed, and in his subsequent work in theatre (notably Son of Oblomov), television (notably the sublime Q6, 7 and 8) and this one film we see the natural evolution of a comic style defined above all else by its restlessness and inability to adhere statically to formalised conventions. (Even, that is, when those conventions were formalised by Milligan himself, and about as far from both formality and conventionality as can be imagined.) Compare any episode of Q8 with The Goon Show (or for that matter with Monty Python’s Flying Circus) and you will instantly concede Milligan’s point about the sheer idiosyncratic depth of his comic imagination. But if what you’re after is the full Finnegan’s Wake, you really need The Great McGonagall; the only ‘pure’ example of Milligan cinema in existence. He is properly dominant and at liberty, neither pocketed into cameos and guest spots nor straitjacketed by the demands of conventional narrative and characterisation as in, for example, Postman’s Knock (1961), a bona-fide star vehicle with nothing to offer Milligan devotees whatsoever. Goon Show fans may be able to extract a smile or two from Down Among The Z-Men (1952), but Q-lovers in search of bizarre visual ideas, wild mangling of everyday English, characters in blackface, tailor’s dummies, boxing gloves, cornflake-box crowns and people dressed as Hitler have only one option.

The idea for the film came from its director Joe McGrath, one of the most significant creative figures in post-war British comedy, whose work as writer, producer and director encompasses Not Only But Also, The Bliss of Mrs Blossom (1968), bits of the notorious Casino Royale (1967), Sellers’s best film The Magic Christian (1969), the sweet Dudley Moore vehicle Thirty Is A Dangerous Age, Cynthia (1968) and Morecambe and Wise’s peculiar swansong Night Train To Murder (1985). (Actor Victor Spinetti: “He’s a darling, the guy who directed it – we’d have done somersaults backwards through hoops if he wanted us to.”)

Like Milligan and Sellers, McGrath was (and is) a huge fan of McGonagall, whose contrived rhymes and inability to adhere to even the simplest conventions of rhythm and scansion lends his work a comic effect so pronounced that it is easy to forget that the poet’s intentions were always deadly serious. In fact, the three would regularly meet at the Dorchester on McGonagall’s birthday for a celebration incorporating grandiose recitations of his work, and McGrath recalls that, while Milligan would doggedly continue to a poem’s conclusion, Sellers would invariably surrender to hysterical laughter part-way through (a telling example of the important differences between the two men).

McGonagall was not just a figure of fun to Milligan. However hilarious he found his ‘poetic gems’ there can be no doubt that Milligan was as much fascinated and moved by the story of the poet’s life as he was amused by what John Bluthal termed his “terrible, crap, twelfth-grade poetry”. McGrath has confirmed that the film’s interpretation of this rather pathetic historical figure is in large measure a Milligan self-portrait, and more broadly that the latter’s obsession with McGonagall is a reflection of a deep and sincere empathy with an eccentric creative talent who pursued his personal vision in the face of both apathy and antipathy.

McGonagall was an extraordinary individual who, struck by the muse at the age of 52, abruptly gave up his job to devote himself to an art at which he had not the vaguest talent but with which he persevered in the face of insult, mockery and even parody. His public recitations of his works invariably ended with his being pelted with rotten eggs, and often he would secure a spot on theatre bills by paying the owner. (He was also notorious for his performances from Shakespearean tragedies, including a celebrated Macbeth, recreated in the film with Milligan’s customary self-defeating refusal to stick to the point.)

His decision to persevere, and to interpret this constant rejection as jealousy or ignorance rather than an honest verdict on verse that was clearly inept, is almost impossible to understand. And it is these pretensions that continually undermine the essential tragedy of his story. There is both sadness and pomposity, for instance, in the manner in which he courted the approval of the aristocracy and other writers. Broadsheet versions of some of his poems proclaim him Patronised by Her Majesty and Lord Wolseley of Cairo, HRH the Duke of Cambridge, the Right Hon W E Gladstone and General Graham; also the nobilty and gentry etc, before going on to reproduce form replies to unsolicited poems as if they were official praise from their intended recipients. One is headed Copy Of Letter From The Right Hon W E Gladstone and reads simply: ‘Mr Gladstone desires me to acknowledge with thanks the receipt of the two poems which you kindly sent him. Your obedient servant, George Spence Littleton.’ In perhaps his most celebrated gesture of self-delusion he journeyed by foot to Balmoral to read his works to the Queen, only to be turned away at the gates.

Yet despite the steep difference in their levels of acclaim and neglect (and talent, of course) it is not hard to see parallels between the two men in their sense of themselves, and their single-mindedness in the face of disinterest and misunderstanding. Despite his high critical reputation and generally favourable standing with the public, Milligan tended always to emphasise the disappointments and frustrations of his career; for instance in his failure to achieve true international recognition and his perceived ill-treatment by the BBC. It seems clear that he saw in McGonagall a fellow-sufferer, condemned to his personal and uncompromising form of creative expression, a man ahead of his time, and, most of all, a supreme individual. So it was with a strong desire to celebrate this figure, and co-opt him almost as an autobiographical persona, that Milligan embarked upon The Great McGonagall.

It was his first attempt in over twenty years as a professional writer to tell a true story other than his own. In previous work, a slender and ultimately disposable plot would be used as context for a range of obsessions, diversions and whims, always subservient to his almost obsessive need to stray from the narrative path and pursue peculiar tangents, often at dominating length. In his West End success Son of Oblomov he had found success by radically departing from the original script and thus asserting the ultimate irrelevance of plot. Here, however, he has a definite story to tell, and which he wants to tell, and the resultant conflict between his narrative and comic instincts is central to the effect of the film.

