Spike Milligan: Love, Light and Peace

This programme contains some strong language

As you may have heard on the news, earlier this evening, the comedian and writer Spike Milligan died

at his home in Barnet, aged 104.

Widely regarded as one of the country's true comic geniuses,

the late Mr Milligan had only just completed recording a new series

of his zany, wacky half-hour shows for the BBC.

That's BBC TWO, of course, not BBC ONE,

who tended to regard him as something of a light entertainment leper.

And though millions will mourn the tragic passing of Mr Milligan's

unique and eccentric talent, we have been asked by the trustee of his estate,

a Miss Glenda Plunge of Latex Dungeons, Soho,

to honour his memory in the way that he would surely have wished.

BBC TWO is now proud to present

George Formby in Spare a Copper.

MUSIC: The Window Cleaner by George Formby

# Now I go window cleaning... #

Stop it, I said. Stop it! You're stealing my pride. Run telecine.

Here's Spike.

Good evening.

It seems to be going all right so far.

HE BLOWS RASPBERRY

It's me 'usband...

Suddenly, he can't talk proper like.

SPEAKS THROUGH A KAZOO

BAGPIPE MUSIC DIES OUT

You once told me that you had the finest comic mind in the country.

Oh, beyond that. In the universe.

Spike Milligan - actor, Goon, singer...

COMEDIC OPERATIC SINGING

..is the godfather of British comedy.

-'ello, Sarge.

-'ello, Constable.

Milligan, of course, never has been simply a comedian.

-Musician, author, playwright...

-He's an inventive man.

Invective letter writer, crusader against bureaucracy, poet,

illustrator and trumpet player.

He is a national treasure.

I don't want to know about thinking and all that about earning money. I just want to be an idiot.

They actually call me a genius. If I am, I did not know it.

I did not know that.

I'd like to see some Spike.

Tonight, a tribute to the late Sir Edward Elgar,

whose favourite instrument was the...

LAUGHTER

..was the B-flat garden hose,

for which he wrote many great pieces including...

LAUGHTER

..Underneath The Armpits, I Dream My Dreams Away.

Right...

SPLUTTERING SOUNDS TO THE TUNE OF UNDERNEATH THE ARCHES

He was brilliant, beyond brilliant. He was unique.

Spike developed a kind of comedy that had such delightful lunacy.

Spike took comedy up a gear. He had a very strong sense,

"I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it my way."

-Well, 'orses don't play the piano.

-No, he's not a real 'orse,

there's a dog inside working him.

Authorities should be able to be mocked

and Spike, at his best, was a chief mocker.

This government will pursue policies

which will bring it within our grasp.

BLOWS RASPBERRY

I think he's incredibly important in the psyche of the nation, really.

What are we going to do now? What are we going to do now?

What are we going to do now? What are we going to do now?

'Yes, what are we going to do now?'

My first memory...

I can't place where it was, though...

I remember, and it had been haunting me all my life,

I was looking through a porthole and there was a blue sea...

..and a yacht going past with a reddish harbour brick wall

behind it and I can't ever remember where it came from.

Documenting his family history was really important to him.

An archivist, that's what he was.

He was really good at seeking out photographs

and then very carefully putting them all in the family photo album.

So, my grandparents' life was really well documented.

My mother was singing in the choir at St Patrick's Cathedral, Poona.

All troops used to attend church parades then,

merely for the reason of being as close as they possibly could

to the pretty daughters of these officers of the time.

And that is exactly how it worked out.

My father started talking to my mother

and they eventually became engaged and got married.

He was a frustrated actor. His father put in the Army at 14,

but he always wanted to act and perform.

And he did it all through his life,

as a Soldier Showman, he used to call himself.

He was very, very good.

Together, my mother and father, they did shows for the troops overseas.

They were great days. But then came World War I,

it was a famous war, had a big cast and...

LAUGHTER

My father's regiment was sent to Mesopotamia.

He was wounded and he was brought back to India on convalescence

and he must've done something because...

Because nine months later, I was born.

My father was at a firing practice near Ooty Command.

And he received a long envelope on 16th April 1918,

saying, "Son born this morning, so far has refused to walk."

-When did they first call you Spike?

-In the Army.

-So, when you were little, they called you, what, Terry or Terence?

-Terry, yes. Terry.

-You were Terry.

-Yes. I didn't choose to be called Terry,

but they abbreviated the name.

I often wondered why people give you a real name and then abbreviate it.

India was possibly the greatest experience of my life.

I grew up in bright sunshine. I like bright things.

I grew up with excitement, I grew up with animals,

I grew up with tremendous space.

MUSIC: Varnam by Rang Puhar Carnatic Group

We had an Indian ayah, Indian cook, and Thumbi, our houseboy.

And a maali, that's a gardener.

We weren't rich, but in India, you became rich by reason of the fact that the labour was so cheap.

We were living a lie. If we were back home in England,

my father would have been living on a scale 50 times reduced...

and no servants.

And my mother would be back lighting the stove and the grate

and whitening the step.

I grew up believing that white people were superior,

most superior to anybody else.

I used to play with lots of Indian children and I remember

that, when you played hockey, all these little Indian chokras -

that's a Hindustani little boy - they would have hockey sticks

made out of bits of wood and I would have a real hockey stick,

but inevitably they would beat me.

I did treat the servants as my parents used to talk to them,

as being secondary people, which of course they weren't.

I was being filled up with a load of gunge, imperical gunge.

And deep down, I wasn't born to be that type of person,

I was meant to be a liberal.

I had to go to church every Sunday and I liked it

because it had a sung Mass in Latin.

And there's also an Indian priest who said the Mass in Tamil,

and I used to get the giggles because it sounded just like this...

Iggery-buggery, iggery-buggery.

Iggery-buggery-iggery-buggery. Iggery-buggery-iggery-buggery...

and I had to be suppressed many times.

You were too young, weren't you, to laugh at that?

I just thought it was funny sound.

His humour was quite onomatopoeic, if you like.

His use of language, certainly in his poems,

is influenced by having been brought up with two languages in his childhood.

I understand you're a great man to go to an Indian restaurant with.

Oh, yes.

-Haven't you got the Urdu?

-The what?

-The Urdu? I speak Hindustani, yes.

-Hindustani.

HE SPEAKS HINDI

Do you order, do you order...? HE SPEAKS HINDI

AUDIENCE MEMBER REPLIES IN HINDI

THEY CONVERSE IN HINDI

I started school about the age of five

at the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Poona.

