A life of wild artistic commotion surrounded Spike Milligan. As one of his greatest works comes to the stage in Dublin, STEPHEN DIXONlooks back at the legacy of the eccentric comedian
WHERE IS Spike Milligan? Well, we know where the man himself lies – in a cemetery in Winchelsea, East Sussex, under a headstone engraved with his final joke: “Duirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite (I told you I was ill).” But where stands his reputation? How has it fared since his death at 82, nine years ago this month?
He certainly rewrote the rules of radio comedy, but any listener old enough to recall the furore The Goon Showprovoked on its BBC debut back in 1951 would be over 70 now. Sure, he was a profound influence on Monty Python, but the members of that great team are also getting on a bit these days. Nobody under 35 will have seen Milligan in his prime.
For those of us somewhere in the middle, who were around to experience the magnificent and shambolic artistic commotion that was post- Goon ShowSpike Milligan, memories can be a little ambivalent.
There was nobody in British comedy remotely like him: a gangling, untidy wreck of a man, either fizzing with mischief and anarchy or sunk into the blackest of depressions. At his best, he could stop you in your tracks, breathless with admiration at the brilliance of his comic invention.
His little nonsense poems, funny, kind and deceptively-simple, illuminated and inspired possibilities for creativity in many a child. For Milligan, childhood was a place he could always escape back to. Mental illness, one suspects, was also a refuge of sorts.
His friend and Goon Showcollaborator Jimmy Grafton reinforced this: "You begin to wonder to what extent in some circumstances the eccentricity is involuntary and to what extent it is deliberate. He can always get out of trouble by going a little mad."
But the volatility and mood swings of a disordered mind meant an awful lot of rubbish was produced, too. Words poured from him in a torrent but he seemed to have no internal quality control, and those entrusted with the editing of his work were perhaps a little too afraid of his wrath to suggest changes. He dashed off novels, memoirs, scripts, parodies and poems of wildly-variable merit, plus cartoons, environmental campaigns and outraged letters to newspapers (including this one) at a fantastic rate, in between acting in films, appearing on stage and functioning as a refreshingly unpredictable guest on television chat shows.
But from this loose cannon’s fitful explosions, there was still plenty of comic gold dust drifting down for us to catch.
Only once did Milligan take a truly considered attitude to a project, and that was when he wrote Puckoon, published in 1963. And it could be that Puckoon, widely regarded as one of the funniest novels of the second half of the 20th century, constitutes Milligan's real gift to posterity. It cost him plenty to create it. He wrote that "this will be my first and last novel" in the foreword. "This damn book nearly drove me mad. I started it in 1958 and doodled with it for four years. I don't think I could go through it all again."
Milligan, it is well known, was deemed by the UK authorities to be a stateless person and was refused British nationality (which hurt him terribly as he had nearly been killed fighting for the British army in the second World War) because he was born in India, where his Irish soldier father was serving, so he became an Irish citizen in 1962.
And it is in Ireland that Puckoonis set, though it is the Ireland of John Ford, Synge, Somerville and Ross and Dion Boucicault, a neverland of feckless drunkards, whimsical philosophers, constant fighting, lawlessness and irrationality.
The action takes place in 1924, when, through the incompetence of Boundaries Commission officials, a line is drawn on the map through the village of Puckoon, leaving one half in the Irish Free State and the other in Northern Ireland.
As a result, passports are needed to get corpses from the church to the graveyard, village men have to travel to another country to sleep with their wives and in the local pub, everyone crowds into a tiny corner of the bar that is in the North, where drink is cheaper.
As well as being extremely funny, with several good jokes per page, Puckoonwas written with great care and attention to detail, a nod to Dylan Thomas evident in the lyricism of the first few lines:
Several and a half metric miles North East of Sligo, split by a cascading stream, her body on earth, her feet in water, dwells the microcephalic community of Puckoon.This June of a morning, the whole village awoke to an unexpected burst of hot weather. Saffron coloured in the bleach early sky, the sun blistered down, cracking walls and curling the brims of the old men's winter-damp hats; warm-bum biddies circulated air in their nethers, flapping their skirts and easing their drawers.
Joyous voiced children fought for turns at the iron pump, their giggling white bodies splashing in the cool water from its maternal maw; bone-dreaming dogs steamed on the pavements and pussy cats lay, bellies upwards, drinking the gold effulgent warmth through their fur; leather-faced fishcatchers puzzled at the coarse Atlantic now flat and stunned by its own salt hot inertia.
Puckoon's main character is Dan Milligan, a man so indolent that Spike has to abandon his authorial role from time to time to directly address Dan on the page and demand that he pull his socks up and get moving so that the plot (such as it is) can stumble onwards with him. Dan retaliates by complaining about the poor quality of leg Spike has written for him.
Because of its rambling, surreal nature and vast number of characters, for 40 years it was thought that Puckooncould be neither filmed nor staged. A 2002 movie, featuring Sean Hughes, Elliott Gould and Richard Attenborough, seems to have proved the point; critics complained that it contained almost nothing of Milligan's unhinged genius, compared it to a Carry On film, and it sank with scarcely a ripple.
In early 2009, however, a touring stage version by Portstewart’s Big Telly attracted a lot of favourable attention North and South. At last, critics enthused, a company has managed to get somewhere near the essence of Milligan. Such was the success of the tour that this month sees a revival.
Big Telly's Puckoonwill be at various theatres in the North (and Dún Laoghaire's Pavilion Theatre on March 3rd) before moving to London for a three-week run at the Leicester Square Theatre.
So Spike Milligan will be back in the West End, courtesy of an Irish theatre company.
Besides Puckoon, Milligan has another major claim to immortality. In December 2007 his On the Ning Nang Nongwas found to be among the 10 most commonly-taught poems in British primary schools.
Where’s Spike Milligan? He’s where he rightly belongs, playing with the children, enchanting the generation born after he left, making them squeal with laughter and wonder, filling them with delight, making them think about what a very odd world it is.