Still, the best way to appreciate the film is in the light of Milligan’s more ambitious post-Goon Show projects in the theatre. In the early sixties, in collaboration with playwright John Antrobus, he had written The Bed-Sitting Room, a broadly satirical stage success in which techniques developed in light entertainment were applied to the creation of a vibrant British form of absurdist theatre. The play also introduced many elements of Milligan’s visual vocabulary, in particular the false noses, signs, ragged costumes, scattered props and portable doors that would inform the look of Q.

By the time he triumphed again in Son of Oblomov no less a figure than Peter Brook was writing (in his 1968 book The Empty Space) of “Spike Milligan’s theatre, in which the imagination flies like a wild bat in and out of every possible shape and style”, before summing-up his work as “a pointer to what may become a powerful English tradition.” The wild bats were also circling over Allen Eyles, whose contemporaneous The Marx Brothers: Their World of Comedy nominates Milligan as the only fitting heir to their theatrical kingdom. For Spike, one imagines, there could be no higher praise. (Why Brook’s prediction did not come true is, of course, a matter eminently worth pursuing, and one that consumed Milligan in his later years, but unfortunately lies outside the scope of this essay.)

Indeed, this sense that his comedy was essentially theatrical never left Milligan. It permeates Q, in which Milligan frequently makes asides and in-jokes not to the watching tv audience but to the audience in the studio (“those free tickets paid off”), distancing these productions still further from the radio world of the Goons. And it reaches its apotheosis in McGonagall, a film best understood as an extension of these theatrical endeavours. (Cinema/TV Today’s Marjorie Bilbow observed, in what could well be the only positive review the film received, that it will appeal to “the sizeable minority that is switched on to the now-you-get-it-now-you-don’t comedy of the absurd”, adding that it should do best at cinemas “in the vicinity of universities”.)

So, when embarking on the film, Milligan could look back on a career that had seemingly been most successful when he had been most free to do as he wished. From The Goon Show, which apparently greatly vexed the BBC hierarchy of the time, to his irreverent deconstructions of theatrical convention, his wildest inventions had been met with acclaim and success. It would seem he genuinely believed that McGonagall would establish him in cinema as Oblomov had on stage, and the double blow of its cynically limited release and critical dismissal was something he was never able to come to terms with. McGrath has confirmed that, while Sellers was philosophical about the inevitable reception the film received, Milligan was angry and saddened, and convinced to the last that its day would come.

As noted above, the idea and indeed the first-draft screenplay were McGrath’s. It was based on the short account of McGonagall’s life included as an introduction to Poetic Gems, and while much of the text of the film is derived verbatim from contemporary record, the finished film – with Milligan’s script input – significantly departs from fact at every stage. This, combined with the armoury of complex visual and textual distractions characteristic of Milligan’s style make the film a somewhat bewildering experience on a first viewing. As Bilbow observed, “the profusion of throwaway lines and visual jokes require more than one viewing if the full flavour is to be savoured.” On a second viewing, she continues:

The improvement is startling: I not only heard more. I also saw more, which happens when you know what is coming and can afford to let your eyes wander. The pathos also comes over more clearly – and for the same reason.

First time round, viewers will discover that, whatever else it may be, this is not a film for people who like to know what is going on, or to understand what all the jokes mean. Similarly, viewers drawn to the film by an enthusiasm for the subject will soon find themselves in unfamiliar territory. Nigel Gearing in the Monthly Film Bulletin bases his conclusion that it is “one of the most embarrassingly unfunny films ever to see the light of day” at least in part on “the difficulty of catching more than the odd line of McGonagall verse”.

It is true that the film seems perversely determined to deny its viewers the chance to understand what McGonagall actually did. The film’s first poem is not recognisable as such, since it is delivered without intonation as a monologue, others are rendered inaudible by background noise and echoey recording, still more are distorted by being set to music or simply by the erratic rhythms of Milligan’s stylised delivery. In the film’s central Queen Victoria fantasy sequence, Sellers and Milligan join in a recitation of An Address To The New Tay Bridge, McGonagall’s most famous poem, and one that obsessed Milligan so much he even managed to smuggle its entirety into the first few pages of his book Frankenstein According To Spike Milligan. It should be the film’s key illustration of McGonagall the poet, but the film opts to distract us from it by cutting between the pair and shots of Prince Albert (Julian Chagrin) operating a steam-driven theatre-organ which projects a series of ‘What the Butler Saw’-style soft-porn photographs and captions. The poem’s delivery is as usual mannered to a degree approaching incomprehensibility, and the confusion accentuated by the acoustic unsuitability of the location, the accompaniment of a piercing hammond organ arrangement of ‘Amazing Grace’, and the urgent sound of steam machinery.

This cavalier treatment of the works is explained by the fact that McGrath, Milligan and Sellers had been enjoying reading them to each other for years, and it simply never occurs to Milligan that audiences may not instantly know what he is saying or why. Similarly, his habit of preceding readings with a guttural cry of “oooooooooooohhhhhhhh!” is used as a source of humour (forgetting to write it at the start of a poem, serving as a cue for characters to run away, etc) long before the audience has a chance to recognise it as a recurring convention. With Milligan you have to work hard for your entertainment, and if you can’t keep up you come away confused and annoyed, just like poor old Nigel Gearing.

