The son of an English mother and Irish father, he was born in British India, where he spent his childhood before relocating in 1931 to England, where he lived and worked for the majority of his life.

[1][2] Milligan was the co-creator, main writer, and a principal cast member of the British radio comedy programme The Goon Show, performing a range of roles including the characters Eccles and Minnie Bannister.

He wrote and edited many books, including Puckoon (1963) and a seven-volume autobiographical account of his time serving during the Second World War, beginning with Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1971).

His father remained in the Indian Army after the end of the First World War, steadily promoted till "the family's lifestyle became almost lavish"; Milligan considered that "My old man lived the life of a gentleman on sergeant's pay".

He also joined the Young Communist League[3] to demonstrate his hatred of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, who were gaining support near his home in South London.

After his call-up, but before being sent abroad, he and fellow musician Harry Edgington (1919–1993)[9] (whose nickname 'Edge-ying-Tong', inspired one of Milligan's most memorable musical creations, the "Ying Tong Song") would compose surreal stories, filled with puns and skewed logic, as a way of staving off the boredom of life in barracks.

A biographer describes his early dance band work: "He managed to croon like Bing Crosby and win a competition: he also played drums, guitar and trumpet, in which he was entirely self taught".

Subsequently, hospitalised for a mortar wound to the right leg and shell shock, he was demoted by an unsympathetic commanding officer (identified in his war diaries as Major Evan "Jumbo" Jenkins) back to Gunner.

While he was with the Central Pool of Artists (a group he described as composed "of bomb-happy squaddies") he began to write parodies of their mainstream plays, which displayed many of the key elements of what would later become The Goon Show (originally called Crazy People) with Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine.

After a delayed start, Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine joined forces in a relatively radical comedy project, The Goon Show.

[21] For the first few years the shows were recorded live, direct to 16-inch transcription disc, which required the cast to adhere closely to the script but by Series 4, the BBC had adopted the use of magnetic tape.

Over the first three series, Milligan's demands for increasingly complex sound effects (or "grams", as they were then known) pushed technology and the skills of the BBC engineers to their limits—effects had to be created mechanically (Foley) or played back from discs, sometimes requiring the use of four or five turntables running simultaneously.

He was hospitalised, heavily sedated for two weeks and spent almost two months recuperating; fortunately for the show, a backlog of scripts meant that his illness had little effect on production.

During a visit to Australia in 1958, a similar special was made for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, "The Gladys Half-Hour", which also featured local actors Ray Barrett and John Bluthal, who would appear in several later Milligan projects.

Fifteen-minute adaptations of the original scripts by Maurice Wiltshire were used instead, with Milligan, Sellers and Secombe reuniting to provide the voices; according to a contemporary press report, they received the highest fees the BBC had ever paid for 15-minute shows.

Milligan's next major TV venture was the sketch comedy series The World of Beachcomber (1968), made in colour for BBC 2;[28] it is believed all 19 episodes are lost.

Curry and Chips set out to satirise racist attitudes in Britain in a similar vein to Speight's earlier creation, the hugely successful Till Death Us Do Part, with Milligan 'browning up' to play Kevin O'Grady, a half-Pakistani–half-Irish factory worker.

The series generated numerous complaints,[citation needed] because of its frequent use of racist epithets and 'bad language'—one viewer reportedly complained of counting 59 uses of the word "bloody" in one episode—and it was cancelled on the orders of the Independent Broadcasting Authority after only six episodes.

Later that year, he was commissioned by the BBC to write and star in Q5, the first in the innovative Q... TV series, acknowledged as an important precursor to Monty Python's Flying Circus, which premiered several months later.

Milligan's seven volumes of memoirs cover the years from 1939 to 1950 (his call-up, war service, first breakdown, time spent entertaining in Italy and return to the UK).

Miles described Milligan as: ... a man of quite extraordinary talents ... a visionary who is out there alone, denied the usual contacts simply because he is so different he can't always communicate with his own species.

In the 1968 production, Barry Humphries played the role of Long John Silver, alongside William Rushton as Squire Trelawney and Milligan as Ben Gunn.

"[42] In 1961–62, during the long pauses between the matinee and the evening show of Treasure Island, Milligan began talking to Miles about the idea he and John Antrobus were exploring, of a dramatised post-nuclear world.

To this end, Milligan rehearsed for seven weeks with director Frank Dunlop and castmates Joan Greenwood, Bill Owen, and Valentine Dyall at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Once back in bed with co-star Joan Greenwood, Milligan spent the rest of the performance poking fun at the Queen for bringing her son to such a racy play.

They wore these great long pantaloons, a gold dome to their turbans, khaki shirts with banded waistcoats, double-cross bandoliers, leather sandals, and they used to march very fast, I remember, bursting in through the dust on the heels of an English regiment.

These included his vast legacy of books and memorabilia and a grand piano salvaged from a demolition and apparently played every morning by Paul McCartney, a neighbour in Rye in East Sussex.

[74] On 23 July 1981, the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer were presented with a poem about the forthcoming Royal Wedding, delivered to Buckingham Palace on a 3-foot-9-inch parchment scroll, written under the pen name MacGoonical.

According to a letter published in the Rye and Battle Observer in 2011, Milligan's headstone was removed from St Thomas' churchyard in Winchelsea and moved to be alongside the grave of his wife,[84] but was later returned.

The memorial was unveiled on 4 September 2014 at a ceremony attended by a number of local dignitaries and showbusiness celebrities including Roy Hudd, Michael Parkinson, Maureen Lipman, Terry Gilliam, Kathy Lette, Denis Norden and Lynsey de Paul.