The Origins of Spike Milligan's Comedic Style, and of the Goon

Home , Eric Sykes, John Antrobus, Larry Stephens, Spike Milligan, The Goon Show

chapter 1 The Accordion under Construction: The Origins of Spike Milligan’s Comedic Style, and of The Goon Show

Degrees of instability and indeterminacy tend to creep into an analysis of The Goon Show’s origins, style, and genre. Even with the help of analogies to schools of dramaturgy, categorizing The Goon Show poses a challenge. As with other ex- amples of “popular and everyday humour” in which “everything is subordinate to the production of pleasure” (Palmer 1994: 178), The Goon Show has tended to be dismissed as ephemera, despite the preservation of a significant proportion of the program’s original broadcast run. The theorist and scholar of communi- cations Jerry Palmer has argued that the tendency of such humour to be “in ac- cordance with the values of the initial receiving community” (1994: 182) rarely leads to it being considered as part of a canon whose works are assumed to “transcend historical and social change” (1994: 178). A perception of The Goon Show as merely the product of its time has tended to deny it status as a repre- sentative example of a recognized genre conferred by inclusion in a canon. To compound all this, Milligan’s creation has a definite knack for defying categori- cal distinctions. Although The Goon Show’s basic structure takes the format of a comedy-variety show, it is an unusual example of the genre insofar as it show- cases the talents of an ensemble cast rather than a solo performer. Onto the comedy-variety substructure, The Goon Show grafts sketch comedy’s ability to shift rapidly between settings and locales and the continuing and consistent dramatis personae of the sitcom format. The Goon Show lets its central figures loose anywhere and everywhere during the course of any given episode. Histo- ry, current events and literature (both the ‘classic’ and ‘popular’ varieties) are all fair game: if someone had been there, was there at the moment, or could imag- ine being there, Milligan could, and would, place his Goon Show characters there as well.

1 Portrait of The Milligan as a Young Goon: Laying the Groundwork for a Personal Vision of Comedy

Another aspect of The Goon Show which confounds the detachment required for textual analysis is the degree of Milligan’s involvement in the program on a personal as well as a creative level. Since Milligan gave numerous interviews

The Accordion under Construction 11 in which he took pains to establish his own life history and beliefs as sources of major themes in his work, a quick examination of potential biographical influences on The Goon Show is a necessary prelude to the analysis of Milligan’s conception and use of space and time. At the outset of this examination, a somewhat vexing question of author- ship and attribution must be confronted. The spirit of collective creation behind Goon humour and the loose, often improvised style of performance which can be heard in Goon Show broadcasts raise the issue of how to properly weight the individual contribution of each member of the program’s creative team. While Milligan was The Goon Show’s principal writer, his was not the only name to receive writing credit on the program. One hundred and fifty-one epi- sodes of The Goon Show have been identified from recordings and written ma- terials as containing a single half-hour-length adventure: Milligan is the sole listed author of 76 of these; 42 are credited to Milligan and Larry Stephens; 26 to Milligan and Eric Sykes; 2 to Milligan and John Antrobus; 4 to Stephens and Maurice Wiltshire; and 1 to Stephens alone (Wilmut and Grafton 1977: 137–153). Goon Show scripts were clearly not the work of a one author, but they do share a consistency in tone and approach which marks them as the product of a single unifying guiding principle. Milligan’s co-writers quite willingly pointed to him as The Goon Show’s driving force. Eric Sykes “claims that the foundations laid by Milligan made writing Goon Shows a delight—all he had to do was copy Spike’s style” (Farnes 1997: 165). Although Goonism fought shy of Surreal- ism’s “attempts to function as a formal organization” (Zinder 1980: 41) rife with rules, regulations, and manifestos, Spike Milligan can be seen to have served the same function for The Goon Show as Andre Breton did for the Surrealists, by providing what could have easily descended into forgettable “semi-drunken streams of consciousness…by delayed adolescents” (Lewis 1995: 194) with an articulate focal point and a dominant voice. Whether Milligan’s adolescence was delayed or not, his upbringing certainly helped to foster in him a sense of ‘otherness’, of being somehow set apart from the rest of the human race. Born to Anglo-Irish parents on April 16, 1918, Ter- ence Alan Milligan spent the first decade-and-a-half of his life in India and Burma, at a succession of garrisons where his father, Leo, was stationed with the British colonial army. From the start, Spike’s view of his own place in the world was coloured by the experience of being not just a member of a foreign ruling minority in the land of his birth, but a member of a unique cultural sub- group within that minority. Only after his Goon Show years did Milligan express a full appreciation of his Irish heritage.1 Even so, this appreciation makes it

1 This appreciation sometimes extended to implying an Irish heritage for his mother’s entirely English side of the family. In his audiobook reading of Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall,