February 28, 2002

Goon, solo comic and writer who contributed to Hitler's downfall and fascinated generations of children with his fantasy fictions.

Spike Milligan was the outstanding comedian of his generation, first as one of the Goons and then as a solo performer. One of the great innovators in comedy in the last century, he was also the author of many books, which took an upside-down and inside-out view of the world. He would take a joke, a turn of phrase, or a strange thought and pursue its logic to the most absurd conclusions. He could create bizarre worlds in which seemingly sensible conversations were turned on their heads, where wild solutions were hatched out of mundane problems, and where characters talked themselves into nonsensical knots.

Whereas each of his fellow Goons — Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers — had to some degree to invent a persona, Milligan seemed most to be himself. He was naturally out-of-step with the world, convinced that his was the sensible, obvious way. The joke, he implied, was on us: just look at it from his point of view.

Brilliant and iconoclastic creations were spun out of the voices in his head — a mixture of stream-of-nonsense and stream-of-conscience. But the psychological intensity meant that he spent periods of his life as a patient in mental hospitals, and was regarded as a crank by some for his unorthodox campaigning. “I am condemned never to be taken seriously,” he said. The thought haunted him, and his output of scripts, children’s stories, war memoirs, novels and comic performances never compensated him for it.

His output was enormous. Not only did he write and star in almost all of the 157 half-hour episodes of The Goon Show, he also scripted eight series of his own show, Q, for the BBC, and more than 50 assorted books of biography, verse, fiction, letters, games and plays.

The tradition that he created in The Goon Show — with Larry Stephens and Eric Sykes also contributing to the writing — played a vital part in the postwar revitalisation of British comedy. The Goons’ inspired absurdities and attacks on the Establishment made the cosy, orthodox situation comedies that had gone before sound hopelessly outdated. Milligan’s flights of surrealist fantasy, and his anarchic characters, such as Bluebottle and Eccles, paved the way for the satire movement which swept Britain during the 1960s, and for the later television fantasies of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Among other comedians obviously indebted to him were Billy Connolly, Ben Elton, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, and even such writers as Douglas Adams.

Milligan himself had been influenced by W. C. Fields, Beachcomber, Sid Fields, Beckett, Joyce and Groucho Marx. When he eventually met Marx, he enthused at such length about the American’s genius that Groucho asked him if he could do the next 20 minutes on his own. The greatest formative influence on his life, however, was the Second World War, which had an impact on the young Milligan that can scarcely be overestimated.

Born at Ahmednagar, near Bombay, in 1918, Terence Alan Milligan was educated in a tent in the Hyderabad Sindh desert, and graduated from there through a series of Roman Catholic schools in India until the family returned to London in 1931. His father, Captain Leo Milligan, a soldier from Sligo, and his mother, Florence (née Kettleband), were both keen singers and semi-professional performers. Spike took after them, modelling his voice on Bing Crosby and teaching himself to play the trumpet, guitar, double bass and drums. He could never get enough of jazz.

He left school at 15 to work at Stones Engineering in Deptford, but he was sacked because he repeatedly fused the lights. Meanwhile, he had been playing with a number of jazz dance-hall bands before enlisting in the Royal Artillery at the outbreak of the Second World War. Despite his burning horror of the war itself — and he saw plenty of action to justify that — the Army gave Bombardier Milligan a heady sense of freedom and companionship. He was to describe his service in the Royal Artillery magnificently in five volumes of comic memoirs, which began with Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall in 1971.

Milligan’s war was poles apart from that of Evelyn Waugh and his patrician hero Guy Crouchback. Gunner Milligan 954024 represented those classes Waugh and Crouchback disliked and felt threatened by. The opening of Adolf Hitler sets the subversive tone: “A man called Chamberlain who did Prime Minister impressions spoke on the wireless; he said: ‘As from eleven o’clock we are at war with Germany.’ (I loved the WE.) ‘War?’ said Mother. ‘It must have been something we said’, said Father. The people next door panicked, burnt their post office books and took in the washing.”

