Memories of

Milligan

NORMA FARNES

For Jack My Champagne Charlie

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

Desmond Milligan

Eric Sykes

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson

Liz Cowley

Denis Norden

Marcel Stellman

George Martin

Groucho (Alan Matthews)

Barry Humphries

Richard Lester

Richard Ingrams

Jimmy Verner

Peter Medak

Terry Wogan

Joanna Lumley

Alan J. W. Bell

Dick Douglas-Boyd

Jonathan Miller

Michael Palin

Stephen Fry

Eddie Izzard

. . . on Spike

. . . on the Goons

Spike on Spike

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

The concept of this book, as far as I was concerned, was a coffee table book, and that is how it started. After a few months, I was quite happily going along when Louise Haines, my editor, dropped a bombshell. She didn’t ‘want a book of articles. I would like a more chronological memoir.’

Let me tell you about Louise. What Louise wants, Louise always gets. She has a certain way of saying N-O-R-M-A, long-drawn out, very quiet. You know then she’s about to get you to do something you don’t want to do; in this case ten times more work than I had anticipated. However, she’s terrific and knows exactly what is needed, so I forgive her. And you know what – she was right again.

Throughout Spike’s illustrious career – thank God he’s not around to read that. I can hear him say, ‘What career? They’ll say Spike Milligan wrote The Goon Show and died,’ or ‘It’s all for fear of the bank manager,’ or ‘It’s just that Van Gogh couldn’t stop painting and I can’t stop writing.’ All these remarks were repeated to me many times over the years. Well, I think he had an illustrious career and throughout that career he made some friends, a lot of acquaintances and a few enemies.

In this book I’ve tried to capture the varied recollections of some of the people who did know Spike; so many professed to know him, but they didn’t know him at all. He was loyal, and his friendships, the true ones, lasted all his life. I can think of two, alas, no longer with us: Alan Clare, brilliant pianist and composer, and Jack Hobbs, his editor – friendships that lasted over forty years. There were ups and downs with Jack, but Spike never had a cross word with Alan. When he was down and feeling alone, he used to go to Alan’s flat in Holland Park and sit and talk to him for hours, or just go and sit in silence after asking Alan to play for him. When Alan died, Spike missed him terribly and said to me, in such a haunting tone, ‘Oh, Norm. We are all beginning to die.’ One week later, I was the one who had to tell him that Jack Hobbs had died.

The relationship with his brother, Desmond, was a love/hate one. It was either ‘I have a God-sent brother,’ or ‘That stupid brother of mine.’ His book Rommel? Gunner Who? was dedicated to Desmond:

To my dear brother Desmond

Who made my boyhood happy and with whom

I have never had a cross word

Mind you he drives his wife mad

Obviously written in a ‘God-sent brother’ period. The one thing that never changed was the wonderful memories Spike had of their idyllic childhood growing up in India and Burma, and Desmond’s memories of this time reflect the stories Spike had told me.

Eric Sykes was an established writer when he met Spike. He was writing the very successful Peter Brough and Archie Andrews radio shows, Educating Archie. Eric was lying in bed in the Homeopathic Hospital in Great Ormond Street awaiting an operation, the first of many for an infected mastoid. He was listening to the radio and a new comedy show which he thought was fast, furious and very, very funny. It was Crazy People written by Spike Milligan and Larry Stephens. Eric wrote them a letter saying what he thought about the show. It was such an accolade for them, an established writer sending them such a letter of praise. The next day Spike and Larry paid a visit to Eric and that small incident of fate began an enduring friendship between Spike and Eric which culminated in sharing an office for over fifty years.

In about 1953, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, like Spike and Eric, had only just started their writing careers. They met Spike at a rehearsal of a Goon Show and they were introduced after the recording. Together they formed a company, Associated London Scripts (ALS), and stayed together until April 1968 when they went their separate ways, Eric and Spike staying together at Orme Court, their offices in Bayswater. Ray and Alan have wonderful memories of ‘the early days’ when they thought the world was full of laughter.

Friendships, laughter and writing scripts wove them together. It was new and exciting, breaking new ground, and that’s when Spike met Liz Cowley, a journalist and broadcaster. Another relationship that lasted fifty years, though relationship is the wrong word, it belies the love and affection they had for one another until his death. What was always amazing to me, apart from their love for each other, was their deep friendship, and he cared so much for her and her wellbeing. She is such a natural to share her memories with the reader.

Denis Norden is one of the great scriptwriters of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. With his writing partner, Frank Muir, he was responsible for the highly successful radio series Take it From Here which ran for twelve years. He also wrote and presented It’ll Be Alright on the Night for twenty-nine years. He is a great raconteur and has an immense fund of showbusiness stories and anecdotes of stars of the last sixty years.

Spike had great affection for Marcel Stellman. He was an A & R man and producer at Decca records. In the late Sixties Marcel approached Spike, having heard the Goon Shows, to ask him if he had any comedy songs as he was interested in recording him. The first song Spike gave Marcel was ‘I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas’ and he even had a B-side for him, ‘Bloodnok’s Rock ’n’ Roll Call’. Then came the famous ‘The Ying Tong Song’, still popular today, so much so it’s the ring tone on my mobile.

Another lasting friendship for over fifty years was with Sir George Martin. George was best man at Spike’s second marriage, to Paddy, and Spike was godfather to George’s son Giles, not that you would know. He was a very bad godfather and when I reminded him of this he’d say, ‘I know, Norm, but Gentle George [Spike’s favourite name for George] will forgive me. I just forget and I’m getting to be an old man.’ He wasn’t an old man until the last two years of his life when his body started to fail him. He was just an old fake. And Gentle George always forgave him. For Spike, Gentle George could do no wrong. In the late Sixties I’d just taken over as Spike’s manager and Spike was going to a recording session with him. I hadn’t then met George. In my green years and trying to be efficient, I told Spike that I hadn’t seen a contract for the recording session. Very indignantly, Spike replied, ‘I don’t need a contract with George. He’s my friend,’ and for the rest of their working lives together it remained so.

The early Sixties had established Spike as a writer with The Goon Show and his first poetry book, Silly Verse for Kids, with the inevitable plethora of fans turning up at the studios and, of course, fan letters. One from Alan (Groucho) Matthews led to another fifty-year friendship. He and Spike corresponded until about two years before Spike’s death. And to this day I still see him.

Also in the late Fifties Spike had flown to Australia to see his mother and father and while he was there he went to the theatre to see Barry Humphries in his one-man show. He never forgot that wonderful performance. Long before Dame Edna was even thought about. My memory of Barry was when he came to Orme Court to see Spike in 1966/1967. He was so flamboyantly dressed – that picture of him waiting in the hall to go upstairs to see Spike still remains with me – tall, large black coat, which might have been a cloak, and wearing a fedora. After his visit I asked Spike, ‘What was that?’ Spike’s reply: ‘That was talent. You watch and wait, he’ll really hit the big time.’ How prophetic.

It was in 1959 that Spike had the most fun with Peter Sellers and the director Richard Lester. Richard made the first film in which Spike and Peter appeared together – The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film. Spike thought this young American director had the right idea about comedy. How many times did he relate to me, ‘Dick and Pete and I went into a field with a camera. Dick shot it and it was one of the best times of my life, free and easy, no worries. Just Pete and me.’ I heard the same story from Pete. No doubt they drove Dick Lester mad, but their memories were pure gold.

In 1961 Private Eye was founded by Richard Ingrams and after the magazine’s initial success Peter Cook became involved. They were two men Spike admired. It was inevitable that he would support them with spoof advertisements, jokes and cartoons. It was such a loss to Spike when Peter Cook died. ‘Of all of us,’ Spike said, ‘Peter was the most talented.’ In the early days Peter would come to the office and they would sit upstairs in Spike’s office chatting and laughing for hours though I remember quite clearly one day Spike saying to me, ‘Peter needs to watch it. He wanted to go out and have a drink. I told him not to start drinking at this time.’ It was four o’clock in the afternoon. What a tragedy he didn’t heed Milligan’s advice, all that wonderful talent wasted because of alcohol.

Richard, on the other hand, was so down to earth. I always found him to be such a gentleman. Quietly spoken, always looking something like a dishevelled retired Classics master from a public school. He looks forgetful but don’t be fooled: his mind is as incisive as a well-honed, old-fashioned razor.

How did Jimmy Verner survive? He spent seven years as an entrepreneur, taking Spike on tour with his one-man show. There were heartaches and people at the box office demanding their money back when Spike had done a ‘no show’, with Jimmy trying to keep the money and offering tickets for other performances. Then there were the tantrums when a false nose was missing from the prop basket. And yet, Jimmy recalls, ‘Underneath it all he was a good human being.’

Now, I have to explain at the outset that Peter Medak can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned. In this business you meet hundreds of people but there are very few ‘you would walk through fire for’. Peter said this of Spike, and I’m saying it of Peter. He directed Spike in Ghost in the Noonday Sun in 1973, and although the twelve-week filming in Kyrenia was a nightmare, with Peter Sellers behaving abominably, my memories are of the laughter between Spike and Peter Medak. Their friendship grew out of what can only be described as hell on location. Their respect and admiration for each other remained until the day Spike died. When it comes to Peter, I’m just biased.

The Sixties and Seventies saw a broadening of Spike’s remarkable and diverse talent. His first novel, Puckoon, published in 1963, sold over a million copies and was followed by his play The Bed-Sitting Room, later made into a film directed by Richard Lester. Then in 1964 came his memorable theatre performance in Son of Oblomov at the Comedy Theatre. This had been a failure as Oblomov at the Lyric, Hammersmith, but Spike rewrote it as Son of Oblomov. It ran for eighteen months and he ad libbed throughout each performance, and broke all box office records. A torrent of talent!

In 1971 at the age of fifty-three he wrote the first volume of his war memoirs Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall, followed by a further six volumes. Then came his first serious poetry book, numerous records and the first of the Q series for television. Also a milestone, on 30 April 1972, The Last Goon Show Of All was recorded at the Camden Theatre, at Spike’s insistence, because that is where most of the Goon Shows had been recorded.

This burgeoning period brought him many new admirers and some became friends. At times he drove the jovially philosophical Terry Wogan almost to despair, but I think nothing or nobody could do that, Terry has such a personality that his warmth and mischievous character will always have shone through anything that Milligan could have thrown at him. Spike also joined forces with Joanna Lumley and together they set about saving the animal world. He greatly admired Joanna and it is my regret that he didn’t live to see her successful fight for the Gurkhas. He would have been so proud of her and rightly so.

Spike’s talents have been applauded by some remarkable people. Alan J.W. Bell, producer and director of some of the most prestigious BBC television shows, directed him in There’s a Lot of It About, and one of the Q series. He remembers how hard Spike worked, as well as the laughter they shared. According to Alan, there were no tantrums, just laughter. I find that hard to believe – a TV series with no tantrums? Who is Alan talking about?

Dick Douglas-Boyd was the marketing director of Michael Joseph who published many of Spike’s books, including the seven volumes of his war memoirs. I think at first Dick was very apprehensive with Spike and didn’t know how to handle him. Mind you, who did? But as the working relationship progressed they found common ground, because they had both been through the war, and a friendship was built on mutual respect.

The fiercely intellectual Jonathan Miller, who takes no prisoners, directed Spike in Alice in Wonderland. Although he didn’t like Spike as a person I found his comment very illuminating. ‘His work is as important as The Pickwick Papers.’