And it was there, actually, that I got my first chance on the stage.

They had a nativity play and the nuns are not notoriously good

for moving heavy scenery in between scenes.

So, they got me, they put me in front of the curtain

while they were moving all the things.

And they dressed me up as a clown -

rather a prophetic vision, because that's what I became in the end, a clown.

What my job was to do, was to go in front of the curtains like this and jump up and down.

My first performance was exactly like this. I went....

And everybody thought it was very funny for a boy of five.

I remember a very poignant part of that story, was the fact that a nun said to me,

-IN IRISH ACCENT:

-"Now, Terry. When the crib's at the end

"with Jesus in the crib, you mustn't go near there,

"only the angels must go near the crib."

And I thought that wasn't fair, so I actually had a touch,

still had a touch of theatre about me.

I waited... We're all around the crib...

And I went there and took my hat off,

my little clown's hat off, and got a round of applause for it.

Little scene stealer, Jesus came second that day.

Then we moved from there.

My father posted to Rangoon in Burma.

I was mixing with Anglo-Burmese school, you see.

-I was called "white monkey".

-HE TRANSLATES IN NATIVE LANGUAGE

It didn't hurt me, though, to be called white monkey, at all.

I didn't think it was hurtful.

There was a brother born to me when I was eight years of age, in Rangoon.

When my brother grew up, he used to play soldiers with me. We made a little army of our own,

we formed our own country in our mind called Lomania.

The Labour government at the time had made what they called

a 10% cut, of the Army, Navy and the Air Force, which left us

in that invidious position, when Hitler declared war, of having nothing.

My father was cut out of the Army before his time

and we came home on the SS Rajputana.

The trouble is, when you make a 10% cut of staff,

if you're one of those 10%, it says something.

It says either you're too old

or you can't do your job.

That's it, really, isn't it?

So, I think there may have been a bit of a black cloud over them,

leaving that fantastic lifestyle

and coming back to...

IN COCKNEY ACCENT: South London.

The difference between Rangoon and Catford has to be pretty considerable.

-Were you unhappy?

-I suddenly turned inward.

I couldn't understand all the... Everybody seemed never to smile.

They still don't. Sort of very sullen, dark, cold.

We were in an attic room, with a gas stove in the bedroom with us.

My brother and I used to play with our soldiers

and play little records and pretend we weren't there.

English teeth, English teeth

Shining in the sun,

a part of British heritage

Each and every one

English teeth, heroes' teeth

Hear them click and clack

Let's sing a song of praise to them

Three cheers for the brown, grey and black!

LAUGHTER

I went to the South-East London Polytechnic to study metalwork,

and started to hear of Bing Crosby,

and getting very enamoured of Bing Crosby at that time.

But I heard a record by Louis Armstrong

called I'm Just a Gigolo

and then I changed from Bing Crosby to real jazz,

started to play the trumpet.

And then I received a cunningly worded invitation from

His Majesty's government to partake in World War II at, I think it was

a thruppence a day, with the promise of a free burial if I was killed.

I actually was thinking of being a pacifist.

I was a gentle person, I wasn't into violence,

and I said, "Well, I'm thinking of being a pacifist."

He says, "What?! What will the neighbours say?!"

I suppose he couldn't wait to tell people,

"My son's been killed in action, you know." That sort of feeling.

"What, you've come back and you haven't been killed?

"What will the neighbours say?"

I don't think he really wanted us to know how bad it was,

but I also know that it would have done his head in,

just because he wasn't a killer.

He did tell me about losing his friend at Longstop Hill, Tony,

who was blown up, and I just remember thinking,

"God, this is awful", you know?

It broke his heart.

Young are our dead, like babes they lie

The wombs they blest once, not healed dry

And yet, too soon, into each space,

A cold earth falls on a colder face

Quite still they lie, these fresh-cut reeds,

Clutched in earth like the winter seeds

They will not bloom when called by spring

To burst with leaf and blossoming

They will sleep on in silent dust

As crosses rot and helmets rust.

Seeing blood spilled there, it was horrifying.

I daren't think too deeply about it.

The worst fear was not dying, but getting mutilated.

Getting your innards blown out or something like that.

When you saw it actually happening, you realised it could happen to you.

I had got wounded at Monte Cassino.

We were trying to carry up batteries for the OP...

..and the fucking Germans must have seen us.

They started to mortar us.

One must have burst somewhere near my head and I got blown up.

Were you invalided out of the army?

No, they gave me some early tranquillisers, I think,

which sent me to sleep.

Sent me on the lines for seven days and sent me up to the guns,

and as soon as I heard the guns go, I started to stammer.

It was out of my mind, it had completely unbalanced me, you know.

I was giggling and saying to the sergeant,

"Can we have the next dance over the precipice together, darling?"

And they took me to a first aid station somewhere

and then I... I've never recovered since.

When they saw the state I was in, I went to a psychiatrist

and he said, "I'm sorry, it would be dangerous for you

"to go up the line in this condition. It wouldn't be fair

"to your comrades. We'll put you in a base camp"

I went to a base camp

and I had a couple of more breakdowns while I was there.

The major stood me up and said, "You're a coward,"

and that was an appalling thing to say to a man.

No crime in being a coward, mind you.

But I didn't think I was a coward in as much that

I'd been in action all through the North African campaign

and all the way out to Cassino.

If I'd have been a coward, I'd have run away the first day, wouldn't I?

-Tell me that.

-Yes, I think that seems true.

Well, I think I'd just run out of steam, that's all.

Were you attracted by the formality of the Army

and the way it rigidly controls your life?

Yes, I've suffered Army discharge withdrawal symptoms

ever since I left it.

It was very secure, very funny, and if you don't get killed,

-a very good life.

-Did you ever think of going back into it?

No, I never did.

I wanted to try and make a go of the entertainment world.

Dad was doing Variety Bandbox,

as was Peter Sellers,

erm, and shows like

Educating Archie on the radio.

Spike was trying to get his career off the ground.

He was still playing with the Bill Hall Trio,

but he wanted to write and do his own stuff.

I used to work behind a bar in Westminster in London,

and the chap who owned the pub, he was writing at the time,

odd scripts for a chap called Derek Roy,

who was big shakes in those days.

I used to tell one or two jokes, and then, bit by bit, he said,

"Do you know any jokes?"

I said, "There's some more jokes", and then I'd ran out of the jokes!

He said, "Will you do any more?" I said, "No, I'd make some up, I suppose."

