Spike Milligan's Q Vol 1 (15.)
Produced and (presumably) directed by Ian McNaughton.
Starring Spike Milligan, John Bluthal, John Wells, Richard Ingram, Peter Jones, David Lodge, Robert Dorning, Julia Breck and Alan Clare. 480 mins. 3 Disc DVD set released by Simply Media. Order at simplyhe.com
All surrealists and mold-breakers are engaged, to some extent, in the process of trying to escape from their own boredom: “Oh look, Salvador's shaved half of his mustache off – isn't that interesting.” For Spike Milligan the battle was to prove, through the creation of free wheeling off the wall comedy, that he was not Light Entertainment. His previous attempt at this, The Goons, ended up becoming a national institution. (No subversion there, thought it probably got under the Queen's skin no end to have her first born chained to the wireless and doing Neddy Seagoon voices.) His ultimate battleground was his BBC2 creation Q, a sketch show in denial about being a sketch show. I'm not sure it's a fight that he or it ever really win, but they put up a good effort, fight like (showbiz) troopers
1, The first series was a major influence on Monty Python, don't you know.
2, Q ran for 6 series from 1969 to 1984. This collection contains the first three – Qs 5 to 7. In the last version, what would've been Q10, the title became There's a Lot of It About. Q is a rubbish title but There's a Lot of It About is almost perfect.
3, It's all a lot of work and bother this Q business, there's a destructive mania to it. Things get smashed or thrown constantly, performers have to undress, get shot at, or commit suicide. In the opening of Q6 Spike appears from a hospital bed where he is undergoing chemotherapy, announcing that by changing his brand of cigarettes his life expectancy has gone up by two days. Dark doesn't really cover it.
4, While on the other side, comedians in dinner jackets and bow ties were making jokes about the “darkies” and the “coons,” on Tuesday or Thursday at 9.00 pm on BBC2, Spike was making jokes about the Jews and the “wogs.”
5, While on the other side, Benny Hill was chasing scantily clad women around, on Tuesday or Thursday at 9.00 pm on BBC2, Spike was employing scantily clad ladies, (in the case of Jenny Lee Wright, a Benny Hill favourite, the same scantily clad lady) to stand around and be ogled. You'll get a full assortment of “ists” and “isms” in each episode. If you find one of these sketches on Youtube, it'll be above a lists of comments complaining about it being the kind of thing you can't say or do any more because of all that bleeding Political Correctness.
5, His glamour stooges do have a kind of ironic presence. Jenny Lee Wright appears throughout Q5 posing in a showgirl shiny bikini or draping herself over Richard Ingrams and does so with amazing amount of dignity. In Q6 and 7, Julia Breck takes over the being-underdressed and buxom role but she usually has lines. Both of them feel like a genuine cast member: the girl who has to bounce around topless at the start of Q6 rather less so. Spike is so licentious that at times you think he wouldn't look out of place hanging off the back of a double decker with Reginald Varney leching over the latest clippies in On The Buses.
6, Spike, who was a major influence on Monty Python, pioneered the sketch that doesn't have a punchline or even an ending. In Q5 one of them ends with Milligan announcing rather sheepishly that there isn't any more of this. Later it became more formalised – when the sketch had run out of steam the cast members would turn to the audience and walk off stage chanting “what are going to do now.”
7, I always envied them that. There's a moment in Blazing Saddles where Slim Pickins gets to say, “piss on you, I'm working with Mel Brooks” which I think is the line of movie dialogue I'd most like to have said; to have been one of Mel's gang in the mid 70s would've been a splendid thing to be. But, failing that, (which I did) walking off stage with Spike going, “What are we going to do now, what are we going to do now,” would have been a decent consolation.
8, I can't imagine Spike, the beloved entertainer, was the easiest person to work with and there is a considerable cast turn over between series, but it always looked like it was great fun working on Q. This was partly because Milligan was always corpsing, and usually taking two or three fellow performers with him. No show passes without some suppressed giggling. Suspiciously, the less funny the sketch the more likely he is to start laughing. Scriptwriters for Frankie Howerd had to carefully write in every “Oooh no,” and “Oooh missus,” and “Titter ye not,” and you suspect that there was something similar going on here with the “spontaneous” cracking up.
9, Q was a major influence on Monty Python, of course.
