Proud to be a product of the Milligan Effect

Much of Spike Milligan’s humour came from a lifelong medical condition: an incurable allergy to authority, pomposity, and anyone polishing a brass plaque with their own name on it. Politicians, officers, royalty and the respectable classes were not simply targets; they were a grand civic buffet, laid out for Spike to prod with a fork and declare overcooked. He once said that The Goons gave him the chance to “knock” the sort of people he and his father had been expected to call “Sir” — a neat reversal of the British class system, in which the forelock was replaced by a well-aimed custard pie.

That rebellious streak had earned its campaign medals. Milligan served in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War, fighting in North Africa and later Italy, where he was wounded. He also suffered shell shock, a brutal inheritance that no patriotic poster ever mentioned in the small print. Years later, he turned those experiences into wildly successful memoirs, beginning with Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. The title alone performs the kind of historical judo Milligan loved: taking one of the twentieth century’s monsters and reducing him to a supporting role in a comic private’s paperwork.

One lesser-known detail captures him beautifully. In 1992, when he received an honorary CBE, he observed that making him a Commander of the British Empire was a curious promotion, given that the Empire had largely packed its bags and left the building. They might as well, he said, make him “a commander of Milton Keynes” — a line that does for imperial nostalgia what a banana skin does for a marching band.

Even death was not allowed to enter without being heckled. Milligan wanted the words “I told you I was ill” on his gravestone, a final memo to posterity and possibly to several doctors. When objections were raised, his family simply had the line written in Irish instead, smuggling the joke past officialdom in a linguistic false moustache. It was the perfect exit for a man who treated authority, solemnity and life’s grand ceremonies with the suspicion they so richly deserved.

In my view, sarcasm, cynicism and social satire were once vital parts of British life. They once offered a release from the constraints of the “stiff upper lip” tradition — until, arguably, Britain began importing its emotional plumbing from America. That shift may have begun during the Second World War but has also gathered pace since the 1950s, the decade in which I was born. Yet we Brits needed the “Milligan Effect” because it provided much-needed escapism from our recent social trauma.

This change to our inherent psyche may have begun with a newly engineered humility that Britain was suddenly expected to adopt after the war: we were to be endlessly grateful to America for defeating Germany and rescuing us from catastrophe. Then came the “free love” of the 1960s, which helped mask the failures of American imperialism in Vietnam. Later, the capitalist business model born from the “American Dream” was embedded in almost every corner of commercial life across the so-called “free world”. From then on, Britain and many others were increasingly shaped by American power — a pattern still visible in today’s unfolding geopolitical consequences.

As Western society continues to splinter — with America helpfully supplying the hammer and charging for the nails — the British, and others, thankfully seem to be rediscovering the “Milligan Effect”: the habit of puncturing inflated importance before it blocks the light. In my experience, many Americans, though certainly not all, can carry a self-importance that grows with the size of the wallet, the office, or the flag behind their desk, often set against décor with hideously tacky gold-leafed ambitions. Humility is not always easy to locate in the American vocabulary; I suspect it sits somewhere between “modesty” and “public transport”. Yet in an age of social sickness — much of it shipped from the good ol’ US of A by venture capitalists seeking their next hostile takeover — the rest of the world need not buy into everything on offer, least of all more ultra-processed cultural junk with Uncle Sam branding, loud packaging, and another monthly subscription.

Humour and humility remain among the few medicines not yet fully privatised by the American machine. Whether that over-the-counter relief will last is probably a whole different “ball game” however, the more that America continues to erode trust – and the blind allegiance it once enjoyed, the healthier the world may yet become… I have a dream!