Then I started to write way out things and nobody ever used them, except when I met Peter Sellers,

and then he laughed like mad at these jokes.

I said, "Do you think they're funny?" He said, "Yes!"

I thought that was praise enough at the time

because he was quite a big name in radio when that happened.

Jimmy started taping their bantering sessions,

and so he tried to put a pilot show together.

The BBC reluctantly, at first, let them broadcast it.

It wasn't called The Goons then, it was called Crazy People.

PHONE RINGS

What? Yes, oh...

Gentlemen, a mystery has been committed!

It was like nothing we had ever heard before.

It was four men who spoke in these funny voices

and they were just these wild bunch of anarchists.

Eccles, I suppose,

was really a combination of Goofy plus every idiot I've ever met.

"There's somebody straining in a dark corner over there!"

Bluebottle was a character that Peter Sellers saw in a school.

He said anybody who brought a toy to school, this kid would

always say, "Can I be the one that sees nobody touches it for you?"

The freeform of the characters, the freeform of the story,

the boldness, the audacity, the cheek, the silliness,

the absurdity, it was just, no-one else was doing that.

Everything was reasonably conventional up to that time.

It's a sort of encapsulation of the war experience

and I suppose a lot of the listeners

who had been through the Second World War

probably subconsciously locked into that.

After the war, The Establishment wanted everything

to be the same again, and, in a way,

The Goon Show took the high ground

because it just mocked everything.

There's that sort of feeling that you had to behave, and The Goons,

it was completely the opposite.

These were people who were misbehaving, doing the most extraordinary things.

It was a very patrician society, you know,

"We know best, the ruling classes know best,

"all you chaps, you just get on with it, all right?"

And Spike was...

And a lot of servicemen who had come back from the war were not happy,

weren't content with that kind of thing any more,

they weren't just going to slide back peacefully into their old roles and be told what to do.

No, thank you very much.

They'd seen the world, they'd seen worse than that,

and they'd fought for their country.

They deserved more than being told, you know,

"Go on, go and get back to your plough."

PHONE RINGS

-Seagoon, answer the phone.

-What?

-I want to speak to you on it.

-Oh.

-Hello?

-Is that you, Seagoon?

-Yes.

-This is Hercules Grytpype-Thynne.

-Oh, just the man.

-You owe me 10 weeks' wages.

-You're fired, there's from 11 weeks back.

It sort of warns you to be aware of people with enormous confidence

and smoothness, doesn't it?

Whereas the poor people like Bluebottle

pay the price for what these other people are doing.

It's quite socialist, really, when you think about it.

But an interesting way of presenting a view of the world

that's funny, but somehow, underneath,

rather dangerous and disturbing.

All these Goon Shows and so on, they're very gentle, aren't they?

You're very... You're non-satirical in your work

but you project a great satirical front.

Well, I'm not an intellectual, therefore I cannot write satire.

I feel violently against, about things, terribly violently,

but I'm not a violent person. That's what I'm trying to say.

My thing is... They say, "Oh, jolly funny!"

"Wait a minute, was that jolly funny?

"He had some pretty...

"He pointed the finger at ME.

"Wait a minute, he was doing a thing about the Ministry... That was me!"

But they laugh at the time, but they reflect -

it's a reflective sort of humour.

It appealed to the anger, the latent anger in the younger generation,

who thought, "No, we're going to do something different now."

They wanted anarchy, they wanted to break out.

It was certainly useful in terms of changing

the shape of Britain, I was going to say, to make a big statement,

because authority was moribund, and wherever it sort of crops up,

it wants to establish itself and become holy,

and Spike was having none of it.

And she proposed to me. She said, "Will you marry me?"

And I thought, "I don't want to disappoint her", so I said yes.

-Had you known her long?

-Oh, I'd known her about a year.

There I was, with all this responsibility.

I went on writing and writing. Well, I had to go on writing,

I had to earn a living.

I've just come in the front room and found him

-lying on the carpet, there.

-Oh, is he dead?

-I think so.

-Oh, hadn't you better make sure?

-All right, just a minute.

GUNSHOTS

He's dead.

I think it was Bentine

who thought there had never been a big enough silence on the BBC,

and he said, "Now, ladies and gentlemen,

"we're going for the world record silence."

And we just stopped.

ROARING AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

We didn't do anything,

and it was the audience started to do it for us.

They started to cry with laughter.

We left it so long, we just went to the end of the show.

Better get out while the going's good, I think.

That was his own idea, and "Good night!", that was it.

Now, the Bentine story is interesting,

and no-one has ever seemed to be able to get to the bottom of it.

The thing about Bentine

was that he took quite a long time to build up to a punch line,

whereas Spike would go...

Take it or leave it.

And they didn't see eye-to-eye, comically.

I mean, there was a lot of friction between Peter and Spike as well,

but that was a different sort of thing, that was like a marriage.

Mike seemed to have come from a slightly different route, somehow.

In the end, Mike just sort of thought,

"Well, it's not worth the aggravation",

and sort of stepped out of it.

He was a lovely man, lovely man,

there was never any kind of huge animosity.

There was creative differences between them.

-Who writes the scripts?

-Spike, Spike writes them.

-Yes.

-Where do these ideas come from?

-I have no idea.

Methodically, it's... I don't write them on fag packets like people claim.

Spike did a whole stream of consciousness, really,

on and on and on. Draft, draft, on and on.

Until you had to say to him, at the end of a Friday,

"You've got to stop now because we've got to send it up for the show on Sunday."

When you went to The Goon Show, you went to the Camden Theatre.

It was full of excited people, you know,

it was quite hard to get a ticket.

Then they'd be up on the stage,

usually looking a bit dishevelled, really.

They'd read the script and frequently burst into fits of giggles themselves.

There's somebody laughing outside the bedroom door.

LAUGHTER

And it was sort of wild, sort of irreverent,

a bit like going to a party.

We look forward to this incredible day, this Sunday,

this sort of reunion for us. I mean, we used to live for that, didn't we?

I mean, I did, and I know you did.

I suppose Spike used to feel a bit weary,

because during the week, he wrote most of it.

The Sunday get-together used to sort of put a charge in Spike

and the thing used to get off the ground.

There were times when I was positively manic, gripped with this

great fervour to write this stuff and to hear them do it every Sunday.

I couldn't wait for them to do it.

When it went down, I thought, "I've done it, I've done it!"

Then I'd have to start it all over again,

that was the awful part of it.

It was a mad desire to be better than anybody else at comedy,

and if I couldn't do it in the given time of eight hours a day,

I used to work 12, 13 or 14.

