Advertisement

Spike Milligan

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP

Spike Milligan

Advertisement

The Biography

Humphrey Carpenter

Hodder & Stoughton

$280

Advertisement

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.

loading
Advertisement