Spike Milligan RIP

Sad. RIP.

My initial thought was "Why? Because Geri Halliwell pinched his arse?"

He was a really funny and creative man.

He was manic-depressive too, I think, and is always top on my "name-a- manic-depressive" list along with that chap who lopped of his ear.

What'll we do now? What'll we do now?

Mary Pugh was nearly two

When she went out of doors

She went out standing up, she did,

but came back on all fours.

The moral of this story,

please meditate and pause,

is never send a little girl out

in loosely waisted drawers!

the dong with the luminous nose = saddest story i read in my entire childhood => cuz he fell in love with a JUMBLY!! (heads green, hands blue seive blah blah))

the HILLS OF THE CHANKLY BORE! i am going to weep *weeps*

like ed, i brough up on the goon show by my dad who used to go and see the shows, and my mum who knew jimmy grafton's daughter, so used to hang out aty the grafton arms...

i really want to see some of that....

Where the Cows go Bong!

And the Monkeys all say Boo!

There's a Nong Nang Ning

Where the trees go Ping!

And the tea pots Jibber Jabber Joo.

On the Nong Ning Nang

All the mice go Clang!

And you just can't catch 'em when they do!

So it's Ning Nang Nong!

Cows go Bong!

Nong Nang Ning!

Trees go Ping!

Nong Ning Nang!

The mice go Clang!

What a noisy place to belong,

Is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!

I watched The Bed Sitting Room recently, I really liked it but I was thinking about how the aesthetic is almost like that grating, 'wacky' English/British eccentric Keep Calm And Carry On stuff that's been everywhere over the last 10-15 years (though maybe it's become a bit less intense, possibly it will be seen as a particularly 2010s thing in the future?) Stuff like this:

https://www.militaryimages.net/media/bombardier-beer.82706/full

but I think the difference is that Milligan finds the stiff-upper-lip stuff genuinely repulsive and not at all charming, it's like it's this misanthropic fantasy where you wish they'd drop the bomb and put an end to it all, but even dropping the bomb on Britain isn't enough, the exact same stupidity and snobbery just carries on, there's no killing it.

It feels like it's about Britain's inability to adjust to its post-imperial decline as well, people carrying on with all these rituals and ceremony in the ruins despite the fact that they no longer make any sense or have any point - there's something about the fact that the 21st century wacky British stuff tends towards a kind of soft empire apologism or nostalgia, and is mostly made by people too young to really remember the empire as anything other than existing mostly in the past tense, unlike the people who made The Bed Sitting room. There's some 'wacky' comedy that I really love and some that I find totally unbearable, and I can't quite pinpoint what it is that makes the difference, sometimes they seem very similar but I have very different reactions to them

Yeah, I think you have it

I have it recorded to watch, and did also see "How I won the war" which is cut similarly, but different. I had seen it before, this time it seemed better than I remembered.

I tried back then with BSR, but lost interest. Will try (again) soon.

maybe 'whimsy' is a better word for what I'm getting at here rather than wacky. I think some of my favourite comedy is whimsical but it's very difficult to do without curdling into something unbearable, e.g. the early episodes of Last of the Summer Wine vs the following 35 years or so of Last of the Summer Wine. I guess Last of the Summer Wine is also 'wry' which is difficult line to tread as well.

they made a film version of Puckoon in 2002 starring Sean Hughes. I've never seen it but the reviews seem to suggest that it ends up being whimsical in the bad way.

Bed Sitting Room was co-written by John Antrobus, who wrote some Goon episodes and a series of kids’ books with an everykid character named Ronnie I absolutely LOVED as a 6-7 year old. That same whimsical-but-threatening vibe is sort of perfect for children’s books. Also the gags are a little tighter (and less racist) than in Milligan’s books. The anarchy and empathy for weirdos thankfully distances it from the cranky Toryism you mention above

https://childrensbookshop.com/images/soldbookimages/89/89123.jpg

Thinking about children's books, I was obsessed with Alice in wonderland when I was a kid, I'd not thought about it before but The Bed Sitting reminds me of the Jonathan Miller tv Alice in Wonderland adaptation, ensemble cast of 60a British comic actors (I think Peter cook is the only one in both, though), people undergoing alarming involuntary physical transformations,the adult world being this elaborate pointless performance/game that's both silly and menacing. The mad hatters tea party scene with them pointlessly moving along from place to place seems particularly similar

I think wacky humour that revels in wackiness is bad, in Milligans work the world is wacky and the wackiness is something to be endured, like Alice being constantly frustrated by wonderland. I think a lot of bad wacky comedy is based on the idea of a return to childhood, a return to freewheeling surrealism as a stand against the drab, boring world but in books that children like it's the (adult) world that is wacky and the child protagonist the normal, serious one.

Great post.

That sort of follows (in my mind) to Curb Your Enthusiasm, where it’s funnier (usually in the earlier episodes) when Larry is an asshole dealing with even bigger assholes, who suddenly seems like the sanest person in the room. Whereas when Larry is the sole asshole/agent of chaos, his individual dysfunction is less interesting than its relationship with societal dysfunction.

Obviously Milligan’s war books are the ultimate “world is wacky” comic setup (although imho the digest version “Milligan’s War” is the best way to read them).

Milligan had no acting talent, I mean literally zero, which he could get away with on radio but, as soon you see him on screen, he just isn't funny or is hardly ever funny. Which got worse as he got older. Do yourself a favour and never watch his movie about McGonagall, it is absolutely dire and he's on screen more or less constanly all the way through it.

Did he play William McG as a canny fool or just a fool?

Hard to say as he was doing his usual self-indulgent unfunny mugging and you could barely make out anything he said.

(xposts) That sounds harsh to me but it's hard to think of a counterexample.

imho the digest version “Milligan’s War” is the best way to read them

That sort of follows (in my mind) to Curb Your Enthusiasm, where it’s funnier (usually in the earlier episodes) when Larry is an asshole dealing with even bigger assholes, who suddenly seems like the sanest person in the room. Whereas when Larry is the sole asshole/agent of chaos, his individual dysfunction is less interesting than its relationship with societal dysfunction.

I think what makes Curb Your Enthusiasm work is that Larry is usually kind of technically in the right, but the reasonable thing for him to do would be to swallow his pride and compromise or let the subject drop and he won't. There was a UK series with Jack Dee called Lead Balloon that was basically a remake of Curb, but Dee's character was just a straightforward asshole and it wasn't funny, there wasn't this tension between him being right in the technical, pedantic sense but wrong in the sense of social rules.

I think wacky humour that revels in wackiness is bad, in Milligans work the world is wacky and the wackiness is something to be endured, like Alice being constantly frustrated by wonderland.

the best Monty Python stuff has this sort of relationship to wackiness as well, where it's something menacing and horrifying, this kind of Kalfkaesque thing where someone is confronted with this incomprehensible world and is desperately, unsuccessfully trying to find logic and order in it, like this job interview sketch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v1OLMjG52I

there's a relationship between wackiness and bullying and domination - I think there's a particular kind of Dave Lee Travis style self-consciously wacky bully. Maybe Spike Milligan's comedy is about wackiness rather than being wacky itself?