The System is Upon Me
Spike Milligon biking to John Payne Spike Milligan is a brilliantly inventive writer and humorist. Although he has spent most of his life amusing and entertaining people, happiness and fulfilment have eluded him. Being subject to periods of depression and periods of great creative energy has, to some extent, been his fortune but it has also been an almost unbearable burden. Spike Milligan in his theatre dressingroom during the running of ‘The Bed Sitting Room’ of which he was coauthor and in which he acted.
JP Have you developed some personal method of coping with bouts of depression?
spike You don’t cope, you don’t at all. When you’re ill you’re ill - one of my dearest friends is lying in bed at this moment with the curtains drawn, and he insists that he doesn’t want to go back to work. I think he has got the right idea. I think his illness is a materialisation of truth - he doesn’t want to go on coping.
JP Can you work at all when you are depressed?
SPIKE I’ve had constant interruptions all day and I have done nothing today to earn bread for my children. That’s not illness, that’s naturally feeling depressed and it is what society does to you.
JP Do you think you are in a constant state of depression then?
spike Well - yes, probably now. Yes. This is a dreadful society, they’re crucifying people like me night and day. If you sat in a room on your own for three months, at the end of that time, when you came out you’d be a criminal - that’s modern society. You will a) owe hundreds of pounds on your parked car, b) be summonsed for not answering questions like: Who lives in your house? Is your daughter married and old enough to pay tax? How much money did you earn when you went to China? You could spend 6 months of the year answering official questions and if you don’t do it you’re a criminal. This isn’t freedom, it s lunacy let loose on a large scale and people who are not ‘normal’ are absolutely in the majority. They have become ‘creatures’.
JP Because they accept society’s rules you mean?
spike Well they’ve been beaten into it, if you don’t accept you’re going to be screwed. I don’t know what I m living for you know, I’m keeping my head above water just for my children’s sake, otherwise I would go to Prison and I would stay there.
JP 0? you find your sensitivity is a great burden? Do you find you get very upset or depressed by world events?
SPIKE I get adjusted to events like any normal human being should. But any person with any kind of depth should feel for suffering and feel for the creatures of the earth to come - feel for all things that are good on earth.
What we’ve got now is dead, this is out. You are computerised from birth today, the creatures growing up in America today taking exams and more exams, take another certificate without knowing what it’s all for and give it to an Insurance Company who will then give them a job.
Or you take your training certificate to a training depot at Houston and become a pilot. You get into a rocket and get sent to the moon and they will do the tricks on the moon that they are asked to do. They won’t say one word of poetry when they get to the moon - for one word of poetry when the astronauts got to the moon I would have cried, but what do they say? ‘It’s a kind of dirty grey’ colour, ho-ho-ho’ … ‘it looks like Boot Hill, ho-ho-ho’ - So the moon is dead too.
JP So do you live on a constant scale of degrees of depression? You must have periods of elation when you work well and things go right - or is this getting less and less frequent?
SPIKE Oh yes! It’s getting impossible now. I had to fly half way round the world recently to try to write 60,000 words of a book but they couldn’t leave me alone even there, and consequently I never finished the book out there [Australia].
And the tragedy is, if you write something bad, if the results of your work are bad, it is because of your fellow man. He is the first one to say, ‘It’s bloody awful’, and he could be the father of that ‘bloody awful’, the father and mother of permanent ‘bloody awfuls’.
I don’t write any more - what do I do on television? I don’t even appear. I don’t know how I am living -1 don’t even exist.
JP What would you like to be doing now?
SPIKE I’d like to be a writer. I’d like to be writing music and poetry and painting and making the world a better place.
My son has dropped out. I told him to stay dropped out - ‘don’t you get back to “this”, I said. ‘You confuse them and act as unruly as you like without actually being a criminal in the face of barbarity. Don’t fill in forms, don’t participate, don’t do anything at all - withdraw your labour. Feast off them, live off the Labour Exchange.’
JP Can you predict when you are going to be badly depressed?
SPIKE No. JP Are there any warning signs or is it something that comes out of the blue?
SPIKE It’s an accumulation.
Jp So, if you try and pull yourself out of it, can you do so or do you just knock off and go to bed?
SPIKE It would kill you to try to goon. You go to bed for a week - maybe a fortnight sometimes.
JP Do you do this ? I mean do you still stay in bed as long as this?
SPIKE What can you do when your rationality says, ‘Don’t get up’ ? If you get up you’re going to go straight back into those jokers’ pockets and they’re at you again.
JP Do you get any treatment, do you still see doctors?
SPIKE I’m not ill.
JP It’s just your constant state of mind?
SPIKE Yes. I’m not ill. I’m made depressed normally, you know. The sickness is in the society, the cheap bloody society, not me. I’m OK but I’m suffering from this contemporary society.
JP When you began to get bouts of depression, presumably you had treatment early on at some time. The treatment portrayed in the TV documentary you did for Granada, for instance?
SPIKE I was puzzled by the way I felt, that’s why, I was puzzled and I thought I was genuinely ill. Now I know I’m not ill and I’m not prepared to go to these jokers (psychiatrists) and pay 5 guineas a shot. I’m OK.
JP What led you to make the film for Granada then? Was that an attempt to explain how you had felt to the public?
SPIKE It was a way of making some bread.
JP Did you invest more of yourself into making that than you would normally do?
SPIKE No - no, I didn’t suffer any traumatic experience.
JP The hospital experience that you portrayed in that film - was that a direct representation of one particular experience of yours or was it an amalgam of experiences over the years ?
SPIKE No, it was just this one particular period when I went in the first time.
JP And you reconstructed what you had felt then?
