Memories of Milligan

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I’ve often read so much and heard so much about his treachery. It was a closed book to me and I never came across it at all. There was a time when I ventured into one of his black dog depressions. It was when he invited me to go to Manchester and he was doing a one-man show, all those ad-libs that I knew off by heart. He had booked me a room next to his in the hotel. He had said, ‘Let me know when you arrive,’ so I arrived and started to put notes under the door of his room saying, ‘Hello. I’m here.’ There was a big sign on his door that said, ‘DO NOT DISTURB. I’M SLEEPING.’

I wouldn’t dream of knocking on the door so I kept pushing notes under it and then I sent him cartoons and little poems. I was bending down with a note saying, ‘It’s nearly 7 o’clock and you are due on stage at 7.30,’ when he opened the door and sent me flying because I was down there with my nose on the end of the door. He shouted, ‘What are you doing on your hands and knees outside my room? It’s theatre time, woman!’ I said, ‘Actually, you invited me up here, Spike, and I thought you’d be amused by the notes. And you asked me to let you know when I arrived.’ He said, ‘Go to the theatre. I don’t want to talk to you now.’ And he left.

NORMA: I asked Liz if she was ever the butt of his treachery.

LIZ: Treachery is not a word I would use, but he could and did hurt me. When he was filming Ghost in the Noonday Sun in Cyprus he asked me to fly out to be with him. Then he ignored me totally, went out to dinner with other people and never invited me. That was terrible. Otherwise I had a lovely trip – enjoyed the beach and the sunshine – but it seemed he didn’t want to know me. It was very hurtful. I came home early.

NORMA: I told Liz my memory of her on that trip. The sun was shining, she went into the sea, lay on her back and said, ‘Thank you, Spike.’ So it wasn’t all bad.

LIZ: No. At least I got away from the English weather.

NORMA: Spike was a strange person and Barry Humphries said he could be an absolute shit but that people forgave him. I asked Liz why she thought people forgave him.

LIZ: Because he had such a kind and sweet way of making up afterwards. He could be sweet beyond belief. This was my experience, anyway. Sweet beyond belief. I remember when I was sacked by a Fleet Street editor. I was doing television previews for him and was absolutely demolished by this. Spike was at the Mermaid Theatre doing Ben Gunn, or whatever, and I went there straight from my Fleet Street sacking to see him. I was crying and the doorman was so flustered he let me into Spike’s dressing room. Spike said, ‘I can’t talk to you. I’m just about to go on,’ and I said, ‘I know. I know.’ I told him what had happened. He gave me a bottle of wine, half full. He’d had the first half. He told me to take it home, drink it in the bath and I would feel better. I did exactly that and when I arrived at the house there was a huge bouquet from Interflora. How he managed to get it there before I got home I don’t know. That was the sort of radiant kindness that touched me again and again. When I hear of his treachery and his racism I can’t associate these things with him at all. It was silly, wasn’t it, just because he’d blacked up as an Indian in Curry and Chips, for heaven’s sake.

He was very kind in his own way and he loved my little girl, Suzy. I was talking to Suzy the other day – she’s a fully-fledged shop-owner now – and she said, ‘I didn’t think much of him.’ She had brought him breakfast in bed one day when he came to stay. She put a little flower in a vase and he shouted at her. He didn’t want toast, he wanted a roll, or it could have been the other way round. Suzy was demolished. She came back and said he wanted a roll. I said, ‘We don’t have a roll. It’ll have to be toast.’ He shouted from the bedroom, ‘I heard that. And make sure it has butter and strawberry jam on it.’ Suzy took it upstairs and Spike said, ‘Take it away. I’m not hungry now.’ And that from a man who loved children! It was very hurtful. She was only about four, but she knew I adored him. That was too bad, and yet when he was leaving he said, ‘Look, I’m very fond of Suzy. I didn’t mean to shout at her, so take my undershirt. She can have it because the weather is turning cold.’ It was one of those Wolseley knitted vests. Huge! Of course, she would drown in it, so I kept it and I still sleep in it to this day.

NORMA: There were tears in her eyes as I told Liz that I had always wanted Spike to marry her and that towards the end of his life he was un happy.

LIZ: I wish I’d known. Perhaps I could have helped. But he never called me. I would have gone anywhere with him if he had asked me.

NORMA: He came to stay with me, he said to sort himself out. He was deadly serious. I told him he could have a room as long as he wanted to stay. He said, ‘What a friend we have in Jesus, but I’ve got a better one in you.’

LIZ: The last time we met was in one of his favourite restaurants, the Trattoo, in Kensington. It was The Ivy of the day in the Sixties, Seventies and early Eighties, always buzzing with people from theatre and television. It was a year before he died and I could tell his health was fading. As we parted he said, ‘Please. You stay alive and keep your enthusiasm. I think I’ve lost mine. Yes, this time, I really do.’

NORMA: Liz hasn’t lost any of hers. And I’m sure her memories of Spike keep her warm in colder days. He should have married her.

Denis Norden

According to his headmaster at the City of London School, Denis had what was considered to be ‘a fine academic brain’. His parents, no doubt, wondered which profession he would grace. I don’t suppose for one moment they considered showbusiness. What a loss to this profession it would have been if he had taken the academic route.

