English Teeth, English Teeth!
 Shining in the sun
 A part of British heritage
 Aye, each and every one.

 English Teeth, Happy Teeth!
 Always having fun
 Champing down on bits of fish
 And sausages half done.

 English Teeth, HEROES' Teeth!
 Here them click! and clack!
 Let's sing a song of praise to them -
 Three Cheers for the Brown Grey and Black.

First published in “Silly Verse for Kids”, 1959. Also appears in “Poems on the Underground” (5th ed.), 1995.

A wonderfully irreverent gem from Spike Milligan; readers are strongly advised to lay their hands on either of the above publications, so as to savour the accompanying illustration (drawn by Milligan himself).

— Thomas

PS. Insightful commentary? What’s that?

Biography

Terrance Allan “Spike” Milligan, born 16th April 1918.

Dubbed “the godfather of alternative comedy” by Eddie Izzard, Spike Milligan pioneered the joke without a punchline, paving the way for Monty Python and all the waves of anarchic anti-format humour that followed in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.

He was the son of an Army Officer posted to the Empire, and was born in (what was then British) India. Although he fought for the United Kingdom during the War and has lived in England since 1933, he recently had so much bureaucratic flak about the official status of his citizenship that he took an Irish passport instead.

Spike served in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War, which wasn’t the best place in the world to develop an interest in gardening, but probably helped him secure a sense of humour amidst the tragic but ridiculous events occuring around him (it certainly helped his bank balance when he published his war diaries many years later to popular acclaim).

In the early 1950s, he and some other conflict-battered chums by the names of Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine decided to put together a radio series for the British Broadcasting Corporation. They wanted to call it “The Goon Show”, but the BBC knew best, and decided it should be known as “Crazy People”. At first it was a sketch show, much like its spiritual successor Monty Python, but a change of producer (and a change of title to, finally, “The Goon Show”) led to a story based format, which only served to highlight the strangeness of the humour. At first both Milligan and Bentine wrote scripts for the sketch-based series, but artistic differences made Bentine go solo and left Spike as the creative core of the outfit until its final broadcast. The flavour of The Goon Show is very difficult to get across on paper, as it depended so heavily on sound effects (Milligan ended the series partly because he had used every tape in the BBC library), Harry Secombe’s joyous timing and the mercurial vocal performance of Peter Sellers. Indeed it was probably this dependence upon and familiarity with its radio format that made it stand out from its competitors, both contemporary and subsequent. An attempt to convert the series’ scripts onto television in the 1960s as The Telegoons did not prove satisfactory.

A lifelong sufferer from depression, Milligan once tried to kill Peter Sellers (and it’s a mark of their friendship that they remained close pals until Sellers’ natural death). The script writing process took a lot out of Spike, and he often cites it with deep despair as the main cause for his divorce. Secombe once commented that he and Sellers had all the fun of performing for a grateful audience at the sunday recording sessions, while Milligan painfully immersed himself in his craft throughout the week leading up to it. Eventually, the strain proved too much, and he decided to end the series in 1959. However, a wave of protest from devoted fans convinced him to make one extra set of programmes which ended with The Last Smoking Seagoon on the 28th January 1960. Even this was not to be quite the end, and The Very Last Goon Show Of All was recorded on television before a Royal audience (which, alas, did not include the series’ most famous fan, Prince Charles) in 1972. Spike screamed the last line after the applause had died down: “Now, get out!”

After The Goon Show, Spike went on to write and star in the TV sketch series Q, and has published lots of written material including his interpretation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as his famous war memoirs which began with “Hitler, my part in his downfall”. Several characters from The Goon Show also appeared in a film he made with Peter Sellers called The Muckinese Battlehorn.

– http://www.catharton.com/authors/812.htm

Links

Complete Goon scripts: http://www.residents.com/Goons/ Complete Monty Python scripts: http://www.montypython.net/scriptsindex.php3

There, that should keep you occupied for some time <grin>.