Michael Palin was hooked on the Goon Shows as a schoolboy. He and Spike became friends and Michael has some wonderful memories of Spike. I recall a memory that Spike had of Michael. He was on holiday in Tunisia, nothing to do with the fact that the Monty Python team were filming Life of Brian there. Naturally, they met up and on his return to the office we exchanged the normal pleasantries: ‘Good hotel, food OK, wine lousy,’ he said. Then, ‘I met Michael Palin out there. You’d like him. He’s very funny, a warm person, and something unusual about him, he’s a good human being.’ It wasn’t until months later I discovered the whole team had been in Tunisia and that Spike had appeared in the film. This was so typical of Spike. Filming meant nothing to him – it was something to be dismissed but the fact that he had taken a liking to Michael Palin was the one thing he thought worth mentioning.

For Stephen Fry it was not just Spike’s originality that he so admired, it was ‘the fact that he was afraid of nobody. And the fact that he didn’t toady to anyone.’

I wanted to include Eddie Izzard in this book although he didn’t really know Spike, was neither a friend nor an acquaintance. But I wanted to know from Eddie, as a more recent newcomer, what he thought Spike’s legacy would be. I knew he had memories of Spike, but more importantly Spike had asked me whether I had seen Eddie perform. At that stage I hadn’t and told him so and Spike said, ‘Go and see him. Out of this new breed he’s going to be the one that will last. He’s original and going to be around a long time. Most of the others are flash in the pan compared to him.’

So, Memories of Milligan, some good, some not so good, but that’s what he was like – the little girl with the curl. When he was good he was very, very good but when he was bad he was horrid. But aside from all this was his unbridled talent – an original, a free spirit. He genuinely didn’t care what people thought of him and if he didn’t like someone he would dismiss them. He just didn’t want to know anything about them.

Within an hour he could be mean, cruel, hateful and despicable, then generous, compassionate and understanding – a most complex man. In business he could betray me without a second thought and I would remind him, ‘I’m not your enemy.’ A typical Milligan reply would be, ‘Well, don’t act like one.’ And yet in my personal life he was a true friend. He was always there when I needed him and he never let me down.

Life is not so much fun without him in my world. I miss the old sod.

Norma Farnes, 2010

Desmond Milligan

Desmond Patrick Milligan, born 3 December 1925 in Rangoon, younger brother of Terence Alan Milligan, born 16 April 1918 in Ahmednagar, Poona. Simple, straightforward names, but this is the Milligan family where nothing is simple or straightforward.

Their father, Captain Leo Alphonso Milligan, was a charming, eccentric Irishman. Their mother, Florence Mary Winifred Kettleband, was a resolute Englishwoman, strong and determined. She ruled her family with military precision. Both were from military backgrounds. For years I had assumed they had married in England, Leo had been posted to India, and they had gone there as bride and groom. The reality was rather different. Florence was taken to India where her father had been posted. It was 1901 and she was eight years old. Leo was posted to India in 1912, arriving in Kirkee, where the Kettlebands lived and where their romance was about to begin.

When he was in England Leo had developed a love for the theatre. So much so, he changed his name to Leo Gann and had reasonable success appearing in the Imperial Palace in Canning Town, doing a soft-shoe shuffle dance, and a song and dance act. It was inevitable when he arrived in India he would form a repertory company and he performed at regimental balls and concert parties. It was in St Ignatius church he heard Florence playing the organ and singing in the church choir. She had a trained contralto voice and Leo was hooked – ‘I fell in love with her voice.’ Together they formed a double act ‘entertaining the troops’ performing at the Poona Gymkhana Club. They were both accomplished horse riders, and Leo became riding master and gave instruction on equestrian drill. One can only imagine what a wonderful life they had together.

Leo was a wonderful storyteller, always insisting the stories were truthful, until one day, as a boy of about seven years old, Spike caught his father telling lies about a tiger he had shot. He said to Spike, ‘Now listen, son, would you rather have the boring truth or an exciting lie?’ For me, this sums up Leo more than any of his stories. No wonder Spike spent the rest of his life embellishing the truth.

In her later years I grew very fond of ‘Grandma’, as I always called Florence. On her yearly visit to England (from Australia, where the family, apart from Spike, relocated) she would stay with me for a week. It was always a joy. We would go out to dinner in the evenings and she would relate stories of her time in India with ‘her boys’. The wine would be consumed, sometimes a little too much, and I do recall one evening in the Trattoo restaurant the resident pianist was Alan Clare, a very accomplished pianist and composer. In the middle of one of her stories she suddenly stopped talking and shouted over to Alan, ‘Alan, you played a bum note there.’ Then went back to telling her story. That memory will stay with me forever.

A devout Roman Catholic, when she was staying with me I had to drive her to confession on a Saturday evening. I once asked, ‘Grandma, why do you still go to confession, what do you have to confess at your age?’ (She was about 83 or 84 years old at the time.) She replied in that strong voice, ‘Norma, please don’t you get like Terry.’ She was very artistic, she made beautiful clowns, hand sewn in bright coloured velvets, large pointed hats and stars for their eyes. The one I have sitting on a chair in my office is 3 feet high. She named him ‘Nong’, from Spike’s poem On the Ning Nang Nong. On one of her visits she knitted a beautiful white rabbit and gave it to me on the last night of her visit, attaching this little gift card (above right).

And Grandma, I miss you very much.

In one of our early conversations Spike told me he had a brother, Desmond, who lived in Australia. He extolled Desmond’s virtues, explaining that he was a great artist and his portraits were worthy of being hung in the National Portrait Gallery. How was I to know that the rest of the family called Desmond Patrick, or that, while Desmond called his brother Spike, the rest of the family called Spike Terry?

I only discovered this idiosyncrasy when Spike was going to Australia and I received a phone call from Grandma Milligan. ‘Will you please tell Terry that Patrick will pick him up at the airport. He needs to know the flight number and time of arrival.’ Who was she talking about? Confused? Well, it gets better.

Desmond was married to Nadia Joanna Klune who was born on 21 May 1932 in Alexandria, Egypt. Their son Michael Sean was born on 10 December 1965 in Sydney, Australia. According to Spike, apart from his own mother’s ‘curries’, Nadia’s mother’s cooking – Mama Klune’s – had to be tasted to be believed. He went on about it for years, and finally on my first trip to Australia with him we were invited to Mama Klune’s for dinner – a ‘welcome home, Spike’ dinner. I asked why ‘welcome home’ when he had never lived there and I was told, ‘Well, everyone thinks he lives here.’ And that was that; total acceptance. But I wouldn’t let it go. ‘Spike, you have never lived here. How can it be a “welcome home” dinner?’ His reply has stayed with me for nearly forty years. ‘Norm, your home is always where your mother is.’ Some twenty years later I was going to Yorkshire for the weekend, and although I hadn’t lived there for over thirty years, I said to Spike, ‘I’m going home for the weekend.’ He had remembered. ‘There, I told you so. Your home is always where your mother is.’

So, welcome home dinner or what, Spike couldn’t wait to taste Mama Klune’s food again. No one had prepared me for the torrent of languages, a baffling clamour of conversation in three or four tongues, and the realisation that everyone seemed to understand except me. As we sat around the table, Mama Klune spoke to Nadia in Greek and Nadia answered in Greek. Michael answered in English, while Papa Klune spoke to Nadia in Italian and she answered in Italian. Nadia spoke to Michael in Greek, but again he answered in English. In all, Nadia spoke five languages fluently: Greek, Italian, French, Arabic and English. I asked Michael if he spoke these languages as he seemed to understand what was being said. ‘Oh yes, but I was born in Australia so I speak Australian.’ It was a wonderful evening, Nadia acting as interpreter for me. There was a lot of laughter. Spike was right, the food was excellent, and so I was catapulted into the Milligan family.

DESMOND: Terry is almost eight years older than me, but the story I heard as a boy, over and over again, was the calamity of his birth. Of course, it had to be in the middle of a storm and the nearest transport to get my mother to the military hospital in Ahmednagar was a bullock wagon taxi called a dhumni. The hospital was several miles away and the roads were rough dirt tracks. She had started in labour, she was in great pain. When they arrived at the hospital the duty nurse had to unlock the door, that’s how small the hospital was. By this time my mother was in the advanced stage of labour and when the battery doctor arrived – Dr Anderson – she screamed at him, ‘Get out of here! I never want to see another man in my life again.’ Dr Anderson replied, ‘Don’t blame me, Florrie. I didn’t do it.’ So, at 3.30 p.m. on 16 April 1918, screaming his lungs out, Terence Alan Milligan was born, all 8½ lbs of him. From now on I’ll give him his nickname, Spike. He had been given this name when he was in the army because he was so thin.

Apart from hearing the story of his birth a thousand times, we had a wonderful happy childhood. My father had been transferred to the Third Field Brigade Port Defence in Rangoon, Burma. I was born there in December 1925. We had a big house within the military grounds, and we had servants, including a gardener. My earliest memory of Spike was in 1930 when Rangoon was struck by a huge earthquake, the epicentre being in the north. It was evening and after the earthquake my mother and father had been expecting a major riot and looting. I remember, as we sat down to dinner, Dad had on his pistols. Mum had her .44 Winchester rifle alongside her, and Spike, being Spike, was upstairs having a cold bath. He too had a pair of pistols on the chair alongside the bath. As the first shocks arrived Father Milligan reached over and grabbed me. ‘Everybody outside,’ he shouted and rushed into the garden.

Everything was shaking. The noise was terrifying, added to by all the birds being shaken out of the trees. Up in the bathroom the double doors shook violently. Spike thought that rioters were breaking in and shouted, ‘Koowan Hai? Koowan Hai?’ (Who’s there?) Of course, no reply, so he picked up his pistols and fired through the doors. He soon realised it was an earthquake, threw a towel around himself and ran to join us in the garden.

The shocks subsided but the town to our north, by the epicentre, was totally destroyed. I was looking over my father’s shoulder directly at the Golden Shwe Dagon Pagoda. It was all illuminated and as I looked the umbrella crown at the top broke off and crashed to the ground. It contained a casket of jewels placed there by the last king of Burma in 1930. It’s extraordinary, but it was not put back until 1960, and I wondered if the jewels got put back up. Lucky for us this did not happen during the monsoon season. In the East, when the rainy season moves in, boy, does it rain. It’s like a solid wall of water hitting the ground, and it goes on and on. All social activity comes to a halt. The Burmese priests, called pungees, walk through it with giant umbrellas, in their saffron-coloured costumes. Then when the rain stopped, everything grew like crazy. All the little creatures came out of hiding: snakes, lizards, little furry things and insects by the million. Gorgeous butterflies and more . . . but back to the earthquake. There were many aftershocks over the following days, but it is surprising how quickly life returns to normality. Mum and Spike were soon playing on our tennis court or going on outings with his school, as if nothing had happened.

NORMA: In spite of the age difference, did you still play together as children?

DESMOND: Oh yes, life for us kids was heaven. Spike went to St Paul’s High School, run by the Brothers de La Salle, and I went to a tiny school run by Catholic nuns in the convent grounds. Father, as a military man, taught us to play soldiers and drill with our toy guns. We would have battles in the bits of jungle and three lakes that surrounded us. We made a flag and we called ourselves ‘The Lamanian Army’. Spike wrote an anthem, ‘Fun in the Sun’. We recruited three soldiers, Sergeant Taylor’s son, Haveldar’s son and our servant’s son – wait for it – Hari Krishna. It was here that the fun started, the lampooning of people and places where Spike’s stretching of reality began. He decided we needed a proper trench. We dug a big one right in the middle of Mum and Dad’s garden. My God, were we reprimanded.