Another feature of Milligan’s work that can cause difficulties for modern audiences is his characteristically ambiguous yet obsessive use of racial humour. But this is never a simple matter, and it is notable that the Jamaican actor Clifton Jones is never made the subject of any explicit racial jokes. The closest Milligan comes to using Jones in this way is at the end of the film, when he appears as King Theebaw, described by McGonagall as “a genuine chinky-poo king”, a lovely line disarmed of any trace of malice by its hopeless (and deliberate) confusing of racial terms. Spinetti’s British officer in the Zulu sequence calls for a letter-bearer with the simple cry of “Nigger!”, but not only is this historically valid, the call is answered not by Jones but by Valentine Dyall blacked-up only from the neck upwards. (Jones later plays a fop in whiteface.)

This will be no surprise to students of Milligan, and particularly of Q, where humour is extracted not lazily from the meaningless pointing-out of racial differences but from the artificiality of the stereotypes themselves. In one sketch, for example, Keith Smith appears in Scots Guard uniform and minstrel make-up (as ‘Private Shand’). “What’s the matter”, asks Milligan, “couldn’t you find the soap?” Addressed to a black man this would be a logical, albeit offensive, joke. Addressed to a white actor playing a soldier made up for no reason as a minstrel it is meaningless, harmless, hilarious and quintessential Milligan.

The film’s theatrical style and subject are perfectly complemented by McGrath and Milligan’s audacious decision to shoot the entire production within the walls of one building.

Wilton’s Music Hall, situated in a narrow alley a short walk from Tower Bridge, was one of the first and most popular music halls in London. It closed in 1885 and after use as a mission and then a rag warehouse it was abandoned and left empty and decaying. A campaign in 1964 saved it from demolition, but by that time it had fallen into serious disrepair, and ten years later remained derelict and facing an uncertain future.

It is hard to imagine this crumbling, dirty (and surprisingly small) building proving adequate as a feature film location at all, yet Milligan and McGrath decided to shoot every scene there, with the stage, wings, stalls and corridors doubling as Dundee’s Theatre Royal, pubs, courtrooms, prison cells, schools, Balmoral and (a deliberately artificial) Africa. It was a decision to which a large part of the film’s unique and puzzling atmosphere can be attributed.

In one incredibly beautiful sequence a simple corridor is used as a seedy back-alley and is at once poetically ‘unrealistic’ and yet totally convincing, due almost solely to the economical but expert use of backlighting and a little dripping water. In reality, this corridor looks nothing like a street and everything like a corridor: McGrath and cinematographer John Mackey really have made something exceptional out of virtually nothing here. (Look sharp and you will spot the plaque commemorating the original construction of Wilton’s on the right hand wall.)

Similarly, the drab, crumbling walls of McGonagall’s house are really the drab, crumbling walls of the once-renowned ‘Mahogany Bar’, just inside the theatre’s main doors. The despairing claustrophobia of this convincingly created Victorian hovel is emphasised by occasional glimpses out of the ‘front door’ into a street even more tightly enclosed than the poet’s house. It is in fact a narrow backstage corridor: the set dressing, lighting and photography are truly masterful.

Needless to say, the building did not present ideal conditions for a film crew, as McGrath recalled:

It was like living in a slum. We got there every morning at about eight o’clock and we were there until about ten o’clock at night some nights. The place was rat-infested. There were rats actually there. Very funny. I said “Are we paying for this location?”

Victor Spinetti concurs:

It was a wreck, very dusty and uncomfortable to sit about in… It was quite an experience. You couldn’t wait to get home and have a bath because you were covered in dust. It was filthy… There should have been a film made about making that film.

The location also posed technical problems. McGrath remembers “no electricity, just a sort of small fusebox, so we had to bring a generator”, resulting in the decision to augment the minimal lighting with atmospheric candlelight in most scenes. (“It looks gloomy but then we meant it to look gloomy… we definitely wanted it to look the way it does”, McGrath explains. Indeed, John Mackey’s approach to lighting the film was the subject of a lecture he gave to the British Society of Cameramen shortly after the film’s release.)

As with so much of the film, this is an example of an act of necessity proving inspirational. The film begins with a caption suggesting that, from the moment he determined to become a poet, McGonagall was “onstage for the rest of his life”, a neat metaphor that explains (or rationalises) the restricted setting at a stroke. If, as McGrath insists, the metaphor came first and the location was sought to match it, the finding of Wilton’s must rate as one of the greatest strokes of good fortune in cinema history. (It is one of many elements of the film that give it an almost art-house feel, a view shared by the novelist Jonathan Coe in a letter of appreciation to McGrath and by Milligan’s co-star John Bluthal, who told us: “It’s sort of a film for the art world… I don’t think a general audience would go for it because it’s way out.”)

The initial contact with Wilton’s was probably Milligan’s. In 1970 he (and Sellers) had appeared in Wilton’s – The Handsomest Hall In Town, a recreation for BBC television of a typical night’s entertainment. Milligan had visited the theatre in his capacity as champion of conservation and persuaded BBC Head of Comedy Michael Mills to finance the programme, with the cast accepting a fee of only fifty pounds each so that the surplus could be spent on helping to restore the building.

