Bringing the comic genius Spike Milligan to the Brighton stage

Spike comes to Theatre Royal Brighton from October 11-15, the latest adventure for writing team Ian Hislop and Nick Newman (The Wipers Times, Trial By Laughter) who first met during their Sussex schooldays.

Nick explains: “We initially wanted to write something to mark the centenary of Spike’s birth in 2018 so we're only four years late! We were asked to have a look at Spike and we were given a whole tranche of correspondence between Spike and the BBC and also internal memos about him, and that is what really formed the backbone of the story.

"But I was always a huge Goons fan and when it was mooted that we look at Spike I was very keen that we should but the key thing was to find a story. But fortunately the story basically just leapt out of the correspondence. It's Spike complaining about money, Spike complaining about money, Spike complaining about money and he is just very funny. He can't stop making jokes and the BBC at times did try to take him on and make jokes back but that hardly went well. And it just dawned on me that Spike just carried on fighting the war but with the BBC instead. Making people laugh was what he most enjoyed doing and the thing is that people like Spike just don't stop performing.”

In the play there is a fantastic line, as Nick says – a line that Harry Secombe said about Peter Sellers who features quite prominently in the piece: “Secombe said that Peter Sellers could do all these voices but the only voice he couldn't do was Peter Sellers.’ And Spike was the same. He never stopped performing. These comedians are very strange people!”

And appropriately Milligan continues to live on at Private Eye which Ian edits.

“Ian's predecessor at Private Eye was Richard Ingrams who was a great friend of Spike’s. Spike is still very much a presence at Private Eye. We've got a letter of his hanging up outside the office. Spike was mentioned in the magazine right in the early days and he wrote to the magazine and his final words were ‘All hail Private Eye!’”

And there is certainly a crossover “I think it does come across how satirical the Goons were and if you think back, another of Spike’s biggest fans was Peter Cook who owned Private Eye. A lot of the madder stuff in the Eye in the 1970s was Peter cook directly influenced by Spike Milligan.

“But I think one of the things that really struck us when we started writing this play was that there is a whole generation out there that doesn't really know very much about him. Our own children are completely new to him despite us! And it has been a great pleasure seeing a younger audience react to the material. The Goons have a reputation through our parents’ generation as being quite loud and noisy and abrasive but actually when you go through the writing, it is comedy writing of the very highest quality.”