Many parts to Spike

Press, 7 June 1980, Page 6

Many parts to Spike

By

JOHN COLLINS

But for Spike. Milligan’s Impassioned plea that the audience stop wasting good drinking time sitting around clapping and calling for more, he would probably be continuing, his “alarmingly funny evening with Spike Milligan arid friends” at this moment. After three encores, in the James Hay Theatre last evening his suggestion was that since they liked clapping so much they should go home and form small clapping parties in honour of him. while he went off and had his dinner. By that time he had Worked his way through enough material to keep tnost stand-up 'comics going for a week, and was down to extracts from his war experiences (“Adolf Hitler, my Part in his Downfall,” “Mussolini, his Part in my Downfall,” “Mae West, my ..Part In her Uplift,” “The Bromley Sewer, my Part in its Outfall,” etc.) and nasal renditions of. his animal poems for

children and children poems for animals. ‘ So strong is the committed • Mill igan following, and so irresistible the Milligan pres--1 ence, that the audience ' would probably have been : content to sit and listen to ’ him read his laundry list. Milligan himself is getting ’ on, but compared with much , of'his material he is a mere : stripling. A. great deal of his : act consists of stand-up one- ’ liners so old they should ’ qualify for a subsidy of some 1 sort. Yet the jokes are de- ! livered in a flood of such , overwhelming Goonery and patched together with such , eccentric improvisations that f ey would have worked with 1 the stiffest of audiences, let! 1 alone the thousand or so 1 Milligan addicts, including this one, at last evening’s ' performance. Milligan has been perhaps ’ the main influence on British humour for more than 30 years, and his show ranges through all of it, from poem's to skits, from lunatic and

libs to the sort of unpredictable lunacy we have come to expect only from politics at the very highest level. The first part of the show was taken by Glenn Cardier, whose brother, Tachy, has been popular for some time with older audiences. Cardier, an Australian,. but talented for all that, is a sort of manic Leonard Cohen with an occasional relapse, into pleasant, romantic sombreness. His satirical lyrics, and the antic piano playing of Carl Vine, were ideally suited to warming up Milligariites. If one may be permitted a small criticism of a show that really deserves only praise, Cardier might have been better kept in the first half of the show only. Time after time Milligan brought the audience to a high pitch, but then sat down ; sipping wine or interfering with his Muldoon dummy, while the mood of elation was washed away by a skilfully Leonard Cohenish, but misplaced, ballad or two from Cardier.