SPIKE Yes. It was an outrage - the noise there was incredible.
JP In the hospital?
SPIKE The noise was incredible. They don’t know. I know that the dividing line between the person who is mentally ill and the person who isn’t is almost one of empathy on one side or the other.
JP So what was in that film was your first major experience. And was, in fact, the worst?
SPIKE Yes - that was the first time I went under from pressure of overwork. opening of the World Wildlife Exhibition in 1969
JP Do you remain interested in the way it all works? I mean, do you have any friends who are psychiatrists who you discuss this with?
SPIKE I know one, who seems the best of the lot of them and I send people to him. He’s not so much a psychiatrist he never started out as a psychiatrist, he is an investigator - what he does is to rationalise all the way through and I speak to all his patients afterwards because I sent all the people I know to him. But these people are, once again, victims of society - they really are. I mean a horse that has had its legs chopped off won’t win a race but the horse isn’t sick, it’s just been maltreated. It’s the same with people.
JP Going back to this question of feelings and elation, do you really never feel ‘Ai’ any more?
SPIKE No, never.
JP Why do you think this is?
SPIKE Well - the system is upon me, it’s got me by the throat.
JP But you never find yourself divorced from it, even for a few days, and really all systems go?
SPIKE No, not really. No. I know I’m trapped, I’m in a cage I don’t want to kid myself I don’t want to get up too high because I don’t want to get knocked down because that’s bad. Stay at low and then you haven’t got so far to go down.
JP When you’re feeling really bad what do you do for yourself, how do you counteract it?
SPIKE I take Tryptizol and pull down the blinds. I put on some music, possibly Debussy or something like that - I put on a record and then I pull the blinds.
JP And you go to sleep eventually?
SPIKE Yes, I go to sleep. Well, it’s so depressing all your energy is drained out of you. You’ve fought uphill. It’s like climbing up a mountain and you know you’re never going to get to the top of it. So you just pack up - lie down.
JP Do you know, when you’re going down, how bad it’s going to be? SPIKE Yes.
JP When you’re feeling really depressed, can you explain what it feels like - is it emptiness?
SPIKE Complete emptiness, drained; congealed rage - you’d like to take a gun and shoot every person that comes in your way, one after the other because that would be good survival -1 would be able to create.
JP Do you despair in general - not just of getting the work done?
SPIKE Yes, I despair. I expect to be finished by the end of this year. I expect to be bankrupt. All washed up.
JP You mean there’s no more to come out or you’re not allowed to let it come out?
SPIKE I can’t get it out. Tax is 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years behind and why I don’t know.
JP To what extent though do you think that your sensitivity and varying moods have been your fortune in terms of the kinds of humour you have written?
SPIKE It’s been a disaster. It’s been a cataclysmic disaster. I may have made other people laugh but I’ve destroyed myself. Jesus got off light. I’d rather be crucified and get it over with than have this running crucifixion we’ve got now.
JP But do you imagine that you would have had this zany kind of humour if you had not had heightened sensitivity and wild vascillations of mood?
SPIKE I can’t say what the gift is - I’ve been given some ability as a writer and that’s something beyond my ken.
JP You say you despair. Do you have any faith, any hope of redemption for society and mankind?
SPIKE I have a feeling it’s not going to work out - at least it’s not going to work out my way, therefore I’m not pleased with the current society. I’ve tried to give my children a chance, but they too are caught in the warp and weft of this tenuous society. We are conditioned by money more than we are by life, this is a situation which is unbearable to me. I want to give love and have love back.
JP Is this why you applauded your son dropping out?
spike Yes.
JP You’re not worried about how the world might treat him because he’s a drop out, because he’s in the minority - you’re in the minority?
spike He’s happier than me. He’s happier than me. I’ve kept myself as an individual in the mainstream but I’m paying the price for it, left, right and centre. He’s dropped out early on before they’ve got hold of him and he owes stamps on the card. As soon as you get a f?rm, move to another address - straightaway, change your name, do anything, but keep away from them.
JP When you were a young man in the army, did you have periods of feeling very depressed even then?
spike No, it was fine then.
JP It is really since you’ve been in the public limelight that you’ve felt bad and got progressively worse?
spike Yes. All the time.
JP In the early days before you were famous - say the early days of the radio comedy in the ’50s when you were writing this very zany stuff for the Goons …
SPIKE I must say I’m unaware of being famous. I don’t know what it means. It’s like a word I don’t have any feeling for. I reject it utterly - it’s wrong. Well, anyway, carry on with what you were saying.
JP In the early days when you were writing original humour for the Goons was that a rational decision to write a different kind of humour or was that vou?
SPIKE I don’t know. There was a tendency to want to impress Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers I suppose, but I don’t know the origins really.
JP Do you write much comedy now?
SPIKE No. I don’t feel like it. I just write as if the world is full of idiots, which it is. But I don’t want to become a vicious person and I never will.
JP If there was no pressure on you to pay back taxes and you could stop appearing and performing, would you do so?
SPIKE I’m dropping out at the moment. I’m not appearing on television, I’m not appearing anywhere. I’m doing bits and pieces - quickies and I’ve accepted the fact that I’m going to be bankrupt or whatever it is they make you. I have one suit and, in the moment of madness, I bought a Mini Minor, as against all the jokers I’ve seen in their Rolls Royces, and I work like the clappers more than anyone else. I’d say I’m one of the hardest working men in England.
Do you get any joy out of writing comedy or performing it? Do you enjoy the comeback or the audience reaction?
SPIKE I don’t know, I haven’t any ego. I’ve tried to get rid of my ego. What makes people have stage fright is their ego - that they’ll never live up to the image of themselves. I just believe in myself.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.