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Goon, but not forgotten
(Filed: 05/10/2002)

Spike Milligan's riotous novel Puckoon has finally been filmed. Ben Thompson reports

By the time of his death - aged 83 - in February of this year, the writer, performer and all-round British comedy guru Spike Milligan had accumulated a well-stocked cellar of possible epitaphs.

	Tempestuous: Spike Milligan

The man who had sometimes, in his (sadly frequent) darker moments, been heard to observe that life was a disease for which death was the only cure, had also asserted that he wouldn't mind dying, he just didn't want to be there at the time, and was further credited with the most unanswerable of all suggested tombstone inscriptions: "I told you I was ill."

As yet, no monument stands above the grave in the beautiful Sussex churchyard which is the last resting place of this tempestuous creative spirit. And while the intensity and eloquence with which Milligan's passing was mourned left no doubt as to the extent to which he was loved by large sections of the British populace, the different strands of his artistic legacy will take many years to unravel.

The first stage in this process is the long-awaited cinematic rendering of Milligan's riotous 1963 novel Puckoon, which received its British premiere at the closing gala of last month's Ealing Film Festival. Twelve years in the making, this film's long process of gestation was overshadowed from the beginning by the all too evident mortality of its author. Early on in the production process, director Terence Ryan took Milligan to Shepperton Studios for a week and filmed him reading the text against a blue screen.

Not in the best of health even then, Milligan asked Ryan, "If you haven't got the money to make the film yet, why are we shooting this now?"

"Then he smiled," the director remembers, "and said 'Oh, I know what you're doing.' " As it transpired, initial plans to have Milligan's face morphing around the screen and appearing in different guises as gargoyles or horses' heads eventually gave way to a more conventional narration (supplied by friend and long-term fan Richard Attenborough).

Given the book's popularity, it might seem surprising that no serious attempt had been made to film it when its author was younger. To anyone familiar with the vertiginous switchbacks of Milligan's thought processes in general and the genial chaos of Puckoon in particular, the delay is not so mysterious.

The story is set in a fictional small town, heedlessly bisected by the boundary commission at the Partition of Ireland in 1924, and this motif of random division is extrapolated into a gleeful miasma of sub-Joycean Paddywhackery. When Ryan bravely suggested to him that "the story does jump around a bit", Milligan confided that on holiday at his father's home in Australia while in possession of the galley proofs, he got drunk and - with emotions running high - set fire to 30 pages, which were never replaced. (It was Milligan senior's memories of growing up in Ireland, passed on to Spike in the course of the latter's own childhood in India, that gave the book its emotional foundation.)

As well as the fractured nature of the narrative, there was also Milligan's famously protective agent, Norma Farnes, to contend with. Desperate measures were called for even to secure the film rights. On the advice of director Richard Lester - who had worked with Milligan on his ground-breaking 1950s TV vehicle A Show Called Fred, as well as on the prize-winning 1960 short The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, so influential on Lester's later film work with the Beatles - Ryan and producer Ken Tuohy cheekily by-passed her, going to Spike's favourite Italian restaurant, buying a couple of bottles of his favourite wine and tracking the great man down in person at his home near Rye.

Milligan's daughter Jane (herself an actress - currently appearing in a touring production of Return to the Forbidden Planet) remembers her and her father "sitting down having a cup of tea, watching the rugby" when the phone rang from a pub down the road.

On a less auspicious day, the two chancers on the other end of the line would have been sent home with a circus of fleas in their ear. On this occasion, they left with the author's blessing, and his daughter ended up cast as one of the film's numerous unflattering representations of womanhood - as it happened, a Rabelaisian re-imagining of her own grandmother.

Looming large among Puckoon's numerous autobiographical subtexts is the shadow of Milligan's traumatic experiences in the Second World War. In exchanges worthy of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the story's central character, Madigan, harshly brands himself "a hero with coward's legs" ("While his mind was full of great heroisms under shellfire, his legs were carrying the idea, at speed, in the opposite direction").

Initial reservations about the ability of comedian Sean Hughes to catch the essence of Milligan's humour are mitigated by the discovery that he stepped out of a minor part and into the breach as Madigan at the last minute. The film-makers' previous choice (the seemingly even less suitable John Gordon Sinclair) had pulled out the weekend before shooting began.

They managed to show Spike an early print of the finished film shortly before he died ("His shoulders were bouncing up and down," says Tuohy proudly, "which we took to be a good sign"). What comes through most strongly thanks to the faithfulness of Ryan's adaptation is the intensity of Spike's absence. In a way, perhaps that is the aptest tribute of all.

Spike Milligan's madcap novel Puckoon has finally been filmed. Richard Attenborough tells Bob Flynn why he just had to help

Bob Flynn
Guardian

Tuesday July 23, 2002

'I don't mind dying, I just don't want to be there at the time." As Richard Attenborough recalls Spike Milligan's famous quote, he roars with laughter, rocking back in his chair. Milligan died in February this year and the throwaway joke has now become the great absurdist's cinematic epitaph, scrawled in bold Celtic copperplate across the opening titles of the film version of his first novel, Puckoon, published in 1964.

By now, Attenborough is almost in tears, but let's not mention weeping. Not yet anyway. Speaking just before the premiere of Puckoon at the Galway film fleadh earlier this month, he is pink-faced, effusive and exuberantly white-bearded, reeling off lines from writer-director Terence Ryan's adaptation of Milligan's satirical tale of the fictitious village of Puckoon which, one day during the partitioning of the country in 1924, is arbitrarily split between Northern and southern Ireland.

"When I first read it, I was laughing so much I was close to getting arrested - or peeing myself," Attenborough says. "I always loved Spike and what he did for British comedy. He moved it into another realm with the Goons. I knew them all, especially Peter Sellers, but Spike was the true original, the central genius. I couldn't wait to get involved in the movie."

As the film's omnipresent writer-narrator, Attenborough cajoles and commands characters played by Sean Hughes (hapless Dan Madigan), Elliot Gould (village doctor), and an array of veteran Irish actors, along with Milligan's daughter Jane as Madigan's ferocious wife.

Milligan claimed that his debut novel nearly drove him mad. Yet, despite the disjointed narrative, unashamed Paddywhackery and a structure in the style of a Joycean pastiche, Puckoon became a publishing phenomenon, never out of print and selling more than 6m copies.

Attenborough, normally associated with grandiose epics, hasn't acted for four years and is still smarting after the failure of his last directorial outing, Grey Owl. One gets the impression that the disarmingly passionate actor-director has had enough of mega-buck blockbusters. Puckoon was filmed in Ireland on a budget that wouldn't cover the catering costs on a typical Attenborough movie. It's certainly a long way from A Bridge Too Far. Has he stopped chasing Oscars? Attenborough leans forward and slams the table so hard the teacups rattle.

"Before we begin, I never fucking cried at the Oscars - that's myth," he says, referring to his emotional speech when accepting eight Academy awards for Gandhi in 1982. "In fact, I don't really like the Oscars; it's a commercial promotional event. It helps immeasurably to sell films, but it's hardly the Nobel prize."

It is all getting a little bizarre, even Milliganesque, when Attenborough sits back and laughs. The last of the old-school English film impresarios and chairman of innumerable arts organisations is relaxing into Galway's unpretentious atmosphere. The setting could not be more appropriate for the unveiling of a film inspired by Milligan, the troubled comedian who carried an Irish passport and whose coffin was draped in the Irish flag.

"Spike's humour was all about irreverence, and I like that," says Attenborough. "I know I'm regarded as an establishment figure, but I was crucified by the establishment for Oh! What a Lovely War, Gandhi and Cry Freedom. So I relate to Spike. Irreverence is an essential part of our culture. I admire that enormously."

Attenborough is 80 next year and does admit to having trouble remembering names, but remains "consumed by the movies. I don't take up many acting jobs these days, but this was irresistible. I liked the fact it was being made in Ireland and there was no big-budget hoopla involved. It was very invigorating and refreshing for me. And there were some old pals involved."

The old pals are Gould, a lifelong Milligan fan who appeared briefly in Attenborough's overstuffed, star-studded A Bridge Too Far, and Milo O'Shea, Attenborough's co-star in the 1970 film of Joe Orton's play Loot. All of them, says Attenborough, did Puckoon out of "an overwhelming adoration of Spike. Money was the least consideration. I'd have done it for a pint of Guinness. In fact, I think I did."

With this, he gets up and starts pacing the room, hands clasped behind his back, as if delivering a final briefing before the next escape attempt. "I'm beginning to think that we must get back to making movies like Puckoon, which are essentially indigenous, rather than trying to take on Hollywood at its own game. Look what happened to FilmFour. We keep making the same mistake, trying to invade America by sailing halfway across the Atlantic. You just sink without a trace."

Puckoon itself was partly filmed in Hollywood - Hollywood, Belfast, that is, the working-village folk-museum doubling as Milligan's divided town, where beer is cheaper in the northern half of the pub and corpses have to have newly issued passports to cross the customs post erected across the newly partitioned graveyard.

The ultimate irony is that Puckoon is the first ever co-production between Northern and southern Ireland. "It's fantastical, magical, mad stuff ," says Attenborough, "but, deep down, Spike was dealing with the division of a people for political ends."

Ten years ago, when Spike was 73, director Terence Ryan recorded the author's reading of the novel. Milligan was well aware that the recording was being made in case he died before the film was financed. It was partially true. By the time production began, a decade later, Milligan was in poor health.

"He was meant to be in the film but was too ill," says Attenborough. "He never made it to the set but would call and say, 'Get a bloody move on - I've not long to go.'" Yet Milligan saw the finished film before he died, with his daughter Jane by his side. He laughed all the way through. "Spike's humour is a very fragile thing on screen," says Attenborough. "You've got be careful not to damage the wonderful madness. But now that he's gone, as he would say, 'What are we gonna do now?' "

· Puckoon is released in the UK in October.