Spike Milligan, 83; Radio 'Goon' Inspired British Comics

L.A. Times Archives

Feb. 28, 2002 12 AM PT

From Associated Press

LONDON — Spike Milligan, comedian, author, gadfly and the last surviving member of “The Goon Show” on BBC radio, died Wednesday of kidney failure at his home in Rye on the southeast coast of England, his agent Norma Farnes said. Milligan was 83.

His sly comedy made him a British institution and inspired later generations of British comics, but he was almost as famous for his struggles with manic depression and his rages against human folly, the British variety in particular.

A tall, thin man with rather wistful blue eyes, Milligan was a vegetarian, a nonsmoker and an avid environmentalist.

“I support all the causes that are trying to increase the sensitivity of the human race to the odious things that they do,” he once told an interviewer. “We’re a pretty horrendous crowd.”

Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine launched the Goons on May 28, 1951, in a radio show titled “Crazy People Featuring the Goons.”

Later retitled “The Goon Show,” the program, which ran until 1960, set a comic style and became a classic.

The program involved the Goons in their constant defense of the British Empire from nefarious threats. The show satirized many traditional British ideas and served as an inspiration for a generation of British comedians.

“We all had this sort of lunatic sense of humor.... We turned everything into imbecility ... doing things like climbing Mount Everest from the inside,” Milligan once said.

British comic Eddie Izzard once called Milligan “the godfather of alternative comedy for the world.”

Writing in the New York Times Book Review years ago, Beatle John Lennon remembered “The Goon Show” as hipper than the hippest and madder than “‘Mad,’ a conspiracy against reality. A coup d’etat of the mind.”

One of Milligan’s biggest fans was Prince Charles, patron of the Goon Show Preservation Society, who called Milligan’s death “the end of a great era of British comedy, exemplified by Spike’s extraordinary genius for the play on words and for the art of the nonsensical unexpected.”

Milligan, author of dozens of books, never became as widely known as Sellers.

“I thought I had the same comic ability as Peter Sellers,” he told the Sunday Express. “But the cards fell right for him when he went into films and never came right for me.”

Sellers died in 1980, Bentine in 1996 and Secombe in 2001.

Milligan’s film credits include “The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film,” an 11-minute caper directed in 1959 by Richard Lester.

Milligan played his own father in a 1972 adaptation of his war memoir “Adolf Hitler, My Part in His Downfall,” and had numerous bit parts in films, including “The Life of Brian.”

He was born Terence Alan Milligan on April 16, 1918, in Bombay and spent his first 16 years in India, where his Irish father was a sergeant major in the British army. His mother was English.

Milligan was educated at Roman Catholic convents in Poona and Rangoon before the family returned to Britain.

He learned to play the double bass and the trumpet and worked in local bands in London. He went to war as an army gunner, but after seeing a lot of action, he first sought psychiatric treatment in 1944.

After the war, he was in and out of hospitals with his mental problems, which reached a peak while he was writing a new “Goon Show” each week for six months.

“The war started the gradual deterioration of my mental stability, but ‘The Goon Show’ finished the process,” he said.

His first marriage, to Ann Howe, fell apart under the strain. She left him and their three children.

Milligan raised them and a daughter from his second marriage, in 1962, to Patricia Ridgeway who died of cancer in 1978.

He married Shelagh Sinclair in 1983.

Because of a change in British immigration laws, Milligan discovered in 1960 that because his father was not born in Britain, he would have to reapply for citizenship and take an oath of allegiance to the queen, despite his years of army service.

Outraged, he became an Irish citizen instead. Britain made amends in 2000 by making Milligan an honorary knight.

The personality Milligan showed to the world was often prickly and disillusioned.

“You’d have to be a total idiot to be happy today,” he said in 1987. “I would never have had four children if I’d known what I know now.”

He is survived by his wife and his children.

Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.