Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall
Hampstead
The Black Album
Cottesloe
Good old Spike. Wonderful, charming, innocent Spike who could skewer authority with a child’s unthinking acuity. ‘Where were you born?’ asked the recruiting sergeant when he was conscripted. ‘India,’ said Spike. ‘Which part?’ ‘All of me.’ Ben Power and Tim Carroll have had the inspired idea of sifting the highlights of Spike’s wartime diaries and turning them into a singalong comedy tribute biography. But hang on. What’s a singalong comedy tribute biography? Well, it’s a bit of memoir, some gags and sketches, a few 1940s favourites to tap along to and a deep and meaningful section where Spike’s nerves collapse and his piles explode.
Mystifyingly, the mixture flops. There’s too much of everything and not enough of anything. We start at a concert party, comically under-rehearsed, of course, then we skip to North Africa for a slice of wartime documentary, then we’re back to the concert party, then we hop over to the Italian campaign via a handful of sketchy sketches and in between we get two shoddy caricatures of Hitler and Goebbels making threadbare jokes.
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