Q

How Spike Milligan's Q paved the way for Monty Python

Just as with Python, on Q anyone in Britain with any kind of authority was told exactly how Milligan felt about them.

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.

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 Milligan'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 Milligan's skull.