Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 20

Using the Beatles (upon whom Milligan, Sellers, Secombe and the man we are about to meet were such a crucial, if neglected, influence) as a template, posterity cut fourth Goon Michael Bentine a deal midway between Ringo Starr’s and Pete Best’s. His substantial contribution to the first three Goon Show radio series might have been largely overlooked, but his 1970s children’s TV series Michael Bentine’s Potty Time would introduce many an impressionable child of a later generation to the madness and grandeur of war (albeit at a comfortably surreal remove, via epic battle scene reconstructions starring a clan of small imaginary creatures called The Potties, and with little bits of sand blown into the air to signify explosions).

In ‘From the Ridiculous to the Paranormal’, an autobiographical one-man show he puts on at the Shaftesbury Avenue Lyric Theatre in the same week as Hope’s Royal Albert Hall date, Bentine refers to being born English as ‘first prize in the lottery of life’. His wartime experiences – after being refused entry to the RAF eleven times on account of his half-Peruvian parentage, Bentine was arrested as a deserter; he then contracted typhoid, typhus and tetanus as a result of a bungled inoculation – suggest otherwise in the strongest possible terms. But Bentine’s capacity for laughing in the face of adversity seems to be more or less infinite. Now suffering from cancer, he describes this as his farewell appearance (which it ultimately turns out to be), yet still leaves the stage with a grin. Goon, but not forgotten.

For those who have grown up thinking of The Goon Show as something Prince Charles likes which has a lot of silly voices in it, the idea that it actually represented a revolutionary overturning of the established order will necessarily take a bit of getting to grips with. But when the historian Peter Hennessy called The Goons ‘a kind of decade-long “other ranks” revenge on the Empire and its officer class’, he was not talking out of his hat. And Observer jazz critic Dave Gelly’s analogy between the impact of Milligan, Bentine and co. and that of the 1951 Festival of Britain was not far off the mark either: ‘The festival laid out the future pattern for architecture, town planning and design…while the Goons set about reducing to rubble the redundant edifice of British imperial smugness.’³⁷

As ex-servicemen united in their hatred of bureaucracy and time-wasting officialdom, the four men honing their act after hours at the Grafton Arms in Victoria’s Strutton Ground in the aftermath of the war had more than just bad memories of unfeeling superior officers in common. First off, being forced to do things you don’t want to do, in a confined space, in company you would not necessarily have chosen, has always been one of the most fertile breeding grounds for comedy (and would continue to be so long after The Goons were demobbed, from Porridge to Father Ted to The Office).

But beyond that, Spike Milligan’s personal experience of wartime as an expansion of mental as well as physical horizons does not seem to have been an isolated one. ‘Going abroad was a bonus in their lives,’ he wrote fondly of his fellow Gunners, ‘even though it took a war to give it to them.’

Spike Milligan, Pauline Scudamore’s fascinating biography, describes the impact of his first wartime posting to Bexhill-on-Sea. Far from alarm at being snatched from home and hearth and prepared for the possibility of violent death, Milligan’s chief response seems to have been one of exultation at unexpectedly rediscovering those senses of space and creative possibility which had been steadily closing down since late adolescence, when his family returned from Burma (where his father had been a noncommissioned officer in the colonial army) to the grim, grey world of pre-war Catford.

Escaping from the pettiness of 1940s south-east London³⁸ into a life of endless new experiences and constant physical danger, he found himself blessed with a dramatically heightened awareness of the world around him. ‘His sense of the ridiculous began to bubble in earnest,’ writes Scudamore of Milligan’s experiences in the North African campaign (so memorably detailed in war memoirs such as Rommel: Gunner Who? and Monty: His Part In My Victory): ‘what had war to do with all this beauty?’

Having got into the battalion concert party by means of his facility with a jazz trumpet, Milligan found himself expanding the element of knockabout banter in his musical performances into anarchic full-scale revue shows such as Stand Easy. In much the same way that Dadaist art had been underpinned by the horrors of the First World War trenches, these early comedic forays were inspired by the madness unfolding around him. ‘It was pure lunacy, no rhyme or reason in it,’ Spike later observed to Scudamore, ‘it was meant to be pointless, just like the war.’

The traumatic experiences under fire which would haunt him for the rest of his life would find a clear therapeutic echo in the regular bomb blasts and deranged sound effects of The Goon Show. ‘By creating a world where explosions hurt no one,’ Goon Show Companion compiler Roger Wilmut wrote sympathetically, ‘he made his own memories of the reality more bearable.’

The impact of wartime experience was not always so explicit. Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe & Son writers Galton and Simpson were originally recruited to the septic ranks of professional comedy scribes from a pneumonia ward. But Tony Hancock, a.k.a. The Lad Himself – the fellow ‘NAAFI comedian’ with whom Spike Milligan would later share a disastrous barge holiday (they couldn’t agree on which pubs to stop at) – never saw any action scarier than the concert party in Bournemouth.

Back in Civvy Street, the ex-soldiers’ battle-hardened irreverence would often rub up uneasily against those stuffy institutions – most notably the BBC – which had yet to reflect the impact of post-war social changes. The Goons, in Milligan’s subsequent assessment, were ‘trying to break into satire’. (They ‘could have beaten the fringe by ten years’, he insisted to Pauline Scudamore, had the producers of the time not ‘all been frightened out of their fucking jobs’.)

Peter Sellers ‘could do any voice of any politician in the land’, Milligan boasted, ‘the Queen included…and that made us lethal’. Yet archaic restrictions on the representation of living people forced them to hide behind such diplomatic formulations as Dinglebee for the prime minister and Lady Bold De Speedswell for the Queen.

The unsympathetic attitude of BBC bureaucrats would drive Milligan up to and, eventually (when the pressure of writing all the Goon Show scripts on his own caused him to attack Peter Sellers with a kitchen knife), over the brink of nervous collapse. However, the next generation of would-be TV satirists would be able to rely – at least in one case – on more sympathetic treatment from the corporation’s top brass. And in this instance, the lapse into military terminology is not inappropriate.