System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Spike Milligan
1918 - 2002
LONDON (Wed February 27, 2002) - Spike Milligan, comedian, author, gadfly and the last surviving member of ``The Goon Show,' died Wednesday at the age of 83.
Milligan died of liver failure at his home in Rye on the southeast coast, his agent Norma Farnes said.
His sly comedy made him a British institution, but he was almost as famous for his struggles with manic depression and his rages against human folly, the British variety in particular.
A tall, thin, white-haired man with rather wistful blue eyes, Milligan was a vegetarian nonsmoker and an avid environmentalist.
``I support all the causes that are trying to increase the sensitivity of the human race to the odious things that they do,' he once told an interviewer. ``We're a pretty horrendous crowd.'
Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine launched the Goons on May 28, 1951, in a radio show titled ``Crazy People featuring the Goons.'
Later retitled ``The Goon Show,' the program set a comic style, ran for years and became a classic.
``We all had this sort of lunatic sense of humor. ... We turned everything into imbecility ... doing things like climbing Mount Everest from the inside,' Milligan once said.
Sellers died in 1980, Bentine in 1996 and Secombe in 2001.
Milligan, author of dozens of books, never became so widely known as Sellers.
``I'm an ongoing failure, but the most successful one you'll meet,' he told the Sunday Express. ``I thought I had the same comic ability as Peter Sellers ... but the cards fell right for him when he went into films and never came right for me.'
He was born Terence Alan Milligan April 16, 1918, in Bombay and spent his first 16 years in India, where his Irish father was a sergeant-major in the British army. His mother was English.
Milligan was educated at Roman Catholic convents in Poona and Rangoon before the family returned to Britain. He went to war as an army gunner and it was in 1944, after seeing a lot of action, that he first had psychiatric treatment.
After the war he was in and out of hospitals with his mental problems, which reached a peak while he was writing a new ``Goon Show' each week for six months.
``The war started the gradual deterioration of my mental stability, but 'The Goon Show' finished the process,' he said.
His first marriage, to Ann Howe, fell apart under the strain, and she left him and their three children.
Milligan raised them and a daughter from his second marriage, in 1962, to Patricia Ridgeway who died of cancer in 1978.
He married Shelagh Sinclair in 1983.
Because of a change in British immigration laws, Milligan discovered in 1960 that because his father was not born in Britain, he would have to reapply for citizenship and take an oath of allegiance to the queen, despite his years of army service.
Outraged, he became an Irish citizen instead. Britain made amends in 2000 by making Milligan an honorary knight.
In later years he appeared little on the radio, but wrote children's fiction and verse, humorous collections and volumes of autobiography including ``Adolf Hitler, My Part in His Downfall' and ``Mussolini, His Part in My Downfall.'
He found a constructive use for his depressions.
When the moods come on, he told the Sunday Express, ``I find that I can write serious poetry. ... Strangely they attract others with the same illness. I'm the manic depressives' poet, just like Byron was for the romantics.'
The personality Milligan showed to the world was often prickly and disillusioned.
``You'd have to be a total idiot to be happy today,' he said in 1987. ``I would never have had four children if I'd known what I know now.'
Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced. He is survived by his wife and his children.