Even the word Goon goes back to when we were reading Popeye cartoon strips in the English papers that we received. There were some blob-like characters in the strip that were called Goons, and that is where the word came from. When we were fooling around, we would impersonate these characters as we saw them. We would literally become them. I suppose one could say it was the beginning of The Goon Show. The world of the Raj gave us so much material for fun. For example, there was an Indian businessman who had dealings with Dad’s battery. His name was Percy Lalkakaa. He bought himself a bright red motorcar. There were very few privately owned motor cars in this little town at the time. But a bright red one! Wow! So Spike (we stilled called him Terry) wrote a song about him and his car. It went something like this:

Oh Percy Lalkakaa in his red motorcar,

Oh Percy Lalkakaa we see him from afar.

Oh Percy Lalkakaa he comes to see Papa,

He comes to see Papa in his red motorcar . . .

We loved the lakes that surrounded us. In the heat of summer they dried up and grass grew across them. The villagers grazed their cattle on them, but when the thundering monsoons arrived the lakes filled to the top. Then Spike came into his own. He would persuade his school friends to play truant and swim in the Chorcien lakes which weren’t exactly healthy, and Spike would develop severe tropical fevers. But he still kept on doing it.

Nothing daunted Spike. He decided to build a machan – a tree platform for shooting big game – but this one was to be in our garden. A homemade ladder gave access to the platform. I would dress up as a tiger and Hari Krishna as a deer. Spike would always have the toy gun and he would fire at us. We spent many happy hours playing this game and with all the kites we made. Spike always drew funny faces on his, and then we would vie with each other who could draw the funniest face.

Spike was about twelve when he joined the 14th Machine Gun Company as a cadet and drove Mum mad. He would dismantle a Vickers .303 machine gun and reassemble it about a hundred times. Possibly to stop this continuous practice Dad bought him a banjo and undoubtedly this started him off on his musical career, and from then on music was the order of the day.

Entertainment came right to our front door – snake charmers, dancers, the shoe repair man (the Mooche Wallah), the barber (the Nappie Wallah). There was no television or radio so as a family we entertained ourselves. Dad formed a concert party that toured the army camps performing everything from comedy sketches to Shakespeare. The Milligan boys were drawn into productions so this was a very good grounding for Spike.

But time was running out. The Great Depression had struck, the size of the army was cut down and the Milligan family came to London, in winter 1933, when Spike was 15 years old. I remember we were returning to England from Bombay on the SS Kaiser-I-Hind. A makeshift canvas swimming pool had been erected on the deck. I was about six or seven years old and was just learning to swim, or drown as Spike put it. I jumped into the pool and panicked, I was saved only by the squeaky high-pitched voice of a stick-thin four-year-old girl, saying to my father, ‘He’s fallen in the water!’ That memory never left Spike and it would later become one of the most famous catch phrases in The Goon Show.

NORMA: I never believed Spike when he told me that story. You have to remember, he would make up a story, swear it was the truth, then say, ‘Well, it made you laugh, didn’t it, so what the hell?’ The child is father to the man. [And although Desmond has confirmed that it was true, don’t forget that he is from the same stock.]

DESMOND: Returning to England in winter – cold, drizzling and windswept, a shock for us colonial-borns. Spike could never get used to the grey skies and drizzle. He missed all the magnificent colours of India. No more big houses with servants. Suddenly, Mum had to do everything. Cooking, cleaning, shopping etc. and we were stuck in one of those long lines of two-storey houses. And in London there were line after line of them going on for miles.

Spike wrote a poem, ‘Catford 1933’:

The light creaks

and escalates to rusty dawn

The iron stove ignites the freezing room.

Last night’s dinner cast off

popples in the embers.

My mother lives in a steaming sink.

Boiled haddock condenses on my plate

Its body cries for the sea.

My father is shouldering his braces like a rifle,

and brushes the crumbling surface of his suit.

The Daily Herald lies jaundiced on the table.

‘Jimmy Maxton speaks in Hyde Park’,

My father places his unemployment cards

in his wallet – there’s plenty of room for them.

In greaseproof paper, my mother wraps my

banana sandwiches.

It’s 5.40. Ten minutes to catch that

last workman train.

Who’s the last workman? Is it me? I might be famous.

My father and I walk out and are eaten by

yellow freezing fog.

Somewhere, the Prince of Wales

and Mrs Simpson are having morning tea in bed.

God Save the King.

But God help the rest of us.

We were no longer the Burragh Sahibs. We were just one of the crowd. It was a let-down for us kids, but we quickly adjusted to the working-class district we were living in. Dad was out of work for six months. Finally, an old army buddy got him a job with the American Associated Press in the news division. He became photo news editor in a very short time. Spike had odd jobs of no consequence, but was soon making his way with the local band groups, joining ‘Tommy Brettell’s New Ritz Revels’ playing at St Cyprian’s Hall, Brockley. By this time Spike had mastered four instruments: the banjo, guitar, double bass and finally the trumpet. So he was well in with the young band scene. But we spent lots of time together during the long cold winter nights, drawing everything you could imagine. I suppose this got me on the road to being an artist.

NORMA: [I told Desmond the remark Spike had made regarding the standard of his paintings, that they should be hung in the National Portrait Gallery. Desmond told me he had painted an extremely good portrait of Spike, parcelled it up and posted it to him from Australia. Spike opened it and returned it just as it had arrived; no acknowledgement, no comment, nothing. Desmond was quite clearly hurt by this appalling behaviour, but all he said was, ‘My brother at his worst.’]

DESMOND: As we became adults we tended to go our own ways. Spike was finishing High School and mixing with his mates, and then things changed dramatically. Mum, Dad and I emigrated to Australia and Spike stayed in England. He was just getting established, had written the first Goon Show, but was planning to follow – the rest is history. Of course, he visited us once, sometimes twice a year, and when he was with Mum, up at Woy Woy, he was always so happy. He did the odd television and radio show. That’s why so many people think he was an Australian. We wrote to each other very frequently. We worked together and I illustrated a couple of his books. We had our ups and downs as brothers.

NORMA: I’m sure you know that your brother, like your father, made up wonderful stories and he would swear they were the truth just to make you laugh. This is a wonderful opportunity for me to find out if the story about your father is true. Spike told me his name was to be Percy Alexander but he was baptised Leo Alphonso. The story goes that, on reaching the cathedral, the priest officiating at the baptism suggested he should be named after popes or saints, hence Leo Alphonso.

DESMOND: It does feel like something my brother could have written, but it’s absolutely true.

NORMA: When did you become aware that Spike was famous?

DESMOND: I remember going to local music gigs to listen to Spike playing his trumpet and realising he was mixing with a different set of people: artists and musicians. But I think my first visit to a recording of a Goon Show – to hear the laughter and applause – and thinking ‘my brother wrote that’. I knew then.

Eric Sykes

‘A piece of gold in showbusiness’ – Spike’s description of Eric Sykes, and to know him is to know the meaning of the word courage.

Early in the Seventies, Spike told me how Eric had tackled a burglar in his house and pinned him against the wall until the police arrived. ‘You know, Norm, Eric has the courage of a lion.’

As Eric’s manager for nearly thirty years I know him to have a different kind of courage. As most people are aware, Eric has been deaf for over forty years, but for the last fifteen he has been partially sighted until now he is almost blind. To a lesser mortal this would herald the end of six decades of a truly great laughter maker – director, writer and comedy genius – but not Eric. When Sir Peter Hall asked him to appear in his production of Molière’s The School for Wives in 1997, Eric was hesitant, until Peter mentioned the word vaudevillian. ‘Molière was a great lover of vaudeville and you are the last of the vaudevillians.’

Eric was hooked. He loved working with Peter and enjoyed the experience immensely. Then some years later Peter was back. He wanted Eric to play Adam in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. ‘That’s a bridge too far for me,’ Eric said, but I knew the persuasive charm of Peter, who invited us to lunch. My money was on Peter.

‘Do you know, Eric, Shakespeare appeared in only one of his plays and he chose the role of Adam. Don’t tell me you can’t do it, because I know you can.’

I encouraged Eric. ‘You have to do it. Shakespeare, for the first time, at eighty. After all these years we will be legitimate!’ Then came a gesture that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Sir Peter, the greatest authority on Shakespeare in the world today, recorded the part of Adam on to a cassette to enable Eric to learn the correct inflections. In Bath, on opening night in 2003, only one thing marred the evening for me – Spike was not sitting beside me to watch ‘his old mate’ perform Shakespeare. He would have been so proud. But I have no doubt he would be up there telling God, or anybody who would listen to him, ‘That’s my old mate. He has the courage of a lion.’

ERIC: I was in bed in hospital awaiting a major operation on my ear, and while I was enjoying the comfort of a proper bed and listening to the radio I heard a comedy half-hour. It had me laughing and I was so taken by it I promptly wrote a letter of appreciation, a whole two pages telling the writers what was admirable about it. It was a new type of comedy, and it was breaking new ground. Hearing it for the first time was like walking through clear air after being stranded in a fog, infinitely laughable and funny.

Next day I had the operation. It was a long job – about four hours. I was sitting up in bed with my head swathed in bandages like the Maharajah of Shepherd’s Bush. The door of my room opened and the nurses were coming in and out in a constant stream and I was coming in and out of semi-consciousness, and I saw two figures, little white faces peering at me, making ‘Psst Psst’ noises. I thought, ‘What the hell’s that?’ Then the matron came in and hauled them out. I learned later their reason for being there was to thank me for the letter I had written. It was Spike Milligan and Larry Stephens. I had briefly met Spike at the Grafton Arms and he had impressed me as a man with comic ideas, exploding from his mind like an inexhaustible Roman candle.

We met later and that meeting proved to be the seed which turned out, over the years, to become Hyde Park. I came to know Spike fairly well and a few weeks after that we rented an office, five floors above a greengrocer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush. It’s difficult to believe we turned up every day in suits and collars and ties. We were almost a registered company and trying to behave like one. Spike and I, with Frankie Howerd, named the company Associated London Scripts [ALS]. The aim was to corner the market in scriptwriters. That office over the greengrocer’s shop saw probably some of the happiest days of my life. I was newly married and lived in Holland Villas Road which was just round the corner. It suited me down to the ground, and the office became the centre of attraction for many jewels of our profession – Gilbert Harding, Irene Handl and her two pet dogs, Gretzel and Pretzel. They were little things, one under each of her arms, and we could hear her stopping on every landing to catch her breath, or possibly it was the dogs that were tired.

NORMA: It was such a pleasure to see Eric’s enjoyment, recalling the obviously happy times he shared with Spike. They lunched together every day at Bertorelli’s which was just across the road. Shepherd’s Bush was a busy metropolis and crossing the road was hazardous so they took it in turns to limp, and the other one to help the limper across the road. The traffic always stopped and as soon as they got to the other side they marched to their lunch like members of the Household Cavalry. Next door to Bertorelli’s was a funeral director’s where, in a now legendary scene, Spike knocked on the door and then lay on the pavement and shouted ‘Shop!’

Eric at that time was writing Educating Archie and Spike, who had now progressed from Crazy People to The Goon Show, was busy with his new creation, but they were still in the same office, sitting back to back. Spike had a typewriter and Eric was usually on the telephone. They had a ‘hilarious time’, but you can’t spend all your life laughing. Spike was writing a Goon Show a week and the pressure was taking its toll. By this time, Eric noticed the change in Spike. He was very drawn and tired and he asked Eric if he would write some of the Goon Shows with him.