10, The support cast are stellar, but among them all, you have to single out the contribution of his faithful retainer John Bluthal, who was with him throughout. Bluthal is great at any role but his Hughie Green impersonation is so wonderful, such a perfect distillation of heartfelt insincerity, it's a validation of Green's existence.
11, The stream of consciousness approach is strongest in Q5, made in 1969. (Only three episodes remain of it: 2,3,4. The first two are in black and white, before abruptly jumping into colour.) Mostly though this first incarnation is like a Footlights revue, if only because of the presence of Richard Ingrams and John Wells in the cast. They seem to be anchoring the show, giving it a veneer of satirical respectability but overall it is the loosest and most free associating of the series, jumping from idea to idea like a marvellous phantom of liberty.
12, By the time you get to Q7, made in 1977, the series has become mostly set and sketch bound. Now each episode is typically made up of six or seven sketches that will go on for up to five minutes. The main comic impetus is the characters' fury at being a figure in a comedy sketch, and the joke is the futility of the format. It's the Morecambe and Wise show as imagined by Sartre.
13, The happiest balance is struck perhaps in Q6, from 1975. Here, alongside collaborators such as Peter Jones and Robert Dorning, who were masters of playing bowler hatted British authority figures, the show achieved an often blissful momentum, flipping between long sketches and short filmed interludes and having an often uncanny feeling for how long to play out each section to maintain the sense of silliness.
14, Q is like watching an escape artist repeatedly struggling free of his chains and the brown sack, only to then jump back in the sack the moment he sees daylight. It wants to be free, but it can't live outside the cage for long.
15, Over the course of these three series, you'll see him suddenly catch a wave of inspiration that might carry him through a period of ten to twenty minutes of delirious comic marvels before breaking and leaving you to make your way through a period of strained wackiness. One of the most blissfully funny sketches is one where a Dalek, a Pakistani Dalek to be precise, comes home to his human wife at the end of a long day in which he has exterminated a number of colleagues. The movement of the Dalek, going back and forward restlessly, smashing into furniture, his antennas gesticulating wildly and shooting everything and everyone in sight, may be a perfect encapsulation of Spike Milligan's comic style: a frustration that is expressed outwards and blasting randomly at whatever is in his path.
And that's all there of that. What am I going to do now, what am I going to do now, what am I going to do now.
Produced and (presumably) directed by Ian McNaughton.
Starring Spike Milligan, John Bluthal, John Wells, Richard Ingram, Peter Jones, David Lodge, Robert Dorning, Julia Breck and Alan Clare. 480 mins. 3 Disc DVD set released by Simply Media. Order at simplyhe.com
All surrealists and mold-breakers are engaged, to some extent, in the process of trying to escape from their own boredom: “Oh look, Salvador's shaved half of his mustache off – isn't that interesting.” For Spike Milligan the battle was to prove, through the creation of free wheeling off the wall comedy, that he was not Light Entertainment. His previous attempt at this, The Goons, ended up becoming a national institution. (No subversion there, thought it probably got under the Queen's skin no end to have her first born chained to the wireless and doing Neddy Seagoon voices.) His ultimate battleground was his BBC2 creation Q, a sketch show in denial about being a sketch show. I'm not sure it's a fight that he or it ever really win, but they put up a good effort, fight like (showbiz) troopers
1, The first series was a major influence on Monty Python, don't you know.
2, Q ran for 6 series from 1969 to 1984. This collection contains the first three – Qs 5 to 7. In the last version, what would've been Q10, the title became There's a Lot of It About. Q is a rubbish title but There's a Lot of It About is almost perfect.
3, It's all a lot of work and bother this Q business, there's a destructive mania to it. Things get smashed or thrown constantly, performers have to undress, get shot at, or commit suicide. In the opening of Q6 Spike appears from a hospital bed where he is undergoing chemotherapy, announcing that by changing his brand of cigarettes his life expectancy has gone up by two days. Dark doesn't really cover it.
4, While on the other side, comedians in dinner jackets and bow ties were making jokes about the “darkies” and the “coons,” on Tuesday or Thursday at 9.00 pm on BBC2, Spike was making jokes about the Jews and the “wogs.”
5, While on the other side, Benny Hill was chasing scantily clad women around, on Tuesday or Thursday at 9.00 pm on BBC2, Spike was employing scantily clad ladies, (in the case of Jenny Lee Wright, a Benny Hill favourite, the same scantily clad lady) to stand around and be ogled. You'll get a full assortment of “ists” and “isms” in each episode. If you find one of these sketches on Youtube, it'll be above a lists of comments complaining about it being the kind of thing you can't say or do any more because of all that bleeding Political Correctness.
