Bully's Book Club: Spike & Co.

Hi hi hi, everybody! Welcome to Bully's Book Club! It's book review week here at the old bull-og, all day, every day. Which may bore some of you, but, hey, getcher own blog, complainey-guys! I'm not even talkin' comic book books—these are books with lotta words and only a few pictures, so they take a little longer to get through. And they're all about things British and English, so if you're not an Anglophile, your mileage (or kilometreage) may vary. But stick around! If you're not careful you may just learn somethin'.

Sitting on my "to read" shelf along with a bajillion Ian Rankin books and that Jonathan Lethem novel I keep meanin' to get to are most of the books I brought back from my British Christmas holiday, where I spent lots of time and pounds in lovely London bookshops. One of my favorites (or should that be "favourites"?) was actually a last-minute purchase at the extensive and bustling Heathrow Airport International Departures shopping centre, which includes a fairly densely-stocked Borders (formerly the Books Etc. chain), chock-full of all your last-minute gift and airplane reading needs. One of the quirky things I like best about buying books at Heathrow is the British publishing "airport exclusives," which are paperback editions of current just-released hardcovers: slightly lighter books perfect for airplane carrying at only slightly reduced prices. It was in Borders as I counted my last pocketful of chunky Queen-embossed pound coins that I finally picked up a book I'd been eyeing my whole vacation, a biography of my favorite comedian of 'em all, the brilliant and bristly Spike Milligan: Graham McCann's Spike & Co.: Inside the House of Fun with Milligan, Sykes, Galton & Simpson.

If you don't know Spike Milligan, why, my goodness, your life is poorer for it. He's best known as the writing and performing genius behind the brilliant and groundbreaking 1950s BBC radio comedy programme The Goon Show (which skyrocketed the careers of Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe): a silly, surreal, frantic, frenzied half-hour of anarchy punctuated by harmonica and jazz quartet musical numbers. The Goon Show is rightly considered as the first major modern cornerstone of post-war British comedy: without The Goon Show we wouldn't have gotten Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Young Ones, or stand-ups like Billy Connolly or Eddie Izzard...at least not quite in the form we roar with laughter at today. Aside from The Goon Show, Spike's done many other amazing radio, TV, book and film projects with varying levels of commercial and critical success. I've read many, many biographies and autobiographies of Spike. I highly recommend his multi-book War Memoirs (here's a one-volume compilation, but I recommend the single volumes starting here), which start fairly silly (but wonderfully fun) but by the later books have turned wistful, detailed, and in some places, terrifyingly shaking memories of life on the front lines of Italy and Africa in World War II that contributed to Spike's nervous breakdown and later emotional problems. I've read histories of The Goon Show and biographies of Secombe and Sellers and timelines of British comedy, but I've got to admit that even for being a very intense and fevered little stuffed Milligan fan, I wasn't really aware of another great contribution of Spike to the history of British comedy: his co-formation of one of the great writer's collectives of English entertainment, Associated London Scripts.

If you're a fan of or follow British comedy you'll likely know the other three names mentioned in the book's subtitle: Eric Sykes. Ray Galton. Alan Simpson. And Johnny Speight, who joined them shortly after. The four of them together are as important as The Beatles or even The Fantastic Four to the modern British entertainment industry. Sykes was one of the first big-name comedy writers who built up the careers of entertainers like Frankie Howerd before embarking on his own, years-before-Seinfeld, successful television acting career. Galton and Simpson created Steptoe and Son (later remade in America into Sanford and Son), the pioneering sitcom that brought social and familial problems to the flickering telly screen. Speight took that groundwork to the next level by creating Till Death Us Do Part, the inspiration for the American All in the Family, which addressed such concepts as racism, politics, feminism, and toilets for the first time to a popular audience. Just as post-War British art changed that world forever, the work being done by Associated London Scripts, by these men and the others in the collective, took a fledging medium and gave it a brave new social conscience at the same time as providing deep bellylaughs.

As I said, I'm a major Milligan fan, but I actually enjoyed the sections of the book on the other ALS members even more than the Spike chapters. I knew little or sketchy details about Sykes, Galton, Simpson and Speight, and it's a wonderful introduction to the dramatic way entertainment was changed and evolved through the fifties, sixties, and seventies. The organization of the book is clever and organic: McGann starts by walking us through the London office door of ALS as it would have been in its heyday, then chapter by chapter visits different "offices" to paint vivid and detailed pictures of these comedy geniuses one by one. McGann then returns in later chapters to follow up the men with their work: extensive sections on the major shows and writing springing from their frenzied big brains. There's a lot of other big names in here as well from the British comedy and entertainment worlds, working for or with ALS: bug-eyed genius Marty Feldman was a member for a while, as was Terry Nation, inventor of the Daleks. The Beatles and Brian Epstein, Michael Caine, British comedy icons The Two Ronnies, Tommy Handley, Kenneth Horne, Frank Muir and Dennis Norden, Hattie Jacques—they're in here too. If you know 'em, you'll enjoy seeing this little-covered sides of their entertainment careers. If you don't, this is a wonderful introduction to the workings of how genius comedy and entertainment got made. Above all, it's an amazingly entertaining and funny book, chock-full of excerpts from some of the great radio and television shows they had a hand in, plus McCann's light and lively tongue-in-cheek writing style gave me plenty of chuckles. I of course highly recommend this book if you're a Spike or Britcom fan, but even if you aren't read it for a better understanding of writers at work, hampered by social and political pressures but still producing amazing innovation.

Because of its very British focus, of course, it wasn't published over in the USA, and you're prob'bly not gonna find Spike & Co. at your local bookstore. If you're lucky enough to frequent a shop that stocks a good selection of British imports (like New York City's wonderful Shakespeare and Co.), they may be able to order it for you. In this day and age of the worldwide internetmajig, of course, those of you with DIY tendencies can click on the link at the right and order it from ever-eager Amazon.com. At the price and time for delivery Amazon.com is currently listing, however, you might actually be better going straight to London—virtual London, that is—by clicking on this Amazon.co.uk link and ordering it direct from England. Current exchange rates are a little less than two bucks per pound, so expect it to run you about twenty-six bucks and change plus five to seven bucks international postage. But you'll get it a lot faster; usually within a week to ten days a chunky brown cardboard parcel straight from Amazon.co.uk's Slough warehouse will land on your doorstep with a resounding thump and you'll be buried in the world of Spike and Company by teatime.

I chose this book to review not merely because it's been sitting on my bookshelf since I've come back from London waiting for me to write a few dozen words about it, but I specifically chose today to write about it because April 16 is Spike Milligan's birthday. He passed away in 2002, but he would have been 89 today. Curiously or karmically, it's also my mom's birthday today, and she's thankfully still with us. Spike taught me the value of laughter, as well as the joy of whimsy, anarchy, rhyme, silliness and surrealism. By no coincidence at all, my mom taught me the same lessons. Happy birthday to both Spike and Ma Bull, and needle nardle noo to all of you too. Vivat Milligna!