COMEDY legend Spike Milligan died 20 years ago and many who remember him will recall a curmudgeonly man with bipolar disorder who had several mental breakdowns.

Those in the know will realise he changed the face of post-war British comedy through trailblazing satire and buffoonery in The Goon Show, goading the establishment while gaining legions of fans.

It’s one of the reasons Ian Hislop and Nick Newman wrote Spike, a play that tells how the former wartime soldier became a comedy phenomenon on radio and later on television.

“We didn’t want an audience coming out thinking ‘the really important thing about this person is that they were miserable and unhappy. And now so am I,’” says Ian, one of our best-known modern satirists.

“We wanted them thinking ‘the important thing about this person is that he produced all this!’ and it made a huge number of people very happy. And still does.”

Ian, Private Eye editor and Have I Got News For You team captain, is 62 and was too young to experience The Goon Show when it was broadcast in the 1950s.

Spike made the show with Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers and they achieved huge radio audiences in its heyday. Ian and Nick have the ambition to introduce Spike’s work to modern audiences.

“I didn’t hear them first time around,” says Hislop. “I missed out. The pleasure for me of making this play was Nick saying ‘this is reallyfunny. Genuinely funny and brilliant writing.’

“I went back and listened to it and was gobsmacked. I’d become so used to the older Spike, and the older Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers, that I’d forgotten that when they first came along, they’d just been demobbed from the army, they were really young men, and they blew the place away.”

But the irreverence of the Goons did not appeal to everyone, including the hierarchy at the BBC.

“The people in charge at the BBC couldn’t bear it,” says Ian. “They had no idea what this group were doing. They thought they were noisy and anarchic and up to no good, all of which was true. That’s what made them so attractive.

The play includes a dispute with the BBC about Peter Sellers doing an impression of the Queen. The BBC hauled Spike in and told him “You can’t parody the Queen!”

“Three years later, Prince Philip invited the Goons to be his representatives in the Cambridge National Tiddlywinks Championship,” says Ian. “He clearly thought the Goons had delivered a very amusing representation of his wife.”

And, of course, Prince Charles has long been acknowledged as The Goons’ most-famous fan.

Spike will be at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, from Tuesday 20 September until Saturday 24 September.