He was under a lot of pressure,

it is a pressure to get out a show week after week after week.

It's a constant striving, you almost beat yourself.

Consequently, I was sometimes writing all through the night,

which I was willing to do, but then somebody would want you

to write all day for another script and write the following night.

And this was happening.

And because I was gentle and I didn't like to say no to anybody,

I went on with it.

My wife was suffering with postnatal fever

and she collapsed on the night that the baby was brought home,

and I had no idea how to handle the baby. I cuddled it

and tried to make a meal for my wife, who had this high-temperature.

I got the doctor, he said to keep her cool

and to give her this every four hours,

and the baby's screaming, and it's time to write.

After two days, I thought I'd go mad.

The tension was so immense, I cracked up

and I started to sweat profusely,

and I got very hot and I had to go to bed.

The doctor couldn't treat me,

so what he did was to shut me up with sodium amytal.

I was lying there for a month and a half,

and I got worse and worse,

and I knew if I didn't do something, I'd be lying there for ever.

When all hope is gone,

I suppose, your mind cracks or you commit suicide.

I didn't want it to reach that stage,

so I decided that I had to do something desperate,

and I got a potato knife...

..and I went out to Peter Sellers' front door -

his flat was opposite - and I'm certain I walked through it.

I remember I was cut, it was a glass door...

You walk straight through it, I think I did that.

And I remember shouting, "I've come to kill Peter Sellers."

Thank God they gave me deep narcosis.

I went to sleep for about three weeks,

and that seemed to break the tension, but I was still ill.

I wasn't getting any better.

In fact, staying there, I could have actually got worse.

They were just giving me pills, no emotional love, just pills.

I thought, "Well, I can get these on prescription,

"just carry them in my pocket."

So, when I got up one morning, I packed my clothes

and I went downstairs... They said, "Where are you going?"

I said, "Well, I'm leaving."

I was mentally ill, no two ways about it.

I shouldn't have been working.

But I had to hang on to this job, which was a very good job.

I went in and out of mental homes about once every six months.

But at this time, when you say you were ill,

-you were turning out classic comedy material.

-It's amazing, yeah.

-Do the ideas still come under those circumstances?

-Yes, they did, yes.

They were manic. Absolutely manic, you know. I was slightly off my nut.

-Were they usable ideas?

-Oh, yes, they were usable.

They became more abstract and more exquisite, you know?

Like, you'd get a scene where Neddie Seagoon

is saying, "We must get to the woods before the trees get there."

It was trying to drive insanity to its limit, in the show.

Bend down and I'll climb on your back

-and I'll reach the leather box like that.

-OK, up...

No, it's no good, I can't reach.

Well, you stay where you are and I'll get up on your shoulders.

-Right...

-Can I climb up yet?

Stay there and I'll climb on your back.

-OK.

-Nearly there.

No good, I'll have to get on your shoulders now.

And that was Spike's genius, he could exploit radio

to build those wonderful, like, Escher drawings,

wonderful pictures in your mind which can't exist anywhere else.

The fact that you could have a show in which you would hear

someone knock on a door and then you'd have 30 seconds

of footsteps, just footsteps, coming down, getting to the door.

"Hello, who's that?" "It's Henry. Can you let me in?"

"Yes. I'll go and get the key."

And then another 30 seconds when he went upstairs again.

90 seconds of nothing more than steps up and downstairs,

and I thought it was just absolutely thrillingly wonderful

someone could do this on radio.

Spike is imposing the most difficult sounds to make,

like a piano being played at high speed across the Atlantic, you know?

VARIOUS ANIMAL NOISES

Answer that phone.

Spike, with the radio series, was continually up in arms

at the BBC over the sound effects, because he said they were not...

They would do very tatty sound effects

to what he had in his mind.

I was trying to shake the BBC out of its apathy.

Sound effects were a knock on the door and a trunch on gravel,

that was it.

And I tried to transform it, and I had to fight like mad, and people didn't like me for it.

I raged and banged and crashed, and I got it all right in the end,

and it paid off, but it drove me mad in the process

and drove a lot of other people mad and that's why I don't think

I can be a success again on that same level because I couldn't go through all the tantrums.

I remember Spike once wanted the effect of something being hit

with a sock full of custard. Remember that time?

And he got the lady at the canteen of the Camden Theatre

to lovingly prepare this custard for him.

She said, "Here you are, Spike, here's your custard."

He took his sock off and poured it in.

He went downstairs and he swung the sock around his head,

hit it against the wall. It didn't have the effect he wanted.

-CHILD:

-Now, I'm telling you a story.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Sile.

The girl's a very little girl and she's very good, you know.

Say "That was Miss Laura Milligan..."

That was Miss Laura Milligan, if you like to know,

so don't smack your bottoms and think you don't know.

You talk too much, Miss Milligan.

When I was little, I actually didn't listen to The Goon Show.

We were getting the real thing at home, on a children's level.

Peter would arrive up and they'd both start talking

to each other in these ridiculous languages.

CONVERSING IN SILLY GIBBERISH

We were getting Bluebottle, all the characters.

And I was totally unaware that he was famous.

We couldn't use the word 'goon' because BBC owned it.

So, three series - Idiot Weekly, Price 2d,

the Show Called Fred and Son of Fred.

Fred was a word that Spike and Peter found amazingly funny

for some reason I've never been able to work out.

I suppose it was just the antithesis of smoothness.

It's Monte Carlo!

Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix.

The count of Monte Carlo!

THEY SPEAK FRENCH

-After you, Ricardo.

-Right... Ride, ride!

'HORSE' HOOVES CLAP I'll master you yet, proud black beauty.

Come dear, let's go home.

He had images, great, great ideas and he had them

genuinely like fireworks going off.

And he was so desperate to mould the medium of television

to his ideas that we were left trailing behind, saying,

"I think I know how I can do that."

Fire Torpedo One!

# When your friends forsake you, and you can't find romance,

# Jump into a dustbin and dance

# Throw out all that rubbish, show them you don't care

# When they come to empty it, it won't be there

# When you've got no trousers, with ragged underpants,

# Yes, leap into the dustbin and dance! #

The response to the first two of the three series was very, very good.

The difficulty is that he then leapt forward with the third series.

Well, hello folks.

-We're just seeing if our old ship is still rail-ready, eh, Dellis?

-Ya.

-All is good.

-All is good.

By Son of Fred, it was a form of visual rather than verbal surrealism.

