Laughter and misery are often intertwined, and no more so than in the subject of a new biography, as CHRIS TITLEY discovered.

SPIKE Milligan was routinely hailed as a comedy genius, but he didn't make everybody laugh. Even now his work tends to divide the audience along love-hate lines.

"There's always a problem with generations of comedy performers," admits Humphrey Carpenter, author of a new biography of Milligan. "I have two daughters, one of whom doesn't like comedy and has taken against Spike and has decided he was a nasty piece of work. I don't know why.

"The other one was devoted to him when she was about ten. She wrote a letter to him, saying 'Dear Eccles, I think you are pretending to be Spike Milligan'.

"He wrote back by return of post. She's still devoted to him."

Despite this touching dedication to a young fan, having read Carpenter's biography I am apt to agree with the first daughter's assessment. Milligan was a nasty piece of work in so many ways.

He was a spoilt child and became an utterly self-obsessed adult - he used to lock himself in an upstairs room and send his wife telegrams demanding she deliver him a meal.

He rarely and grudgingly acknowledged the role of his scriptwriting collaborators. Indeed it was news to me how many Goon Shows he wrote with a partner, or were written without him.

He often belittled his colleagues, including Harry Secombe, and was particularly jealous of the success of another Goon, Peter Sellers. And he kept attacking the BBC, even though no other broadcasting organisation would ever have allowed his talent to flourish, or put up with his mood swings.

Milligan was also a racist. Although he defended his use of terms like "wogs" in his TV sketches as being about debunking race taboos - shades of Bernard Manning here - his comments in interviews revealed a deep seated colour prejudice.

In his favour, Carpenter describes Milligan's devotion to his three children. But this is later undermined by his attitude to two secret love children, whom he ignored for most of their lives.

Having spent the year after the comedian's 2002 death digging into this darker side, did Carpenter emerge liking Spike Milligan? "No," he said.

"I don't dislike him. I find him fairly intractable.

"He's disappointing as a biographer: there isn't a secret life. The biographer always wants to uncover a secret life."

His book on Benjamin Britten revealed aspects of the composer's private life previously unknown. "With Milligan it's on the surface."

Carpenter is being tactful. The book makes plain his distaste for Spike. Even when a publisher pays Milligan's writing a compliment, he does so "defensively".

You cannot blame the biographer. Spike was hard work to live with, hard work to deal with, and is hard work to like. But this makes the book a sometimes wearying read.

The picture on the front cover says it all: the portrait shows an old, melancholic, disconnected Spike under a floppy hat. On the back is a picture of the younger man in a comic pose which would make most readers smile. "I would reverse them," admits Carpenter. "I think the funny side is what people want to remember".

It is certainly the funny side which drew the biographer to his subject, and particularly Milligan's greatest achievement, the Goon Show.

"It was an extraordinary self-contained world. I must have regarded the very early Goons as absolutely real," Carpenter said.

"When I was older, by 1958 or so, everybody was doing the funny voices at my school - Bluebottle and Eccles especially. It was the cultural backdrop to my world." The humour was like nothing else around. "Most radio comedy shows, then and now, are stage-performed variety shows transferred to radio.

"But they used radio completely creatively to do the impossible - haul pianos up Everest, etc."

Does that make Milligan a comedy genius? Carpenter is not so sure. He peaked early, he argues: nothing he ever did later, the Q television series, the books, surpassed the Goons. "He had the most extraordinary repertoire of jokes. He wrote about 250 Goon show scripts. On the whole they got better and better. It's an extraordinary outpouring of material.

"If you put on any old Goon Show tape, you don't get a poor episode."

It is impossible to divorce Milligan's work from his mental illness. For most of his life he suffered from depression. "It's absolutely central to him," Carpenter said.

The manic side of Spike was witnessed by several long-suffering creative partners. Neil Shand, co-writer on Q5, told Carpenter how the former Goon spouted comic ideas "faster and faster and faster, out of control, then Spike slows down in gloom and depression and exhaustion. Classic depression."

His experience of war probably had much to do with it. "He was probably born that way, and it took a few things to trigger it off. It started really in his 30s, which is quite common," said Carpenter. "But whether all that shelling in Italy which left him in hospital set it off... yes, I think it did."

Carpenter's biography does not bring you particularly close to its subject. It is mostly a cuttings job, with little here that cannot be found in previous biographies, Milligan's own autobiographical writings and newspaper articles. And although the early, if a little forced, Goonish energy soon dissipates you never escape the feeling that this book was rushed.

Neither those who enjoyed Carpenter's more scholarly works on Britten and the former archbishop Robert Runcie, nor ardent Spike fans who already know his story, will take much away from it.

But if you want a guide to the life and times of a man who revolutionised English comedy, then this, as its author says, is "the complete road map". Just don't be surprised if you dislike the destination.

Updated: 09:40 Wednesday, August 20, 2003