UK Edition
Spike Milligan's Puckoon: the greatest comic novel you've never heard of
A radio play will bring ‘Puckoon’ by Spike Milligan to a new audience. His daughter Jane talks to Jake Kerridge about her father's zany genius
Many comedians have written novels, and nearly all of them are as disposable as Christmas cracker jokes. The great exception is Puckoon, Spike Milligan’s anarchic portrait of Irish rural life in the Twenties – still in print after more than 55 years. And as a tale of outsiders meddling with the Irish border, Puckoon is perhaps more topical today than when it was published in 1963.
This short, sharp, freewheeling novel took Milligan several years to write, during a period when he went through a difficult divorce and then endured a period of no contact with his girlfriend Paddy while she made up her mind whether or not to marry him.
“The odd thing is that though I wrote it in torment, I reckon that it is one of the funniest books in years,” he once said, with his customary lack of compunction about blowing his own trumpet. But he was right. Few books before or since have been funnier.
Milligan just lived to see and enjoy Terence Ryan’s film of Puckoon, released in 2002, the year of his death. Now the novel has been adapted as a radio play, with a cast including Mock the Week stalwart Ed Byrne, Pauline McLynn (Father Ted’s Mrs Doyle) and Jane Milligan, daughter of Spike and Paddy (yes, she did agree to marry him).
“Spike created this smorgasbord of characters, the villagers of Puckoon, so we all ended up playing five or six different parts,” says Jane. “It’s a brilliant production and it was even more fun to make than it sounds. We laughed the day away, we really did.
“Dirk Maggs [the director] has done a beautiful job with the music and the background sound. There are sound effects Dad would have been proud of.” The explosions, violent sneezing fits and (in Milligan’s words) “great posterior blasts” are created with a loving care that is indeed reminiscent of The Goon Show, the offbeat Fifties radio comedy that made Milligan’s name as a writer and performer.
The script has been written by the children’s comedian and author Ian Billings, who was previously nominated for a best new writer award – “at the age of 53!” – for his biographical radio play Spike and the Elfin Oak. He has been a fan of Puckoon since he was 14, and had a copy signed by Milligan at a book signing in the Eighties.
“He was a delight. I said to him, ‘Sorry, I can only afford paperbacks,’ and he replied, ‘That’s OK, I only write paperbacks.’”
What does Billings love about Milligan’s work? “The way it taunts authority. Coming out of the war [Milligan served with the Royal Artillery and was wounded at the Battle of Monte Cassino], he had that sense of demob-happiness that really infused his work. There is dissent, naughtiness. And a willingness to challenge the laws and structures of comedy as it was perceived in the Forties.”
Jane Milligan thinks that with Puckoon her father was determined to show he could expand his range beyond radio comedy. “The bar was very high for Spike for his entire existence. He never went to uni – he was self-educated. This was his first novel and I think he wanted to prove what a fantastic way with words he had.”
Billings agrees, pointing out that “a lot of his prose in Puckoon has a lyrical quality to it – people forget Milligan was a poet too. I wanted to make sure that we balanced the wild, hilarious comedy with his beautiful descriptive writing. There’s almost a Dylan Thomas-esque turn to his phrases in his evocation of Puckoon.”
The adaptation does have something of an Under Milk Wood-on-acid vibe. But instead of the sonorous narration of a Richard Burton type, the voice of the author is provided by the veteran comedian Barry Cryer – once Spike’s warm-up man – whose deadpan intonation moves easily between lyricism and whimsy.
As in the book, the layabout hero Dan Milligan (played by Ed Byrne) gets into arguments with the author about the direction of the plot or begs him for help when stuck in tricky situations. “Milligan was very proud of his innovation in having a character talk to the author, and so we break the fourth wall in the same way, if you can have walls on radio,” says Billings.
Perhaps the most resonant scene in Puckoon nowadays is the meeting of the ill-assorted members of the Irish Boundary Commission, who agree after much bickering to hold the official red pencil between them and push it along the map of Ireland to determine the exact location of the new border. (“Steady, someone’s pulling to the benefit of Ulster.”)
The border cuts through the middle of Puckoon, with wonderfully absurd consequences: corpses need passports to cross from the church to the graveyard at their funerals; one corner of the pub is on the Ulster side of the border, and is rammed with customers because the drinks are 30 per cent cheaper.
Billings’s script does not make direct allusion to the current Irish Border question, “but it is a story about what the little people will do in response to the onslaught of political control. And it’s also about how the people who are left to actually do the partitioning are human beings with flaws who can make daft mistakes.”
Although Puckoon bursts with surreal humour, some of the most outlandish episodes were not invented but taken from family stories Spike’s Irish father told him. For example, Mr Pearce, who smuggles grenades for the IRA in his hollowed-out wooden leg, is based on Spike’s great uncle Willie, who did the same thing after losing a leg at Mons.
Milligan’s personal experience of Ireland had extended no further than a handful of days in Dublin when he wrote Puckoon, and Jane thinks the book was an attempt to explore his roots. “Spike was so very, very Irish for a man that wasn’t born in Ireland. He was buried with the Tricolor on his coffin.”
Born in India, Milligan lived in England from the age of 12, but as he was writing Puckoon his automatic right to a British passport ended with the passing of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962. “He probably could have got one but he was bloody-minded and he wouldn’t fill in the forms,” recalls Jane.
He continued to live in England as an Irish citizen, but remained aggrieved that the country he had fought for in the Second World War wouldn’t automatically grant him a passport. Jane recalls her father’s reaction when the South African barefoot runner Zola Budd was speedily granted citizenship so that she could compete for Britain at the 1984 Olympics.
“He went to No 10, held up a toilet plunger with a bit of toilet roll in it for a torch, took off his shoes and socks, and ran up and down shouting, ‘Will you give me a passport if I run fast enough?’”
She hopes that the radio play will put Spike back in the spotlight. “He’s been a bit quiet for a while, Dad – I think it’s time he got out more. With this, it’s like he’s having a little outing for Christmas.”
Puckoon is on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday Dec 28 at 2.30pm