hilarious. Spurred on by this Spike experimented with writing scripts for more mad voices. Pete and Harry, who was also doing the odd job for the BBC, showed them to an innovative producer, Pat Dixon. Pat commissioned a trial script from Spike and his co-writer, Larry Stephens, and Pete suggested some voices. Spike later described it as ‘the crappiest script ever’ and the BBC planners rejected the pilot programme they recorded. But Pat was persistent and the first show, starring Michael, Harry, Pete and Spike, was broadcast on 28 May 1951 as Crazy People. It was a hilarious, anarchic comedy sketch show. After an incredible response the planners did not hesitate to commission a second series, starting in January 1952, and increased the number of episodes from seventeen to twenty-five. And this time the BBC caved in and let them call it The Goon Show.
Spike’s parents had tired of the cold and damp and grey of London living and decided to emigrate with Desmond to Australia. Spike was still more or less homeless so Pete took him home to meet his parents. Bill Sellers had been a church organist in Bradford before being hired by Peg’s mother as pianist and driver for her touring company. Peg and he fell in love, married and became a performing team. When Spike was first taken to the Sellers flat in Finchley Bill was still doing the rounds with a ukulele act but Peg was overseeing her son’s career. They hit it off and Peg agreed that Spike could move from the attic to the flat where he slept on the floor on an airbed.
One night Pete took Spike along to meet his girlfriend, Anne Howe. On the way they picked up Anne’s friend, June Marlow, and Spike fell in love. The best friends married the best friends, Spike and June a few months after Anne and Pete, in January 1952. The Goon Show became a cult hit but the strain of producing such innovative humour led to a breakdown later that year and Spike was treated at a psychiatric hospital for two months. Over the years his depression became increasingly uncontrollable, and by his own admission he behaved abominably towards June. They had three children together, Laura, Sean and Silé, the last born in 1956, but things became so bad that in 1959 June left with the children and moved in with a porter from Covent Garden market. When they divorced in 1961 Spike was given custody. At least he could remain in the family home at 127 Holden Road in Finchley, one of the few constants in his life. It was a spacious Edwardian house in a quiet tree-lined street and he became a driving force in the Finchley Society, which he co-founded in 1971 with the aim of preserving the dignity and tranquillity of the district.
The year Spike met June was one which marked the beginning of a more lasting relationship. In 1951, while Eric Sykes was in hospital being treated for the first signs of ear trouble, he heard Crazy People on the radio. The writers were unknown to him. ‘I thought their material was the funniest I’d heard for some time and wrote them a letter saying so, with a few pointers to how I thought it could be made even better,’ he recalled. By that time Eric was already a hugely successful writer and performer. As well as writing for Frankie Howerd and with Sid Colin for Peter Brough as Archie Andrews, then later for Tony Hancock, he wrote for American comics appearing at the London Palladium and topped the bill there in his own right. The young writers were thrilled to hear from him.
A couple of days later Eric was propped up in bed in his private room. ‘Two faces peered at me through a window in the corridor, Spike and Larry. They were so grateful I’d written and thanked me.’ Later that year Spike visited Eric in his one-room office at Longridge Road, Earls Court. ‘He was bursting with ideas. Couldn’t keep still. He said his mind was so busy inventing them he hardly had time to sleep,’ said Eric. ‘We hit it off and decided to share an office.’
Eric found rooms to rent five flights above a greengrocer’s shop at 137 Uxbridge Road, Shepherd’s Bush and they moved in. The collaboration was fun from the start, although there were a few obstacles, particularly because rationing was not over. ‘At that time,’ said Eric, ‘oranges were still in short supply and when a shipment came in there was always a queue outside the shop. We had to wait with them until they were all sold before we could go to work.’
Eric and Spike got on extremely well because they were both idealists. An idea they had for a co-operative, with writers working alongside performers or producing scripts for their own use, at last came to fruition in the early Fifties. I suppose Spike was more of the dreamer, attracted by the vision of artists working in collective harmony. Eric told me that Spike helped to get the project off the ground and he made sure it worked in practice. They formed ALS and word soon got round among budding writers that it was worth sending them material to get advice and maybe more, if they were good enough.
ALS worked very simply. ‘We would all do our own thing,’ said Eric, ‘but subscribe to a fund that would be there when one of us hit a fallow period. There were several rooms so we invited two young chaps who were just beginning to get the odd success, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, to take one of them. I had more work than I could handle so passed Tony Hancock over to them.’
They needed an office secretary and Alan knew an ambitious young girl, Beryl Vertue. She was a brilliant organizer, and her rôle developed with the business, eventually becoming agent. Then David Conyers joined them to work alongside Beryl and the co-operative multiplied into an awesome collection of talent. Spike invited along a struggling television writer, Terry Nation. Then a script came in from a young fellow called Johnny Speight. ‘I thought it revealed enormous talent and sent for him,’ said Eric. ‘He was working as an insurance agent at the time and came to the meeting with his wife. I told him to give up his job and move in with us. He did and became one of our very best writers.’
As they became more successful ALS found better offices at Cumberland House on Kensington High Street. Then Eric and Spike discovered Number Nine. Each bought a quarter, with Alan and Ray, and ALS moved in at the beginning of 1962.
Spike’s marriage was not the only thing to come to an end with the close of the Fifties. There had been ten series of The Goon Show, but the pressure of organizing nannies, writing the scripts, recording, then shuttling home to read the children a bedtime story, towards the end must have become unbearable to someone so mentally fragile. In January 1960 the last run began. The remaining Goons (temperamental Michael Bentine left after the second series) were being offered film and stage roles. Spike had already written and performed in three television series, and written dialogue for and performed in some comedy films, including, of course, The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn, and his future seemed bright.
In 1961 Spike was cast in a Second World War film, Invasion Quartet, and fell for one of the extras, Patricia Ridgeway, who everyone knew as Paddy. She was statuesque, very good-looking, but with a weight problem she battled all her life. Spike recounted how he sighed when he first saw her on set: ‘Oh, look at those legs.’ He asked her out to dinner and the attraction was immediate. When she went on to appear as a nun in The Sound of Music Spike was bewitched by her lovely voice and proposed.
She was from a very middle-class Yorkshire family, her father a director of Monsanto. They married in Yorkshire in June the following year with the Beatles’ producer, George Martin, as best man and Spike’s three children in attendance. But the dignity of the proceedings was destroyed when, as he stood at the altar with his bride, Spike put on a big black moustache and turned round. The congregation tittered, but Paddy’s father was appalled.
Although Spike and Paddy loved each other their temperaments clashed. Perhaps their first disagreement occurred shortly after they married, when she insisted that his children should go to private school, which he considered very Victorian. But she won and Laura went to a convent as a weekly boarder and Sean to a local private school. Soon more rifts occurred. Spike told me there were moments of great happiness but terrible rows. They were like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing against each other. Both had tempers and Paddy could be very forceful and stubborn, and with Spike’s volatility, the combination was lethal. Result: rows, passionate reconciliations, and philandering by Spike.
He had a bust-up with the British Government when passport regulations changed in 1962 and his Indian birth and Irish father denied him an automatic transfer to a British passport. Instead, he became technically stateless. As an ex-soldier he obstinately, but by his lights logically, refused to swear the oath of allegiance necessary to gain a new British passport on the grounds that he had shown enough loyalty to the Crown by fighting for the country. Instead