Silly hats and leaks all round, the Goons from left: Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan.
Monty Python and more to build on.
prompted an ABC inquiry.
"The police haven't arrived after me up here at Woy Woy," he told The Age.
following an interview on ABC radio. As the newsreader drew breath overseas political leaders, the comic's unmistakable staccato voice piped up.
"What about Spike Milligan?
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about a Qantas safety award.
"With only 33 crashes, folks!"
news in an hour.
"You'll never make it," Milligan quipped.
studio during a news bulletin. Aunty eventually saw the joke and few years ago.
The incident was vintage Milligan. Raising two fingers to authority was central to his anarchic, unpredictable humour, particularly to The Goon Show, the groundbreaking BBC radio comedy he wrote and in which he co-starred for nine years. The program work for which he is best known.
The show's characters - Eccles, Ned Seagoon, Bluebottle, Major Bloodnok, Grytpype-Thynne and to today's television audiences. Indeed, they still are to the 40,000 listeners who tune in to ABC Radio National's Friday morning reruns of The Goons.
More than 50 years after the show first aired, many comedians comedy and Milligan as the patron saint of silliness.
But it took a great deal of pain to create such mirth and Milligan, who died in 2002, suffered from deep depressions throughout his life. Milligan's talent and troubles are at the centre of a play, Ying Tong - A Walk with the Goons. Roy Smiles' play is set partly in an They were an unlikely trio.
Milligan and Sellers, who did most of the voices, had a fractious relationship. Milligan once tried to kill Sellers with a potato knife. It is hard to imagine the three calming influence, Smiles says.
The London-based playwright is too the Goons in the 1970s, he was startled by their freshness.
"I grew up with Love Thy Neighbour, all that racial comedy and mother-in-law gags," he says. "Milligan's humour was extremely weird, surreal stuff.
(The Goon Show) was 20 years old then but to me it was so refreshing. It was just fantastically odd. I think all the British left-field stuff has come from Milligan.
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of the show's humour. As Britain recovered from postwar austerity but with its class system still entrenched, the light-hearted contempt for authority resonated with audiences.
"Milligan was fighting the class war," Smiles says.
"Bloodnok and all the major characters were attacking the army mentality, the upper-class mentality. There's a lot more anger in it than people think."
Australia of the 1950s.
Satirist Max Gillies listened with glee to the broadcasts as a teenager.
"Standing for the national anthem, saluting the flag, Empire Day, that was the cultural landscape and the Goons were richly parodying all of those values," Gillies says. "Somehow it was a way to let off steam without breaking any windows.
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The Goons' humour, with its absurdity, catchcries and disrespect for authority has its roots in vaudeville, Gillies says. The and highly packaged comedy.
perfectly shaped sketch or story.
Nothing ever ended with a grand round saying, 'What do we do now?' "
scripts were just a part of his huge creative output. Milligan was also a cartoonist, musician and author of about 50 books including verse and children's books.
His first novel, Puckoon - set in an Irish village - is one of Gillies' favourites.
than I have any other. I've had so many copies of it and lent it to people," Gillies says.
"There are more laughs on every page than I can remember getting out of just about any book."
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