A minor publishing blizzard still surrounds Spike Milligan, the latest offering being Fourth Estate’s ‘Box 18: The Unpublished Spike Milligan’, a rather sad book of scribblings that should really be locked up with Spike’s mental health records. The title of McCann’s book suggests the same, but it’s the subtitle – ‘Inside The House Of Fun with Milligan, Sykes, Galton & Simpson’ – that tells the real story. It’s about Associated London Scripts (ALS), the writing collective founded by Spike and Eric Sykes in 1954. This chaotic cabal of young writers wrote with the passionate zeal of Angry Young Men, creating masterpieces – ‘Sykes’, ‘Hancock’, ‘Steptoe and Son’, ‘Til Death Us Do Part’, ‘Round the Horne’, ‘TW3’ – that still dominate the comedy canon to this day.
McCann’s meticulous research conjures up the ambience of those ALS offices in Shepherd’s Bush: an outraged Milligan flinging a heavy ashtray at Sykes (it smashed through a window and on to the Uxbridge Road); a nearly blind Sykes continuing to handwrite pages of scripts long after his Biro had run out; Galton and Simpson listening obsessively to US radio sitcoms on forces radio and arguing about the ‘rhythm’ of a gag; and the restrictions of ’50s BBC censorship (they banned ‘suggestive references’ to honeymoon couples, ladies’ underwear, lavatories or ‘effeminacy in men’). Particularly delightful is hearing how Johnny Speight responded to Mary Whitehouse’s regular complaints about ‘Til Death Us Do Part’ – he simply got Alf Garnett to praise her to the skies, only infuriating her more.
McCann rarely offers his own critical opinions, although he can be insightful. He identifies a rather patrician, Fabian-ish tendency in Johnny Speight’s writing that lacks confidence in the working classes’ ability to effect change (‘which is why his more class-based comedy, for all its anger and urgency, often seemed so bleak’). And he’s great when analysing Eric Sykes’ scripts for Frankie Howerd (scripts Paul Merton may well have studied in great detail). The only slight sadness is that, by the end of the book, Milligan’s own patchy TV surrealism looks rather threadbare next to the legacy of his office partners.