It confused the hell out of the audience, but he was really,

really pushing to see what was possible in comedy.

I think this is insult. I play Verdi's Caravaggio.

I know, but I've told you, I'm sorry,

we do need a camera. Now, close in tightly, that's right.

Swing it over here, that's lovely and tight.

Now then, change lenses over.

There is a terrible tendency in television to be very happy

repeating a previous success.

And they thought it was wilful of us all

to try to do something that we didn't know

whether it would work or not, and it probably didn't work,

but there were bits in it that were brilliant.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I will play Verdi's Caravaggio.

I think there was a lot of discord going on between my mother

and my father on the trip.

I was very aware of bad tensions going on.

The marriage was already faltering, so...

Dad was on manic highs and playing up.

I think he became quite down on the trip,

and I actually wanted to get off, but I was only about...

I think I was quite small.

I don't think June was happy, so, you know,

you pick up on your mother's sadness. I mean, she was only young.

You know, imagine you're on a boat and you've just found out

"I really have married a lunatic.

"This is not what I planned."

He was highly popular in Australia, where they treated him like a god.

He really was put on a pedestal.

I think he liked all that fame when he was younger. He was very humble.

He didn't like a fuss made of him but he liked to be recognised.

So, I think him coming to Australia, and the fact that he actually

had family on the ground there, was quite a big thing.

And in the news tonight, the ABC brings you Spike Milligan.

Do you find any basic differences in the humour of, say,

Australia and Britain?

I thought there might be until, when I arrived here,

I discovered that the old Goon Show was quite popular.

So, I presume humour of a certain pitch is pretty universal.

It's all in the mind, you know.

-SILLY VOICE:

-It's all in the mind!

-You trod on me. Oh, dear, my man.

-What are you doing in the gutter?

I was meditating in it.

There's a place for that...

I got custody of the children through a very dodgy lawyer,

who kept threatening her.

And I got the custody in court.

Very unusual, wasn't it, Spike?

It was unusual, but she had committed adultery.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean, even in those days...

Yeah, but I'd got them before the court case.

The judge said, "What do you do for a living?" I said, "I'm a writer."

He didn't seem to go very deep. He thought, "That's good enough."

And he said, "Right, well, custody granted for the children."

I'm still haunted by the fact that I deprived them of a mother.

And it was my fault.

My first wife was a very fine woman

and I was in the middle of a terrible nervous breakdown

and I was awful.

I must've been actually abominable.

And she couldn't stand it. That's all. And she left.

And it's one of those things,

an unfortunate fact of life that happened.

Later on in life, I was so proud of my father

because he never said one bad word against June.

He said, "She was a beautiful woman, a lovely nature."

He said, "It was all my fault.

"And I wouldn't want you to think it was anything to do with her."

He said, "It was all me."

And, God, did I respect him for saying that.

When your first wife left you, in fact, you brought up

the first three children on your own, I think, didn't you?

Yes, with the aid of a housekeeper, yes.

Do you look back on those as good days?

Well, I was pretty tortured by the fact that they didn't have a mother.

That hurt a lot. It still does, in fact.

And I think it hurt them.

Unfortunately, their mother never came to see them, for some reason.

There's a terrible photograph of all of us sitting around

with Dad just leaning over a cake.

And just looking as miserable, as miserable, as miserable...

Not a good time.

I was overwhelmed by this. And I thought, "What can I do?"

So I thought, "I'll do something.

"I'll write a book of poetry for my children,

"so they know that I love them." That's how I was thinking.

And I wrote Silly Verse For Kids.

Oh-ho!

What's... What's this behind this tree?

'How's that for ham acting? Untrained, too.'

What a bit of luck!

'That's what I said.'

It's the Silly Book Of Verse For Kids by Spike Milligan.

"'I've never felt finer,' said the King of China,

"sitting down to dine.

"'He fell down dead, he died, he did.

"'It was only half past nine.'"

I was so excited when it was...

I loved it. I love the humour, the drawings.

"'Are you sure there's a Bongaloo, Daddy?'

"'Am I sure, my son?' said I.

"'Why, I've seen it, not quite on a dark, sunny night.

"'Do you think that I'd tell you a lie?'"

Buy! Buy! Buy!

Buy!

More money!

'Yes, children, buy this book at once.

'And beat your parents until they do!'

When we were younger and it was just Dad at home, we had nannies.

In fact, we had a lot of nannies,

because I think we drove them absolutely round the bend.

RASPBERRIES BEING BLOWN

I blew a raspberry in one nanny's face,

and she went and reported me to my father.

And he said, "If you can't take a raspberry,

"I think you'd better go downstairs and pack your bags

"because you're not going to last very long at all."

# Let it go... #

BLOWS RASPBERRY

And now a little poem I wrote for my son, Sean.

Hello, Mr Python, curling round a tree,

Bet you'd like to make yourself a dinner out of me

Can't you change your habits, crushing people's bones?

How can you eat a dinner that emits such fearful groans?

LAUGHTER

He sort of just took us off into this innocent place

where only children can go.

And we used to receive pixie and fairy letters

that were tiny, tiny, tiny.

All handwritten by Dad.

Obviously, we didn't know at the time.

You'd find them and write back.

And he had us putting invitations

into bunny warrens and squirrels' holes

to invite them to parties with the pixies and fairies.

So we were like...

We were the events management for the pixies and fairies

and all the natural creatures in the woods.

It was fantastic.

He just liked children to have imaginative games

and be and become whoever they were.

Any he liked just spending time in the garden.

He used to say, "People, they pay a fortune for van Goghs

"you know, to put on the wall..."

He said, "..when it's right under your feet. This is it.

"This is the beauty right here."

# Will I find my love today?

# How I wonder where we'll meet

# In the park or on a street

# Will she come my way? #

You married again.

Paddy, yes. She was very strong, very powerful,

and gave my children,

who were sort of social orphans at the time, gave them a mother.

She gave up her own career. She was a superb singer.

# In some quiet night... #

And she gave it up to look after my children.

And I'm eternally grateful for her.

# Will she come my way? #

She was only 25 when she married Dad.

And she took on three children, ten and under.

I mean, she's a saint, really.

# I wish that we were married

# So we'd never, never, never, never say goodbye

# I'm glad we... #

Just after he married Paddy, he wanted to see his parents.

And he wanted Paddy to stay with us.

But Paddy was a new, young bride. She wanted to be with him.

# I wish that we were married... #

He went for six months for a honeymoon with Paddy

and we all got to go and live in the convent

where we went to school for six months.

