‘Spike would now be considered politically incorrect’
Michael Palin
Sixteen years after Spike Milligan’s death, Michael Palin still misses him. “I think Spike’s way of looking at the world is still the way I look at it,” says the former Python. “Sometimes I long for someone to press the ‘absurd’ button. [His comedy] gave us a glimpse that there was a world beyond this world – he saw beyond restrictions and formalities and controls, he looked around the side and said, ‘These are just silly people with funny hats on and strange voices telling us these things.’ That’s what was so liberating about it.”
Palin’s recollections of his sometime collaborator coincide with Milligan’s 100th birthday, which would have been this coming Monday, an anniversary Palin is marking with a two-part Radio 4 show about the comedian. Spike Milligan: Inside Out includes touching stories from both Palin and Milligan’s daughter Jane, as well as clips from previously unheard interviews with his biographer Pauline Scudamore, recorded between 1980 and 1985.
They include Milligan’s own account of how he was wounded by a shell during the Second World War (“there was this ‘bang’, like a red noise”) and the story of his supposed suicide attempt after an encounter with an unresponsive audience in Coventry. (“Peter [Sellers] and Harry [Secombe] were banging on the door shouting ‘let us in’” – Milligan was standing on a chair with a rope pulled tight around his neck – “It was only in a sense of fun.”)
“When I met him, I was slightly trepidatious, because I had heard about his moods,” says Palin. “He could be a bit prickly but he could also be terrifically friendly, considerate and encouraging. We both felt that the BBC didn’t quite get our shows. He could be very, very funny, but much of the time he was very worried about why he had this talent, and how he could use it best, and was it running out?”
Manic depression is one of the things the public associate with Milligan – who made his name in the Fifties radio comedy The Goon Show with Sellers and Secombe and went on to star in TV comedies as well as write plays, novels, children’s poems and hilarious memoirs of his time in the war – as well as his zany persona. But Jane Milligan says there were other sides to her father’s personality.
“A lot of people don’t get it that he was a very disciplined man, that’s the only way he got it all done,” she says. “We lived in a beautiful house in north London. When you opened the front door, you would not think this ‘eccentric genius’ lived there. It was a stunning, organised, Victorian home, not the crazy loony bin you might have imagined, not in the slightest, the opposite.”
Jane remembers him as a magical father, who would create bedtime stories for her and draw pictures to accompany them on a blackboard. He was also a committed environmental and animal rights activist.
When he was depressed, she says, he preferred his children’s company to that of anyone else.
“I knew he would be having a bad time about the world sometimes. He only really liked seeing the kids when he was down, he wasn’t that into adults, so I delivered a lot of tea to his room. There was always a smile.”
Milligan had divorced from his first wife, musical theatre actress June Marlow, in 1960 after eight years of marriage. Unusually for the time, Milligan won custody of their three children.
In a remarkable 1975 interview with David Dimbleby on a bizarre series called Face Your Image, in which celebrities were confronted with negative comments made about them by friends and colleagues, Milligan was asked to respond to Peter Sellers’ claim that after his marriage break-up he had come to hate women.
“No, I don’t hate women,” protested Milligan. “My first wife was a very fine woman and I was in the middle of a terrible nervous breakdown … I must have been abominable, and she couldn’t stand it, that’s all.”
He married his second wife, Patricia “Paddy” Ridgeway, in 1962. She was 26; Milligan was 44, but she took on the role of mother to his children. The couple had Jane four years later.
Milligan was a popular figure. He was friends with the Beatles; George Martin was his best man at his wedding to Paddy; Jane remembers Dusty Springfield and James Mason visiting her father, among others. “I remember James Coburn coming to the house and playing my flute – he was going out with [singer] Lynsey de Paul at the time.”
She also recalls the evening, when she was 13, that Prince Charles came to dinner. “They were good pals,” she says. They sat reading each other work by the “worst poet of all time” William Mcgonagall – a hero of Milligan’s.
“The two of them found him hysterically funny and just read to each other by the fire in the drawing room. He stayed into the early hours of the morning until they couldn’t talk any more, because they were laughing too much.”
Jane’s childhood, however, was blighted by tragedy. Paddy died from breast cancer in 1978. Jane recalls the night before her death. “It was a terrible trauma to be summoned to the room to be told the worst news in the world. I was 11. He tried to tell me that she wasn’t going to be there in the morning, and he couldn’t actually do it, so my nan did it. I’d never seen him cry. All four of us were there and my darling nan (the family nanny Jean Reed).”
In his grief, Jane says, Milligan threw himself into writing, painting and composing on the piano, swimming and playing squash. (He would later marry for a third time to a BBC employee, Shelagh Sinclair, 25 years his junior.) He would also continue making television shows.
A long-acknowledged influence on the Pythons, Milligan’s Q5 television show was first aired on BBC Two in March 1969. While the material could be unfiltered and patchy, it featured inspired sketches such as the Operatic Singing Relay and the Grandmother Hurling Contest – in which grannies were catapulted off the cliffs of Beachy Head – either of which could have appeared in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which followed in October 1969, and was shot by the same director, Ian Mcnaughton.
Milligan was only finally commissioned for a new series, Q6, after Monty Python had ended in December 1974. Had Palin ever worried that the Pythons had stolen Milligan’s thunder? “I think we were producing our own material,” he says. “Occasionally it looked very, very close to Spike’s, and that’s why I worried if Spike on the odd occasion got a little bit spiky about it. At times he would say, ‘You know you got it all from me.’”
Some of Milligan’s humour has dated. One famous sketch involves a Dalek husband arriving home to his human wife late from work after exterminating the other commuters, speaking in Dalek with an Asian accent, shooting the family dog and announcing: “Put. It. In. The. Curry.”
“I’m not a racialist but I love racial humour,” Milligan once told an interviewer. He also had a fondness for stockings-and-suspenders-clad women in his sketches.
“He would certainly be considered politically incorrect in some ways, but I don’t think that’s of any importance at all,” says Palin. “Spike was an instinctive comedian.”
“He was a very gentle, compassionate soul,” says Jane Milligan. When a tabloid newspaper took a swipe at him after his death in 2002, aged 83, “it really hurt me and it hurt my family,” she adds. “I’m sure there are people out there who didn’t like Dad, of course, it’s life … but they tried to make him out to be mad. That was inaccurate.”
“The great gift that Spike had was that he didn’t see the world logically at all,” says Palin. “He saw it at an angle. And he gave so many of us such joy and pleasure.”
Spike Milligan: Inside Out is on BBC Radio 4 on Monday at 11.30am