ERIC: I looked at him and I thought, ‘Yes, because otherwise Spike’s going to end up as the youngest death in the graveyard.’ So we wrote and it was amicable and I saw the colour come back into his cheeks.

But when you get two highly combustible people working together there’s invariably an explosion, and it came one day when Spike and I disagreed over one word. It was either ‘the’ or ‘and’. I said it was import ant to put ‘the’ in and Spike said it wasn’t, and I said it was. This got so heated that Spike picked up a paperweight and threw it at me. Now, had I been prepared I would have ducked, in which case I would be in the graveyard, but I didn’t. I stood there, frozen, and it missed me by about a foot and went through the window – remember we were on the fifth floor – to smash itself onto the pavement. When I collected myself I walked straight downstairs, picked up the pieces, came straight back and put them on the desk in front of him and I said something very banal, which was, ‘Remember what day this was.’ It was like a B-movie. It was silly, it’s like a sentence that would go down in history and he was a bit sheepish at the same time. Also he was wearing an open-neck shirt and I saw these red spots on his chest and neck that I hadn’t seen before and I realised that his manic depression was something physical. And so I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, Spike. You write one week and I’ll write another.’

So for a few Goon Shows that’s how we wrote, until one Sunday I went to the recording of one of my scripts and they were standing round looking gloomy, the three of them. Peter Eton was the producer and I said, ‘What’s happened?’ And Peter said, ‘It’s not funny,’ and the three of them were mute – Spike, Harry and Peter. Suddenly, I lost my rag and I said, ‘Listen! Whatever happens, it’s too late now to do anything about it so you’ll have to go on and do it tonight. And I’ll tell you something. I’ll never set foot in a Goon Show studio again.’ And with that I made my exit, better than made by Laurence Olivier.

Every Sunday night after the show we used to eat at the Czech restaurant in Edgware Road. I went and had dinner alone and when I came out a taxi pulled up and Peter Sellers got out. He came over and he was actually crying and he said, ‘That’s the funniest show we’ve ever done,’ and he flung his arms round me. Me being a Lancashire lad, thick and stubborn, said, ‘But remember what I said. I’ll never set foot in a Goon Show studio again.’ And I never did and I’ve never forgiven myself for that.

Spike and Peter, the three of us, remained friends after that. It was a friendship and I was relieved not to have the responsibility of writing the Goon Shows. After all, I was only copying Spike’s style and I didn’t want to paint the shoes of a choirboy on a Michelangelo painting. But when I think back to those days when we rented that office in Shepherd’s Bush, I think it was so natural. Spike and I were drawn together as if we’d been brothers. We just went together like bacon and eggs.

NORMA: Eric and Spike shared an office for fifty years. For Eric the Goon Shows are ‘golden nuggets that will last for eternity’. And thanks to Mary Kalemkerian at BBC Radio 7, Eric’s favourite radio station, they are still played frequently. Surprisingly, Eric admitted that he had not been the butt of Spike’s outbursts. He explained that from the moment they had first met it was understood tacitly that he was the governor. There was no way Spike would lose his stripes by behaving badly in front of him and he never expected it of him.

ERIC: That side of Spike had to be borne on your poor young shoulders, but for all those readers who are starting to grieve, you survived and so have I.

In a way I was a bit strait-laced and Spike was free of his corsets. I remember we went from Shepherd’s Bush, moved up into Cumberland House in Kensington. This was before the hotel was built opposite and I remember the Aldermaston marchers were marching past. Spike and I were both going through somebody else’s scripts and Spike looked up, saw them through the window and he dashed out and joined Father Huddleston and Michael Foot at the head of the procession and he walked with them to Trafalgar Square. I thought, ‘What a cheeky sod. Those poor devils have walked for miles and I bet when he gets to Trafalgar Square he’ll be breathing heavily as if he’s done the trip.’

Then from Kensington we moved to Orme Court. We spent the rest of our days as writers. And Spike was very fortunate – he met you. You and Spike came together when you were a green shoot and Spike was on the bottom rung of the ladder, and you moulded each other into a whole. You became his manager, his mentor and, if the occasion demanded it, his mother.

Spike led the life of a slightly retarded gypsy. He would sometimes lock himself away in his room with a notice on his door not to come in, but that’s polite. It was F.O. When you saw that on the door you knew that to enter you were taking your life, and even the building, in your hands. As far as writing was concerned I had gone my way and he’d gone his, but we used to get up to some real pranks. I remember one day Spike’s secretary came in with an envelope addressed to me. Our offices were only across the landing, five paces. I slit open the letter and it said, ‘Dear Eric, where do you fancy going for lunch?’ And I got my secretary to type ‘Dear Spike, I think Bertorelli’s would be very nice. But it’ll have to be about 2 p.m. Sincerely, Eric.’ And that was delivered and his secretary came back again with another letter. ‘Eric, why 2 p.m.? Sincerely, Spike.’ And I wrote ‘Because I’m in the middle of something and I don’t want to break the thread. Sincerely, Eric.’ Then the door opened and Spike came in and said, ‘We’ve got to go now.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘Because I’m running out of paper.’ And so we both went to lunch.

On another occasion he came into my room and he was stark naked. He was carrying a script and he put the script in front of me and said, ‘What do you think of that?’ and I read it. ‘Well, that line can come out there,’ and I made certain criticisms. ‘The end is fine like that.’ Then Spike said, ‘You bastard! Here I am bollock-naked and you haven’t mentioned it.’ ‘Yes, but you asked me to read the script, not examine you.’

NORMA: Eric explained that Spike was ‘driven by his whims’ and could be unreliable. He remembered once Spike was in the car when his first wife (he thinks it was his first wife, not the one he eventually ended up with) was driving and they were having quite a row. They were driving in the Bayswater Road and Spike had had enough, opened the door and got out. They were doing forty miles an hour. That could hardly be called the action of a responsible person. Eric also remembered one time when Spike was due to appear on stage.

ERIC: I think with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. Something upset him and he locked himself into his dressing room. They couldn’t get him out and he wouldn’t go back on stage. This again doesn’t stoke up a CV of reliability. Peter and Harry had to go on to fill in. It’s very difficult to tell an audience that Spike will not be appearing as he’s locked himself in his dressing room, because that would take away some of the steam.

Although he was unreliable, he was trustworthy. And I say this, because if you left a thousand pounds on your desk and he came in, it would still be there when he left. And also you could leave your children with him knowing he would enthral them and entertain them with his stories and poems. Which reminds me of a hilarious Christmas Eve. His wife had left him and rather than spend a lonely festive season we invited him to spend Christmas with us in Weybridge, which he accepted because he had no intention of cooking the turkey. The four children, two of ours, Kathy and Susan, and his two, Laura and Sean, got on like a house on fire. They were all the same age, five or six years old.

Spike was the sole organiser. It was pitch black and my wife Edith had given him empty jam jars that he filled with candles. He dotted them all around the lawn, those flickering little lights. He told the children they were fairies, then speaking through a tube from the Hoover, through a little gap in the window behind the curtains, he said, ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! This is Father Christmas speaking. Now where exactly are you staying tonight?’ and they were all whispering they’d heard Father Christmas himself and he was coming to see them. Spike’s energy was boundless. He was creating things for the children and I realised he’d hit the bullseye. I envied him this because I was less attentive to my brood, I knew Edith would bring them up properly. The children loved it. It was a very happy Christmas Eve.

We saw the children into bed and filled their stockings. As usual on the Christmas morning Edith and I, and the four children, were up early and we were all unwrapping our presents. I had lit the fire so it was cosy, with a big cardboard box to put the wrapping in, but where was Spike? What had happened? Had he left? We went up and searched all the rooms. He wasn’t anywhere. Perhaps he’d been kidnapped, although I didn’t think he was worth a lot in those days. About 11.30 in the morning a rejuvenated Spike came into the room. He had locked himself in the attic and spent the night there so he wouldn’t be disturbed. I thought he had missed the best time of a child’s life, when they are opening their presents. It was rather typical of the man.

NORMA: One of the qualities Eric admired in Spike was his extraordinary generosity.

ERIC: He would give you his last halfpenny. If he saw what he thought was a cause he would probably mortgage his house in order to swell the charity coffers. He was a very generous man. If he saw a man limping in the street I would know he’d buy him a pair of shoes. He was impulsive – he lived on impulse half his life. Money didn’t mean anything to him. It ran through his fingers like lukewarm water.

NORMA: Eric spoke of Spike’s love of jazz and the wonderful times he spent at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club. It was a real home from home and he used to go there three or four nights a week. For both Spike and Eric, Ronnie was a hero.

ERIC: Spike was such a friend to Ronnie, and then came startling news in 1983 that Spike was getting married again and was about to move to the wilds of the country, temporarily at first in Ticehurst, then in Rye, East Sussex. Now, it is my belief that the Thames separates one part of London from the other and never the twain shall meet, and on this occasion Spike was in a foreign country miles out, so that his new-found wife had cut him off from all that was familiar and all that he loved, including his beloved Ronnie’s. And sadly I regret I never went to see him for the simple reason I didn’t have satnav or enough petrol to get there, but that’s where he ended his days. For me it was like I’d lost a brother.

NORMA: Spike once said to me, many years ago, ‘Eric had a sister in Hattie and I’ve got a brother in Eric.’ As Eric prepared to leave (to film an episode of Poirot with David Suchet, one of his favourite actors, he was so looking forward to working with him), I asked him if he had heard this quote. Such a look of sadness came over his face.

ERIC: Do you remember the story I told you at the beginning about Spike knocking on the funeral director’s door, shouting ‘Shop!’? I was lucky. It took fifty years for them to answer. I used to think, ‘When our time comes I hope we go together. I would hate to live in a world where he wasn’t.’

On 26 February 2002, one of the jewels fell from the comedy crown. It was the day Spike Milligan, with whom I’d shared an office for over fifty years, passed away. I use the phrase ‘passed away’ for that is exactly what he did. Spike will never die in the hearts of millions of us who were uplifted by his works. For me and you, Norma, he still prowls the building in unguarded moments. He will always be welcome. As Hattie was my sister, so he was my brother. Rest in peace, Spike, and say hello to Peter and Harry.

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson

On my way to meet Ray and Alan, I reflected on the early days at Orme Court. The building pulsated with talent: Spike, Eric Sykes, Johnny Speight, Terry Nation, Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock and his two scriptwriters – Ray and Alan – who played such an important part in making him the nation’s favourite comedian. At six foot four, Alan topped Ray by an inch. Not much else separated them.

The year was 1966, only a few months into my induction, and Milligan was having what I later termed a mini-tantrum. I hadn’t quite got used to ‘the wild Milligan’, in his own words. He had been working all day on a television script. After several re-writes and accompanying outbursts, heard by everyone in the building, the day’s work was thrown into the wastepaper basket. I heard him shout, ‘I’m gone. I’ve binned it. I didn’t realise I could be that unfunny.’ Over the years to come I must have heard that a thousand times.

The door banged as he charged out of No. 9. I retrieved his ‘unfunny’ efforts, as I would do many times, and tried to make sense of what he had written. It was late and I thought I was alone in the building when the door opened. Alan, who had obviously heard the outbursts, poked his head round the door. ‘Why don’t you go and work in a bank?’ After the tension of the day I burst out laughing. It was pure Hancock from The Blood Donor – that famous line, ‘I’ll do something else. I’ll be a traffic warden.’

