Milligan's Wake

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I was originally of a mind to write something of chisels, having found four or five of my Dad's in not-so-optimum storage conditions in the small shed that is currently in a state of slow-motion collapse: a condition I have to halt come springtime, otherwise I'll have to demolish it and start again. I realised that the initially very sorry looking tools I unearthed, were actually not that far gone and decided that I would try and resurrect them; a process I started this afternoon, more progress having already been made on next door's kitchen.

Instead, when I sat down at the laptop, I got sucked into the YouTube vortex and ended up on the Wogan show in 1989. Wogan himself was not even present; Joanna Lumley deputizing for the holidaying host. Already on set was Harry Secombe, to be joined by Spike Milligan for interview. The conversation that followed was typical Milligan/Secombe; the kind of surreal ad-libbing that only friends of very long standing and with a very particular mindset can generate. Even though I am too young even at sixty-six to remember the Goons on radio - I was only six when it came off air, I grew up aware of recordings of it and a rather odd TV offshoot later on in childhood, the Telegoons.

Even when being controversial - especially when being controversial: Milligan's comedic edge never left him, right into old age: a true genius who in my opinion sits in the pantheon right alongside Lenny Bruce [no arguing that Bruce wasn't laugh out loud funny - the comparison between him and Milligan is much deeper than that]. One thing I will say, and I don't believe this to be a generational thing, is that there was a particular weirdness that overtook comedy, postwar. Maybe it was the psychological after-effects of that conflict rolled up with the ensuing Cold War, who knows; but that disjointed and somewhat nihilistic surrealism was to colour comedy right through from the 1940's to the 1980's, peaking somewhere in the middle of the 1960's.

I still find Milligan truly funny: not much that passes for comedy makes me laugh as spontaneously as he does. Like Les Dawson or Tommy Cooper, funny just being themselves, with or without a script.

'I'm not afraid of dying - I just don't want to be there when it happens...'  - Spike Milligan

 

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