: Homes: A tortured genius and a Goon.

Byline: William Leece

MAYBE you've just got to be mad to be funny. I mean, just imagine being the warm-up man at the annual dinner of the National Association for Compulsive Sanity.

If you can get your head round this concept, then read no further and join the Young Liberal Democrats. They need you more than this review does.

But if the whole world seems terminally bonkers and probably a better place for it, then please proceed.

We are gathered on this page to celebrate the life of the late Terence Alexander Milligan, KBE - all right then, Spike Milligan - who kept the British public simultaneously baffled and amused for 50 or more years from the Goon Show to Badjelly the Witch until his death earlier this year.

By the end, he had become a Great British Institution, an accolade which probably drove the ever-irreverent Milligan to his grave in despair. But GBI he was, and last year, in the manner of things that happen to GBIs, it was decided that his many friends would set their recollections of Spike on the record, now published as Spike Milligan: His Part in Our Lives.

Compiler Maxine Ventham had already put the bulk of the book together before Spike's death. But they must have known that the end was nigh, given Spike's poor physical health. For all that, the writers use the present tense. Every one of them seems, deep down, to have been writing an obituary - of at least the kind of recollection that is retailed at a memorial service.

Or wake. The Irish have the right idea, and Spike was as much Irish as he was British. Born in India to a military family, he carried an Irish passport and only arrived in Europe as a 10-year-old boy. He was later to recall that the first thing he saw as he arrived in Southampton was a newspaper bill declaring ``Docks Crisis: Ramsay MacDonald steps in'' - a favourite Spike anecdote but a little surprisingly not included here.

So what did it take to be a friend of Spike Milligan? Immense reserves of patience - as a high-profile manic depressive he could at times be quite impossible.

Honesty - he could see straight through a sycophant. And a similar mind-set - but upstage him at your peril.

The writer and broadcaster Barry Cryer tried it once.

Warming up an audience before a Milligan TV show, he yielded as Spike strode on stage and grabbed the microphone. ``Van Gogh was Jewish,'' declared Spike and left the stage.

Cryer's instinct got the better of him. ``In that case, the rabbi must have had an incredibly bad sense of direction.'' The glare from Spike reduced him to being three inches tall. And yet they stayed friends.

Loyalty and the need for it played a big part in his psyche. His wartime friends from D/19 Battery, 56th Heavy Regiment RA recorded his unswerving friendship over decades. ``Over these last 60 years, he has always been a D Battery boy,'' recalls ex-gunner Dennis Sloggett.

Perhaps a sharper insight into the depths of Spike Milligan's mind comes from the film director Richard Lester, whose tangential inspiration seems often close to that of Milligan's.

Lester had cast Spike in the Three Musketeers in the 1970s as Raquel Welch's husband, of all people.

A masked ball was filmed on location in a Spanish castle, with Spike viewing from the sides.

``When I looked at him, he was sobbing. He said: `It's so real, and they're all dead.' He could see them as the real people of the past who had died, and it had moved him to tears.''

Now Spike has gone to join them, and the next world will not be the same again.

l Spike Milligan: His Part in Our Lives. Compiled by Maxine Ventham.

Published July 25 by Robson Books. 208pp hardback, pounds 14.95.

CAPTION(S):

CLOWNING AROUND: Spike Milligan with his fellow Goons, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe