"I told you I was ill..."

An affectionate tribute to Spike Milligan and his unique comic genius, by Radio 4 Extra producer Peter McHugh

“I told you I was ill”. The elephant in the room on the head of a pin. I’ve said it. Had to. No choice. Well, if Spike Milligan’s own gravestone epitaph stands (or lies) shoulder-to-shoulder with Groucho Marx’s pearls of wisdom it deserves to headline (my personal Groucho favourite, as he passed an equally aged Igor Stravinsky in Hollywood: “by the way… give my regards to Beethoven”. And let’s have an honourable mention for Some Like It Hot star Jack Lemmon, whose headstone simply reads: Jack Lemmon “In”.)

Spike Milligan (1918 - 2002) Photo © BBC

I’m sure the acerbic Spike Milligan would have given opinion polls as short shrift as headstones, but in a 1999 BBC poll he was voted the "funniest person of the last 1,000 years". Opinion polls are really a polaroid rather than a stone tablet (Yes, a Spikelike no-sense sense, there). Auction prices for Elvis memorabilia have been reportedly declining in recent years – the simple cruelty of pop culture popularity, and the worry of all comedians – the original audience are now leaving the arena.

It’s lucky for all of us then that Spike’s best known creation, the Goon Show, has a forever home on BBC Radio 4 Extra. It features – alongside the drama I Told You I Was Ill, and a two-and-half hour celebration, The Spike Show: Milligan Remembered – in Radio 4 Extra’s season marking the 20th anniversary of his death (and that headstone), in 2002.

Spike was born in India in 1918, with an Irish father and English mother; he chose an Irish passport – declining an oath of allegiance to those he mischievously considered to be foreigners. Serving in the British Artillery in World War Two, his autobiography, Hitler, My Part in His Downfall was a best seller. Shared wartime experience was a reactive wellspring for his friends, Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine and Harry Secombe, as they developed the concept of the Goons, which started on BBC radio in 1951 and ran until 1960 – with The Very Last Goon Show of All in 1972.

The Goon Show is uncategorizable – it has to be heard to not be understood. Maybe a comic hero of Spike’s – Groucho Marx – could help me out again with a stab at its unlogic: “Hello, I must be going.” Yes. That’s about right.

The main writer of the series, dreaming up the absurdist adventures of Hercules Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty, Major Bloodnok, Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister, Bluebottle and Eccles led to creative pressure, great personal strain, and the manic depression attacks that were to dog Spike throughout his life.

An early test pilot for ejecting from BBC Radio into TV, Spike’s BBC 2 sketch show series, Q, ran from 1969-1982. It was a show often without punchlines, or endings, with the cast sometimes walking towards the camera asking, "What are we going to do now?" or the scenes morphing into the next utterly unrelated sketch.

Together with the Goons, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, it established an anarchic un-grammar of humour that still can still hold sway (think Reeves and Mortimer, League of Gentlemen, The Mighty Boosh). In Radio 4 Extra’s Spike Milligan season (and delightfully on cue for this paragraph), Python star Michael Palin presents Spike Milligan – Inside Out, a two-part exploration of Spike’s own recordings, musing on comedy and his wartime years.

When he died in 2002, superfan Prince Charles remembered him as an “irreverent and hysterical presence”. Though in 1994, Spike had called the Prince of Wales a "grovelling little bastard" (cue riotous laughter) as a letter from the heir to the throne was read out at the 1994 British Comedy Awards.

Spike was there accepting one for lifetime achievement: “About bloody time, I’m not going to thank anybody… because I did it all on my own,” Spike said, to deafening applause (you can add to the 2.6m views on a certain video sharing website [YouTube]. It’s like a prototype fever dream of letting Ricky Gervais loose at the Golden Globes...).

The often spiky Spike had obviously made his peace with the idea of British Royalty, when Terence Alan Milligan was knighted in 2001. After his death on 27 February 2002, fellow comedian and writer Stephen Fry described Milligan's writing as "absolutely immortal".

But I will leave the final thoughts to his widow Shelagh, who said that in later life when confronted in the street by someone saying "You're Spike Milligan," he’d reply, "I know who I am, now go home and find out who you are."

I think Groucho Marx would, eyebrows up-down-up-down, have approved.