What a Performance! - Spike Milligan

hello again as we continue this celebration of the best of our offbeat comics what a performance that was a catch phrase coined by the great character comedian Syd field and it's an expression I've often used after experiencing Spike Milligan Spike's always been the most daunting of guests because you can never be sure what he'd get up to it frequently made for exciting television especially if you're the sort of person who watches Formula One for the crashes but if you were the host of the show Spike's wilder antics could give you a serious laundry problem I first saw Spike 50 plus years ago I watched from the wings of the golden screen Hippodrome was spike did the audience warm up before a very famous radio show of the day called variety bandbox and frankly it wasn't so much a warm-up as a cremation and beside me the producer was muttering he's killing the show and every joke was going down in total silence and then suddenly spike dropped his trousers and the audience how could laughter and he shouted ah ha ha so it's subtlety awake and dropped his underpants as well with the goons of course he went on to give comedy a new dimension and his Q series for BBC two really opened the door for the Pythons to charge through you know you can be only 30 years old but if your first joke doesn't get a laugh you can be 80 in a hurry and if you're 80 and you get laughs inari then you get to be 30 spike will always be 30 Hadi's oh very well named owner nobody who work with him ever doubted that he was a genius genius is not a word we should toss around it's only show business Einstein Fossati Gnaeus that's cosmology this is just comedy being Irish I suppose it makes a difference as I say the Irish think sideways I think the best the best word that describes a sense of humor is anarchic although he was still very capable of thinking out the old musical jokes and saw nothing wrong with doing that what appealed to me about the goon shows was that it was you know when you said you have something saying money talks editing are she know the shows and did the gun show as a sort of relief really and then the gun shot took over but it was it slightly different from anything else we wrote on thermal currents about Milligan's imagination that was it you Antibes max fine I showed you break it first I'll make a hole in it good ridiculous that's the word [Music] where did you get a name like that [Music] before company was straightforward and not very funny really when you thought about him but you gotta use your mind you're there listen carefully that lovely melody that I have recorded my name is fume which is no showing North Louisville and it's called if I had to do it all over again I'd do it all over you this fight we try to do is just squeeze names into the script that the sensor the sense aureus figures wouldn't notice and Milligan II magoons had an acrobatic act called Novak and good and people complained about it especially when they got a third member and they were known as still Novak he's got a mind back nobody else in the world Milligan it's completely off the wall and yes it's brilliant yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away yesterday suddenly suddenly what I liked about his Cheryl why I like about image that he plays at the forum of the whole thing you know it's all unexpect is very little on that show that you could ever predict really Chief Constable Sir Robert Road Safety commercial once tell us exactly what the police reaction is to this very serious charge they didn't understand the humor their battle by it but it was getting fan mail and that's further captured or was very brave of them you know I mean a spike sort of was almost a kind of a model in my mind and I assume in the others for this this surrealist leap of the imagination spike could always encapsulate you know it's a jump one idea to another that just radio yeah [Music] [Music] and in the savage and it stops playing there's as if but the great thing about that is is if that that summer shop it's happening all the time so he's always got a time already the owner so oh not another one oh you still mean it makes you think I must go down to the sea again the lonely sea in the sky and all I asked was a tall ship I think spike didn't didn't think punch lines were terribly important basically because you couldn't think of any and so there were some waves out of it excuse me sir yes would you bear witness to this vile robbery yes finish the sketch he gives the viewer an incredible amount of license for understanding what's going on he doesn't need to wrap it all up in rows we had enough fun then let's do this so it's not so much a lack of punchline it makes perfect sense all right we can carry on walking around but you know with these noses on and and finish this off in a while while trumpet or they can start striking the set and also what are we gonna do now and cuz it's telly we can cut to something else that of course is that reaction hey your family and then you laugh any you laugh then so you do get a laugh because you get a laugh because you last for a long reason but I like that I like that idea of that kind of premeditated well you know Pollock's t you know get in the punchline he's not afraid of stereotypes at all because he defies you to say they're not funny they are I said I became stereotypes and lots of stereotypes are very funny and he knows that in 1970 the iris attempted to enter the moon race anything to escape from the iris race while in 1972 Scotland launched its own program to put a man into space he's not a PC man I vaguely remember it was one in a queue there was a ramp by playing a till a Roomba and he always used to black up a lot I think again a specie in context of the time as I say you know when you actually watch 70s television it is incredible what how people were very happy to make racist jokes spike does the Asian characters and a lot of today people killed it so quite grew up in it he genuinely does not feel the need to explain himself he says I love India I grew up in India where it doesn't agree with your quantification of what the agents that that is my experience and I defy you and I deny you the right to second-guess me which a lot of his humor Dalek what he didn't agree yeah yes pure spike absolutely I mean I do like it but I said what he was thinking of ask mr. Banerjee [Music] the only aspect of spike that's gone out-of-date was the only aspect that was never really in fashion and that is it was not politically correct in a big way he wasn't and he had views they were indistinguishable from race prejudice and he had them since the war spike was really shaken up in North Africa it's between the lines it's in the lines of his books and he would unblushing me refer to Arabs as woggs and so on it's not you can't do it now you couldn't do it then I wasn't being told what to do and the world was full of people telling people what to do I think spike hates Authority in any form you know if you're gonna be psychoanalytic about it would be the same thing about being kids it would be like Authority represents parental figures grown-up nurse all the rest of it how you should behave and therefore the bigger the authority figure Hitler or ever you know the more liable they are to be you know to make to be made look stupid Hitler himself spike finds it the funniest character in the twentieth century but as he would in in a defiant way and in it gun quite true way and he feels he earned the right to laugh at Adolf Hitler he was a twit Twi T pronounced spike never minded going where nobody else would want to go and if he told people he was going there they would have tried to stop him if they were TV controllers in fact a lot of that happened if he'd told anyone look I want to be Hitler singing at George Formby song they probably would have tried to shut him down because somehow he got on the air and did it [Music] slave Ashley copied him nobody what I took off in was the is the way that he didn't I don't think you really have to have that polish a lot of presentation on TV I think is to do with you know polish that's unnecessary the most important thing is their gag and the the material really after being savaged by an aardvark at London Zoo today keeper was assured by his doctors not to worry because aardvark never killed anybody reports are coming in about a horse in a tree well that's it tonight except except for another report about a horse in a tree I don't know whether they think I'm dead but nobody's commissioned me to write for the last ten years I think some of the people she was reading like flowers the grave and mistaken identity in a Highgate Cemetery believing it to be me maybe to thank anybody because I did it all on personally either than my fortune

Channel: Doctor Zerkalo's Monitor Zone

Views: 1,620,644

Rating: 4.7339902 out of 5

Keywords: Spike Milligan (Author), Absurdism (Film Genre), Surreal Humour (TV Genre), Comedy (Film Genre), The Goon Show (Radio Program), Q (TV series), David Baddiel (TV Personality), Danny Baker (TV Personality), Tim Brooke-Taylor (TV Program Creator), Terry Jones (TV Writer), Clive James (Author), Harry Hill (TV Writer), John Thomson (TV Writer), Bob Monkhouse (TV Actor), Monty Python's Flying Circus (TV Program)

Id: ZDQRRDEMaAU

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2015