He took us in Old Min,

which was a vintage car that, actually, he got from Peter Sellers.

And put us all in it and said, "It won't be for long."

And waved.

And we didn't see him for six months.

So he was a bit of a coward in a lot of ways

in that he didn't want to let us know that he was leaving us there.

And that was a hard six months.

We used to get letters. And "when's he coming back?"

And suddenly realising "is he going to come back?"

And I remember running away from the school

and back down to my house in Holden Road.

And running around the back and wanting to get in.

And there were another family sitting at the kitchen table eating.

And I was just standing in the back garden sobbing.

They were very sad times.

And Sean got pretty distressed.

And Sile...

Sile was just, dee-de-de-de-de-deee!

Dee-de-de-deee!

So, in a way, she saved us. She had a very happy little personality.

I came back to England.

And by now, of course, Peter Sellers had become famous as a film actor

and Harry was playing the Palladium and playing it very well, I hear.

And I was wowing them at Finchley Labour Exchange.

Because I was absolutely skint.

And I remember getting a letter from my bank.

He wrote, "Dear Mr Milligan, have you possibly overlooked the fact

"that you're overdrawn by £410?"

So, I wrote back and said, "No, I haven't overlooked it."

LAUGHTER

"Can you?"

LAUGHTER

-WOMAN'S VOICE:

-Hello, Harrods?

-MAN'S VOICE:

-Hello? Hello?

Britannia One calling Ground Control.

-WOMAN'S VOICE:

-Hello, Harrods? Hello, Harrods?

-MAN'S VOICE:

-Hello? Get off the line, madam. Hello, Ground Control?

You've now, however, written a play, with John Antrobus.

With John Antrobus.

Yes, I can't help feeling a play is a very long thing

for a man with your kind of mind.

I had not really written much of The Bedsitting Room.

Spike loved the idea.

And he would elaborate upon it and care passionately about the work.

Right now, gentlemen, can you tell us something about this play?

It's about the H-bomb dropping.

It does hold sort of good news, you know, for the British.

Because it does deal with what is indestructible.

-Although, after an atomic war, the sort of, the ignorance...

-Yes.

-The prejudice.

-All that, yes.

-The concern with class. Status symbols.

-Yes. Yes, sir.

And this man is going to typify them in the play, aren't you?

Yes. Yes, sir. I'll be doing the typifying.

I'll be typifying the character.

The ignorance. And you're proud of it, as well, aren't you?

I'm very proud of my typifying, yes.

It was received ecstatically by everybody.

You know, it was fantastic.

-Well, gentlemen, thank you very much indeed.

-Huh, is that all?

-That's all.

-What about the money?

-Was theatre important to you?

-Well, it was to me.

Firstly, it was a means of livelihood.

And I had sort of lagged behind my confederates

that had remained in the writing seat.

I think I'm a good writer.

I've yet to prove myself as an actor.

But I like writing most, you know?

But there was no work going as a writer.

He was asked as an actor, really,

to do this play called Oblomov,

which they showed in the theatre at Hammersmith.

It started as quite a straight play.

And it got quite ordinary, you know, sort of OK notices.

But then Spike began improvising more and more.

His head would appear on the floor, sticking out from the curtain.

Just his head. He said, "Ah, who's taken my body?"

And things like that.

Which I don't think were in the original Russian script.

I started to clown it up and ad-lib it.

And I'm a very good ad-libber.

In fact, I had liver for lunch.

LAUGHTER

Er...

And I started clowning it up and people liked it,

they liked me taking the mickey out of this cast, you see?

I clowned my way out of what was a very bad script,

even though Goncharov might disagree with me.

I clowned it into a West End success

and we kept changing it all the time.

-What do you get the biggest kick out of?

-I like to hear people laugh.

That's the biggest kick in the world.

Spike turned the play into a riot of humour.

Stand up when you're spoken to or I'm going!

From being something that might have had a little run

and then come off, it became a huge hit.

-Did you lay on a special royal performance?

-No, no.

Just as it came, man, you know?

But, at one point, you shouted, "It's the Tower for me tonight!"

-That's right.

-Weren't you intimidated by royalty at all?

No, it was the Tower of Blackpool I was talking about.

It became the hit show of London of the '60s.

People came from Hollywood to see me.

Barbra Streisand came. People like that.

Charlton Heston.

And I thought they would take me onto Broadway and I'll do it there.

But it never happened.

Spike's hope to be taken more seriously as an actor

was jeopardised by a reputation that he had,

which sort of served him well in one area, being unpredictable.

But they'd say, "What's he going to do if we give him this role?

"He'll start playing around."

And so I think that sort of...

The thing that worked for him also worked against him.

NEWSREADER: Few thoughts were given at Clydebank

to conquest of the air or space

by the great crowd of nearly 50,000 at John Brown's shipyard.

I got a call from Norma Frances' manager,

if I would go and see Spike at Orme Court.

And Spike said, "They've offered me a series."

Dominating the scene, the Q4.

Culmination of an immense team effort by designers and builders.

The boat that was being built in the John Brown shipyard

was known as the Q4.

And so we became Q5.

3 is Harrington of Cambridge and 4 is Cambridge of Harrington.

They're getting ready now. Set...

They're off!

It's Harrington on the inside lane who's making the going.

Bradley's pushing him. Cambridge is the backmarker.

They are neck-and-neck as they are about to come to the tape.

And it looks like Thomas. No, it's Bradley.

Is it Bradley? Thomas?

No, it's Bradley and Thomas!

No, no, it's Bradley and Thomas!

No, I think it was Bradley.

But it's a photo at second and third. And fourth.

When BBC TWO started, they had a lot of very unusual programmes.

And the most unusual of them were these Q series.

Help!

Because they didn't really fit anything you'd ever seen before.

Yes?

-Erm... Good morning, madam.

-Good morning, madam.

It was very bracing to watch.

You knew you were always going to be shocked by something that was going to happen.

That's not always the same as enjoying it.

But you'd say, "Wow! They tried to do that? Hey, that's great!".

That is the end of that bit.

Terry Jones and myself, particularly, we loved that.

Reveal yourself!

Mother!

We'd worked in television for two or three years.

And we knew there were certain things you were not allowed to do.

For instance, never go onto the set of a drama

with your label from the costume department still stuck on your coat.

You know, that had happened once and people had been fired.

And never, never, never again. So, what's Spike's take on it?

Everybody in the entire show has a little label on their coat.

It must've been inexplicable to most people.

