John Graham Jones - Writer -

Articles

Spike Milligan

A shambles of a stage set: kitchen chairs, a couple of tables, various hats, a blackboard and easle, wooden boxes, a grand piano and, slumped in an easy chair, a dummy in an overcoat and hat. Figures grope around behind the back curtain. A voice: "If we stand here, when the curtain goes up, they'll laugh." Curtain up and, true enough, we laugh. Not just then but for most of the evening of entertainment supplied by Spike Milligan and Jeremy Taylor with pianist Fred Loftin.
The hats are for Spike to wear to do his many impersonations. Some hover on the edge of bad taste e.g. straw hat on for the impersonation of Maurice Chevalier - Spike lies down dead. Some are scathing e.g. a tartan tam for an incoherent, nasty folk-singing Glaswegian. Some are satirical e.g. an army sergeant who puts recruits through their paces with a stream of incomprehensible orders in good old-fashioned army jibberish. But they were all very funny.
Spike Milligan is not in the great tradition of British comics. Probably the tradition ended when The Goons began. Even radio comedy before The Goons was music-hall orientated. Spike Milligan and The Goons revolutionised comedy in this country: they introduced a zany, Absurd Theatre element which, of course, took firm root in Monty Python. But I think Spike Milligan is superior to it all - The Goons, Monty Python, The Goodies - all of them. His endearing lunacy comes not from a caricature of a human being or an impersonation of a human being but from a real life human being who we know to be none other than Spike Milligan himself.
He does hovver on the edge of bad taste sometimes; he makes racialist references that might give offence; he can appear to be close to actual lunacy; but being Spike Milligan he can get away with it all and leave us laughing.
He is nobody's fool but his own: he never condescends to his audience or panders to poular taste. I get the impression that if he were to get no laughs at all, he would still go on doing what he does: conducting the audience in "Good Evenings" - "Goods on this side of the audience, Evenings on the other; and those in the circle - all together: 'Jim';giving his potted history of the Second World War - "I shall mime those screams of 35 years ago"; slowing the show down because "it's going too well"; singing his crazy songs - "I left my heart in San Francisco, I left my knee in old Peru"; turning angrilly on the dummy in the chair and beating it about the head - "laugh won't you".
An excellent evening's entertainment (with a few dead spots) from Spike Milligan at his best, well supported by a most talented satirical singer, Jeremy Taylor - "for the ladies who may be interested," says Spike, introducing him, "his inside leg is 32 inches".