Spike Milligan

There is a new series of Blankety Blank (BBC1), if you fancy that. This economical series is bomb-proof as it leans confidently on the personality of the presenter - Terry Wogan, Les Dawson and now Lily Savage. When Spike Milligan was on the Blankety Blank panel, he seemed out of place because he instinctively gave witty answers. Too late he realised that what was needed was the bleeding obvious.

Spike Milligan (only his mother knew his real name) looked like the last dandelion of summer on the point of being blown away. The first five rows of the audience were famous. He said "I haven't organised anything, so nothing can go wrong" and gave them the old ones, the loved ones. The oldest and most loved one being Spike himself.

Take the latest Spike Milligan vehicle. Someone, somewhere must have thought that this script, by John Antrobus, was funny. Was it the "comic" voices with the faintest echoes of the Goons, still the symbol of radio's golden age? [...] Spike himself, judging from his interview in The Radio Times, must have doubts... "no one," he said "ever says the man who wrote the jokes wasn't funny." You're wrong, Spike, I do.

The same can't be said of Spike Milligan, back again in Q9 (BBC2). He is no less inventive than ever, but he is no better organised either, so only about every third number comes off. Milligan finds certain things automatically funny which, when you think about them, are automatically funny, such as eating cheese and tomato sandwiches or impersonating a German officer. In this latter role he screams into a telephone: 'Nein, nein, nein!' The next thing you hear is a police car arriving. For several reasons this is not a joke that a German would easily get.

Spike Milligan also tells blue jokes but most of them are funny and he has a million other ideas as well. Q9 (BBC2) once again b=proves that he is the fons et origo of contemporary British rubbish. Half the sketches get lost in their own entrails, but it doesn't matter. Spike is at his best when the number is collapsing all around him. He should not, however, make casual jokes about Zyklon B. The time to trivialise such a memory has not yet arrived.

On the night the BBC went off the air, the opposition fielded A Few of Our Favourite Things (Thames), starring Eric Sykes. Written entirely by Sykes himself, it was a very funny show. One sketch grew out of another. It was the Python no-punchline principle, but Sykes has incorporated it into his writing without easing up on his sense of discipline. The result is a sort of coherent Spike-ese, with overtones of Tommy Coo... but this is to sound academic.

Not all trivia are bad, of course. Spike Milligan's Q9 (BBC2), which has now come to a lamented end, was probably the most trivial TV series of all time, but it had at least one sublimely inventive moment per episode. In the second-last instalment there was the body-builder's rosary (it had beads like cannon-balls) and in the last instalment there was a brilliantly funny interview with the Queen's chicken, featuring John Bluthal as Huw Weldon and Spike as the chickenmaster. Such flights of inspiration make the common run of light ent. look hopelessly ponderous.

His new series Q9 (BBC2) is his best ever - an outstanding comic achievement even in a year which has already produced the prodigious 'Fawlty Towers'. Somebody - either co-writer Neil Shand or Python producer Ian McNaughton, or perhaps both - is holding Spike's proliferating imagination on line and providing the wherewithal to realise his fantasies. Usually television is too cumbersome a medium to catch what;s going on in Spike's skull.

A one-off called The Melting Pot (BBC1), written by Spike Milligan and Neil Shand and performed with a copious admixture of improvisation by Spike Milligan and John Bird, was the worst thing to have happened to race relations since Pharaoh went sour on the Israelites. I ought to have hated it, but was left so panic-stricken with laughter that I don't know where I stand. It was in such bad taste it was coming back the other way. Objecting to it was like debating against an attack of flatulence: it was a fart accompli.

Anyway the hour passed pleasantly enough if you didn't worry too much about some of the animals' uneasiness. I liked Rod Hull's emu. Most of Spike Milligan's shaggy dog jokes. And bits of Mr Bygraves. And so would the alligator, given the chance.