A few days after Spike’s outburst he had another one. This time I was better prepared. There was the usual shouting and ranting. ‘Right,’ I told him. ‘I’m going home. I’ll deal with it all tomorrow.’ Unknown to me, Ray was in the hall and had heard what I said. He looked at me. ‘I think you’ll stay. You have that Scarlett O’Hara attitude.’

All the writers in Orme Court at that time had different methods of working. Ray and Alan were very disciplined. They would arrive every day about ten, have tea or coffee and start writing. Eric didn’t come to the office every day, mainly because he was appearing in theatre or filming. Johnny mostly wrote at home. He didn’t have an office in Orme Court but would visit Eric once or twice a week.

Spike wrote when he felt like writing. He was in the office every day. From the late Sixties right up until the early Eighties he had a bedroom in Orme Court and he would sleep there Monday to Friday. So if he felt like writing late into the afternoon this is what he would do, and work into the early hours of the morning.

I knew that meeting Ray and Alan again would be a pleasure. They’re both oenophiles and lovers of fine food, and I was so looking forward to seeing them. Then an embarrassing memory flashed through my mind. After Spike introduced me to Ray I said to him, ‘Isn’t he gorgeous? So beautifully dressed and so sophisticated.’ (Back in the Sixties I’d never heard of anyone having their shirts handmade by Turnbull & Asser.)

Spike wasn’t interested and I thought he hadn’t taken any notice of what I had said until later that evening, in a crowded hall when everyone was going home, he shouted, ‘Ray! She’s got hot pants for you!’ I could have killed him. I was young and naïve and I thought I would die of embarrassment.

I met Ray and Alan together at Ray’s beautiful Queen Anne house where he has collected one of the most extensive private libraries in the country. Peter Eton, a producer of The Goon Show, told me many years ago, ‘It’s one thing having a fine library, but unlike most people Ray has read every book in it.’ As the car turned into the drive Ray appeared in the doorway, a slight stoop now, but as charming as ever, and Alan with that wide, kind but knowing smile that always makes me feel he knows exactly what’s going on in my mind before I realise it myself. He has filled out over the years. Ray is as slim and gangly as ever – still beautifully dressed.

Equally well read, Alan is enormously knowledgeable on almost every subject. He is philosophical about most things, having suffered tuberculosis that after the war put him in a sanatorium, where he met another patient, Ray. Their sense of humour sparked a relationship that has survived the years and brought laughter to a nation, first with their memorable scripts for Tony Hancock and later with Steptoe and Son. It was after their enormous success that Alan decided he would retire – and did. Ray was disappointed, but this decision never impaired their friendship which, to me, seemed to strengthen after they both tragically became widowers.

Ray showed me into the drawing room. There was a beautiful Christmas tree fully decorated. It was late February! ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘is the Christmas tree still here?’ Ray’s reply: ‘It’s so lovely, I didn’t want to take it down.’ Alan didn’t seem to think there was anything extraordinary about this. Enter the world of Galton and Simpson. And believe me you have to be sharp to live in it. Alan has a phenomenal memory and was in no doubt when they had first met Spike.

ALAN: We hadn’t been in the business very long when we went to a Goon Show recording, about 1953. We would be in our early twenties and like almost everyone else in that age group we were great fans. Someone introduced us to him and we were really thrilled. We thought no more about it. At the time we were working from my mother’s house in Mitcham. Months later, probably in 1954, the phone rang.

‘Spike Milligan here.’ Christ! Spike Milligan! What’s he want with us? What he wanted was to find out whether we had an agent. No, we hadn’t. ‘Well then,’ said Spike, ‘Eric Sykes and I haven’t got one either and we are being picked on by an agency called Kavanagh’s.’ That was the big showbusiness scriptwriting agency.

Spike said he and Eric were looking around to find writers who were still free from agents so they could team up and form a group as a bulwark against being picked off. We were obviously flattered that they had even considered us. We went to meet them at this really dreadful office above a greengrocer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush. We were the new boys on the block so we listened and then said, ‘Yeah. We’ll come in with you.’

Finally, after a couple more meetings we had a main meeting to decide on the set-up. It was agreed we needed a secretary, someone to organise the office. We said we knew a girl who was doing our typing – very efficient. Beryl Vertue. It was agreed we should approach her. Well, she said, she had a good job in advertising and to leave she’d need twelve pounds a week. ‘Gawd Almighty!’ said Spike. ‘Twelve pounds a week!’ Wait a minute, we pointed out, that’s only three pounds a week each. ‘That’s true,’ they agreed. So Beryl came on board.

[Beryl Vertue later formed her own company producing successful films and television series, including Men Behaving Badly.]

What were we going to call ourselves? I suggested Associated British Scripts. Fine! But the Board of Trade said we couldn’t have that name. What about Associated London Scripts? Yeah. We could have that. And that’s how it all started. I think our first client was a man called Lew Schwartz, sent by Dennis Main Wilson or somebody like that from the BBC. Frankie Howerd got a script from someone called Johnny Speight and suggested he should go and meet the lads above the greengrocer’s shop. He was the next one in. Then there were lots of others – Terry Nation who invented the Daleks, and his mate from Wales, Dick Barry. It gradually filled up from there. Ray can add to that I’m sure.

RAY: Well, I don’t know about adding to it. I agree with most of it, but I don’t think we were as unknown as you have said. I don’t think Spike would have bothered with us if we had been that unknown. But that wasn’t the first time we met Spike. I think it was at his house. He called us and we went to meet him. That lovely man Larry Stephens was there [he wrote some of the Goon Shows with Spike]. They were obviously sending us up like mad because they both pretended to be drug addicts. Do you remember this, Alan?

ALAN: No, I don’t.

RAY: I think the real reason Spike invited us over was to see whether we would contribute or write one of the Arthur’s Inn scripts [a successful radio series].

ALAN: You’re going to get this all the time, Norma. In fact Gail Frederick [BBC] commissioned us to do two things. One was to write Arthur’s Inn and the other was to write a pilot for Wilfred Pickles. We found out afterwards that there was never going to be a pilot for a Wilfred Pickles sitcom. Gail was just giving us a chance to earn some money.

[They wrote an episode for Arthur’s Inn and had Graham Stark playing Sir Humphrey Planner, a Shakespearean actor.]

RAY: But Spike must have been writing it.

ALAN: Maybe. I don’t know. I know Sid Colin, a radio scriptwriter, was involved with it. [Colin co-wrote some of the Educating Archie scripts with Eric Sykes. He was also a brilliant jazz guitarist and composer.] That was long before we had the meeting above the greengrocer’s shop. We started in the business at the end of 1951, so it must have been just before Hancock’s Half Hour started. And we wrote at my mother’s place, but after the meeting we travelled to the greengrocer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush every day. We had a room on the fourth floor. Spike and Eric worked on the floor above us and Beryl had a room to herself. We stayed there until 1957. We needed to move to more salubrious offices and I think it was Stanley Dale who found a block on the ground floor of Cumberland House in Kensington High Street.

RAY: They were really prestigious. And we occupied a large part of the ground floor. Two property dealers, Jack Rose and his brother, bought the property then discovered that we were on the ground floor and paying only eight quid a week rent. Jack didn’t like that. He was living with his wife and children in a beautiful flat on the fourth floor. He used to bash into our office unannounced and say, ‘You’d better get used to the idea. I’m going to get all of you out of here.’ We became quite friendly with the guy. I used to go up to his flat – really beautiful – and have a drink with him. He never mentioned getting us out of the building then. He wanted to talk about laughter, but his wife only wanted to talk about somebody’s barmitzvah she was arranging and whether she should put so and so next to Charlie Clore or whoever, or perhaps on second thoughts it would be better to keep them apart, so on and so on. He ignored her and kept on talking to me about humour. He and his brother wrote a book about how to be property dealers.

Then one day he came into our office and said, ‘Right! Come along! Put your coats on. I’m going to show you something.’ We asked, ‘What’s all this about?’ ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’m going to show you something.’ We followed him up Millionaires’ Row, across the Bayswater Road and into Orme Court. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘Number 9. It’s the only one that’s got planning permission for business use. During the Blitz everybody got bombed out of London and the City so this house is the only one along here that has got planning permission.’

He already had the key and took us all over the building. We could see it was a wonderful place. But how much? £26,000, he said. God Almighty! Where were we going to get £26,000? Don’t worry, he told us. He would get us a mortgage. And he did. So he had his wish – getting us out of Cumberland House – and the four of us owned No. 9. It was a great office. Still is.

NORMA: About early 1968 there was a problem when you, Johnny Speight and some others agreed to a deal, negotiated by Beryl, to join the Stigwood organisation. [Robert Stigwood was an enormously successful international impresario.]

RAY: We thought about buying Spike and Eric out, but what was the point? It would just be a drag so we sold out to Spike and Eric.

ALAN: They made an offer to us and we made a bigger counter-offer to them. But we realised it would be too much hassle, and they were staying in the building so we sold out to them. We’d bought it in 1961 for £26,000, between the four of us, and we sold our half for £52,000 in 1968.

RAY: I believe Eric owns the whole bloody lot now.

NORMA: He does. Spike decided to sell because he thought the place was filthy. He was having one of his bad times and had spent the weekend scouring the basement floor with Brillo pads . . .

RAY: . . . and on the Monday he told me he wanted to sell his half of the building. He said to me, ‘I’m nothing more than a fucking janitor.’

NORMA: Spike’s accountant and solicitor told him not to be a bloody fool, but he wouldn’t listen. He insisted on selling his half. I asked him plaintively, ‘But where will you go?’ He replied, ‘Go? What do you mean where will I go?’ I told him, ‘You’re selling the building. Where are you going to go?’ To which he replied, ‘Fucking marvellous! I bring you in and now you want to get rid of me!’ I told him, ‘Well, I wasn’t exactly in the gutter.’ [Ray and Alan laughed.] Spike asked, ‘Why would I want to move from here? As from today I’ll pay rent.’ He scowled at me and then said in exasperation, ‘Well, fuck off, all of you!’ So he stayed, and paid rent.

RAY: I’d like to explain about going to Stigwood. Beryl had overtures from him and most of us saw the sense of going with him. He wanted half the company, that’s all, but in return we would get very good offices at his place and benefit from all his connections. All the writers, with the exception of Eric and Spike, could see the sense in it. We took a poll and every one of them decided to go with Beryl to join Stigwood. We put it to Eric and Spike, but they said they weren’t interested. We knew that what Beryl was doing was the right thing because Stigwood had the money and the contacts to get our work sold to America.

[Beryl successfully negotiated the sale of Johnny Speight’s scripts of Till Death Us Do Part, and Galton and Simpson’s scripts of Steptoe and Son, to an American television network. Till Death became All in the Family and Steptoe became Sanford and Son.]

ALAN: I don’t think Spike was interested in the business side.

RAY: And he didn’t want to move out of the building. I remember a meeting of the writers’ co-operative. One day I said, ‘We haven’t had any meetings.’ So we looked at Spike and said, ‘We’d better have a workers’ meeting,’ and all the chairs were put out and all the writers came into our office. Spike was there but I don’t know if Eric was. The first question came from John Antrobus who was provoked by Johnny Speight. He wanted to know why we two, and Eric and Spike, didn’t pay rent while the other writers did. Spike walked out, slammed the door, went to his room and started to play his trumpet. That was really the end of the workers’ co-operative.

ALAN: First and only meeting.

NORMA: Why did he walk out?

