Was he really that brilliant? And what part did Hitler play in refining his comic sensibility? By putting Milligan's wartime memoir on its feet, Carroll and co may help us identify the DNA of a major strand in UK comedy.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 18:37:56 Boxid IA101611 Camera Canon 5D City London Donor

To us, he's just the old-stager who called Prince Charles a 'little grovelling bastard' at the British Comedy awards, or tried to have his headstone engraved with the words 'I told you I was ill'.

After all, it's hard for us later generations to judge claims of Milligan's genius, not least because the BBC destroyed the tapes of his ground-breaking TV sketch series Q. That's the spirit Tim Carroll's production (London-bound at the end of the month) hopes to revive, with its promises of a Milligan-style collision of tragedy and idiocy, jazz music and comedy sketch. In Milligan's theatre, wrote the no-less-eminent Peter Brook, 'the imagination flies like a wild bat in and out of every possible shape and style'. His West End appearance in an adaptation of the 19th-century novel Oblomov is better remembered Milligan used the story, of an inert Russian melancholic, as a launchpad for his own wild improvisations. Few now recall Milligan's hit play The Bed-Sitting Room, co-written with John Antrobus, which foresaw a post-apocalyptic London (World War III lasted a mere two minutes and 28 seconds – 'including the signing of the peace treaty') in which characters mutate into parrots, wardrobes and, er, a bedsit. It also fed directly into British theatre. At any rate, Spike's mix of nonsense and iconoclasm (and all that merciless Goon Show ribbing of the officer class) prepared the ground for the 60s satire boom and directly inspired the Pythons. And it's easy to imagine the free-associative comedy we associate with Milligan – daring to speak crap, submitting to the reign of the subconscious – as a response to the boredom of service, as a little rebellion against the disciplines of war. But it's Milligan who's hailed as 'the godfather of alternative comedy' – by Eddie Izzard, no less. Can we trace a whole strand of anarcho-absurdist UK comedy back to Milligan's WWII experiences? Okay, so the losers' humour that characterises much British sitcom owes its origins to the likes of Galton and Simpson (the writers behind Steptoe and Son and Hancock's Half Hour).

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