The experience of war shaped Milligan’s comedy, and particularly its humane outrage at hypocrisy and its destructive ploys. He looked at the world and decided that it was not only absurd but harmful. Despite the comradeship, war also aggravated the manic depression he had inherited from his father, and which was very little understood at the time. He spent much of the rest of his life veering between episodes of mania and devastating bouts of depression that put him in hospital for months at a time in near suicidal despair.

Milligan’s shooting war began with the landings in Algiers in November 1942, and continued until the end of the North African campaign, and beyond into Italy. In January 1944 he was nearly killed by a mortar bomb near Lauro in the hills to the northeast of Mount Vesuvius. He suffered severe shellshock, started to stammer, and suffered the first of the nervous breakdowns that were to plague him for the rest of his life.

While recuperating in Naples, he began to hone his skills as an entertainer. Mistakenly told by a doctor that he could not play the trumpet again because of a bad chest, he took up the guitar and hooked up with the jazz violinist Bill Hall and the double bassist Johnny Mulgrew to form the Bill Hall Trio. They entertained the troops until the end of the war, and when they were finally demobbed, they teamed up again on exhausting tours around Europe, for which they were paid little more (and often less) than their keep.

These were wild times for Milligan, years when he seemed afraid to stand still. Despite his emaciated physique, which he referred to disparagingly in his war diaries, he was a remarkably charismatic and good-looking young man and a success with the ladies, though many of them were left rather baffled by him. Asked by one admirer where his daft patter came from, he said: “It arrives once a month by boat from Scandinavia. I just glue it together on the Monday.”

After splitting from Bill Hall, Spike fell in with the Ann Lenor Trio for some more touring before eventually returning home to Leathwell Road, Deptford.

Jimmy Grafton, a scriptwriter for Derek Roy on Variety Bandbox, encouraged him to write, and introduced him to Harry Secombe, who in turn introduced him to Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine. Though he had had little formal education, Milligan slaved away at bits of freelance scriptwriting in Grafton’s attic, but it was to be several years before the BBC allowed these pub wits to air their first show, billed as Those Crazy People, The Goons. First broadcast on May 28, 1951, it ran for 11 series.

The weekly programme, then on the BBC Home Service, became a national institution, capturing the imagination of the country. Characters such as Neddy Seagoon, played by Secombe, Major Bloodnok played by Sellers, and Milligan’s own Eccles became the favourites of a generation. The Prince of Wales later described it as “one of my favourite programmes”, and it ran for eight years, ending in January 1960. A final performance was given in 1972 to mark the 50th anniversary of the BBC.

Though the show made Milligan famous, the intolerable pressure that he felt he was under at the BBC was to imperil his sanity. At one point during the third series he was taken to a hospital in Muswell Hill, put in a straitjacket and kept in an isolation ward for three months. The pressure also cost him his marriage to June Marlowe, whom he had married in 1952 and with whom he had a son and two daughters. Milligan never forgave the BBC, though he continued, perforce, to work for it.

Not the least of his grievances was a ban on commenting on or satirising actual events. “All we could be was funny,” he said, “but it had no point. We could have been lethal, but the BBC would never let us do any real voices, or anything to do with reality. That broke my heart.”

While The Goon Show was running successfully on BBC Radio, Milligan was also pioneering a new style of British television comedy with A Show Called Fred, which won him a British Academy Award in 1956, and then the Q series. Yet after The Goon Show came to an end, he did not find it easy to create a new role for himself. He played the part of an unemployed actor for more than a year until in 1961 Bernard Miles (later Lord Miles) gave him the part of Ben Gunn in an adaptation of Treasure Island at the Mermaid Theatre, London. It was the beginning of a fruitful partnership.

A whole new area of opportunity was opened up for Milligan, who was inspired to write The Bedsitting Room with John Antrobus. It was a success and transferred eventually to the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End. Other plays and adaptations followed, including Frank Dunlop’s production of Oblomov with Joan Greenwood at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1964. By then Milligan had married Patricia Margaret Ridgeway (in 1962), and published his first book, Puckoon, about the partition of Ireland. They had one daughter.

The instant success of Puckoon was the beginning of a long period of creativity that was impeded only by bouts of illness, the birth of his fourth child in 1966, and the death of his wife from cancer in 1978, aged 43. Milligan was a doting but often absent father. He continued touring, writing wonderfully silly verse for his children, and flirting with film, winning the Golden Rose of Montreux for scripting and appearing in The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine in 1972.

Because his father had been born in Ireland, Milligan found himself, in his own phrase, “declared a stateless person” in 1960. He considered the official decision both inexplicable and deeply wounding. Although he became a citizen of the Irish Republic, and later considered Australian citizenship, official rulings had a habit of bringing him into conflict with authority. He was not a man to be pigeonholed.

Never easily dissuaded from his point of view, Milligan became a passionate defender of the rights of the downtrodden of all kinds. His love of animals led him to smash a window at the Hayward Gallery in 1972 in protest at an exhibition which proposed to electrocute 20 catfish as a work of art. In 1974 he again took direct action by shooting an airgun at a 16-year-old youth whom he suspected of vandalising a children’s playground at the back of his North London home. He was given a conditional discharge.

Other campaigns had conspicuous successes. As well as one of the founders of the Finchley Society, he was a member of the Victorian Society and his enthusiasm for old buildings and fittings led to the retention of the Victorian lamp standards on Constitution Hill outside Buckingham Palace, which the Department of the Environment had wished to remove. In the early 1970s he also spent three years personally restoring an oak carving of elves in Kensington Gardens.

He became an increasingly ardent advocate of causes ranging from CND to the ban on the slaughter of seal pups. He was a member of the World Wide Fund for Nature and Greenpeace; he was fiercely opposed to pornography and smoking (even though as a young man he smoked like a chimney), and he was a compulsive letter-writer.

No issue was too trivial to catch his attention, whether it was defecating dogs, useless town councils, over-hanging hedges or leaky Biros, the last of which inspired a memorable letter to Harold Wilson. He found allies for these causes in people as disparate as Robert Graves, Prince Charles, Elton John, Paul Getty, Eric Sykes, Ronnie Scott, Paul and Linda McCartney, and Michael Foot.

When he wrote to The Times in 1990 to ask the paper to make sure his obituary was ready (“as I have not been feeling well lately”), he added that his “most recent exploit was trying to save Rye Hospital” (“Yours ailing, Spike”).

With his almost total recall (which make his memoirs such vivid reading), Milligan was a formidable opponent in an argument. His solutions to problems — expelling all children who encourage others to smoke at school, for instance — often seemed drastic, but there was an iron logic behind them. And his outrage was genuine.

Despite having four children of his own from his three marriages, and two other children, Milligan was obsessed by population growth. When Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997, Milligan wrote to him with a modest proposal to help to remedy the crisis: a moratorium on births for five years.

Like a man refusing to be beaten by impossible odds, Milligan never let go of his hard-won beliefs and principles. He lived his life like a precocious child, took great pleasure in his own children, and continued to write in a youthful, zany way until his death. His books on animals for children, including Milliganimals (1968), Milligan’s Ark (1971) and Condensed Animals (1991) are among his most lasting works, and Badjelly the Witch (1973) has had generations of young readers quivering. He also painted in both oils and watercolours.

A vulnerable and honest man, Milligan could at the same time be ruthless, obstinate and awkward. He claimed to be a misanthrope, but it was exploiters, manipulators and fools he hated, not mankind in general.

He received many awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award for comedy in 1994, the year he was appointed honorary CBE. He was advanced to Hon KBE in 2000.

Spike Milligan is survived by his wife Shelagh Sinclair and by his children.

Spike Milligan, comedian and writer, was born in Ahmednagar, India, on April 16, 1918. He died in Rye, East Sussex, on February 27, 2002, aged 83.

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