Book Review - Monty His Part in my Victory by Spike Milligan

 Monty: his Part in my Victory: War Biography Vol. 3 by Spike Milligan, edited by Jack Hobbs

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978 (first published 1976)          ISBN 0140045031

It is arguable, but it's quite possible that Spike Milligan was the funniest human being in history. I have grown up with him, listening to The Goon Show in my early years, the Q shows, and buying into his absurdist humour, which is slowly fading from herd memory (the amount of people in a crowded room that "get" a Milliganism when it's dropped is getting fewer and fewer and time marches on).

For some reason I never got around to reading his biographies of his time spent in the army in World War Two - formative years for him in a creative sense, but also very traumatic. I read the first part  which covered his entry into the forces and training, and now for some reason am reading the third part, which deals with his time in Africa after the defeat of the Axis in Tunis (I think Spike would approve of reading his four-part trilogy out-of-order).

This book - highly and funnily illustrated - is a collection of vignettes of an army at rest after victory, enjoying the spoils of war (i.e. getting drunk as much as possible), and of Milligan's membership of the Battery Concert party, the beginnings of the surrealist mayhem that became The Goon Show.

This volume did not make me laugh out loud as much as volume one, but was still well worth an hour or so's time.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell