Spike Milligan – Puckoon, May 31, 2019

Puckoon 1963 edition

Comic adventures have featured in our reading every year. This time it was a novel by Spike Milligan, best known in Britain as the creator and writer of The Goon Show, a half-hour radio comedy that ran on BBC in the fifties, starring Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. Milligan had a nervous breakdown from authoring scores of episodes over the years, but later he was given a bunch of comedy writers to assist him, preserving his brand of off-key humour.

Devika

Richard Attenborough who filmed the novel in 2002 said “When I first read it, I was laughing so much I was close to peeing.” The novel took the author three years to write. It is not so much a continuous story as an assortment of disconnected episodes threaded loosely by the narrative of gormless cartographers drawing a boundary between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The central question of the boundary remains topical with the vexed Brexit issue in current British politics.

Saras discusses

Attenborough says, “Spike's humour was all about irreverence, … irreverence is an essential part of our culture. I admire that enormously.” Spike was meant to be in the film; however ill-health prevented his participating, though he saw the film before he died. His daughter Jane acted as the fierce wife of Dan Madigan.

Puckoon film poster 2002

Our readers concurred that the book was a riot of laughter almost all the way through. The individual pictures will bear testimony to their enjoyment, but here they are at the end, completely chortled out, barely a smile left with which to crease their faces. 

Geetha, Devika, Saras, Thommo, Geetha Joseph, Pamela, Priya, (seated) Hemjit