He met Frank Muir in 1947 and together they became the successful writing partnership of Muir and Norden, with hits such as Take It From Here, a radio series which lasted twelve years. Other radio hits were Whack-O and three series of Faces of Jim, both wonderful vehicles for Jimmy Edwards. But I remember the brilliant radio sketch they wrote for Peter Sellers called ‘Balham, Gateway to the South’. This must have been in the early Sixties. In 1980 – about two years before Peter died – Spike, Peter and I were having dinner in the Trattoo. We were having a normal conversation when suddenly, with that chameleon quality he possessed, Peter changed his demeanour and in the accent he used in ‘Balham’ he recited the first part of the sketch. It was amazing. Spike just took it for granted.

But I wondered how, after all the characters Peter had played over a period of what must have been at least fifteen years, he could remember the sketch so clearly. I asked him the question and with a complete throwaway he said, ‘Norm, I just can.’ Spike, not to be outdone, burst into ‘Ying Tong Diddle I Po’ and together they sang the first five or six lines of ‘The Ying Tong Song’. I don’t think I’ve ever told Denis the story of his brilliant ‘Balham’ sketch. I know it would make him smile, as he made the nation smile with his long-running television series It’ll be Alright on the Night.

DENIS: I think I first met Spike at Daddy Allen’s Club where everybody (and this would have been post-war, almost immediately post-war) who was just starting at the BBC then used to go, to this club in Soho, the chief benefit of it being they had a slate and you could eat on tick there. So all of us who were trying to get into radio, particularly Michael Bentine and all those people, we would take these equally young BBC radio producers there and treat them to lunch which would always be a steak because they were in such short supply. Looking back on it now, I’m sure it was horsemeat anyway but nobody knew the difference in those days. I remember Frank took somebody and took one of the producers who ordered a steak and we didn’t have any money and Frank sort of indicated to me it was to go on the slate and the producer said ‘Can I have an egg on it?’ and Daddy Allen said ‘You can have an egg yes, but Christ, the bill’ which wasn’t the best way to entertain. But I think that was where I first met Spike.

Thereafter we sort of interwove quite a few times because we both recorded our shows at the Paris Studios in Lower Regent Street on a Sunday and either we went in after they recorded or they came in after we recorded so there would be this interval where we’d meet in that narrow corridor down at the bottom of the stairs at the end of which there was a canteen and we would have a cup of tea together, or else we would meet in the Captains Cabin which was the local pub for everybody who recorded at the Paris Studios.

NORMA: What were you recording at that time?

DENIS:Take It From Here.

NORMA: Spike was recording The Goons?

DENIS: Yep. One of my principal interweavings with Spike was when my children were young. Spike did a Saturday morning radio programme of records and the whole programme was aimed at children. There was one record called ‘Little Red Monkey’ which I think actually Joy Nichols sang, which he played regularly and the kids would sing around the house. He would also recite his poems, so at a very early age we regularly got Spike Milligan verse on long car journeys, chiefly ‘There are holes in the sky where the rain gets in but they’re ever so small that’s why rain is thin.’ Now that particular quatrain which I may not have perfectly remembered – my kids grew up with that, they then had children of their own so my grandchildren were read Spike’s verses and they went marching round saying, ‘There are holes in the sky where the rain gets in.’ My grandson (who is an architect in Los Angeles) has two small boys and they are now perpetuating those ‘holes in the sky where the rain gets in’. So that’s four generations of holes in the sky.

NORMA: What was your first impression of Spike?

DENIS: I think it was his audaciousness on radio, quite apart from the fact that technically he did things with sound effects which nobody had done before. Spike was the first to fool listeners’ ears with his sound effects and it’s never been better done than those interminable footsteps he would write in, which is now a kind of cliché but all clichés begin as novelties. He had enormous nerve in beating the censors in ways that they never noticed. We all suffered from having to have our scripts examined before they could be broadcast, but I remember Spike would throw in references, for example, ‘Grant Road, Bombay’, which nobody knew (except those who had either been brought up in India or had served there) was the road where the brothels were, and various other Indian expressions which he only got caught on two or three times, as I recall. He got away with murder in that respect. When he was at his best, there was nobody like him. Gaiety – that word which has now been kidnapped. There was nobody who could make a gathering more, in the old-fashioned sense, gay, or make people feel more at ease than Spike when he was on form. As everybody knows, he wasn’t always on form but for a large part of the time he was and my principal memory of him is laughter.

I think people are inclined to get the wrong idea about the Fifties. They are always painted as being dull, austerity was the word. What they forget was we had passed the decade before, or at least half of the decade before, in a state of constant apprehension, boredom, grief and sometimes terror, a wholly artificial way of living – and suddenly we’d been reprieved and you can’t over-emphasise the enormous feeling of relief that everybody had at that time during the late 40’s and the 1950’s, you know time doesn’t split neatly, the 60’s actually began about 1957 so you know it doesn’t divide into decades so neatly. But we had what no other generation has had since, an enormous feeling like a group of people who have been trapped in a room and suddenly they’re all let out and standing on the pavement outside. The whole country was like that and we’d all lived through the same inconveniences and dangers, and you only had to mention them and everybody picked up on them. We could share allusions in a way that nobody has been able to since, particularly as it’s now become so multicultural that there’s not a great sharing of allusions anyway. So we were very fortunate in that respect and there was a mateyness too, especially amongst those of us who had been in the Forces. Frank and I had been in the RAF, and we’d done the troop concerts, either writing or performing, and we knew that the way to make a military audience laugh was to send up the officers. You had to gauge it in such a way that you made fun of them but without inciting to mutiny. You had to know where to stop. And that is why I think that generation, Spike and so on, sent everything up but not to the point of destruction. One thing I remember about Spike, talk about a rebel without a cause, Spike was a rebel with too many causes. He was a rebel with more causes than anybody.