The Essential Spike Milligan

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

'Wonderful anthology. A superbly sustained piece of comedy. Like so mush else in this collection, these excerpts inspire a return to the source.' Chris Power, The Times 'The most comprehensive compendium of the troubled genius' work. This volume spans his entire career...making this a testament to one of our most absurdly talented comedians. Poignant, nonsensical and hilarious. The Essential Spike Milligan is a more than appropriate epitaph.' Ben Arnold, Jockey Slut

UK Kirkus review

George Orwell asserted that 'whatever is funny is subversive', and this was never truer than in the case of Spike Milligan. His absurdist vision was not unique, but with him it perhaps shone the brightest and burnt him the worst, leaving him with a tender mind, often on the cusp of madness, but always brimming with comic, surreal ideas. He was the creative spark of the generation of comics who survived the war and, along with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, he created The Goon Show, a mould-breaking radio programme quite unlike anything else austere Britain had heard before. It's often taken as the precursor of Monty Python (and thereby much of post-war British comedy), but a more convincing ancestor would be Milligan's long-running Q TV series or his Running, Jumping, Standing Still film, both of which took his highly skewed world view to new realms of weirdly addictive comedy. As the years took their toll on his mental stability, Milligan's output grew more and more patchy - and elements of casual racism in his later comedies do grate - but his memoirs and children's fiction became more assured instead, and his autobiographies of his war years were especially popular, being comic, poignant and revelatory, and opening his world to a new audience. This marvellous collection is an excellent smorgasbord of the man's prodigious output, with selections and titbits from his prose, his poems and limericks and his scripts. Skilfully gathered together, this is a marvellous testament to a giant of comedy whose brilliance and influence remain with us still. (Kirkus UK)

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