The Great McGonagall

I'd heard this was pretty bad, but hey, Spike Milligan can be patchy, so you usually have to put up with some duff jokes along with the good stuff. Alas, it really is so painfully atrocious that I couldn't even bear to watch it all the way through. It isn't funny in the slightest, and the director - who co-wrote the book on which this is based but never claimed to be an actual movie director - obviously doesn't have a clue what he's doing, and hasn't got the nerve to tell Spike when his laugh-free hamming isn't working. This isn't even a good video scan, though the film is so abysmal in all other respects that it may have originally been shot very badly, possibly by a friend of Spike's who didn't claim to be a cameraman but fancied giving it a go. The only professional-looking aspect of the film is the main set, and that's because it was a real Victorian music-hall they were allowed to use for nothing because part of the reason the film was made was to provide funds to save it from demolition. I don't know what happened to the building, but if its existence depended on this movie making a profit, these days it's presumably a car-park. Don't watch this! It really, truly is so bad that I'm amazed it was even released. And I don't mean that in a 'so bad it's good' way - it's just tedious dreck that looks like a TV sketch dragged out to feature-length. By the way, this was the only time Spike was ever given full creative control over a movie. You can see why it never happened again.

Watched the clock all the way through. Dreadful.

As a fan of both McGonagall AND Milligan, it grieves me to say that this probably ought not to be in your first 500 selections.

Read a volume of McGonagall's poems instead. Because they take themselves so seriously, they are wonderfully bad and generate their own pathos. It's the best way to get a laugh out of them. They're rather smothered here by the surrealism and self-conscious post-modern comedy that would fit other Victorian subjects better.

As you'd expect from Spike Milligan there are some lovely reality-defying moments which recur to you days later, bringing a smile with them. But these are mixed with sub-Christmas cracker jokes and stuff which was experimental in the sense that he was prepared to do lots of stuff that didn't work to get at the off-the-beaten track stuff that did. I'm just not convinced he needed to release so much of the former into the public domain!

But then, if we're really honest, that's a fair summary of his whole post-Goon show career, isn't it?

The best thing about it is that fiming it all in a disused music hall (the form of comedy Milligan did more than anyone else to expose the laziness of...)makes it look stunning.

Unless you are a Spike Milligan freak and will be entertained by absolutely everything he does - think carefully before ordering this dire film. I've had more fun at the dentist!!!!

This film is the pits, confused and incoherent. It claims to be a comedy, thats a joke in its self. Rather have a wet weekend on a rainswept beach.