Spike Milligan

Goons producer marks show's 60th anniversary

It's 60 years since BBC listeners first discovered The Goons. None of the stars are still alive but producer Charles Chilton can still recall the pleasure and perils of putting Spike Milligan's extraordinary creation on air.

Spike Milligan's widow Shelagh dies

Spike Milligan's widow, Shelagh, has died after a High Court judge ruled that the comedian's children were left nothing in his will.

ITV1's Unforgettable strand, in which friends, family and peers pay tribute to great entertainers, celebrates the life of Spike Milligan, the writer, musician, poet, artist and Goon who died in 2002. Milligan, considered a genius and madman in equal measure, had an absurd and subversive humour that fuelled The Goons, the Fifties comedy troupe which made his name and was so influential it's led to him being called the godfather of alternative comedy. In a sense, the show owes a debt to the War: Milligan met fellow Goon Harry Secombe when both were serving with the Royal Artillery in Tunisia. Post-war, they teamed up with Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine to launch the most popular comedy show of the Fifties, remembered fondly for its surreal humour and ludicrous plots.

Away from performing, Milligan was a successful author, too, producing dozens of books for children and adults, most memorably his hilarious series of war memoirs, beginning with Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. His success was tempered by depression and melancholy, however, making Milligan the archetypal sad clown. This intimate tribute features photos from Milligan's personal collection as well as previously unseen home movies, and contributions come from Milligan's children, including the first interview with his daughter Romany, one of two of his children born out of wedlock. Eric Sykes, Paul Merton and Terry Jones also pay tribute.

Spike Milligan, my dad

Having Spike Milligan for your father wasn't all wacky. His daughter Jane says that, along with the fun, came lessons in love and humility.

I'm Rimsky-Korsakov. I've got a brother at home - he's got a cold on his chest. We call him Nasty-Chestikov. Boom-boom. My girlfriend used to be in a circus. She chewed hammers. Was she professional? No, hammer-chewer.

Shall I stop now? In the early 1950s a comedy new wave was breaking on the shores of the Light Programme. Spike Milligan and Michael Bentine were breaking all the rules in Crazy People, later The Goon Show, while the improvised In All Directions featured Peters Ustinov and Jones in a Beckettesque road movie, driving round in a perpetual search for Copthorne Avenue.

But some of the emerging talent cleaved to more traditional comic values, as evidenced in my intro. Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise's idols were Abbott and Costello and the Marx Brothers, and it showed in their rat-a-tat routines. Apart from playing the perfect straight man, Wise took it upon himself to be the duo's archivist, and he recorded a stack of material which lay in suitcases in his garage for decades. "I don't think he ever played them back," his widow, Doreen, told Jon Culshaw in Morecambe and Wise: The Garage Tapes. "He just knew he should keep them." A wise decision, given the BBC's historic penchant for wiping stuff.

The elements we know and love from the TV shows are all there: the bad playlets, the song and dance routines, the guest stars ripe for mickey-taking, though not the stellar names of later shows. Then, it was the likes of Jack Jackson, Brylcreemed trumpeter and Housewives' Choice disc-spinner, or Brian Rees, star of The Adventures of PC 49 ("surely you remember his catchphrase 'Oh, my Sunday helmet!' "). It feels like aeons ago, not just half a century.

When the pair first tried to break into TV, in 1954, it was a disaster. For the rest of his career Eric carried round the Express review: "Is that a television I see in the corner of my living room? No, it's the box the BBC buried Morecambe and Wise in last night."

The Bed Sitting Room Review

A very British apocalypse from Richard Lester, based on the satirical one-act stage play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus.

Richard Lester's adaptation of the play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus is a truly bonkers curio. Set in a blasted post-apocalypse Britain where roughly 20 people have survived, all of whom steadfastly avoid discussing what has happened, the film features an impressive pantheon of 1960s British talent - Milligan, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe - attempting to carry on as normal with bicycle-powered public transport and the ever-present threat of mutation.

Lowe turns into a parrot, Moore turns into a sheepdog, and Richardson wearily endures his inexorable transformation into the titular rented accommodation. Bleak, dark, surreal, silly and truly unique.

The long-lost 1969 comedy The Bed Sitting Room is finally given the spotlight it deserves. Based on a rather freeform post-apocalyptic play by Spike Milligan, this is rightfully regarded as something of a missing link in UK comedy. Under Richard Lester's inventive direction, Britain is reduced to around a dozen characters following a nuclear "misunderstanding" and the population dwindles further as radioactivity causes people to mutate into parrots, wardrobes and the titular cheap accommodation - yes, Spike Milligan clearly did write this. It's a bleak and funny mix of music hall gags and Samuel Beckett-style existentialism with a cast including the great Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Marty Feldman.

Written by Alf Garnett creator Johnny Speight, ITV's notorious, short-lived 1969 sitcom centred around the workers of a factory named Lillicrap Ltd. It starred a blacked-up Spike Milligan as an Asian immigrant named Kevin O'Grady (his workmates dubbed him 'P*ki P*ddy'). Speight maintains that he was challenging racism, but some felt the programme reinforced it.

This is scarcely a trace of a story-line, hence all the gags and lunatic gooneries are without dramatic connection, and situation comedy cannot survive without a plot to supply the situations. The gallery of character can hardly be said to interact with one another; in many cases they exist solely in terms of a single outlandish idea or costume, with little else in the way of discernible personality. In this situation the natural comics Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Marty Feldman - thrive; the the others however - in particular Michael Hordren, Rita Tushingham and Ralph Richardson - are quite unable to sustain the interest which their predominant postition in the film demands.