Q&A with the
Authors Of Spike, Ian Hislop and Nick Newman – A new play coming to Darlington
Hippodrome
Spike
Darlington Hippodrome
Tuesday 18 - Saturday 22 October 2022
Ian
Hislop and Nick Newman have teamed up to create a new stage play based on thelife of Spike Milligan which comes to Darlington Hippodrome in October.
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| Ian Hislop and Nick Newman |
Your play ‘Spike’ tells the story of the young Spike
Milligan, coming out of World War Two and writing and performing with The Goon
Show – which became a phenomenon. How did the play come about?
Nick Newman [NN]: We wanted to
write something about Spike to coincide with the centenary of his birth –we
didn’t quite hit that deadline, but we made it for his 104th! From
the outset, we wanted it to be a celebration. There are too many biopics of
comedians that tell the ‘tears of a clown’ story. And while you can’t escape
Spike’s mental health issues, for us that was something that we saw as powering
his comedy.
Ian Hislop [IH]: We didn’t want an
audience coming out thinking, ‘the really important thing about this person is
that they were miserable and unhappy. And now so am I!’. We wanted them
thinking, ‘the important thing about this person is that he produced all this!’
and it made a huge number of people very happy. And still does. There are two
very grim incidents in the play involving Spike having breakdowns, both of
which he immediately turned into comedy. That in itself is
fascinating.
Did you want to celebrate Spike because you were Goon
Show fans when you were younger?
NN: Maybe. I remember when I was at
school, just crying with laughter reading Spike’s war memoirs. And The Goon
Show, I was brought up on it. My father was in the RAF and we were stationed in
places like Singapore where there was no television. All we had to listen to
was acetate recordings of The Goon Show. I can still quote chunks and bore for
Britain.
IH: I’m a lot younger than Nick, so I
didn’t hear them first time around. I missed out. The pleasure for me of making
this play was Nick saying, ‘this is really funny. Genuinely
funny and brilliant writing.’ And I went back and listened to it and was
gobsmacked. I’d become so used to the older Spike, and the older Harry Secombe
and Peter Sellers, that I’d forgotten that when they first came along, they’d
just been demobbed, they were really young men, and they blew the place
away.
And the people in charge at the BBC couldn’t bear it.
They had no idea what this group were doing, and they wanted to shut them down,
basically. They thought they were noisy and anarchic and up to no good. All of
which was true: that’s what made them so attractive. So for me the challenge
with the play was: can we bring all that to life onstage?
And that's what the play depicts: the battles between
Milligan and the BBC?
NN: When we first began writing, we
managed to get hold of a great cache of correspondence between Spike and the
BBC, and from BBC management about Spike. And that gave us the backbone of the
story. Because it was quite clear that Spike, having been fighting Hitler and
Mussolini for five years, went into the BBC and started fighting them. It was a
continuation of war by other means.
IH: Spike always hated the BBC. He
was furious that they didn’t pay him enough money and didn’t respect him and
were trying to get rid of him. There was something about institutions that he
found incredibly annoying – but also productive and comforting. He wouldn’t
have been who he was without them. After all, the BBC gave him two brilliant
producers, who made the anarchic mess that was the Goons into one of the
greatest radio programmes ever. So they both enabled and frustrated
him.
NN: Some of it was class warfare, I
think, because Spike was working-class. As you can tell from his war memoirs,
he didn’t have time for the officer class. And of course, after the war, all
these officers went straight into the BBC and ran it. So Spike was at
loggerheads with them on that basis.
As we’ve tried to reflect in the play, the BBC
management were always saying: there’s too much in The Goon Show about the war,
it’s too noisy, there are too many explosions. And this was Spike exorcising
his demons. One critic described the Goons as being “like shell-shock on
radio”, and that says it all. That was Spike’s experience: he was shell-shocked.
And he carried on reflecting that in his work.
IH: It’s interesting, because we tend
to think of the 1950s as being incredibly deferential and then luckily along
came satire in 1961 and everything changed. But that’s not how it happened. The
great satirists Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook were huge Spike
fans. When I took over as editor of Private Eye, [previous editor] Ingrams said
to me ‘Spike Milligan will write in letters. Just put them in! He’s a genius.’
And Michael Palin, who we worked with on our film The Wipers Times, said to us, ‘People say
Monty Python was very influenced by The Goons. And yes: it was!’
