There is something very special about British humour: the rapid improvisation of people like Paul Merton and Lee Mack and the zany way a theme is developed. What you may not be aware of is the origin of this stream of comic creativity lies not with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and Beyond the Fringe orThe Monty Python Show but with a 1950s BBC Radio programme called The Goons.
The Goons originally starred Michael Bentine, a man with funny voices, a Welsh singer with an operatic voice, Harry Secombe (Jeremy Lloyd), the man who went on to star as Inspector Clouseau and, on film, to seduce Sophia Loren, Peter Sellers (George Kemp) and the writer and performer, the inimitable Spike Milligan (John Dagleish). It is Ian Hislop, long time editor of the magazine Private Eye and head of one team on Have I Got News For You who has penned this homage to Spike Milligan along with Nick Newman his collaborator. We saw The Wipers Times (2017), Hislop and Newman’s earlier play set in the First World War about a satirical newspaper. This play is very well researched and Spike Milligan has left an extensive written archive including seven volumes of war memoirs and letters to the BBC.
Spike Milligan was a creative genius troubled by bouts of bipolar illness who found himself frequently at odds with the BBC management played by Robert Mountford. As Mountford, the unnamed but generic BBC executive, complains about the latest episode of The Goon Show, his wife Mildred (Ellie Morris) is shown laughing her head off. An incident when an angry Spike turned up at Sellers’ flat in the middle of the night wielding a potato peeler is recreated in the play. There was always pressure on Spike to produce the script despite being paid less than half what the other two earnt from the BBC. A lovely scene lampoons the BBC as the Big Brother Corporation!