5, His glamour stooges do have a kind of ironic presence. Jenny Lee Wright appears throughout Q5 posing in a showgirl shiny bikini or draping herself over Richard Ingrams and does so with amazing amount of dignity. In Q6 and 7, Julia Breck takes over the being-underdressed and buxom role but she usually has lines. Both of them feel like a genuine cast member: the girl who has to bounce around topless at the start of Q6 rather less so. Spike is so licentious that at times you think he wouldn't look out of place hanging off the back of a double decker with Reginald Varney leching over the latest clippies in On The Buses.
6, Spike, who was a major influence on Monty Python, pioneered the sketch that doesn't have a punchline or even an ending. In Q5 one of them ends with Milligan announcing rather sheepishly that there isn't any more of this. Later it became more formalised – when the sketch had run out of steam the cast members would turn to the audience and walk off stage chanting “what are going to do now.”
7, I always envied them that. There's a moment in Blazing Saddles where Slim Pickins gets to say, “piss on you, I'm working with Mel Brooks” which I think is the line of movie dialogue I'd most like to have said; to have been one of Mel's gang in the mid 70s would've been a splendid thing to be. But, failing that, (which I did) walking off stage with Spike going, “What are we going to do now, what are we going to do now,” would have been a decent consolation.
8, I can't imagine Spike, the beloved entertainer, was the easiest person to work with and there is a considerable cast turn over between series, but it always looked like it was great fun working on Q. This was partly because Milligan was always corpsing, and usually taking two or three fellow performers with him. No show passes without some suppressed giggling. Suspiciously, the less funny the sketch the more likely he is to start laughing. Scriptwriters for Frankie Howerd had to carefully write in every “Oooh no,” and “Oooh missus,” and “Titter ye not,” and you suspect that there was something similar going on here with the “spontaneous” cracking up.
9, Q was a major influence on Monty Python, of course.
10, The support cast are stellar, but among them all, you have to single out the contribution of his faithful retainer John Bluthal, who was with him throughout. Bluthal is great at any role but his Hughie Green impersonation is so wonderful, such a perfect distillation of heartfelt insincerity, it's a validation of Green's existence.
11, The stream of consciousness approach is strongest in Q5, made in 1969. (Only three episodes remain of it: 2,3,4. The first two are in black and white, before abruptly jumping into colour.) Mostly though this first incarnation is like a Footlights revue, if only because of the presence of Richard Ingrams and John Wells in the cast. They seem to be anchoring the show, giving it a veneer of satirical respectability but overall it is the loosest and most free associating of the series, jumping from idea to idea like a marvellous phantom of liberty.
12, By the time you get to Q7, made in 1977, the series has become mostly set and sketch bound. Now each episode is typically made up of six or seven sketches that will go on for up to five minutes. The main comic impetus is the characters' fury at being a figure in a comedy sketch, and the joke is the futility of the format. It's the Morecambe and Wise show as imagined by Sartre.
13, The happiest balance is struck perhaps in Q6, from 1975. Here, alongside collaborators such as Peter Jones and Robert Dorning, who were masters of playing bowler hatted British authority figures, the show achieved an often blissful momentum, flipping between long sketches and short filmed interludes and having an often uncanny feeling for how long to play out each section to maintain the sense of silliness.
14, Q is like watching an escape artist repeatedly struggling free of his chains and the brown sack, only to then jump back in the sack the moment he sees daylight. It wants to be free, but it can't live outside the cage for long.
15, Over the course of these three series, you'll see him suddenly catch a wave of inspiration that might carry him through a period of ten to twenty minutes of delirious comic marvels before breaking and leaving you to make your way through a period of strained wackiness. One of the most blissfully funny sketches is one where a Dalek, a Pakistani Dalek to be precise, comes home to his human wife at the end of a long day in which he has exterminated a number of colleagues. The movement of the Dalek, going back and forward restlessly, smashing into furniture, his antennas gesticulating wildly and shooting everything and everyone in sight, may be a perfect encapsulation of Spike Milligan's comic style: a frustration that is expressed outwards and blasting randomly at whatever is in his path.
And that's all there of that. What am I going to do now, what am I going to do now, what am I going to do now.