Major structural repairs had been undertaken two years previously by Universal who had filmed part of Isadora (1968) there, and the BBC then restored much of the interior’s original gold and deep red décor. It was still technically derelict when McGrath and Milligan began filming, however, as frequent glimpses of peeling paint, bare wooden floors and crumbling brickwork amply testify.

After making the BBC programme Milligan and Mills were involved in the establishing of a trust to maintain Wilton’s, and such was Milligan’s love of the building that McGrath recalls him sleeping there overnight on occasions during McGonagall’s three-week shoot. (McGrath also remembers him spending a night in a sleeping bag in the middle of a field of cows during the filming of Digby, The Biggest Dog In The World.)

On repeated viewings, the true nature of the surroundings becomes apparent, recalling the deliberately underdressed sets that were such a trademark of Q.

But to McGrath’s credit this is far from obvious on one’s first encounter with the film. The use of only three different spaces for virtually the entire production is constantly inventive, and lends the film an almost eerily authentic period atmosphere, as if a condemned Victorian theatre has been prised open to reveal a condemned Victorian world still operating within. Spinetti agrees:

It has a tremendously Victorian feel. If you thought of the crumbling Empire and all the rest of it, it caught it absolutely. It came across as if it could have been filmed in Victorian times. To me it looks like a film found in the archives… shot in a theatre with these actors doing a tribute to a Victorian poet. That’s exactly what we did.

The theatrical atmosphere was further underlined by the decision to use the cast in multiple roles, giving the film the feel of an amateur stage production. (The spontaneity and ensemble style reminded Spinetti of his work at Stratford East with Joan Littlewood’s company, particularly Oh, What A Lovely War!) We are introduced to the cast in the title sequence, which shows each in turn being made-up in one of the theatre’s dressing rooms. (Ever vigilant against the notion of a moment making too much sense, Milligan is shown being made up (by Sellers) with a gag in his mouth, a Hitler moustache and his hands tied behind his back.) McGrath explained the idea:

My idea was: it’s a group of actors just getting together to make a film on McGonagall… In the opening titles they’re getting made up, and you can see the extras all come in and sit down. You can hear me direct them and say “Action”.

The undisguised use of the theatre stage for the more outre settings, such as Balmoral, which is identified by a large postcard-style backdrop reading ‘Welcome To Balmoral’, and Africa, identified by the simple expedient of having the location and date written on a board stage-left, brings this sense of theatricality to the fore. The script makes this two-level approach far clearer than the film itself, showing that the locations are intended to simultaneously represent both the narrative location and the theatre in which they are filmed, and the cast (as Spinetti recalled) playing both characters and actors. Thus Milligan is at once McGonagall and himself. It is also why the Zulu scene features shots of the enemy advancing through a seated audience watching the drama unfolding on the stage, and why (in one of the most confusing moments of the film) the location mysteriously switches from a seedy tavern filmed in the theatre stalls to the theatre stalls themselves. (Beaten, robbed and thrown to the ground, McGonagall is asked where he has come from and replies “The gallery”.)

This is shown in the script by the frequent references to McGonagall’s ‘Dressing Room/Home’, and by such revealing (unutilised) stage directions as:

The corridor has been painted as Paton Lane which was the street on which McGONAGALL lived when in Dundee. More unemployed MEN AND HOUSEWIVES stand around. CHILDREN are skipping and playing football, some well-dressed MEN and WOMEN stroll with CHILDREN IN SAILOR SUITS carrying small union jacks. DAN LENO and ALBERT CHEVALIER pass by on their way to the stage. McGONAGALL appears walking down the corridor. He nods to them. They nod back.

This is extremely complicated stuff, very difficult to convey cinematically. The film as we have it doesn’t even try.

The sense that the film generates of being the work of a troupe of players putting on a show is therefore quite deliberately contrived. Of the film’s nine speaking players, only three - Milligan as McGonagall, Sellers as Queen Victoria and Julia Foster (a popular film and tv actress of the time) in an entirely straight performance as McGonagall’s wife – play a single role. Virtually all of the remaining cast members had previously worked with McGrath, Milligan or both, creating a palpably friendly rep-like atmosphere. These include dwarf actor and frequent Milligan co-star Charlie Atom, Clifton Jones (a replacement for the originally-cast Ray Ellington, famous as regular musical guest on The Goon Show) and Julian Chagrin. Chagrin, a noted mime artist (and one of the tennis-payers in Antonioni’s Blow Up) had appeared in McGrath’s Thirty Is A Dangerous Age, Cynthia and, the year before McGonagall, in Milligan’s tv programme The Last Turkey In The Shop. (He was also the ‘secret lemonade drinker’ in the famous tv commercial directed by McGrath.)

Completing the cast are John Bluthal, Victor Spinetti and Valentine Dyall. Dyall, a tall, distinguished and sepulchral actor famous as radio’s ‘Man In Black’, was a frequent comic target of The Goon Show, one of Peter Sellers’s celebrated range of quite good (supposedly uncanny) impersonations, who got the joke and became a guest star and later appeared in the stage version of The Bed Sitting Room. (Long after the Goons he remained a name that Milligan liked to drop: in one episode of Q6 Peter Jones appears, with an irrelevant wax moustache and no attempt at a vocal impersonation as “Valentine Dyall, your friendly neighbourhood actor”, one of several people living inside the Hunchback of Notre Dame.) Very much the actor-laddie in manner if not in status, McGrath recalls Milligan christening him ‘Borrowing Valentine Dyall’ on account of his regular requests for small loans.

