New play remembers late great Spike Milligan –Brighton dates

Spike comes to Theatre Royal Brighton from October 11-15, the latest Sussex adventure for Ian and Nick who met back in 1974 at Ardingly College where they were at school together. Following Spike Milligan through the origin of The Goon Show and his battle with the BBC, the play delves into the inner workings of one of our most brilliantly irreverent comedy minds. Spike is set in 1950s austerity Britain. Out of the gloom comes Goon mania as people across the country scramble to get to a wireless for another installment of The Goon Show. While Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers get down to the serious business of becoming overnight celebrities, fellow Goon and chief writer Spike finds himself pushing the boundaries of comedy and testing the patience of the BBC.

As Ian says: “That was the thing about Spike. You just didn't ever know what Spike was going to do. There are a couple of very strange real-life stories that we've come across back in the 50s and 60s and the fact is they are absolutely true. He had this wonderful quality of chaos and unpredictability. I think the whole thing goes back to the war. We could have called this play Milligan’s War – not with the Germans, though but with the BBC. He had fought the war and came out of it and found himself fighting the BBC which he found was run by the same officer classes that has been making his life such a misery during the war. For him working for the BBC was a continuation of that war really. But the play is not all BBC bashing. There is a lot of railing against BBC but the fact is that the BBC put him on. They realised that he was difficult and cantankerous and all that, but they also realised that he was a comic genius.

“I met him. I knew him a bit later and I interviewed him when I was a journalist in my 20s. It didn't go terribly well. It was on the radio and I made a bit of a hash of it but he rescued me. It was a birthday guest slot and I opened the champagne which went all over my notes which became just a sea of green but he found it incredibly funny and effectively then he just went on to interview himself!”

Was he in any sense a happy guy? “You get so many biographies of comedians that say that they were miserable all the time and so someone ends up writing a miserable play about them but the fact is he wrote the Goons! People all over the country went nuts with happiness in the dreary 1950s. Fortunately we are very lucky with this to have the cooperation of the Milligan estate. We were able to work with his daughter and his daughter said that we have produced the best version of Milligan that she had seen. I think for her what we had captured was that great sense of spontaneity and that great sense of enjoyment. Spike Milligan was unique. The Goons were his greatest achievement and his books were fantastic. T hey are incredibly good particularly about the war.”