Norma Farnes (1934–2019)

I’m a tad too young to remember The Goons the first time around but since the BBC have been repeating them on the radio it whetted my appetite to find out more.

I really enjoyed the history of how the group was formed and the quotes from Spike are good fun.

The scripts seem like they’ve been put in as padding as they aren’t part of the story but still funny nonetheless.

If they’d added a chapter on Peter Sellars then I maybe would’ve given it the full five stars

Loads of great photos of the gang make this an ideal coffee table book… (mais)

Spike Milligan was a prolific writer of letters throughout his life, and his former manager Norma Farnes collects some of them into a book here. Many of them are as funny as you’d expect from Milligan, but there’s a lot that show the other sides to his personality. He was known as a difficult man to work with at times and he suffered from severe depression throughout his who life, and this all surfaces amongst the letters in this book. He helped out with lots of charities and wrote in support of many causes, but could also at other times get angry about things and often seems to have been good at putting the blame for his mistakes on other people. It’s an interesting way of getting a glimpse into his life in general.

If there’s a problem with the book though, I’d say it’s with the editing. The material just doesn’t seem very well organised. It is split into lots of chapters each with a different topic, which works quite well, but the letters aren’t always arranged well within these. Letters jump backwards and forwards through the years from one page to the next, and at one point Spike’s reply to a letter is printed on the page before we see the letter he was replying to. Farnes occasionally puts notes in, but not very often, and there’s many times when a letter will refer to things without us having a clue as to what they are with nothing to explain this.

It’s Milligan’s sense of humour that makes this a book still worth reading though. Some of my favourite moments include his writing to a tea company asking what they did with the corners when they switched from square to round teabags and apologising for not being able to attend an event due to having been dead for 24 years. The fact that he consistently referred to his publisher, Dick Douglas, as Doug Dickless also amused me far more than it should have done. Overall, it’s an interesting insight into Milligan’s personality, but it’s a shame it wasn’t better organised.… (mais)