Spike Milligan: The Biography
by Humphrey Carpenter
436pp, Hodder & Stoughton, £20
Some years back, Humphrey Carpenter made merry with an account I provided of the Marx brothers, declaring that the Marx brothers "don't need a biography" - comedians should be left to speak for themselves. None more so, one might have thought, than Spike Milligan, who has committed seven volumes of his own reminiscences to print, as well as more than 50 other books. There have also been several previous biographies of Britain's chief Goon and master of misrule, so why another?
Well, you can't get enough of a good thing. His appeal is, I am afraid, something of a male thing, though some women did "get it", most prominently, Spike's three wives, who had to balance the days of wit and laughter with the nights, and days, of dread melancholy, depressed silence and a locked door, with occasional telegrams emanating room to room, beseeching: "Please send up some tea."
Milligan always fretted at the description of himself as a "tortured genius", but he was certainly tormented, throughout his creative life, by a manic-depressive condition, which took him in and out of treatment, though, as Carpenter attempts to follow the twisted skein, he ruefully concludes that some spells in Gestapo-like asylums might have been made up. Research, in this case, consists of following the paper trail of scripts and BBC arcana, and the oral trail of old mates, male and female, spiced up with an extended talk with mother and son of one of Spike's long-concealed extra-marital affairs.
But how about a trip to Poona, to check out Spike's claim that at the age of six he had been sent to a convent school for girls - surely Hodder & Stoughton could have coughed up the readies? No? Bastards! How about the intriguing possibility that teenage Spike, confuddled by his removal from the hot sun of India to darkest Catford, might have briefly joined Oswald Mosley's blackshirts, rather than - as he himself claimed - donning the hair shirt of the Young Communist League? This is mentioned in a footnote, like much of the more tantalising data in this book, as if there wasn't enough time to integrate the stuff into the page. Did the Mosleyites not keep proper records that a diligent researcher might have dug up? Bastards!
As John Antrobus, Milligan's scriptwriting partner, said: "Even if he did join the fascists, he made up for it later by fighting Hitler." Spike's joyous "Hitler" books do, though, raise the question of whether the intervention of Gunner Milligan might not have prolonged the war by several years.
The really good thing about the British, in my view, is that they laughed Hitler into oblivion long before they managed, with a little American help, to do the real deed. A great deal has been written about the Goons, Britain's postwar contribution to world culture, but at the time they, with other accretions of satire such as Private Eye, Pete and Dud, et cetera, were lumped together as Good Old British Rubbish. Philosophers were not available to prise out their "real" meaning, but it was understood that being British had a lot to do with admitting the grand size of one's own feet of clay.
The combination of Spike, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine, with help from deep-dish subversives emerging from their cocoons in the BBC, created an explosion of verbal anarchy that nevertheless flowed from a tradition, combining music hall with Lewis Carroll and the nonsense prose and poetry of Edward Lear. Carpenter does not make enough of this last influence, and a comparison of Lear's and Milligan's awkward trawl through life could have proved fascinating.
Spike suffered from an advanced case of the comedian's love of people combined with a hatred and loathing of humanity as a whole, that bizarre species that can hold forth so eloquently on truth and beauty while recklessly trashing its surroundings. It was no surprise that he became obsessed, later in life, with the inalienable rights of fish and wasps. He was, of course, quite barmy, but an improvement on Sellers's wracked, often violent self.
Milligan was miffed when Sellers became an international movie star, while he was left with such turkeys as The Great McGonagall. But Sellers was an inveterate hustler and self-promoter, and Milligan, as Carpenter demonstrates convincingly, could hardly promote himself to his own fans.
He was, in a way, the total comedian, the one who understands how deeply absurd his own endeavours are. As Carpenter writes: "He could make anyone laugh except himself." It was this, I think, that constituted his greatest strength, the fact that he knew no borders in comedy, and spewed out, in his manic moments - and they were as many and prolonged as his depressions - endless screeds of gags, jokes, mad characterisations and impossible plots. Perhaps this also explains the resistance of many women to his humour - do women tend to find the idea that the world is chaos and society full of insane maniacs threatening rather than funny, more so than men?
Spike's lack of boundaries led him inevitably to fall foul of society's current prohibition on racial stereotypes, which were part and parcel of his upbringing and age. He could no more avoid insulting Jews and "wogs" than he could avoid breathing. How could he, they were part of that irrascible humanity which included mad Indian Army majors such as Bloodnok or home grown imbeciles like Eccles.
As a convinced pessimist, his position was "You can't solve the problem [of race relations] so you might as well laugh at it." But faced with BBC television's heightened sensitivities, he could neither shift his ground nor bend to the prevailing winds of change in comedy as in everything else. He was "funnied out", exhausted by that punishing schedule of weekly Goon shows for a decade, and his more rewarding comedy books.
Spike himself, of course, was Irish, as so many good wordsmiths of the English language are, and eventually gave up a long battle to retain his British citizenship by taking out an Irish passport, thus avoiding having to swear a demeaning oath to the crown.
Like all clear-thinking people, he was a stranger wherever he went. As Carpenter quotes production designer Michael Pickwoad (there's a goonish name for you), he was "a totally insane person living inside a precariously sane one". Or, one might say, the other way around? Comedians like Milligan highlight the precarious nature of our existence as supposedly rational beings; Nietzsche and Schopenhauer do it by making us thoroughly depressed, Sellers and Milligan, and the Marx brothers, WC Fields, Laurel and Hardy et al do it by making us laugh.
The American comics had the mighty machine of Hollywood to spread their message. Spike had John Snagge and the crazy guys who made bumps and squeaks with spoons and egg-beaters in BBC basements. But I would still like to see a rerun of the infamous Q series: Milligan as "Mrs Rita Goldberg of Golders Green playing a cash register while wearing a large plastic nose."
Spike Milligan does need a biography. This one will do, until somebody jets off to Poona and finds out what was really going on there in convent girls' schools in the 1920s.
· Simon Louvish's Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett will be published by Faber in November.