![]() Maybe a comic hero of Spike’s – Groucho Marx – could help me out again with a stab at its unlogic: “Hello, I must be going.” Yes. The Goon Show is uncategorizable – it has to be heard to not be understood. Shared wartime experience was a reactive wellspring for his friends, Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine and Harry Secombe, as they developed the concept of the Goons, which started on BBC radio in 1951 and ran until 1960 – with The Very Last Goon Show of All in 1972. Serving in the British Artillery in World War Two, his autobiography, Hitler, My Part in His Downfall was a best seller. Spike was born in India in 1918, with an Irish father and English mother he chose an Irish passport – declining an oath of allegiance to those he mischievously considered to be foreigners. It features – alongside the drama I Told You I Was Ill, and a two-and-half hour celebration, The Spike Show: Milligan Remembered – in Radio 4 Extra’s season marking the 20th anniversary of his death (and that headstone), in 2002. It’s lucky for all of us then that Spike’s best known creation, the Goon Show, has a forever home on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Spike Milligans epitaph, which was declared by the Daily Mail as Britains Favourite Epitaph appears in Irish on his headstone Dirt m leat go raibh m. ![]() ![]() Auction prices for Elvis memorabilia have been reportedly declining in recent years – the simple cruelty of pop culture popularity, and the worry of all comedians – the original audience are now leaving the arena. Opinion polls are really a polaroid rather than a stone tablet (Yes, a Spikelike no-sense sense, there). I’m sure the acerbic Spike Milligan would have given opinion polls as short shrift as headstones, but in a 1999 BBC poll he was voted the "funniest person of the last 1,000 years". ![]()
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