But, those who knew it, it was very, very nice.

It's a great day for the grandmother hurling finals here at Beachy Head.

And the last three eliminations over,

100 grandmothers were successfully thrown out to sea.

After which, only two returned back

in the penalty time of one and a half minutes.

I think Spike thought that we just pinched the Q idea

to make Monty Python.

It wasn't quite like that.

But, certainly, we admired Q5 and the risks it took enormously.

And this is Mr Arthur Grainchurn and his 80-year-old grandmother.

-Er, Major.

-I beg your pardon.

-A grandmother and a teacher...91.

-91?

Well, well, well! Goodness me!

You couldn't nick Spike's stuff, really. It was so distinctive.

You could take the spirit of Spike, but you couldn't take the detail.

The Major is just making sure that the straps are...

-Put your fingers in your ears, Granny.

-Put my fingers in my ears?

And clench your teeth or they'll go pop.

-She's clenching her teeth now and...

-See the rocks?

Flatten out.

He has instructed her...

He has instructed her now to flatten out over the rocks when...

..as she's about to go.

Now...

-Are you ready, dear?

-I'm ready.

I think he's ready now.

Looking at his watch, he's...

The sweep of the illness was almost lunar in its cyclical nature.

You could almost predict to within the day whether he would be up

or whether he would be down.

He was at his most brilliant and most creative

when he was about three quarters of the way up,

the upswing, if you like.

He was brilliant.

Beyond brilliant. He was unique.

He was Spike Milligan

as Spike Milligan would always like to be.

And the ideas flowed and he was creative

and it was a joy to be there.

When he got to the top of the swing, everything was so fast...

HE JIBBERS

And it was like a kaleidoscope of comedy.

And you were grabbing at things wherever you could.

And then he'd slowly start the move down again.

And, erm...

Again, he was very good until we got towards the bottom.

And then it was slide off and no more writing again.

He was a beautiful father.

But we did have to cope with his moods.

I was very aware, very young, of his depression.

And it was hard.

I go under.

And I...I sort of break down.

And I just have to say, "Sod it! Leave me alone."

And I...just stay in the room on my own, that's all.

Listen to some music.

We always knew if he was in his room and it said, "Do not enter",

that he was having a down time.

The door would open and it would be a shadow of the man

who would sit by our bed and tell us stories.

It would be awful to see this six-foot-something man

just shrivel in front of your eyes.

And he'd shrink.

He practically looked like a little elf by the end with hollow eyes.

You can tell a lot by the eyes when they go into darkness.

Mental pain is worse than any physical pain.

It's invisible.

That's the awful part of it, you know?

An invisible pain aggressing you all the time.

Calling you to vacillate in your moods.

And I've spent so much time in bed under tablets I can't remember.

Which would add up to a year.

I do remember men in white coats coming.

And I do remember them taking him in his pyjamas to the bathroom.

I had no idea what was going on.

Then I found out it was electric shock treatment.

TV PRESENTER: ECT is one of the most controversial treatments in modern medicine.

Many doctors swear by it. Others think it's greatly overused.

I was in a great depression. I was helpless in bed.

A man put these electrodes on my head. Put me to sleep.

When I came out, I was crying.

And crying, itself, was a relief, you know?

And so, quite obviously,

it produced something which created a condition of relief.

He would be lying on that bed for two days

and nobody would get into the room.

I once tried the old British standby...

"Pull yourself together, man!"

And, of course, that was just rubbish. "Go away! Go away!"

You, like so many people who suffer from this, get very irritated

with people who say, "Snap out of it."

-Oh, that's silly.

-Yes.

It's like saying to a man with a broken leg,

"Come on, walk, and you'll be all right."

But most people get depressed.

I can tell you've never been this deep down yourself. I can tell it.

It's just like a... Well, you just can, that's all.

He still didn't feel like people understood what depression was.

And especially as he'd been in a coma in the war for three weeks,

people related it to that.

But I, personally, actually believe he was just born like that.

Because it runs in small fractions through my family.

And he'd spent a lifetime trying to explain to his mum and dad

about how he gets depression.

But, I suppose, it was the era.

I want to tell you a story.

It concerns a man who had once been a dashing cavalry officer

in one of His Majesty's crack Indian cavalry regiments.

He was a devil-may-care sort of man,

with no time for women.

Except one.

His father used to say to him,

"Well, son, you know, you've just got to get on up there,

"get back on the horse and pull your socks up."

And then Dad said to me,

"You'll never believe it, Laura, two years before my father died,

"he sent me a letter telling me

"that he'd suffered the same illness his whole life."

And that really upset my father.

That his own father couldn't admit it to him.

It was all held in.

The... The darkness.

LEO MILLIGAN, CHUCKLING: But what does it matter?

It all soon will end with the sentinel's, "Who goes there?"

And, to death, I will cheerfully cry, "A friend!"

And he'll say, "Pass, devil may care."

Who helps you?

The children help me. Involuntarily, they help me.

By their sheer simplicity

and their not wanting anything except love or a story, you know?

# The birds and beasts were there

# The old baboon by the light of the moon combing his auburn hair... #

Jane is the youngest now.

And I feel saddened that she's sort of the last kid we'll have.

I'd like some more,

but it just wouldn't be fair on the world, you know?

When I'm busy and I say, "I'm sorry, Daddy's reading the newspapers."

What's in the newspapers that's so interesting?

When there's a real, live fairy next to you.

It's very bad. I...

It does tell me...make me think anew.

"Come on, Daddy, let's play cowboys in the garden."

I don't feel like it.

But when I analyse it, I go out and I do play cowboys in the garden.

And I do feel like it.

There! They're over there, burning their fires. See? Keep quiet!

All right, get a bucket of water and put their fire out, shall we?

Shush... Follow me now.

Very quiet. Shush...

Oh! An arrow's gone into me!

Quick! Quick! Aw! Quick!

Children just seem to bring him that peace,

that inner peace that he needed.

There's always been a child running through my head,

laughing, all through my life.

I just don't seem I can get old.

Not old enough to get away from it.

I have a childish charisma inside me.

And I... I love it.

What's it like being Mrs Spike Milligan?

Erm...

Interesting.

I don't really... I wouldn't know how to answer that question.

You recognise him when you see him on television?

Is that the same chap that you're married to?

Oh, yes. He's not somebody who alters very much, is he, you know?

He doesn't, erm...

He's not the great actor that puts on the great...

I mean, you know, he's just Spike, isn't he, all the time.

