Author's product rating: 
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A bonus for Milligan fans |
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There won't be any more |
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yes |
Norma Farnes was Spike Milligan's manager and agent for 36 years until his death in 2002. During that time she became his biographer as well as his close friend and confidante, and when the mood took him, as it frequently did, she would assume the additional roles of lackey and whipping-boy. Professionally, Farnes probably knew him better than most, learning over the years how to recognise the onset of his well-documented bouts of depression, and subsequently understanding how best to deal with them.
In "Box 18: The Unpublished Spike Milligan", Norma Farnes has brought together a collection of Milligan's 'ideas', which, as she explains in her affectionate but unsentimental foreword, were those pieces of work which he would begin and then file away, either to be returned to as and when inspiration came to him, or to be discarded ultimately as being unworkable. In the meantime they would be filed in 'Box 18', one of Milligan's meticulously-arranged box files in which he kept every scrap of paperwork, both personal and professional.
Included in this posthumously-released anthology are various pages from Spike's appointment diaries, several unfinished (as far as Milligan was concerned) scripts, poems and stories, together with a selection of his drawings, photographs, and letters to friends and figures of authority, among them Princes Charles and Philip, and Paul and
Linda McCartney. Like his files, the book is arranged into neat categories; many of the entries are reproductions of his original handwritten work, with typed copies appearing alongside those items less easily deciphered.
Reading a person's scribbled and often illegible appointment diary entries wouldn't normally be my idea of entertainment, nor would it be of most people, I suspect, and in that sense, Milligan's diary extracts are no more enthralling than anybody else's might be. What they do offer, however, with the help of Farnes' explanatory footnotes, is some sort of insight into how his mind worked, and as a consequence, how difficult it must have been for both him and those around him to cope with his illness.
Farnes remarks that she could always tell when he was about to enter into a period of depression, and nothing, perhaps, is more illustrative of his darkest moments than the one-word entry dated Friday 26th September, 1980, which reads, simply: "Die". As Farnes observes wryly, "He didn't". A sombre note, possibly, on which to begin a book containing the works of a great comedian, and there are moments when you feel that you've eavesdropped on something which you had no right to be viewing; you do read it of course, and I think the best way to look at it is to liken this first part of the book to, say, a wedding: get the serious bit out of the way at the beginning and then get on with enjoying the party afterwards.
You might be wondering, bearing in mind that Milligan didn't consider any of Box 18's contents to be ready for public airing, how much of it is up to his usual standard and actually worth publishing. It's a valid question to ask, and indeed, it isn't difficult to see why some of the sketches, for example, never made it beyond his filing system; for the most part, though, the book is vintage Milligan, and on balance, I believe Farnes was right to let his fans have one last laugh. There are some otherwise hidden gems which, despite Milligan believing that either they weren't up to scratch or that they needed to be worked on further, are more than worthy of being added to his existing published works. They're presented in their original, often childlike, handwritten format, complete with spelling mistakes and crossings-out, serving to emphasise the fact that Milligan considered them unfinished and therefore not ready to leave Box 18.
Probably my favourite sections of the book are the chapters entitled "Very Bad Jelly" - the long-awaited follow-up to his novel "Badjelly the Witch" - and "Stories for Children", an area in which Milligan excelled, in my view. Each of the stories in this chapter merits a reference in its own right, but I'd have to give special mention to two of them; "The Squirrel Family" and "A Life After Death Story for Children". The first, which just about manages to err on the side of good taste, features a squirrel called Charles, his wife Lady Di, and their son Little Willy, and earned him the postscript: "Are you going to get away with this?" from Farnes; while the second is a story written to explain life and death to young children in a way that they can understand and relate to.
It's this latter story, a favourite of Norma Farnes, which, whilst searching through Box 18 for it, gave her the idea of putting the book together, and I'd have to agree that it's also one of my favourites - Spike Milligan at his very best, in fact. It's beautiful in its innocence and simplicity, and I would challenge any parent to read it without feeling a lump appear in his or her throat.
A few more chapters of miscellaneous jottings and drawings, and then roughly the last third of the book is devoted to Spike's letters, a collection of his previously unpublished correspondence. He was a prolific letter-writer - his missives would feature regularly in the readers' letters pages of the national press, both broadsheet and tabloid - and if the first chapter containing pages from his diaries highlights his blacker moods, then this section portrays him in a very different light; that of a benevolent and passionate campaigner, as well as a good and loyal friend to many.
He was an avid supporter of animal welfare and was a great one for fighting for the underdog generally, his letters often being of the "Emperor's New Clothes" kind - daring to challenge conformity and authority in the innocent and naïve manner of a child unspoilt by cynicism. Milligan was often at his most serious when writing letters, not least when campaigning relentlessly for his right to hold a British passport, but his humour would prevail in equal quantity, depending on the subject matter. I particularly like the series of letters to the accounts department of Harrods in which he promised to take as long to settle their bill as their workmen had taken to complete the decoration of his house - two years - and where he looked forward to their clash in court with "complete and utter joy". It was 1966, the bill was £264:13s:1d, and we never do find out whether the matter went to court in the end. We know whose side we would have been on, however.
I'm glad that Norma Farnes decided to publish this book, because it means that I and other Milligan fans get to enjoy one last piece of his brilliance. Most of the stories and poems are far too good to have gone to waste, which is what I suspect Farnes believed when she made the decision to go to print, and in doing so, she has, I feel, fulfilled her final duty as his agent. Whether the 'old sod', as she refers to him affectionately, would have approved or not is open to debate; have a read and see what you think.
*My copy is the paperback edition containing 352 near-A4 sized pages, which you can currently get hold of for as little as £5.90 from Amazon Marketplace, or £8.57 from Amazon.co.uk
