Terence (Spike) Alan Milligan was actually brought up in India because his father Leo Alphonso Milligan was in the British Indian Army. This television comedy sketch of a tramp picking up his baguette in a café only to find that it produces a clarinet solo by Gershwin is a superb example of how Milligan’s surrealist imagination was also centred in sound and music. John Cleese recognised his influence on Monty Python’s Flying Circus when he said: ‘Milligan is the great god of us all.’ “While working as an assistant storeman at Keith Prowse in Bond Street, Terence Milligan bluffed his way into a part-time evening course in orchestral practice at Goldsmiths’ College, Lewisham, and subsequently joined a local band, Tommy Brettel’s New Ritz Revels, playing drums, guitar, and trumpet, and occasionally providing vocals.”Īnd it is also variously mentioned by his three biographers Pauline Scudamore, Dominic Beehan and Humphrey Carpenter. It is emphasised by Ned Sherrin who wrote his entry (2006) for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: It seems this experience represented an important part of what he saw as his development as a musician and composer. He attended a one term music orchestration course in the middle 1930s at the college’s evening department of Adult Education. Spike Milligan was well-known for his zany and irreverent though affectionate memoirs of his time in the Royal Artillery in World War Two.
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