Hey Goons loons, this salute to Spike is for you
YOU don’t need to be drawing a pension to enjoy Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s Spike Milligan tribute show, but it may help. Hardly anyone under 50 will have heard of Milligan; and only the over-70s are likely to have caught him on his famous radio comedy The Goon Show back in the 1950s. Hislop and Newman tread a fairly familiar path, mixing Milligan’s war against Hitler with his war against BBC executives while writing The Goon Show. Thanks to his partnership with Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers, the show was a massive hit — but Milligan was later hospitalised with a series of nervous breakdowns, caused by shellshock. We learn that at the height of his distress he broke into Sellers’ home and threatened to kill him . . . with a potato peeler. He impersonated an Italian lover at a dance, to woo his first wife, June; and later kept her out of his office with a sign reading: ‘Do Not Disturb — Disturbed Enough Already.’ Set in a radio recording studio and recreating madcap Goon Show sketches, as well as the stresses of writing those sketches, the play is nothing if not ambitious. But it leans too heavily on limp gags that fall flat on modern ears. Both script and production could be leaner, and tighter. Paul Hart’s cast do, however, perform with verve. As Spike, John Dagleish is a manic malcontent who finds mirth even in the depth of his despair, brandishing a noose labelled ‘single use’. But his best moments are set pieces, including bashing a typewriter in time to Leroy Anderson’s light music ditty, The Typewriter. Just as much fun is Margaret CabournSmith, as the woman in charge of The Goon Show’s myriad sound effects. George Kemp is suitably self-satisfied as dapper ladies’ man Peter Sellers. Although Jeremy Lloyd, as Secombe, is not quite Welsh enough, he’s alarmingly good at Harry’s explosive, squealing laugh. And Robert Mountford deploys a lot of Peter Cookstyle pomposity as Spike’s exasperated commanding officer — and his loathed BBC controller. This will be a jolly nostalgia trip for some; but a night of mystifying tumbleweed for others. For me, it was a bit of both.