Well, is he larking around most of the day

or is he a sad and unhappy man?

He doesn't lark around.

He's a quiet person. He's serious.

He's often sad, yes.

Well, he seems to, erm...

..feel that the world's responsibilities are his.

He takes them on his own shoulders

and he makes them his own responsibilities.

You think that's good?

To a certain extent, yes.

It's inhuman. It's anti-Christian.

It's against all that we stand for in the world of progress.

It's a backward step.

We are right! They are wrong!

Let us go on being right!

If he cared passionately about something,

he would go and talk for it and do it.

I think he was always completely uncowed

and unafraid of speaking his mind.

Look at that! Look at that!

It was Spike who told us to use less petrol,

who tried to save trees,

and just did all green things, which was very ahead of its time.

But there's no shortage of men or women or children. We are prolific.

In fact, we are the cause of the crush upon the animal population.

I love my fellow man. But I don't have any worry about him.

He's plentiful. He's too bloody plentiful, if you know what I mean.

Sometimes people would say Spike spoke his mind too often

or too quickly or about the wrong thing.

But he completely refused to be browbeaten by anybody.

And I really...I really admire that in him.

Now, this programme that you're about to see

is a re-creation of an experience I had when I was in a mental home.

One of the nurses used to come in at night. I remember that.

And she used to mock me.

Still feeling sorry for yourself?

A lot of people worse off than you are, you know?

Think of the starving in Africa.

Are you bloody finished?!

You bloody cow!

Just a few years earlier,

he would have been, you know, rejected by society.

He would have been in an asylum.

He made it a subject that could be discussed and talked about publicly.

All right, you've been watching all that. So I'll ask you a question.

Do you think I'm normal or abnormal?

Better still, are you abnormal or normal?

He was brave in telling the world that "I suffer with this illness."

It was quite nice that, actually, some of my girlfriends

thought that, maybe, my father wasn't just a total lunatic,

but he might, actually, have a mental issue as well.

It did make it easier for other people to identify with that

and say, "Well, if he can talk about it, then I can talk about it."

-Eccles...?

-Hello?

It's me, Thin Buttons.

Oh, my friend!

I'm your friend. You remember me?

-I remember you.

-Yeah.

'They did something amazing, didn't they?

'The fusion of those two rocked the world a bit, didn't it?

It was a bit Lennon and McCartney, wasn't it?

APPLAUSE

Honestly, they were like the ugly Romeo and Juliet.

I would have thought they were gay, the way they behaved.

I'm going to take the risk of putting these two together.

Mud and Min, Mud and Min...

Because they hugged and held each other's hands

and kissed each other and...

Yeah, they had a great time together.

Now, Spike Milligan...

# I want to be unhappy,

# But I can't be unhappy till I make you unhappy, too. #

LAUGHTER

I remember Dad and Peter disappearing up to Dad's room.

They'd always ask nanny to bring up the special honey and toast.

And, after 10 or 15 minutes,

there would be hysterical crying laughter

coming out from Dad's bedroom.

LAUGHTER

They'd be playing the static on an old gramophone for half an hour.

You could hear them going, "It's great! It's great!"

And laughing and...

You'd hear it as crying laughter.

And I just thought, you know, I'm a seven-year-old thinking,

"God, you're such a twat, Dad."

No, but then, years later,

I found out that the honey was produced in Mexico.

LAUGHTER

And the bees were fed off marijuana plants.

So it was like marijuana honey.

LAUGHTER

And that went on for ages.

"Can you get me my special honey?"

I just thought Dad had a sweet tooth!

Lift up your trousers, laddie.

CLATTERING

-Oh-ho-ho...!

-LAUGHTER

Who pulled those trousers down?

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

It was a chance for them to get back together

and sort of lay the ghost, I suppose.

Here, who's that snoring in that frock?

-That's...

-LAUGHTER

That's the loose hound.

'The occasion was just fantastic.

'And to see them all up there, doing their stuff, was wonderful.'

Laddie...

'But it was interesting to see Spike on radio.

'Because you could see the cogs working, thinking, "Is this funny?

"Is this funny? Is this working? Do we need to go back on that?"

LAUGHTER

Harry was Harry.

Harry, you know, would just get on and it would be a great laugh.

And Spike had his other interesting new concerns

or worries or angers.

So, I think it probably,

in that way, Peter was the one that would have loved them to come back and do it.

-Eccles...

-Yep?

Let us play a game...

-SNORING

-..and push him down the well.

Yeah.

Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!

LOUD SPLASH

LAUGHTER

He's fallen in the water.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

'Spike was trying to move on to other things.

'Fed up with the whole kind of...

The Goon Show was the only thing he ever did.

Oh...

You know, trying to claw his way away from the thing.

I think, maybe, he thought that this would be a way

of putting a line underneath it and saying, you know,

"That's it, OK? Now I do other stuff."

-Now, get out!

-LAUGHTER

But it just perpetuated the myth, you know?

-ALL:

-What are we going to do now?

What are we going to do now?

What are we going to do now?

-LAUGHTER

-What are we going to do now?

LAUGHTER

No, we would take something and then we would say,

"What can we do to this that will make it funnier?"

And so the Boy Scouts got the bigger hats.

The table...

"Let's put the table on a slope" and everything would just fall.

And they'll have to put it back up,

whilst still conducting their normal dialogue.

We interrupt this interruption with this interruption.

He was the first of the comedians who saw barriers

that didn't need to be there any more.

That comedy didn't have to be confined to your mother-in-law.

# The lonely sea and the sky... #

That you could actually go into whichever area the mind took you.

LAUGHTER

Hel... Hel...

Hello, darling, I'm home.

LAUGHTER

You're late tonight.

LAUGHTER

I'm sorry I'm late.

The tubes were full of commuters.

LAUGHTER

That relationship with the BBC, from my memory, is not a good one.

That's the trouble with the BBC. None of the parts work.

Won't keep you long.

He could be very rough about 'them'.

'Them' being the BBC.

-BLOWS RASPBERRY

-The lot of you!

Spike never got on with any producers.

One he described as a cupboard full of vests.

I think the BBC were amazingly patient with Spike, really.

I mean, he was a bit like a wayward child

who you had to slightly control.

But, I think they probably recognised

there was something very magical there

that they had to somehow preserve.

I've written a song for my mother, who's just come over from Australia.

I wrote it for her and it's called A Waltz From The Heart.

And all my family are in tonight.

I got tickets for them at the exclusion of everybody else.

And this song is for my mother