Q Volume 1 (Q5, Q6 and Q7) DVD review

Since finishing Pauline Scudamore's excellent biography of the Goonfather himself, I've been thinking a lot about Spike Milligan - the phrases 'tortured genius' and 'complex individual' seem barely adequate descriptions for someone whose influence was as pervasive as it was far-reaching. Certainly, he was a reassuring presence during my formative years - growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, the well-stocked libraries at my otherwise grim and joyless schools were stuffed with books bearing his name, from his gloriously silly children's books to the often farcical, sometimes harrowing autobiographical volumes he wrote about his part in Adolf Hitler's downfall, and whenever he turned up on television - usually as a guest on other people's programmes by that stage, though his final BBC series, There's a Lot of it About, remains a vastly underrated treat - you were guaranteed a few welcome laughs. Spike didn't believe in the rambling, discursive, slow-burning silliness of his former colleague Michael Bentine; his comedy was a powerful kick up the arse, guaranteed to shock a reaction out of everyone in the vicinity, whether you liked it or not. Discovering his 'straight' album the Snow Goose revealed another side to his personality - there are no silly voices here, no broadsides or buffoonery, just a haunting musical adaptation of Paul Jellicoe's affecting novel of the same name, with Spike checking his jester's hat at the studio door to deliver a hypnotic narrative around which the orchestral music ebbed and flowed.

The quality of Milligan's work is perhaps inevitably variable, given just how prolific a writer and performer he was. It's very telling that he often wished he was 'ten people at once', because he found the delegation of tasks almost impossible. As a result, he frequently spread himself too thin, and even his staunchest admirers would grudgingly admit that some of his later books left rather a lot to be desired. Which brings us onto his longest-running and most substantial work for television, the six series he made for the BBC between 1969 and 1982 under the umbrella title of Q. 

The Q series divided hardcore Milligan fans - which is to say, those who had grown up with the Goon Show on the wireless - as fiercely as it divided the critics. Even Spike himself had mixed feelings about it - catch him on a good day, and he'd tell you he thought the programmes were 'fucking good'; catch him on a bad day (of which there were far too many) and he'd rail against the complacency or the uselessness of the BBC, remarking that he never stood a chance against, for example, the Monty Python crowd, because they had six writers and performers, and the Q series was 'just me and a load of second bananas'. To this day, there are several comedy experts and professional reviewers who simply cannot stomach the series, complaining of 'ordinary old chestnuts' and 'bouts of charmless corn' marching hand-in-hand with moments of surreal brilliance and idiosyncratic humour. (The fact that Q was rampantly politically incorrect, even in the seventies, doesn't seem to help matters.)

The review on the That's Not Current website, however, sums it up beautifully - 'Watching [Q] in 2016 it still feels as important as it ever was. To use a common phrase, they just don’t make them like this anymore. When you look at the current BBC rota of comedy programming, you just won’t find anything that comes close to being this edgy, rebellious and socio-politically on point (or in poor taste). With Milligan and Shand, you get the impression that they weren’t doing this to carve a successful career for themselves; this was their way to artistically express themselves and give the middle finger to the establishment while venting their disdain for their network. In the current climate of political correctness, Q wouldn’t be touched with a ten-foot pole.' And there's the rub - this was a comedy series with no frontiers and no boundaries. It was a wild ride through the imagination of a man whose own psychiatrist considered him clinically insane, an unfettered expression of his inner complexities filtered through his own Dadaist surrealism and gleeful, child-like sense of mischief. 

Simply Media's release of Q Volume 1 (Q Volume 2 is due to be released next February) features the remaining three episodes of Q5 (four of them have been wiped and presumably lost forever, two exist only as monochrome telerecordings and only one is presented here in colour), all six episodes of Q6 and all seven episodes of Q7. Among the sketches featured here are a grandmother-hurling contest live from Beachy Head, World War One in a trunk, 'physician heal thyself', the Cock-a-knees, the Jehovah burglars, the Pakistani daleks, a holiday in the Bermuda triangle and Star Trek in Catford. There's four hundred and eighty minutes' worth of material to get through, which means the lack of extras in this bare-bones release is no major drawback. One episode of Q5 and the entirety of Q6 and Q7 has been mastered from the original BBC tapes, so they look as good as they're ever going to look until someone pushes the boat out for a full restoration job. The black and white episodes of Q5 are as good as can be expected for low-res monochrome recordings of a colour broadcast.

If you want to piss and moan about the less savoury aspects of Spike's comedy, you can do so here, and you'll be in very good company. If, on the other hand, you're in the mood to watch something that was absolutely miles ahead of the pack at the time (and continues to be so today, particularly in this climate of the cosy, unthreatening, arena-cramming likes of Peter Kay and Michael McIntyre), then you could do a lot worse than setting a few evenings aside for Q Volume 1.