Hodder & Stoughton

$280

Those born too late to have been fans of the Goon Show may not have found the news of Spike Milligan's death last year particularly significant, but his influence on many of us has been profound. His 50 or so books and countless scripts for radio, TV and stage did much to define what we know today as British humour.

Biographer Humphrey Carpenter takes a fittingly irreverent approach. 'Am I alone in finding the opening bits of biographies almost always very, very boring?' he asks on the first page, and he wastes little time exploring Milligan's ancestry and infancy before moving on to his life's work.

The Terence Milligan whom Carpenter paints is a tortured genius. Prone to sudden mood swings, he could be all smiles and charm one minute, then sarcastic and foul-mouthed the next.

Plagued by severe bipolar disorder (then known as manic depression), he was notoriously unpredictable. Depression would seize him in the middle of a rehearsal, a director recalls, and 'his eyes would become heavy and close, you could see the blood drain from his face, and he'd become haggard, have no energy and just sit gazing into space, and it would be impossible to get him to go on'. The attacks lasted for days or months, during which he would lock himself away.

The manic phases of his condition could lead to more bizarre behaviour. In 1952 he tried to kill fellow Goon Peter Sellers, an incident which ended in a straitjacket and, not for the last time, a psychiatric hospital.

For all Milligan's faults, 'genius' is the word that recurs most often in the reminiscences of those who knew him. Even Graham Stark, who was forced to pull out of a play mid-season after co-star Milligan threatened to shoot him, said 'he was very naughty in lots of ways, but he was the most brilliant bugger I ever knew'.

Milligan was a prolific writer and performer for more than half a century but the Goon Show, on BBC Radio from 1951 to 1960, was his most famous work. Before that, post-war British entertainment was in the grip of a pre-war music-hall formula no longer relevant to a changing world.

Monty Python's John Cleese recalls: 'It was a time when people were getting fed up with the stuffiness of England ... [some writers] challenged it with fury . . . the Goons challenged it with joy. They created a sense of liberation which went beyond laughter.'

The show popularised humour based on surreal situations and bizarre associations rather than punchlines or farce. Its idiotic characters inhabited a ridiculous explosion-ridden fantasy world, where people could be shepherd's pies, steal the Suez Canal or use steamed puddings as artillery shells.

The year before he died, Milligan was knighted and voted Funniest Man Of The Millennium on the BBC's website. Cleese said simply: 'He was the great god of us all.' Asked in his later years if he thought he would get into heaven, Milligan replied: 'I'd like to go there. But if Jeffrey Archer is there, I want to go to Lewisham.'