Spinetti, a popular Welsh comic actor with a career broad enough to embrace a co-starring role in Sid James’s 1969 sitcom Two In Clover, an eccentric turn in Anthony Newley’s unclassifiable Can Hieronymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humpe and Find True Happiness? the same year and a notable guest appearance in Bottom (third series, 1995) had previously worked with Bluthal in Help! (1965) and McGrath and Milligan in Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World (1973). Spinetti contributes some of the best and best-judged acting work to the film, despite being one of the last casting choices to be finalised. (McGrath’s shortlist had favoured Milo O’Shea, Henry McGee and Eric Idle, the latter of whom especially wouldn’t have got the hang of it at all.)

John Bluthal, who in his own words had “done a lot of work with Joe and almost everything with Spike”, is one of the greatest yet most unsung figures in British comedy. A truly superb performer, he is almost as important a factor in the brilliance of Q as Milligan himself, with an unrivalled ability to match Milligan’s on-set improvisations and keep up with his sudden leaps of inspiration. He is also a splendidly eccentric impressionist, whose heightened versions of Hughie Green and Huw Weldon are so amusing they became recurring characters in Q. (In McGonagall he bases one character on the Irish stage actor Micheal MacLiammoir, whom he had already impersonated in The Bliss of Mrs Blossom and who had himself appeared in Thirty Is A Dangerous Age, Cynthia.) Rewatching their scenes together in McGonagall and Q, it is impossible to agree with Bluthal’s assertion that he shines in Milligan’s presence “purely because he used me well”. On the contrary, it is because each brings something to the piece that the other lacks that their work together is of such a high standard. The best moments of Q are those in which Milligan’s reckless clowning is set against Bluthal’s measured comic acting: he is the perfect partner for Milligan, the best supporting player he ever had, and his performances combine precision, flexibility and a warmly conveyed admiration for the material and its author.

All aspects of the theatrical atmosphere for which the film strives – the ensemble playing, the artificiality and the inability to disguise or repair accidental errors – come together most strikingly in what plays as the film’s most enigmatic scene. This is the moment in which a fairly complicated plot-led sequence (in which McGonagall is being deceived into thinking that the Queen has invited him to Balmoral) suddenly breaks down into confusion, with McGrath appearing on screen to supervise retakes, then calling lunch.

What ostensibly grinds the scene to a halt is Milligan’s inability to remember, or seemingly to understand, a punchline he is obliged to deliver. Unfortunately this simple reading of the scene is confounded by the fact that the joke in question is so obvious, and so typical of the man failing to deliver it. Victor Spinetti, arranging the spurious appointment with Victoria, says: “Shall we say Balmoral Castle, next Thursday at four pm?” whereupon Milligan is supposed to do just that (say ‘Balmoral Castle, next Thursday at four pm’). Instead, he stops the performance to inquire of McGrath what it is he is supposed to say. There follows a series of attempts to complete the sequence, with Spinetti giggling and enjoying the confusion, McGrath plainly eager to finish the scene in one take and Milligan, seemingly in no mood for levity whatsoever, grumbling that his performance was “over the top” and that he wants to start again. It is as if he is trying deliberately to spoil a take (by pretending to be confused by an obvious joke) so as to force a reshoot of a scene he was not happy with. (This, according to McGrath, was a tactic often employed by Peter Sellers.)

When the line is finally (and reticently) delivered, McGrath calls lunch with the scene still incomplete, whereupon we watch the cast eating outside the building next to a shabby caravan, while a lush song on the soundtrack ironically praises the magic of ‘Showbiz’.

The mysteriousness of the scene is compounded by the fact that McGrath, Bluthal and Spinetti all remember it differently. McGrath recalls it as typical Milligan high spirits:

That just happened by accident because Spike on the take actually said “I think we should go to lunch” and I said “Okay, lunch!” and… we went to lunch and then all came back in and started again. And Spike loves things like that. He hated the discipline of big films. So did Sellers.

But it is McGrath, not Milligan, who calls lunch, and Bluthal accordingly sees the scene as typical of McGrath’s approach to the discipline of film-making:

He’s a very good director, he did some very good films… He was very serious with his work, but of course very funny. I mean, that scene when he said “Oh, it’s alright, love, let’s do it again”: that was just totally Joe! It was part of that aura of theatricalism that Joe loves. I don’t think he was ever an actor but he loves actors. He loves the business of saying “alright, darling, don’t worry, we’ll do it again – okay, lunch now!”

What both versions cannot explain is why Milligan appears to be in such low spirits. This is acknowledged by Victor Spinetti:

It started truthfully: “What do I say next?”… And then he just kept doing it – typical Spike. He’s brilliant because you don’t know whether he was (putting it on) or not. But he was really getting more and more incensed and more and more angry. He knew what he was saying. It started off that he really did dry, and then I think we just kept going.

Which reading is correct? The matter was only solved by the timely location of McGrath’s original shooting script, heavily annotated on-set by Milligan and himself. This reveals, amazingly, that the entire episode was planned, and is acted. It deviates substantially from the original text (in which the director’s voice was to be heard off-screen asking Milligan to repeat the line more clearly) but nonetheless shows that the film was intended to break down on that specific line, and that its completion should then result in the actors going to lunch. (In this original version, rather than a song, the lunch scene was to be accompanied by the actors talking as themselves.)

