Milligan's Meaning of Life

bySpike Milligan

An Autobiography of Sorts

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With his lightning-quick wit, unbridled creativity and his ear for the absurd, Milligan revolutionised British comedy, leaving a legacy of influence that stretches from Monty Python's Flying Circus to the work of self-confessed acolytes such as Eddie Izzard and Stephen Fry today.

Throughout his life, Milligan wrote prolifically - scripts, poetry, fiction, as well as several volumes of memoir, in which he took an entirely idiosyncratic approach to the truth. In this ground-breaking work, Norma Farnes, his long-time manager, companion, counsellor and confidante, gathers together the loose threads, reads between the lines and draws on the full breadth of his writing to present his life in his own words: an autobiography - of sorts.
From his childhood in India, through his early career as a jazz musician and sketch-show entertainer, his spells in North Africa and Italy with the Royal Artillery, to that fateful first broadcast of The Goon Show and beyond into the annals of comedy history, this is the autobiography Milligan never wrote.
Milligan is the Great God to all of us
John Cleese

About Spike Milligan

A legendary and iconic figure, Spike Milligan was born at Ahmednagar in India in 1918. He received his first education in a tent in the Hyderabad Sindh desert and graduated from there, through a series of Roman Catholic schools in India and England, to the Lewisham Polytechnic. He then plunged into the world of Show Business, seduced by his first stage appearance, at the age of eight, in the nativity play of his Poona convent school. He began his career as a band musician, but became famous as a humorous scriptwriter and actor in both films and broadcasting. Over the course of his astonishing career, he wrote over eighty books of fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, cartoons and children's stories. He was the creator, principal writer and performer of the infamous Goon Show, and went on to become one of the greatest and most influential comedians of the twentieth century. Spike received an honorary CBE in 1992 and Knighthood in 2000. He died in 2002.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780241955956
  • Length: 336 pages
  • Dimensions: 198mm x 22mm x 130mm
  • Weight: 235g
  • Price: £10.99
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