ALAN: He was outraged at the effrontery and attitude. It’s the same attitude he adopted to you when you asked, ‘Where are you going to go?’ The cheek of it. Basically, his motives or morals were being questioned by a lot of idiots. We never had a row with Spike but I think we were very unsympathetic about his mental problems. We ignored them. When he threw a tantrum we’d tell him to fuck off. I suppose they were bipolar problems.

RAY: We didn’t really understand. My missus had clinical depression and I don’t think we had any sympathy for that sort of thing until then. Alan and I had spent three years in a bloody sanatorium with tuberculosis [that’s where they met Beryl]. People with colds and things – it was a case of ‘Piss off.’ We weren’t au fait with mental problems in those days.

ALAN: Spike used to lock himself away in his office and we let him get on with it.

RAY: Tantrums.

ALAN: We took the view that when he was ready he would come out. And, of course, that’s what happened. After two or three days he would come out as if nothing had happened. Others in the office would run round him like blue-arsed flies, kowtowing to him. Ray hit the nail on the head. After three years in a sanatorium we didn’t have much sympathy for that sort of thing.

RAY: Having said that, we used to watch his eyes. You’d be talking to him and somebody would bring him a piece of bad news – well, bad news to him. The wife had left the tap on and he had to call the plumber.

ALAN: His eyes would go – dah! That was it.

RAY: He’d lock himself in his office and that would be it. He’d stay there for days sometimes. People would walk around on tiptoe so as not to upset him. We used to think that was showbusiness taking over. I don’t think we understood. We just got on with the job.

ALAN: Having said all that, we both had great admiration for him because of his talent. And when he was in a good mood we got on extremely well. He was great company.

RAY: While we were unsympathetic, we admired his work. Wonderful! We used to go to the recordings of the Goon Shows. Lots of laughs. And we would have lunch with him at Bertorelli’s in Queensway. More laughs! I don’t know how we managed to get away from lunch to get back to work. We should have been on the floor pissed out of our heads. Here was a guy who wrote on his own – used to come into our office and ask, ‘What do you think of this?’ We never asked anybody what they thought of our work.

NORMA: As a person, do you think he was reliable?

ALAN: Well, we didn’t have to rely on him. We all did our own work and Beryl and others looked after the business side. The thing that kept us together was that we were a mutual admiration society. Spike was very generous about our work, more so than Eric. She was a great fan of Tony [Hancock] and I think he appreciated what we were doing for him.

NORMA: He called it ‘a perfect marriage’.

ALAN: That’s the right word for it . . .

There was a junk shop nearby run by an old man, decrepit, wore terrible clothes, and Spike and I would look in to see what we could pick up. Sometimes the shop seemed empty and then we would hear a rumbling and out of a cupboard would pop the proprietor. We loved to drop in there.

RAY: I remember when Spike was restoring the Elfin Oak. He was carving cherubs and elves and things. You don’t often come across blokes carving things like that, but Spike was different from anybody in show business. [The Elfin Oak, an 800-year-old tree stump, had originally grown in Richmond Park. It was uprooted and moved to Kensington Gardens in 1928 where the illustrator Ivor Innes carved fairies, elves and animals on the trunk. Innes maintained the tree until he died in the Fifties. It was neglected until Spike led a campaign to restore it. With his team of helpers the beautiful fairies and goblins became as new, and in 1997 the oak was granted Grade II listed status.]

He was always getting involved in something or other. Mind you, his public persona was rather different from his private one. There was that kid he shot with an air rifle because he had ventured into his garden. He was taken to court. And then we would hear he wasn’t speaking to his wife. If he was going upstairs and she was coming down he would turn his back on her and look at the wall until she had passed. Mad!

ALAN: I have memories of Spike’s laughter. He was a great audience when he was in a good mood. He’d fall about laughing. Very much like Hancock. We only worked with him once, a four-week series called Milligan’s Wake, fifteen-minute shows for ITV. Spike never attempted to re-write anything. He just did it as an actor and performer and did it beautifully. When something tickled him he was a wonderful audience. It was a shame we did only four shows with him. We did bits and pieces for A Show Called Fred. I remember we did a sketch where he was reading the football results, but with a different inflection. When an announcer reads the results you know from how he says ‘Arsenal 2’, in a certain way, that it’s going to be ‘Chelsea 2’. But when Spike read them he got all the inflections wrong. It was hysterical. There was another, again when he was reading the football results, when he realised the results were as he forecast them in his own coupon. He got more and more excited until he got to the last, which was correct and he realised he was a rich man.

RAY: Subsequently, that’s been used by other people.

ALAN: Like the bingo sketch we wrote.

RAY: I remember that raspberry routine. I think it started over lunch. It was all about blowing raspberries. It got very silly. When we got back to the office the telephone rang and out came a really ripe raspberry. We had to go one better than this.

ALAN: We sent a telegram, didn’t we? ‘Dennis Main Wilson from the BBC says Hello, and then a raspberry!’ It got absolutely mad. To cap it all Spike and Co. were in an office a floor above us and Harry Secombe was there. They lowered Harry out of the bloody window, hanging on to him by the ankles. He had a vacuum hose and they lowered him down to our window, which was open. He poked the hose through and blew a really fruity raspberry. If they’d let go of him it would have been the end of Harry. I mean, it was the top floor! We gave up after that. You couldn’t top that.

And I’ll always remember Spike for what I thought was the funniest gag I’d heard in years. It was in his live act. He brought out his trumpet and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen. I was going to play Chopin’s Etude in B minor. Then I thought, why should I? He never plays anything of mine.’ I thought it was hysterical. I’ll always remember him for that.

RAY: I remember another side of Spike. I was very moved because when my wife died in 1995 Spike came to see me. It was a tiring trip for him to come from his house in Rye because he was quite frail by then. He was very comforting and friendly, absolutely wonderful. I knew he liked Alsace wine so I went to my cellar and brought up a bottle of a very good vintage. He never touched it. That was the last time I saw him.

ALAN: Yet he loved his wine. We used to go together to wine auctions at Beaver House in the City. Spike became very interested. We’d buy these very old wines, a case, and split them up, four each. I’d been introduced to these auctions by a publican in Sunbury. Spike was a great wine drinker.

RAY: Fantastic stuff!

ALAN: 1874 Chateau Lafite – things like that. Dirt cheap in those days.

RAY: We got some amazing bargains, including three bottles of genuine 1812 cognac. Absolutely gorgeous! Someone nicked a bottle from my cellar and the third one leaked through the cork.

ALAN: It was like caramelised treacle.

RAY: Good days. I remember when we were all having lunch at Bertorelli’s on the particular morning Spike had received an income tax demand. He suddenly got up from the table and sat on the pavement outside with his cap turned upside down, asking the public for donations to help him pay his tax.

ALAN: He fancied himself as a trumpet player. I don’t think he was very good, but Larry Stephens was a brilliant modern jazz pianist. Up in Spike’s office there was a piano and Larry would strum away with beautiful little riffs and then break into ‘Once in a While’ . . .

RAY: We’d be enthralled . . .

ALAN: . . . then Spike would join in on his trumpet. Compared with Larry he was an amateur. The only thing that used to drive me up the wall was that he never finished anything. It was very sad that Larry died when he was in his thirties. He was very talented. He wrote Hancock’s stage act. One thing I always feel is that Spike was unkind in his treatment of Larry Stephens because he used to call him ‘the highest paid typist in the business’. Very unfair, because I think Larry contributed quite a lot. He certainly contributed a lot to Hancock’s stage act and I think he contributed a lot to the Goon Shows. But the thing that used to amuse me was that Spike fancied himself as a trumpet player but he wasn’t very good, whereas Larry was a brilliant modern jazz pianist.

RAY: I remember when Spike and Eric appeared with Tony on stage. It was at the time when the Russian Army Choir used to tour the world. So Tony was the conductor of the British Army Choir and Spike and Eric were in it. Well, you can imagine what chaos they caused, singing terrible songs badly – the pathetic British Army Choir as opposed to the wonderful, very professional Russian Army Choir.

ALAN: We had a lot of laughs in Orme Court. There would be a knock on the door and on answering it you would expect to come face to face with someone. But, no. There was this dwarflike figure with his head on the floor. ‘Telegram from Lilliput.’ That’s one of my memories of Spike. [He chuckled.]

We had one similarity. We both typed the same way – thumpers, with two or three fingers and a thumb for the space bar. But the similarity ended there. We could hear him thumping away on his portable. He was very noisy. We never got into electric type-writers.

RAY: We were quite concerned about the waste of paper. His bin would overflow and the floor was a sea of discarded, screwed up bits of paper. When he didn’t like what he had written, instead of crossing it out, he simply pulled the paper out of the typewriter and chucked it.

ALAN: Absolutely right. Ray and I were meticulous and took time over everything. Spike rattled away and when he couldn’t think of a line he’d just put ‘Eccles: fuck!’ Then later he’d go back and re-do the ‘fuck’. Sometimes he would do seven or eight drafts before he would be satisfied with a script. Eric used to write by hand, enormous great writing, and he’d finish up with a huge pile. When it was typed out it would be no more than two or three pages. He’d say, ‘I’ll sort it out when I get to the studio.’ We all had our different ways of working.

When I think about it, all my memories of Spike are good. And there’s one other – he was fiendishly good-looking.

RAY: Very handsome.

ALAN: And talented.

RAY: Definitely.

Liz Cowley

If to plumb the soul of a man it is necessary to share his bed then Liz Cowley, once the producer of what is still regarded as the finest of daily current affairs programmes, BBC’s Tonight, fronted by the seemingly affable Cliff Michelmore, can claim to be the ultimate authority on Spike Milligan. I watched them closely for almost forty years, both of them taking other lovers but then without rancour, resuming their relationship over intimate dinners, absorbing conversations, anointed by sharing his bed in Room 5 at 9 Orme Court. Others came and went, but Liz remained the constant in his life. There was something special between them.

Liz, small, very attractive and rippling with an innate sexuality that would be the envy of the boob tube generation, still continues to bed her lovers, but it is obvious that the one dearest to her was Spike. In my opinion she was the perfect partner for him – bright, witty, funny, warm and a great conversationalist, one of the few people who, when he was depressed, actually phoned me to find out how he was. She didn’t want anything from him, she just cared about his well-being. All she would say was, ‘When he’s better, tell him I phoned.’ A caring person. Very rare.

We have remained friends. She calls us ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’ and I always look forward to our lunches because I know it will be a couple of hours of nostalgia and laughter.

LIZ: I first met Spike when I was working for an old army newspaper, Reveille, which is now defunct, and the editor said, ‘This Goon Show thing. What’s it all about? I don’t understand it. Go along and interview them.’ So I did and there was this dreadful man, named Peter Sellers, who was very rude. And a lovely fat Welshman who was so sweet you wanted to hug him and put him in your handbag, if indeed he had shrunk a bit. And then there was this very gauche, gangling, sexy, tall, skinny man named Spike. And I thought to myself, ‘That’s why he’s called Spike, because he looks like a spike.’ And damn it, I didn’t pay much attention to him. I got my story on the Goons.

The next day the telephone rang. ‘Spike Milligan here.’

‘Sorry, who?’

‘I think you interviewed me yesterday. Would you like to go to a party with me tonight?’

I thought, ‘My goodness! A Goon inviting me to a party.’ Sounded good. ‘Yes, please.’

‘It’s at Tom Wiseman’s house.’ My Lord! He was a very well-known journalist at that time.

‘You’ll be all right. He’s a scribbler and you’re a scribbler, so you’ll get on and I’ll get on because you’re getting on.’