This revelation at once clears up a mystery and creates several new ones. Why did neither McGrath, Spinetti nor Bluthal, all raising the subject themselves and fresh from a viewing of the film, remember it as spurious? Why is Milligan opting to appear truculent rather than enjoying a good corpsing session (a regular feature of Q)? And most of all, capable players though all present so undoubtedly are, how was such an extraordinary level of authenticity achieved? There is something so genuine about the behaviour of everybody present, not just the skilled professional actors like Bluthal and Spinetti, but also Milligan and McGrath, who speak in fractured, spontaneous sentences with incredible believability. Is it possible that this moment was a private decision of Milligan’s and McGrath’s, not included in the other cast members’ scripts? This would explain the convincing attitudes of Bluthal, Spinetti and Julia Foster (who can be heard trying to assist Milligan out of shot), and also the actors’ inability to remember the moment as faked. But it still would not account for the amazing verisimilitude of McGrath and Milligan themselves. Whatever the ultimate truth, this compelling sequence remains bizarre, fascinating and (like so much else in the film) way ahead of its time. (To add a further layer of enigma, in his director’s commentary on the recent DVD release of the film – recorded after this article was first published – McGrath states unequivocally that all is artifice.)

The sense of theatre is evoked most deliberately in the film’s frequent use of theatre and music hall settings within the narrative. McGrath was a music hall devotee, as was Milligan (though the latter’s treatment of it in his work was often savagely parodic, in keeping with his treatment of virtually everything). It is interesting to note that McGrath’s Morecambe and Wise film Night Train To Murder is set against a backdrop of forties variety theatres and is suffused with references to Flanagan and Allen and old music hall songs, jokes and routines. Bluthal, too, was a huge music hall fan. Indeed, in the scene in which he portrays music hall artiste ‘Hercules Faint’, performing a splendid satirical song written by McGrath (McGrath: “Lionel Bart had promised to write us a song but of course he was pissed so I had to write one almost on the day”), Bluthal himself suggested that he sing it dressed as G.H. Chirgwin ‘the One-eyed Kaffir’, in a minstrel make-up distinguished by a peculiar white diamond around one eye. Bluthal recalls:

When I first came to England I was nineteen and I went to pubs and I heard all the songs that were sung by George Robey, Vesta Tilley, Vesta Victoria, Harry Champion… I took a lot of stuff with me to Australia and I produced, directed and starred in a series on tv called Gaslight Music Hall… I loved all these great comedians… So Joe knew that, Spike knew it, so when the thing came up I said “Can I come on as Chirgwin, blacked up with a square diamond over my eye?” And that was that!

This intricate layer of homage, at most peripheral to the story of McGonagall, adds the final layer of theatrical artifice to this least cinematic of films and shows it clearly to be a labour of love by all concerned. Alas, however, Milligan’s and McGrath’s ambitions were not matched by those of the film’s financiers, who saw the film in rather more modest terms: as a tax write-off, hence its virtual non-release.

The film was produced by Tigon, in the few short months of the company’s existence after it had passed out of the hands of its charismatic founder Tony Tenser, a shrewd producer who knew a commercial property when he saw one and would never have touched McGonagall with a ten-foot pole. McGrath remembers:

The money came about through Tigon: an Indian accountant called (Kamal) Pasha, and Laurie Marshall who owned a whole group of cinemas at that time. He owned the cinema in the city where the film was premiered… Tigon Distributors gave us the money, but we were lumbered by them because they had put money into a system called Multivista… they had bought a load of Mitchell sound cameras and they said they would let us make the film if we made it on Multivista.

This was a process rather like tv taping, in which up to five cameras were used simultaneously. It had the advantage of saving time on multiple coverage of single scenes, but the severe compensating disadvantage of the constant risk of one camera filming another. Distinguished therefore by staccato tv-style cuts rather than graceful camera movement, the system was hardly used (though Ray Cooney, who used it to direct Not Now, Darling (1972) loved it, telling us: “It was terrific; we did tremendous long takes which is so useful for keeping the energy going, so I couldn’t have been happier.”) But for a less formal creative imagination like McGrath’s it proved an unworkable nightmare, albeit one with a very simple solution:

When we got there I just refused to use it, and we shot it all on one camera. I occasionally used two, when I wanted to get a close-up of Spike and didn’t want to do it too many times because he hates repeating things, then I used a wide-shot and a very tight close-up on Spike. But basically it’s shot on one camera.

This act of mutiny was never discovered, and the credits proudly claim that the film was shot in Multivista, because the producers never once set foot in the location to see how the filming was progressing, nor indeed influenced the production in any way. Pasha and Marshall had hired McGrath and Milligan on the strength of their reputations and, further pacified by the presence of Sellers, had simply let them do whatever they wanted, however they wanted to do it. Apparently, there was never any doubt as to what the subject of the film would be. McGrath:

Spike and I had wanted to do something about McGonagall for years… I had a basic outline – sixty, seventy pages – and Spike read it and said “yeah, I’d like to do a film”. Then he and I did three weeks on it, together, every day in his office at Orme Court. And Peter Sellers came in a couple of days as well.

McGrath insists that the film was tightly scripted and that little of what can be seen in the film was not carefully prepared beforehand. The actors, however, recall much typically Milliganesque on-set improvisation. Bluthal states:

Obviously there was a script there, but knowing the script was not totally defined, a hell of a lot of stuff came off the floor… we’d throw in things, we’d suggest things, he (McGrath) would say ‘yes’ or ‘no’… and we enjoyed it… There were a lot of in-jokes, a lot of theatrical jokes, there’s a bit of smut here and there.

