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The Milligan Papers was a BBC radio comedy show, written by John Antrobus and starring Spike Milligan. First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1987, it also featured Chris Langham, John Bluthal, and Antrobus, and is often referred to as A Goon Show for the '80s. It was produced by Paul Spencer.
In 2018, to commemorate Spike's centenary, theatre company Hambledon Productions adapted a selection of episodes for a rural tour.
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Terence Alan "Spike" Milligan was an Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright and actor. The son of an English mother and Irish father, he was born in British Colonial India, where he spent his childhood before relocating in 1931 to England, where he lived and worked for the majority of his life. Disliking his first name, he began to call himself "Spike" after hearing the band Spike Jones and his City Slickers on Radio Luxembourg.
The Goon Show is a British radio comedy programme, originally produced and broadcast by the BBC Home Service from 1951 to 1960, with occasional repeats on the BBC Light Programme. The first series, broadcast from 28 May to 20 September 1951, was titled Crazy People; subsequent series had the title The Goon Show.
Eric Sykes was an English radio, stage, television and film writer, comedian, actor and director whose performing career spanned more than 50 years. He frequently wrote for and performed with many other leading comedy performers and writers of the period, including Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper, Peter Sellers, John Antrobus and Johnny Speight. Sykes first came to prominence through his many radio credits as a writer and actor in the 1950s, most notably through his collaboration on The Goon Show scripts. He became a TV star in his own right in the early 1960s when he appeared with Hattie Jacques in several popular BBC comedy television series.
Ray Galton OBE and Alan Simpson OBE were English comedy scriptwriters whose partnership lasted over 50 years. They met in 1948 whilst recuperating from tuberculosis at the Milford Sanatorium, near Godalming in Surrey. They are best known for their work with comedian Tony Hancock on radio and television between 1954 and 1961 and their long-running television situation comedy, Steptoe and Son, eight series of which were aired between 1962 and 1974.
William Henry Kerr was a British and Australian actor, comedian, and vaudevillian.
Johnny Speight was an English television scriptwriter of many classic British sitcoms.
Valentine Dyall was an English character actor. He worked regularly as a voice actor, and was known for many years as "The Man in Black", the narrator of the BBC Radio horror series Appointment with Fear.
The Bedsitting Room is a satirical play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. It began as a one-act play which was first produced on 12 February 1962 at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, England. The Bedsitting Room was then adapted to a longer play and Bernard Miles put it on at the Mermaid Theatre, where it was first performed on 31 January 1963 before transferring several weeks later to the Duke of York's Theatre in London's West End.
Graham William Stark was an English comedian, actor, writer and director.
John Bluthal was a Polish-born Australian actor and comedian, noted for his six-decade career internationally in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. He started his career during the Golden Age of British Television, where he was best known for his comedy work in the UK with Spike Milligan, and for his role as Manny Cohen in the television series Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width. In later years, he was known to television audiences as the bumbling Frank Pickle in The Vicar of Dibley. At 85 he played Professor Herbert Marcuse in the Coen brothers' film Hail, Caesar! (2016).
Q... is a surreal television comedy sketch show written by Spike Milligan and Neil Shand, and starring Spike Milligan with supporting players, usually including Julia Breck, John Bluthal, Bob Todd, and John Wells. The show ran from 1969 to 1982 on BBC2. There were six series in all, the first five numbered from Q5 to Q9, and a final series titled There's a Lot of It About. The first and third series ran for seven episodes, and the others for six episodes, each of which was 30 minutes long.
Bernard James Miles, Baron Miles, CBE was an English character actor, writer and director. He opened the Mermaid Theatre in London in 1959, the first new theatre that opened in the City of London since the 17th century.
Brian Todd, known professionally as Bob Todd, was an English comedy actor, mostly known for appearing as a straight man in the sketch shows of Benny Hill and Spike Milligan. For many years, he lived in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
Sykes and a... is a black-and-white British sitcom starring Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques that aired on BBC 1 from 1960 to 1965. It was written by Eric Sykes, Johnny Speight, John Antrobus and Spike Milligan. Sykes and a... was the first television series to feature both Sykes and Jacques, who later starred in Sykes and a Big, Big Show and Sykes, the latter of which featured the same characters and reused some of the same scripts.
The Temperance Seven is a British band originally active in the 1960s, specialising in 1920s-style jazz music. They were known for their surreal performances.
John Arthur Antrobus is an English playwright and screenwriter. He has written extensively for stage, screen, TV and radio, including the epic World War II play, Crete and Sergeant Pepper at the Royal Court. He authored the children's book series Ronnie, which includes Help! I am a Prisoner in a Toothpaste Factory.
Dennis Geoffrey William Wilson, known as Dennis Main Wilson was a British producer of radio and television programmes, mainly for the BBC. Main Wilson has been described by Screenonline as "arguably the most important and influential of all comedy producers/directors in British radio and television".
The Goon Show Preservation Society is a non-profit organisation, formed to help preserve and research the history of the Goon Show. The society, founded in 1972, maintains an archive of Goon Show material, often used by professional researchers and media organisations, including the BBC. The society also owns the Neddie Seagoon puppet from The Telegoons.
Associated London Scripts (ALS) was a writers' agency organised as a co-operative which involved many leading comedy and television writers of the 1950s and 1960s.
