Alexander Games: The Essential Spike Milligan

Reviewed by GRAHAM REID

On national Poetry Day a couple of weeks ago a television news team buttonholed people on the street and asked them to recite a piece of poetry. One guy did an impromptu local variant of Spike Milligan's Silly Old Baboon.

By coincidence, that very day a letter writer to this paper expressed outrage about et.al being chosen for the Venice Biennale by referring to her previous work, "a portable toilet with donkey and exploding noises", as hardly unique: "Just listen to Major Bloodnock in any Goon Show of nearly 50 years ago. I hope she credited Spike Milligan for the inspiration."

That Milligan — who died two years ago — should still walk through our collective memory is hardly surprising; the man was a wit for all seasons, whose songs, poems and surreal musings touched people for their humour and turn of phrase.

This excellent collection takes the long and inclusive view of Milligan's diverse works: here are the lyrics to his 56 hits I'm Walking Backwards to Christmas and the Ying Tong Song ("Ying tong ying tong ying tong ... ") alongside selections from his Silly Verse for Kids ("On the Ning Nang Nong where the cows go Bong! And the monkeys all say Boo!").

There is the first radio script from 51 when Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine, Peter Sellers and Milligan appeared as Crazy People, plus the opening chapter of his hilarious novel Puckoon, a kind of deranged and Irish Under Milk Wood which began: "Several and half metric miles North East of Sligo, split by a cascading stream, her body on earth, her feet in water, dwells the microcephalic community of Puckoon."

Yet in the very absurdity of the malapropism (of the kind which inspired John Lennon's two books) there is poetry, and that side of Milligan is also represented here. Milligan was a tragic clown whose life was punctuated by nervous breakdowns, manic depression (of which he made light sometimes) and lost love. This from Toni about his first serious girlfriend: "But the road we ascended/had finally ended/Addio amore. Toni."

Elsewhere he rails against the insanity of war (The White Flag, Soldier, soldier) and man's indifference to animals. Short moralistic pieces like Once upon (Man's inhumanity to animals, then his own kind) have the ring of Oscar Wilde about them.

But for most Milligan was the funny man and so attention naturally turns to his scripts for The Bed Sitting Room and The Two Ronnies (their classic The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town).

Milligan was an absurdist but everywhere there is a disconcerting ring of truth, captured in a witty, pointed and deflating epigram such as this: "A lot of learning can be a little thing."