Spinetti remembered the process as “very spontaneous”, adding: “there was a script, but whatever took place was used if it turned up.” In particular, he recalled one scene (the first) in which he plays a political agitator in a theatre; an ambitious sequence which features a live horse in the theatre stalls. (“We got a real horse and it shit everywhere”, McGrath remembers.) Spinetti remarks:

That agitator was all ad-libbed. Johnny Bluthal was going to play it. In fact he wanted to play everything!.. They suddenly said (to me): “You’ve got to do it”, and so they chucked me up there and said “Go on – agitate!” So that was that!

An examination of the shooting script reveals that, though the basic structure of the film (including its more confusing aspects) was firmly in place before production, huge numbers of jokes and visual ideas were thought up on set and in rehearsal. Though only the Queen Victoria scene was officially rewritten after the first complete draft (appearing in the script on coloured paper) there is hardly a single page not heavily annotated (by both authors) with new jokes, drawings and ideas.

The question of how free the actors were to depart from the script is important because Milligan is always a performer who seems to thrive on chaos and to find most inspiration when furthest from whatever it is he is supposed to be doing. But in this film – a rare and thus significant example of him performing at his freest but without the reassurance of a studio audience – his performance veers from his most uncontainable style to moments of quiet, genuinely affecting pathos. Spinetti points out that on occasions he is almost “like the straight man in the film”, while Marjorie Bilbow observed that “In the midst of the slapstick and mickey-taking, Spike Milligan gives a consistent and moving performance”. McGrath recalls this sincere commitment to the subject on Milligan’s part, and a sense of mission as far as the project is concerned that on one occasion memorably flared into violence:

Milligan was very disciplined if he trusted you and you trusted him and he was enjoying himself. Very disciplined, always there ready to work, you know? In fact, he had a great argument with the electrician. (During the filming of a scene) it came to half past five and one of the electricians literally pulled the plug out, and Spike just went for him. He really tried to punch him and they had to separate them. I was on Spike’s side and so was the cameraman: (he said) “What the hell are you doing? In the middle of a take!” He was removed and we had great trouble with the electricians’ union, but he didn’t come back to the film… He pulled the plug and it all went dark. John Mackey said “I like it better!”

McGonagall’s life story as told by the film is as follows. After discovering a deep love for Queen Victoria and what he believes to be a genius for poetry, McGonagall leaves his job and is promptly imprisoned for being unable to pay his rent. On release he takes the lead in amateur performance of scenes from Macbeth, staged at his own expense, and receives a sarcastic ovation he misreads as genuine. Gentlemen posing as admirers, one pretending to be John Brown, fool McGonagall into believing that the Queen is so impressed with his work she has invited him to tea at Balmoral. He dreams of being enthusiastically received, but in reality the exhausting walk is concluded by his being abruptly turned away at the gates. Mockery continues to dog him until, on the brink of death following a brutal beating, he receives official recognition of his talent, and dies happy.

The facts of McGonagall’s life are adapted very freely, and the film has that much in common with Milligan’s two novels on the subject (co-written with Jack Hobbs): William McGonagall: The Truth At Last and William McGonagall Meets George Gershwin. These books take the poet to India, Paris and Finsbury Park, introduce him to Gandhi, Churchill and Gunga Din and mix without indication real McGonagall poems with Milligan’s own invented ones. The film’s intentions are very different, and with McGrath’s original treatment as a basis it bears a far closer proximity to reality. McGrath explains:

We decided that the centrepiece of the film should be his visit to Queen Victoria, because the truth of it is he walked the whole way, about eighty miles… We said ‘Well that’s bad enough, so we’ll do that, but then we’ll give him a fantasy that he actually met the Queen’, and that’s how Sellers came into it.

Many of the alterations have been made in the interests of narrative economy. McGonagall’s performance as Macbeth leads directly to his journey to Balmoral, and subsequent events are placed in a sequence that allows the humiliation of the central character to build until his apparent resurrection. McGrath was no doubt the chief architect of this: a careful sense of structure is not a feature of Milligan’s work as a rule, and this is one of the many ways in which the film benefits from their collaboration. Some of the departures from fact, however, seem quite inexplicable, and their purpose can only be to deliberately baffle and disorientate the viewer.

The opening, in which the cast carry McGonagall’s coffin out of Wilton’s front doors, concludes with Milligan telling us in voiceover that the story starts “here, at the Theatre Royal, Dundee.” (An accompanying caption dates the scene as 1890, though it precedes the Balmoral journey of 1878.) This confers utterly misleading narrative weight on the ensuing scene, which is entirely invented and so confusing as to be of hardly the vaguest expository value.

During a political disturbance in the theatre, McGonagall foils an assassination attempt on the Queen: an event derived not from fact but from one of the poet’s lesser-known gems, as the film never bothers to make clear. The fact that McGonagall follows this act of heroism with an onstage Max Miller impression, and that the Queen is so impressed with this that she sends a dwarf postman to his house to put a custard pie in his face, gives some idea of the kind of demands made of the viewer within ten minutes of the film’s beginning.