But neither of them did. It was dreadful because, as I suspected, everybody was terribly, terribly smart, witty and drinking goodness knows what. Spike stood in the corner, very shy, humble and gauche. And I stood in the corner feeling very shy, humble and gauche, and I couldn’t wait to get home and very soon that’s what I did. And I thought that was the end of that, but the next day he rang again.

‘Did I understand you to say you had a university degree when you were talking to someone at the party?’

‘A Canadian BA, with honours.’

‘Ah, well, I can’t consort with you. You’re educated. I’m not.’

‘Well, let’s try, shall we? Let’s try consorting.’

Consorting meant going out to an Indian restaurant and talking, talking and talking. And for years, consorting, that was all that was involved.

That would be in the Fifties. So roll on the Sixties. I got married and Spike got married and divorced. But in between all those bits, and during them, we had our Indian meals. And finally, in about 1964, I said, ‘To hell with all this. Let’s go to bed!’ And he said, ‘Oh well. What shall we do it to? What have you got?’

‘What do you mean, what have I got? I’ve got a Dutch cap.’

‘Woman! You don’t use language like that. I mean what music shall we do it to?’

‘If we go to Orme Court we’ll hear Ravel. Please, not the Bolero, because I know you’re into Ravel, or the Beatles.’

‘Okay. Jazz.’

‘If you go to my place. You’ll hear the Beatles and you’ll hear jazz, but I don’t know about Ravel, so let’s go to my place.’

But we didn’t. We went to Orme Court. The same gauche, gangly person getting very involved with the music, stopping the tape and saying, ‘Did you hear that bit? That was particularly good.’ And I said, ‘Spike! I’ve got nothing on and I’m cold.’ And he said, ‘I think it’s time we went home.’ So that was our first, as it were.

I didn’t fall in love with Spike, but I loved him. I thought, ‘Here is a man I could spend any amount of time with.’ The humour had to grow, because don’t forget the surrealism that was the Goons, and was Spike of course, was something new. We’re talking pre-Monty Python and pre-everything else. So I loved it because I was a great fan of Alice in Wonderland, and that was the sort of thing he was tapping into. He would talk and talk and then say, ‘I’m talking too much. You talk. You’re the one with the degree.’ He was obsessed with people who had been to university and as a result thought he had been deprived of a whole layer of formal knowledge. He was quite wrong. ‘Ah,’ he’d say. ‘Yes, that’s what I’ve been missing.’ Little did he know that when I was going to meet him for supper, I would bone up on the New Statesman, New Scientist and Time magazine. I got my science and politics all ready in a superficial way and I’d blind him with this because I knew he didn’t have time to read these magazines.

No academic, but the man could put the erudite to shame with his colossal knowledge of what made the world tick. And he was no egoist. However humble the opinion you might offer, he would listen so intently it was almost embarrassing. And then say, so wistfully, ‘You see, you went to university. I never did.’ Silly man! Renaissance man. A hugely sensitive friend and lover.

He was someone you wanted to hold on to and listen to. I wish he’d done more with [his talent], particularly his music. I remember The Snow Goose. It was lovely. He was too clever by half and he didn’t know what direction to really milk. He was so proud of the Goons. Once I offered to get his portable typewriter cleaned and he told me to handle it carefully because he had written all the Goon Show scripts on it.

The humour was obviously there, but he didn’t practise humour when he was with me. He talked seriously most of the time. He didn’t talk about relationships. He didn’t talk about people in his life, and I thought that was odd because I rattled on about everything. I got married, got pregnant, and he put his hand on my enormous tummy and said, ‘I wish this little person’ – because they didn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl in those days – ‘I wish this little person was mine.’ And I thought it was the most delightful thing he could say. Suzy was born on 16 April, which is his birthday. Spike added, ‘And Hitler’s birthday as well!’

NORMA: Spike always said that he and Hitler were born on the same day and it’s not true. Hitler’s birthday was 20 April. I told him a thousand times but he always chose to ignore it. I asked Liz if she ever had a serious disagreement with him because he could be very argumentative when he was in that sort of mood.

LIZ: Funny thing! I only remember disagreeing with him about two things. One was the shape of lines in a crazy pavement and I said to him, ‘I think these are made in a kind of design although it’s called “crazy”. If you look carefully –’ He snapped at me and said – ‘You are not looking carefully. You are walking all over them.’ And I said, ‘No, stop! The rain is falling on them and they are shiny. They are like a piece of art and they zigzag this way and that way. It’s very good.’

He shouted at me, ‘IT’S RUBBISH! IT’S FUCKING RUBBISH! Workmen have been here. They’ve hacked the pavement to bits and you think it’s arty. Typical, bloody typical.’

I remember another disagreement. He was very close to a man called Harry Edgington, an army friend. I never met him, but Spike did go on and on about him, and I think I said something very ill-conceived. I once suggested that his love for Harry was quite unusual and amazing. He said, ‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’ He stamped out of the room and when he got back to the office he got his revenge by tearing a leaf out of a leather-bound volume of Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. He’d been presented with it for selling 25,000 copies, so it was special and he sent me the page that referred to Harry Edgington. I must have hit a nerve because his reaction was so over-the-top and I could never understand why. To suggest that there was anything homosexual in Spike was absolute rubbish, although I have to say he wasn’t your jumping up and down, wahey, hairy-chested lover, and that was nice, but satisfying? ‘I ain’t got no satisfaction.’

It was an extraordinary friendship. It certainly had nothing to do with sex at all. He seemed to know what I was going to say before I said it and, I’d like to flatter myself, quite often I knew what he was going to say. I just needed to know that he was in my life because as the years went on I thought, ‘Here is a rich and famous man and he bothers with me.’ That was tremendous. I remember when I was in the throes of my divorce. The divorce papers weren’t yet on the table and my husband and I were trying to make one last go of it by having a second honeymoon in the Algarve, which was a disaster because he would get up early just so that he didn’t have to look at my face over breakfast, and go off with his camera into the mountains. I didn’t see him all day, so I would go down to the beach where there were little rocky coves and I sat in a small cave with the sea coming right up to my knees, and then it washed out. It was very nice, so I wrote in the sand, ‘Spike – you are the one I love’, and then I watched the sea wash it away. Then I did it again and that’s how I spent a whole morning in the Algarve. I knew that the man I was married to was not a man I could be at one with, whereas Spike I could. I also think a lot of it was ego. I thought, ‘This man is interested in me and I need my ego building.’ The fact that he was willing to spend time with me was very flattering.

He never proposed. The only things he proposed were when he thought it was time I left or that we should have a race in our Minis. And yet when he was working in Australia or South Africa he wrote to me two or three times a week, not ordinary love letters. Sometimes they would begin ‘Hi, Cowley.’ I remember he once wrote, ‘Some people might even say I miss you. I haven’t said that.’ So he was always on the defensive.

Spike never liked formal dates, though once I took him to a movie, The Way We Were, starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. Perhaps selfishly I felt it mirrored so much of my own past and might help him to understand where I was coming from. As we left the cinema I expected some sort of sympathetic comment. What I got was, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’ I realised then that my part of the world, rapidly receding the longer I stayed in England, struck few chimes with him. Perhaps that’s why we didn’t marry. That and the fact that he never asked me.

NORMA: The film reflected West Coast, leftish academe, a world away from the tourists Spike wrote about so scathingly in letters he sent when he was doing his one-man show in Australia in 1972.

Liz, with her lovely face, as lively as a linnet, and her memories of Spike that will never fade, looks many years younger than she is. She remembers Spike’s kindness and his requests to meet up in the early hours. There is no sadness in her reminiscences.

LIZ: Perhaps it’s a cliché, but isn’t the mark of a really great man his ability to stop and do little things to help others? When I very nervously started a short series of late-night chat shows on Radio 1, I asked Spike – by then running just to stand still – if he could possibly take part in a ‘fathers and daughters’ debate. There wouldn’t, er, be any money in it but we could send a taxi. He agreed immediately and brought along his daughter, Laura. Thus my humble, local first programme got off to a flying start.

When I began a series for teenagers on BBC1 he came up trumps again, agreeing to sit in as an ‘agony uncle’, offering advice to young people alongside agony aunt Lulu. Now this was a man at the very pinnacle of his career. He didn’t lack for money and certainly not for TV coverage. No wonder I loved him. But perhaps, too, there was some thing very Christian, in the best sense of the word, in this colourful lapsed Catholic. I once asked him whom he would most like to meet in the afterlife and without hesitation he said ‘Jesus Christ.’

But perhaps what I remember most fondly touches on the magical. Here was a man you could walk with down a bleak, rainswept street and he could make it an adventure. ‘Look at that outdoor guttering. Just look! It’s so ill-fitting it’s swinging in the wind. See up there! They’re crashing about like metal cobwebs.’ Or the manholes under our feet, so delicately etched, said Spike, they belonged in a museum. ‘And the ones in the British Museum aren’t much better.’

He was never one for honeyed compliments, however hard you’d worked at the slap and silk, and although gauche he was immensely kind and tried so hard to bite the bullet of his depressions. I visited him once in hospital with a basket of Canadian Golden Delicious apples. Years later he couldn’t recall that particular episode of his ‘black dog’ but he never stopped talking about the apples. ‘Whereabouts in Canada do they grow them? The Okanagan Valley, you say. Do they use a special kind of fertiliser? Can you find out? And to think you brought them all that way to the hospital!’ [She smiled at the memory.] He seemed to think I’d made the trip to Canada to get the apples for him so I didn’t explain that my sister had sent them.

I always felt I could confide in him and his response always was that if I was in trouble he would help, but not if it was boring. I was never bored by him, otherwise I wouldn’t have rushed out in my Mini at three in the morning because he had telephoned and wanted to see me. I sometimes wondered how many other girlfriends he had phoned before me, but I never asked. He was married to Paddy at the time and I think Spike was looking for something he wasn’t getting at home. Obviously, he didn’t get it from me otherwise he wouldn’t have had other girlfriends. At that time I was pretty naïve about sex. Perhaps he didn’t give enough of himself to his wives. That possibly alienated them so that they couldn’t give enough of themselves to him. Another thing to consider is Spike’s love of experiences. If he was to give himself completely to one woman that would blot out much of the opportunity to have the experiences he was always looking for. He loved experiences. Talking, moving, shifting around and a woman tends to be more possessive than that in marriage. Perhaps he didn’t want to be tied to one woman.

He was diabolically clean and I think to him the act of sex was perhaps a bit dirty, in a liquidy kind of way. I remember him saying, when we were deciding whose house we would go back to, ‘I’ll bring the dangly bits. You bring the juicy bits.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ He said, ‘You are not supposed to agree with things like that.’ He was constantly trying to put me back into a mould of innocence and Doris Dayism. He said one of the things he liked about me was that I was very 1950s, wore red lipstick, had a hairstyle of that period and looked like Betty Grable. That was all right by me.

Once he rang at three in the morning. Mike, my husband, picked up the phone and Spike said, ‘I’m here to commit verbal adultery with your wife. Put her on.’ Of course, Mike had been woken up and he wasn’t a happy man. When I was producing a daily programme and needed the sleep, Spike would sometimes telephone at two in the morning and say he knew a restaurant where they were still serving curry. ‘So get in your car and I’ll meet you there.’ And I always did. I always came whenever he asked me. He had no jealousy because I was married and I had no jealousy whatsoever about the Bayswater Harem. I knew one or two of them slightly. Lovely people. But when he was hurt or suffering it tore my heart apart. I remember silly things. Once I took a Sara Lee frozen apple pie to Orme Court because I’d just discovered them. I thought they were very good. He thawed it and ate the whole pie and then sent one of his people out to get nine more.