It’s remarkable that Spike’s work inspired two
different strands of UK comedy: Python-style absurdism but also the ’60s satire
boom.
IH: I don’t think they saw those
things as separate in the way later historians did. Spike was just doing
topical comedy. In 1954, the BBC produced a landmark TV version of George
Orwell’s ‘1984’ . The Goon Show almost immediately produced an episode called
‘1985’, taking the mickey out of the ‘Big Brother Corporation’. It was the same
with the Coronation. They did a whole episode about it. It’s not like ‘oh,
what’s this mad world that the Goons created?’ It’s your world! It’s the one
that’s going on in front of you.
NN: In the play, we show how
satirical Spike was. There were conflicts with the BBC about Peter Sellers
doing an impression of the Queen. The BBC hauled Spike in and said ‘you can’t
parody the Queen!’ Nobody had done that before: a direct satire of the
monarchy. The BBC thought everyone was going to get put in the Tower. But then
three years later, Prince Philip invited the Goons to be his representatives in
the Cambridge tiddlywinks competition.
IH: Prince Philip clearly thought the
Goons had delivered a very amusing representation of his wife. Which endeared
him to me.
NN: In the correspondence we read,
which the play dramatises, the BBC are complaining that the Goons’ endless
jokes about the war are insulting to the memory of the people who fought in it.
So of course Spike turned around and said ‘We all fought in the war!’ If you read his war memoirs, they’re full
of people making jokes about the grimmest situations. There’s this account of
Spike just before he gets blown up at Monte Cassino, crawling up a gully and
being bombed by the Germans. He comes across a rock onto which someone has
chalked a sign saying ‘World War Two: this way’, and an arrow. And you think:
in the midst of death, that is quite funny.
Did doing it live, in a theatre, help you get closer
to the spirit of the Goons' work?
IH: When you put something onto the
live stage, you can bridge the gap to the audience and have real fun with it...
NN: …because when they recorded it,
they were endlessly ‘corpsing’- laughing uncontrollably and breaking the fourth
wall. The BBC got so annoyed. They said, ‘you sound as if you’re having more
fun than the audience.’ And they said: 'We are!' We’ve tried to reflect that on
stage by also breaking the fourth wall. When you see the play performed
live it does remind you that Spike always had an imaginary audience in his
head.
IH: He was never happier than with an
audience. Being a tortured writer on his own, that was the downside. For Spike,
the great bit was rehearsal and then performance. Or the TV chat shows, on
which he was such a great performer. Spike would be on anything. He just loved
it. So we needed an actor who would understand that, who really wanted to get
the laughs.
NN: There is a responsibility to try
and get it right. Because the Milligan family came to see the play, their
reaction was very important to us. Jane Milligan came up to us after the show
and said ‘That was my dad on stage!’ That felt fantastic. Because the family
want Spike’s legacy to be that he was very, very funny. And so do we.
We have a lovely speech at the end of the play, a
little paean of praise from Harry Secombe to what it was like working on the
Goon Shows. Every time I hear it performed, it brings tears to my eyes. Because
it’s exactly what my memory of the Goons is. Just wishing every day was a
Sunday. Soaring on the thermal gusts of Spike Milligan’s imagination.
Reflecting that is everything we wanted to achieve with the play.
IH: Secombe was the one who saw what
fun they were having, who genuinely appreciated it, and tried to keep the peace
with the other two so it didn’t all break up. You know, millions of people
listen to them every week. Every Sunday they’d go into the studio and have an
enormous amount of fun, and then go out to the pub afterwards and have a laugh
with people who loved them. What bit of that isn’t right?! We
wanted to get that feeling across.
Is it part of your ambition with the play to introduce
Spike’s work to new audiences?
IH: Yes, I think that’s fair. There’s nothing quite as
much fun as hearing a joke delivered to a modern audience that was written 100
years ago, in the case of The Wipers Times, or with the Goons, 50 years ago.
And hearing today’s audience roar with laughter. You just think: that’s
fabulous. That is incredibly pleasing.
Tickets:
Spike runs at
Darlington Hippodrome from Tuesday 18 to Saturday 22 October. To book call the
Box Office on 01325 405405 or visit www.darlingtonhippodrome.co.uk
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