Much of this obtuseness is explained by a consultation of the original script. As well as revealing that the film is itself intended to be a theatrical performance by actors, it makes clear the odd leaps in chronology through the regular use of a voice-over narrator (intended to be John Bluthal imitating Bob Danvers Walker). Almost all of this explanatory material is deleted in the film, though Bluthal’s voiceover is used once (“Lord Tennyson is seventy-one!”) and one further piece of the narration is spoken on-screen by Milligan while simultaneously playing McGonagall.

As for the Max Miller enigma, that was solved quite delightfully by the script, and revealed as a delightfully typical piece of deliberate Milligan confusion. The first point to remember is that the whole film is a performance, so the political agitator both is and isn’t ‘real’ in a narrative sense. McGonagall, the film does not explain, is in the theatre to perform his act. (He seems merely a spectator, who celebrates his successful foiling of the assassination attempt – “pausing only to wallpaper myself” – with an impromptu recitation of ‘Mary From the Dairy’. In a fascinating deleted sequence he tells a mysterious businessman (Spinetti) that “they told me I was on immediately after the Gordon riots”.)

The script calls for McGonagall to deliver one of his poems in an ingratiating theatrical style which the script innocently describes as “Max Miller all the way”, meaning of course in a pseudo-Max Miller style. But two telling script amendments reveal what must have happened. In the first place, we read 'Max Miller outfit'. This presumably means that such an outfit was located by chance, and suggested as a way of making the point even funnier. So much funnier that McGonagall is still wearing this splendid silk item on returning to his poverty-ravaged home in the next sequence. (The fact that such a suit appears at least twice in Milligan’s television work suggests that it may even have been his own, certainly the decision to use it here carries his, rather than McGrath’s, fingerprints.)

Then, in the second script alteration, it is with a certain inevitability that we see the poem crossed through, and replaced in biro with “I fell in love with Mary from the dairy”. Thus in quasi-logical sequence, we are able to take a privileged look at the exact thought processes whereby a dauntingly obscure idea for the first scene of a biographical film was transformed into a totally and impossibly meaningless one. Finnegan’s Wake, indeed.

The first scene with anything like a foothold in reality is McGonagall’s performance as Macbeth. Struggling manfully with his eccentric Scottish accent, Milligan does extremely heightened work throughout the film, but now that his character is himself supposed to be giving an exaggerated performance he reaches uncharted heights of incomprehensibility – “overacting at its best”, to borrow a phrase he uses throughout Q. In this he is more than well-served visually by his ghoulish white make-up, fake eyebrows and beard over his real ones, and the armour of a Samurai warrior. This last item was lent to McGrath by a friend, and its availability is the sole reason for its use in this quite inappropriate context (to the sound of another curious rendition of Amazing Grace, this time given neo-Japanese treatment). Its presence, however, inspired the director to mount an eccentric tribute to Akira Kurosawa: in a moment supposedly “stolen directly from Seven Samurai” Milligan’s McGonagall’s Macbeth falls to his death in slow motion beneath a caption reading ‘Live From Dundee’.

We are similarly distracted from the true substance of the story in the final scenes, which do nonetheless contain Milligan’s most poignant acting moments. Here the film conspires to give McGonagall the worthy, heroic send off that real life had denied him, not with pure invention but with cunning manipulation of historical fact. As the poet lies beaten in his bed, his wife informs him that a published account of his futile excursion to Balmoral has ironically brought him renown at last. McGonagall is then visited by four rival Lord Tennysons of which Valentine Dyall’s is identified as authentic. (We know him to be the genuine article, as we have already seen him in his bed amorously reciting ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ to a naked black woman.) As he undresses and joins McGonagall in bed he tells him of a series of honours conferred upon him by the king of the Andaman Islands. The text, what little we hear of it over McGonagall’s requests to his wife for tea and biscuits, is adapted from a genuine letter reproduced in the poet’s autobiography, but the true signatory is not Tennyson but someone claiming to be the Poet Laureate of Burmah. Almost certainly a practical joke, it convinced McGonagall (who always signed himself ‘Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah’ thereafter) and the film honours his memory by taking him at his word. Indeed, it has King Theebaw himself join McGonagall and Tennyson in bed to confer the honour in person. “Happy, darling?” asks Tennyson. Yes, McGonagall replies, but he is very tired. As he drifts into sleep we realise that this has been another fantasy, and the Great McGonagall is dead.

Our final image of the film is of McGonagall lying dead, while on the soundtrack Milligan recites, for once clearly and movingly, lines taken from McGonagall’s own self-prepared elegy:

I earnestly hope the inhabitants of the beautiful city of Dundee will appreciate this little volume got up by me, and when they read its pages, I hope it will fill their hearts with delight,
While seated around the fireside on a cold winter’s night; and some of them no doubt, will let a silent tear fall In dear remembrance of WILLIAM MCGONAGALL.

It is a fitting end, both for McGonagall and for the film, especially so when viewed in the knowledge that even in its dying moments the film remains true to its theatrical, anti-cinematic ethic. For the moving final lines are not dubbed onto the soundtrack. They are recorded live, and are spoken by Milligan, still in shot, lying on the bed under a sheet.

This article originally appeared in Kettering: the magazine of elderly British comedy (Issue 1). Kettering No. 2 is now on sale and features articles on Spike Milligan's Q, Marty Feldman, Irene Handl, Ray Cooney, The Lovers and more! It is available for £3 (UK) or £5 (overseas). For details please contact [email protected].

The authors would like to thank Joe McGrath, John Bluthal, Victor Spinetti, Ray Cooney and Christine Rodgers of Wilton’s Music Hall for their generous assistance.