There were so many evenings I remember fondly. The most fun night I can recall was when he came over all mysterious and invited me back to Orme Court, nothing unusual about that, for a night-cap after a television show. He was one of the unsung heroes of the Thames mud banks at low tide. He found odd artefacts with his metal detector and dug them out with his bare hands. But this particular evening he said he had something special. He opened his ‘secret’ drawer and brought out an ancient, mud-caked half cask of brandy. ‘Here’s to Drake, Shakespeare – well I found it near the old Globe – and the Royal Navy generally.’ He prised it open, 400 years old perhaps, and we scoffed the lot. Now that’s friendship.

I’ve often read so much and heard so much about his treachery. It was a closed book to me and I never came across it at all. There was a time when I ventured into one of his black dog depressions. It was when he invited me to go to Manchester and he was doing a one-man show, all those ad-libs that I knew off by heart. He had booked me a room next to his in the hotel. He had said, ‘Let me know when you arrive,’ so I arrived and started to put notes under the door of his room saying, ‘Hello. I’m here.’ There was a big sign on his door that said, ‘DO NOT DISTURB. I’M SLEEPING.’

I wouldn’t dream of knocking on the door so I kept pushing notes under it and then I sent him cartoons and little poems. I was bending down with a note saying, ‘It’s nearly 7 o’clock and you are due on stage at 7.30,’ when he opened the door and sent me flying because I was down there with my nose on the end of the door. He shouted, ‘What are you doing on your hands and knees outside my room? It’s theatre time, woman!’ I said, ‘Actually, you invited me up here, Spike, and I thought you’d be amused by the notes. And you asked me to let you know when I arrived.’ He said, ‘Go to the theatre. I don’t want to talk to you now.’ And he left.

NORMA: I asked Liz if she was ever the butt of his treachery.

LIZ: Treachery is not a word I would use, but he could and did hurt me. When he was filming Ghost in the Noonday Sun in Cyprus he asked me to fly out to be with him. Then he ignored me totally, went out to dinner with other people and never invited me. That was terrible. Otherwise I had a lovely trip – enjoyed the beach and the sunshine – but it seemed he didn’t want to know me. It was very hurtful. I came home early.

NORMA: I told Liz my memory of her on that trip. The sun was shining, she went into the sea, lay on her back and said, ‘Thank you, Spike.’ So it wasn’t all bad.

LIZ: No. At least I got away from the English weather.

NORMA: Spike was a strange person and Barry Humphries said he could be an absolute shit but that people forgave him. I asked Liz why she thought people forgave him.

LIZ: Because he had such a kind and sweet way of making up afterwards. He could be sweet beyond belief. This was my experience, anyway. Sweet beyond belief. I remember when I was sacked by a Fleet Street editor. I was doing television previews for him and was absolutely demolished by this. Spike was at the Mermaid Theatre doing Ben Gunn, or whatever, and I went there straight from my Fleet Street sacking to see him. I was crying and the doorman was so flustered he let me into Spike’s dressing room. Spike said, ‘I can’t talk to you. I’m just about to go on,’ and I said, ‘I know. I know.’ I told him what had happened. He gave me a bottle of wine, half full. He’d had the first half. He told me to take it home, drink it in the bath and I would feel better. I did exactly that and when I arrived at the house there was a huge bouquet from Interflora. How he managed to get it there before I got home I don’t know. That was the sort of radiant kindness that touched me again and again. When I hear of his treachery and his racism I can’t associate these things with him at all. It was silly, wasn’t it, just because he’d blacked up as an Indian in Curry and Chips, for heaven’s sake.

He was very kind in his own way and he loved my little girl, Suzy. I was talking to Suzy the other day – she’s a fully-fledged shop-owner now – and she said, ‘I didn’t think much of him.’ She had brought him breakfast in bed one day when he came to stay. She put a little flower in a vase and he shouted at her. He didn’t want toast, he wanted a roll, or it could have been the other way round. Suzy was demolished. She came back and said he wanted a roll. I said, ‘We don’t have a roll. It’ll have to be toast.’ He shouted from the bedroom, ‘I heard that. And make sure it has butter and strawberry jam on it.’ Suzy took it upstairs and Spike said, ‘Take it away. I’m not hungry now.’ And that from a man who loved children! It was very hurtful. She was only about four, but she knew I adored him. That was too bad, and yet when he was leaving he said, ‘Look, I’m very fond of Suzy. I didn’t mean to shout at her, so take my undershirt. She can have it because the weather is turning cold.’ It was one of those Wolseley knitted vests. Huge! Of course, she would drown in it, so I kept it and I still sleep in it to this day.

NORMA: There were tears in her eyes as I told Liz that I had always wanted Spike to marry her and that towards the end of his life he was un happy.

LIZ: I wish I’d known. Perhaps I could have helped. But he never called me. I would have gone anywhere with him if he had asked me.

NORMA: He came to stay with me, he said to sort himself out. He was deadly serious. I told him he could have a room as long as he wanted to stay. He said, ‘What a friend we have in Jesus, but I’ve got a better one in you.’

LIZ: The last time we met was in one of his favourite restaurants, the Trattoo, in Kensington. It was The Ivy of the day in the Sixties, Seventies and early Eighties, always buzzing with people from theatre and television. It was a year before he died and I could tell his health was fading. As we parted he said, ‘Please. You stay alive and keep your enthusiasm. I think I’ve lost mine. Yes, this time, I really do.’

NORMA: Liz hasn’t lost any of hers. And I’m sure her memories of Spike keep her warm in colder days. He should have married her.

Denis Norden

According to his headmaster at the City of London School, Denis had what was considered to be ‘a fine academic brain’. His parents, no doubt, wondered which profession he would grace. I don’t suppose for one moment they considered showbusiness. What a loss to this profession it would have been if he had taken the academic route.

He met Frank Muir in 1947 and together they became the successful writing partnership of Muir and Norden, with hits such as Take It From Here, a radio series which lasted twelve years. Other radio hits were Whack-O and three series of Faces of Jim, both wonderful vehicles for Jimmy Edwards. But I remember the brilliant radio sketch they wrote for Peter Sellers called ‘Balham, Gateway to the South’. This must have been in the early Sixties. In 1980 – about two years before Peter died – Spike, Peter and I were having dinner in the Trattoo. We were having a normal conversation when suddenly, with that chameleon quality he possessed, Peter changed his demeanour and in the accent he used in ‘Balham’ he recited the first part of the sketch. It was amazing. Spike just took it for granted.

But I wondered how, after all the characters Peter had played over a period of what must have been at least fifteen years, he could remember the sketch so clearly. I asked him the question and with a complete throwaway he said, ‘Norm, I just can.’ Spike, not to be outdone, burst into ‘Ying Tong Diddle I Po’ and together they sang the first five or six lines of ‘The Ying Tong Song’. I don’t think I’ve ever told Denis the story of his brilliant ‘Balham’ sketch. I know it would make him smile, as he made the nation smile with his long-running television series It’ll be Alright on the Night.

DENIS: I think I first met Spike at Daddy Allen’s Club where everybody (and this would have been post-war, almost immediately post-war) who was just starting at the BBC then used to go, to this club in Soho, the chief benefit of it being they had a slate and you could eat on tick there. So all of us who were trying to get into radio, particularly Michael Bentine and all those people, we would take these equally young BBC radio producers there and treat them to lunch which would always be a steak because they were in such short supply. Looking back on it now, I’m sure it was horsemeat anyway but nobody knew the difference in those days. I remember Frank took somebody and took one of the producers who ordered a steak and we didn’t have any money and Frank sort of indicated to me it was to go on the slate and the producer said ‘Can I have an egg on it?’ and Daddy Allen said ‘You can have an egg yes, but Christ, the bill’ which wasn’t the best way to entertain. But I think that was where I first met Spike.

Thereafter we sort of interwove quite a few times because we both recorded our shows at the Paris Studios in Lower Regent Street on a Sunday and either we went in after they recorded or they came in after we recorded so there would be this interval where we’d meet in that narrow corridor down at the bottom of the stairs at the end of which there was a canteen and we would have a cup of tea together, or else we would meet in the Captains Cabin which was the local pub for everybody who recorded at the Paris Studios.

NORMA: What were you recording at that time?

DENIS: Take It From Here.

NORMA: Spike was recording The Goons?

DENIS: Yep. One of my principal interweavings with Spike was when my children were young. Spike did a Saturday morning radio programme of records and the whole programme was aimed at children. There was one record called ‘Little Red Monkey’ which I think actually Joy Nichols sang, which he played regularly and the kids would sing around the house. He would also recite his poems, so at a very early age we regularly got Spike Milligan verse on long car journeys, chiefly ‘There are holes in the sky where the rain gets in but they’re ever so small that’s why rain is thin.’ Now that particular quatrain which I may not have perfectly remembered – my kids grew up with that, they then had children of their own so my grandchildren were read Spike’s verses and they went marching round saying, ‘There are holes in the sky where the rain gets in.’ My grandson (who is an architect in Los Angeles) has two small boys and they are now perpetuating those ‘holes in the sky where the rain gets in’. So that’s four generations of holes in the sky.

NORMA: What was your first impression of Spike?

DENIS: I think it was his audaciousness on radio, quite apart from the fact that technically he did things with sound effects which nobody had done before. Spike was the first to fool listeners’ ears with his sound effects and it’s never been better done than those interminable footsteps he would write in, which is now a kind of cliché but all clichés begin as novelties. He had enormous nerve in beating the censors in ways that they never noticed. We all suffered from having to have our scripts examined before they could be broadcast, but I remember Spike would throw in references, for example, ‘Grant Road, Bombay’, which nobody knew (except those who had either been brought up in India or had served there) was the road where the brothels were, and various other Indian expressions which he only got caught on two or three times, as I recall. He got away with murder in that respect. When he was at his best, there was nobody like him. Gaiety – that word which has now been kidnapped. There was nobody who could make a gathering more, in the old-fashioned sense, gay, or make people feel more at ease than Spike when he was on form. As everybody knows, he wasn’t always on form but for a large part of the time he was and my principal memory of him is laughter.

I think people are inclined to get the wrong idea about the Fifties. They are always painted as being dull, austerity was the word. What they forget was we had passed the decade before, or at least half of the decade before, in a state of constant apprehension, boredom, grief and sometimes terror, a wholly artificial way of living – and suddenly we’d been reprieved and you can’t over-emphasise the enormous feeling of relief that everybody had at that time during the late 40’s and the 1950’s, you know time doesn’t split neatly, the 60’s actually began about 1957 so you know it doesn’t divide into decades so neatly. But we had what no other generation has had since, an enormous feeling like a group of people who have been trapped in a room and suddenly they’re all let out and standing on the pavement outside. The whole country was like that and we’d all lived through the same inconveniences and dangers, and you only had to mention them and everybody picked up on them. We could share allusions in a way that nobody has been able to since, particularly as it’s now become so multicultural that there’s not a great sharing of allusions anyway. So we were very fortunate in that respect and there was a mateyness too, especially amongst those of us who had been in the Forces. Frank and I had been in the RAF, and we’d done the troop concerts, either writing or performing, and we knew that the way to make a military audience laugh was to send up the officers. You had to gauge it in such a way that you made fun of them but without inciting to mutiny. You had to know where to stop. And that is why I think that generation, Spike and so on, sent everything up but not to the point of destruction. One thing I remember about Spike, talk about a rebel without a cause, Spike was a rebel with too many causes. He was a rebel with more causes than anybody.

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