Memories of Milligan. Norma Farnes
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Till Death Us Do Part, and Galton and Simpson’s scripts of Steptoe and Son, to an American television network. Till Death became All in the Family and Steptoe became Sanford and Son.]
ALAN: I don’t think Spike was interested in the business side.
RAY: And he didn’t want to move out of the building. I remember a meeting of the writers’ co-operative. One day I said, ‘We haven’t had any meetings.’ So we looked at Spike and said, ‘We’d better have a workers’ meeting,’ and all the chairs were put out and all the writers came into our office. Spike was there but I don’t know if Eric was. The first question came from John Antrobus who was provoked by Johnny Speight. He wanted to know why we two, and Eric and Spike, didn’t pay rent while the other writers did. Spike walked out, slammed the door, went to his room and started to play his trumpet. That was really the end of the workers’ co-operative.
ALAN: First and only meeting.
NORMA: Why did he walk out?
ALAN: He was outraged at the effrontery and attitude. It’s the same attitude he adopted to you when you asked, ‘Where are you going to go?’ The cheek of it. Basically, his motives or morals were being questioned by a lot of idiots. We never had a row with Spike but I think we were very unsympathetic about his mental problems. We ignored them. When he threw a tantrum we’d tell him to fuck off. I suppose they were bipolar problems.
RAY: We didn’t really understand. My missus had clinical depression and I don’t think we had any sympathy for that sort of thing until then. Alan and I had spent three years in a bloody sanatorium with tuberculosis [that’s where they met Beryl]. People with colds and things – it was a case of ‘Piss off.’ We weren’t au fait with mental problems in those days.
ALAN: Spike used to lock himself away in his office and we let him get on with it.
RAY: Tantrums.
ALAN: We took the view that when he was ready he would come out. And, of course, that’s what happened. After two or three days he would come out as if nothing had happened. Others in the office would run round him like blue-arsed flies, kowtowing to him. Ray hit the nail on the head. After three years in a sanatorium we didn’t have much sympathy for that sort of thing.
RAY: Having said that, we used to watch his eyes. You’d be talking to him and somebody would bring him a piece of bad news – well, bad news to him. The wife had left the tap on and he had to call the plumber.
ALAN: His eyes would go – dah! That was it.
RAY: He’d lock himself in his office and that would be it. He’d stay there for days sometimes. People would walk around on tiptoe so as not to upset him. We used to think that was showbusiness taking over. I don’t think we understood. We just got on with the job.
ALAN: Having said all that, we both had great admiration for him because of his talent. And when he was in a good mood we got on extremely well. He was great company.
RAY: While we were unsympathetic, we admired his work. Wonderful! We used to go to the recordings of the Goon Shows. Lots of laughs. And we would have lunch with him at Bertorelli’s in Queensway. More laughs! I don’t know how we managed to get away from lunch to get back to work. We should have been on the floor pissed out of our heads. Here was a guy who wrote on his own – used to come into our office and ask, ‘What do you think of this?’ We never asked anybody what they thought of our work.
NORMA: As a person, do you think he was reliable?
ALAN: Well, we didn’t have to rely on him. We all did our own work and Beryl and others looked after the business side. The thing that kept us together was that we were a mutual admiration society. Spike was very generous about our work, more so than Eric. She was a great fan of Tony [Hancock] and I think he appreciated what we were doing for him.
NORMA: He called it ‘a perfect marriage’.
ALAN: That’s the right word for it . . .
There was a junk shop nearby run by an old man, decrepit, wore terrible clothes, and Spike and I would look in to see what we could pick up. Sometimes the shop seemed empty and then we would hear a rumbling and out of a cupboard would pop the proprietor. We loved to drop in there.
RAY: I remember when Spike was restoring the Elfin Oak. He was carving cherubs and elves and things. You don’t often come across blokes carving things like that, but Spike was different from anybody in show business. [The Elfin Oak, an 800-year-old tree stump, had originally grown in Richmond Park. It was uprooted and moved to Kensington Gardens in 1928 where the illustrator Ivor Innes carved fairies, elves and animals on the trunk. Innes maintained the tree until he died in the Fifties. It was neglected until Spike led a campaign to restore it. With his team of helpers the beautiful fairies and goblins became as new, and in 1997 the oak was granted Grade II listed status.]
He was always getting involved in something or other. Mind you, his public persona was rather different from his private one. There was that kid he shot with an air rifle because he had ventured into his garden. He was taken to court. And then we would hear he wasn’t speaking to his wife. If he was going upstairs and she was coming down he would turn his back on her and look at the wall until she had passed. Mad!
ALAN: I have memories of Spike’s laughter. He was a great audience when he was in a good mood. He’d fall about laughing. Very much like Hancock. We only worked with him once, a four-week series called Milligan’s Wake, fifteen-minute shows for ITV. Spike never attempted to re-write anything. He just did it as an actor and performer and did it beautifully. When something tickled him he was a wonderful audience. It was a shame we did only four shows with him. We did bits and pieces for A Show Called Fred. I remember we did a sketch where he was reading the football results, but with a different inflection. When an announcer reads the results you know from how he says ‘Arsenal 2’, in a certain way, that it’s going to be ‘Chelsea 2’. But when Spike read them he got all the inflections wrong. It was hysterical. There was another, again when he was reading the football results, when he realised the results were as he forecast them in his own coupon. He got more and more excited until he got to the last, which was correct and he realised he was a rich man.
RAY: Subsequently, that’s been used by other people.
ALAN: Like the bingo sketch we wrote.
RAY: I remember that raspberry routine. I think it started over lunch. It was all about blowing raspberries. It got very silly. When we got back to the office the telephone rang and out came a really ripe raspberry. We had to go one better than this.
ALAN: We sent a telegram, didn’t we? ‘Dennis Main Wilson from the BBC says Hello, and then a raspberry!’ It got absolutely mad. To cap it all Spike and Co. were in an office a floor above us and Harry Secombe was there. They lowered Harry out of the bloody window, hanging on to him by the ankles. He had a vacuum hose and they lowered him down to our window, which was open. He poked the hose through and blew a really fruity raspberry. If they’d let go of him it would have been the end of Harry. I mean, it was the top floor! We gave up after that. You couldn’t top that.
And I’ll always remember Spike for what I thought was the funniest gag I’d heard in years. It was in his live act. He brought out his trumpet and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen. I was going to play Chopin’s Etude in B minor. Then I thought, why should I? He never plays anything of mine.’ I thought it was hysterical. I’ll always remember him for that.
RAY: I remember another side of Spike. I was very moved because when my wife died in 1995 Spike came to see me. It was a tiring trip for him to come from his house in Rye because he was quite frail by then. He was very comforting and friendly, absolutely wonderful. I knew he liked Alsace wine so I went to my cellar and brought up