Norma Farnes - Memories of Milligan

A few days after Spike’s outburst he had another one. This time I was better prepared. There was the usual shouting and ranting. ‘Right,’ I told him. ‘I’m going home. I’ll deal with it all tomorrow.’ Unknown to me, Ray was in the hall and had heard what I said. He looked at me. ‘I think you’ll stay. You have that Scarlett O’Hara attitude.’

All the writers in Orme Court at that time had different methods of working. Ray and Alan were very disciplined. They would arrive every day about ten, have tea or coffee and start writing. Eric didn’t come to the office every day, mainly because he was appearing in theatre or filming. Johnny mostly wrote at home. He didn’t have an office in Orme Court but would visit Eric once or twice a week.

Spike wrote when he felt like writing. He was in the office every day. From the late Sixties right up until the early Eighties he had a bedroom in Orme Court and he would sleep there Monday to Friday. So if he felt like writing late into the afternoon this is what he would do, and work into the early hours of the morning.

I knew that meeting Ray and Alan again would be a pleasure. They’re both oenophiles and lovers of fine food, and I was so looking forward to seeing them. Then an embarrassing memory flashed through my mind. After Spike introduced me to Ray I said to him, ‘Isn’t he gorgeous? So beautifully dressed and so sophisticated.’ (Back in the Sixties I’d never heard of anyone having their shirts handmade by Turnbull & Asser.)

Spike wasn’t interested and I thought he hadn’t taken any notice of what I had said until later that evening, in a crowded hall when everyone was going home, he shouted, ‘Ray! She’s got hot pants for you!’ I could have killed him. I was young and naïve and I thought I would die of embarrassment.

I met Ray and Alan together at Ray’s beautiful Queen Anne house where he has collected one of the most extensive private libraries in the country. Peter Eton, a producer of The Goon Show , told me many years ago, ‘It’s one thing having a fine library, but unlike most people Ray has read every book in it.’ As the car turned into the drive Ray appeared in the doorway, a slight stoop now, but as charming as ever, and Alan with that wide, kind but knowing smile that always makes me feel he knows exactly what’s going on in my mind before I realise it myself. He has filled out over the years. Ray is as slim and gangly as ever – still beautifully dressed.

Equally well read, Alan is enormously knowledgeable on almost every subject. He is philosophical about most things, having suffered tuberculosis that after the war put him in a sanatorium, where he met another patient, Ray. Their sense of humour sparked a relationship that has survived the years and brought laughter to a nation, first with their memorable scripts for Tony Hancock and later with Steptoe and Son . It was after their enormous success that Alan decided he would retire – and did. Ray was disappointed, but this decision never impaired their friendship which, to me, seemed to strengthen after they both tragically became widowers.

Ray showed me into the drawing room. There was a beautiful Christmas tree fully decorated. It was late February! ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘is the Christmas tree still here?’ Ray’s reply: ‘It’s so lovely, I didn’t want to take it down.’ Alan didn’t seem to think there was anything extraordinary about this. Enter the world of Galton and Simpson. And believe me you have to be sharp to live in it. Alan has a phenomenal memory and was in no doubt when they had first met Spike.

ALAN:We hadn’t been in the business very long when we went to a Goon Show recording, about 1953. We would be in our early twenties and like almost everyone else in that age group we were great fans. Someone introduced us to him and we were really thrilled. We thought no more about it. At the time we were working from my mother’s house in Mitcham. Months later, probably in 1954, the phone rang.

‘Spike Milligan here.’ Christ! Spike Milligan! What’s he want with us? What he wanted was to find out whether we had an agent. No, we hadn’t. ‘Well then,’ said Spike, ‘Eric Sykes and I haven’t got one either and we are being picked on by an agency called Kavanagh’s.’ That was the big showbusiness scriptwriting agency.

Spike said he and Eric were looking around to find writers who were still free from agents so they could team up and form a group as a bulwark against being picked off. We were obviously flattered that they had even considered us. We went to meet them at this really dreadful office above a greengrocer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush. We were the new boys on the block so we listened and then said, ‘Yeah. We’ll come in with you.’

Finally, after a couple more meetings we had a main meeting to decide on the set-up. It was agreed we needed a secretary, someone to organise the office. We said we knew a girl who was doing our typing – very efficient. Beryl Vertue. It was agreed we should approach her. Well, she said, she had a good job in advertising and to leave she’d need twelve pounds a week. ‘Gawd Almighty!’ said Spike. ‘Twelve pounds a week!’ Wait a minute, we pointed out, that’s only three pounds a week each. ‘That’s true,’ they agreed. So Beryl came on board.

[Beryl Vertue later formed her own company producing successful films and television series, including Men Behaving Badly .]

What were we going to call ourselves? I suggested Associated British Scripts. Fine! But the Board of Trade said we couldn’t have that name. What about Associated London Scripts? Yeah. We could have that. And that’s how it all started. I think our first client was a man called Lew Schwartz, sent by Dennis Main Wilson or somebody like that from the BBC. Frankie Howerd got a script from someone called Johnny Speight and suggested he should go and meet the lads above the greengrocer’s shop. He was the next one in. Then there were lots of others – Terry Nation who invented the Daleks, and his mate from Wales, Dick Barry. It gradually filled up from there. Ray can add to that I’m sure.

RAY:Well, I don’t know about adding to it. I agree with most of it, but I don’t think we were as unknown as you have said. I don’t think Spike would have bothered with us if we had been that unknown. But that wasn’t the first time we met Spike. I think it was at his house. He called us and we went to meet him. That lovely man Larry Stephens was there [he wrote some of the Goon Shows with Spike]. They were obviously sending us up like mad because they both pretended to be drug addicts. Do you remember this, Alan?

ALAN:No, I don’t.

RAY:I think the real reason Spike invited us over was to see whether we would contribute or write one of the Arthur’s Inn scripts [a successful radio series].

ALAN:You’re going to get this all the time, Norma. In fact Gail Frederick [BBC] commissioned us to do two things. One was to write Arthur’s Inn and the other was to write a pilot for Wilfred Pickles. We found out afterwards that there was never going to be a pilot for a Wilfred Pickles sitcom. Gail was just giving us a chance to earn some money.

[They wrote an episode for Arthur’s Inn and had Graham Stark playing Sir Humphrey Planner, a Shakespearean actor.]

RAY:But Spike must have been writing it.

ALAN:Maybe. I don’t know. I know Sid Colin, a radio scriptwriter, was involved with it. [Colin co-wrote some of the Educating Archie scripts with Eric Sykes. He was also a brilliant jazz guitarist and composer.] That was long before we had the meeting above the greengrocer’s shop. We started in the business at the end of 1951, so it must have been just before Hancock’s Half Hour started. And we wrote at my mother’s place, but after the meeting we travelled to the greengrocer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush every day. We had a room on the fourth floor. Spike and Eric worked on the floor above us and Beryl had a room to herself. We stayed there until 1957. We needed to move to more salubrious offices and I think it was Stanley Dale who found a block on the ground floor of Cumberland House in Kensington High Street.