Spike Milligan.

Spike Milligan.

(16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002)

He was a comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor of Irish and English parents with Irish nationality. His early life was spent in India where he was born. The majority of his working life was spent in the United Kingdom. He disliked his first name and began to call himself "Spike" after hearing a band on Radio Luxembourg called Spike Jones and the City Slickers. Through his performances on radio, television, poems, memoirs and often just by being himself, he was on the BBC in 1999 and voted  "the funniest person of the last 1,000 year" In the second world war spike often organised music and comedy shows for his fellow troops giving them a rest from the war and a place to kind of relax. As well as writing serious poems when he was ill, he also revelled in funny poems which were influenced by many artists like Edward Lear. On the Ning Nang Nong was one of spikes poems which was voted as the UK's favourite comic poem.

On the Ning Nang Nong

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
And the Monkeys all say Boo!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots Jibber Jabber Joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang!
And you just can't catch 'em when they do!
So it's Ning Nang Nong!
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning!
Trees go Ping!
Nong Ning Nang!
The mice go Clang!

What a noisy place to belong,
Is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!

Spike Milligan in Silly verse for kids, 1968Drawing by the author.

 

This poem was also created and made into an animation and posted online. Ning Nang Nong Animation.

Milligan made several forays into television as a writer-performer, in addition to his many guest appearances on interview, variety and sketch comedy series from the 1950s to the 2000s. Stephen fry as "absolutely immortal, greatly in the tradition of Lear". While depressed, Milligan wrote serious poetry and a novel called Puckoon 

which was parodying the style of Dylan Thomas and a very successful series of war memories in cluding Adolf Hitler in My Part In His Downfall.

Death

Even late in life, Milligan's black humour had not deserted him and sadly died from liver disease, at the age of 83, on February 2002, at his home in Rye, East Sussex. On the day of his funeral, 8 March 2002, his coffin was carried to St Thomas's Church in Winchelsea, Sussex, and was draped in the flag of the Republic of Ireland. He had once quipped that he wanted his headstone to bear the words "I told you I was ill." He was buried at St Thomas's Church cemetery in Winchelsea, East Sussex, but the Chichester Diocese refused to allow this epitaph. A compromise was reached with the Irish translation, "Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite", and additionally in English, "Love, light, peace".