part 5 – There was a strange insanity
This is the fifth of a ten part series by John Repsch, telling some of the stories from the history of the Goon Show. This article first appeared in Newsletter 123 in July 2008.
THE MEMORY of all those years of scriptwriting stress would haunt Spike to the end: “I think Bernard-Shaw would have baulked at accepting a contract where he had to write 26 half-hour stories a year. When you think of it, if you wanted to persecute somebody, you’d say, ‘I sentence you to write 26 funny half-hours a year.’ It’s unbelievable, it’s overwhelming, it destroyed me. It destroyed me completely. So it wasn’t a happy occasion. There used to be a feeling of relief on Sunday if it went well. Then you just went home to sleep and got up on Monday and started again. It was, in the words of justice, totally unfair to do it to a human being. But that’s how the cards were played. That was the set number that they had to have on BBC scheduling: 26 half-hours. Six would have been enough – might have lasted longer.”
Spike’s psychotic problems stemmed from the mortar attacks he had suffered in the War. They had blasted his nervous system and sent him into a stuttering state of shellshock, leaving him prone to sudden despair at the drop of an unkind word. But where Spike differed from other sufferers was that he turned this frightful war ‘injury’ to his advantage. Before the War, he had already had a burgeoning sense of humour, and enjoyed airing it onstage while playing trumpet in jazz groups. The War transformed it. The injury was to hone that comic streak knifelike, while the lunacy of war itself would set his view askew, accompanying him into civilian life and peopling a landscape ripe for lampooning.
The deliriously titled They’re Coming To Take Me Away – Ha-Ha! (Radio 4, 27.4.06) asked why mental illness is such an irresistible subject for comedy. The mentally ill, they said, are often the heroes of the comedian, and that’s perhaps because the delusional and the comedic have a lot in common. These people are often the first to see a socially acceptable norm as an absurdity, and vice versa: “From the Goons to Eddie Izzard, comedians have mined the potential of what one might call benignly creative lunacy. Another part of the appeal of the manical or deluded character is that they often do what we would like to do. These are the people who won’t be beaten down by inhibiting rules and restrictions. They say what we would say, were we not ever so slightly nudged towards conformity by everyday society. They make us enter into it and feel something we’ve all felt, that type of rage, not necessarily to that level. In a funny way, we begin to understand our own mental distress but we see the much scarier version of it. Comedy of mental illness shows people in extreme states – that can often be very funny. We are laughing at people at the end of their tether – on the edge – and there’s a slight cruelty sometimes in that laughter.”
For a long time, Spike would be tight-lipped about what it was like at the end of his own tether, dreading exhuming old horrors in public. But later he would bare his soul in vividly detailed documentaries. Thus anyone with a potential nervous breakdown bearing down on them could learn from his own experiences and seek help forthwith. And those fortunate enough to be unafflicted would hopefully show some sympathy.
The radio programme mentioned other depressives, such as Peter Cook, Tony Hancock and Kenneth Williams, who were far less open about their troubles – certainly less so than American comic Lenny Bruce. Bruce had been described as “hip as a hoolahoop and subversive as Castro,” and wasn’t afraid to release a single called ‘Psychopathica Sexualis’, inspired by an infamous 19th century text about psychological illnesses.
According to the programme’s interviewee, Dr Peter Bum, Spike too had reaped “extraordinary dividends” from his mental disorder: “I think Spike Milligan is the master of the literal joke. Part of the experience of being psychotic is that your sense of language somehow becomes extremely odd and very literal. I can think of the standard one which is: ‘Oh, is your mother dead?’ – ‘I hope so, they buried her,’ is his reply to that. Or when the husband asks, ‘How long will lunch be?’ and the wife says, ‘Oh, it should last about an hour.’ That’s a classic literal Spike Milligan joke. His puns are more dreadful than your standard pun. I was reading one of his recently where he says, ‘the British are made up of four races, the best of which are the Derby and the Oaks.’ He plays on words, and again that’s a symptom of the syndrome of people going manic. Clearly, he wasn’t afraid to refer to his real life experiences of being low and being high as ways of explaining just how rollercoaster his existence was.”
An interview clip from Spike’s later years was broadcast on Sound Advice: How to Stay Sane (Radio 4, 1.7.06). In it he explained how he had learned to live with the affliction: “Early days I had no control over it but, like getting used to a hump on your back, by the time you’re 60 – if you’re a hunchback – you’ve got pretty used to having a hump on your back. But I was still ill. In fact, I think I’ve only just sort of managed to land again in the last four or five years. I’ve just started to become myself. It’s got better — I think I’m being cured. But now when I get depressed, I try and get something from this terrible sadness that comes over me and create something in terms of poetry, which I am doing lately.”
Meanwhile, back in January 1953, the convalescing Milligan was not the only one deserving sympathy. It’s just as well Peter Eton was made of sterner stuff because a BBC memo he sent to the Head of Variety gave the impression that the Spikeless show was crashing down about his ears! Besides the mental strain that Spike had been showing before he was hospitalized, Eton noted that Spike had fallen out with co-writer Stephens and Sellers; Sellers had fallen out with Jimmy Grafton, still employed as script editor; Secombe was often absent recording Educating Archie; and Larry Stephens was boasting about downing four bottles of rum a week.
In spite of – or thanks to – all that, the broadcasts were sounding fine! Jimmy and Larry were now writing them together, and the inexhaustible Peter could simply add Spike’s characters to his own – though several shows sported the comedy actors Graham Stark and Dick Emery to save him talking to himself too much, and an appearance was made by the sinister sounding ‘Man in Black’ himself, Valentine Dyall.
When Spike came back he felt fresh but far from healed, and would have to guard against excess pressure that could prompt a repeat performance. Peter Eton had smoothed things over between him and Larry, and was running a tighter ship all round, with more disciplined rehearsals and shows to cut out self-indulgence. That means this Harry quote may have been referring to earlier rehearsals under Dennis Main Wilson or post-Eton ones: “The rehearsal was hysterical because that was the time when it all came together. The first run-through would be hysterical because We’d all be laughing and mucking about and then when the band came in – you’d have a band rehearsal with the orchestra – then it was a bit different because you were getting near the nitty-gritty.”
For Spike, the read-throughs and rehearsals were often better than the show itself, as he explained in At Last The Go On Show. After a week sweating blood over the script, the first reading was crunch time, and he would watch the others like a hawk, waiting for the laughs to come. When they did, his relief was obvious and he joined in as well: “It was a release when I heard it actually performed because the rehearsals many, many times far eclipsed the actual show for hilarity, because when the boys heard the joke for the first time they were very tempered to laugh instantaneously in a really hysterical way – a deep, deep enjoyment of the joke. It was magic to hear it suddenly exploding around your ears. It’s like Beethoven must have felt when he wrote the fifth and then heard it played. But then he had to go on and write the Sixth and the Seventh and so on. There was no let-up. It was terrible, terrible strain. My personality made me want to write a better one each time and I almost succeeded in doing that, actually improving the quality of the shows. There was a strange insanity. It was my place in heaven I was trying to fight for. I couldn’t stop it; there was nothing I could do. I had to write it, like I was pre-ordained.”
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