Spike at seventy

Press, 22 July 1989, Page 24

Spike at seventy

William McGonagall Meets George Gershwin. By Spike Milligan and Jack Hobbs. Michael Joseph, 1988. 204 pp. $34.95. (Reviewed by Glyn Strange)

Jack Hobbs (no relation) was over 80 when he died in 1963. Not one of his best scores, but not a bad knock for all that. Spike Malinger passed 70 last year and was immediately cautioned for speeding. He has long, thin and knobbly been a fan of William McGonagall, especially in Africa where hairy Scotsmen wearing woollen kilts tend to get hot in parts — especially those ones. If you find the above tame approximation of Milligan’s crazy, inconsequential, . and bawdy comic style difficult to follow, then leave this book alone. Whether it is true (as he asserts in the Foreword) that he and fellow manic-depressive Hobbs wrote this book over a period of time to cheer themselves up when down, it certainly looks like it. As in the old Goon Shows, where one minute you can be in a living room in Penge, the next in a curry parlour in Poona, anything goes. The book is bound by no social,

grammatical, or literary rules whatever. It is full of rubbish (a Milligonagall hallmark, and he is proud of it), but it is also full of magic moments:

There’s a moment in my bedroom, There’s a moment in my lounge, There's a moment in my bathroom . . .Och laddie, if ye don’t mind, I’ll do the poeming in this review.

Ooooooooooh the author by the name of Milligan, has written us another funny book again. And published it with Michael Joseph in London, Which must have left the staff there wonderin’, What on airth it’s all aboot. Well, the great secret can now be let oot! It’s aboot thirty-five dollars in wages, And it’s aboot two hundred in numbers oj pages. (William McGonagall appears in “The Press” courtesy of the Arts Council Literary Fund.) For the aforementioned magic moments this is a book worth persevering with. Even as a septuagenarian, Milligan is one of the funniest men in the world. As he’d say — “Where else?”