· Spike Milligan insisted that his name meant "small-tonsured one" in Gaelic

· He was born in India, son of an army captain who was Irish. He lived through the declining days of the British Raj for his first 16 years before coming to Britain

· He chose Irish nationality in 1960 after being classified as stateless in immigration law, a Milliganesque absurdity. His parents and brother moved to Australia

· The four Goons - Harry Secombe, Milligan, Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers - first performed as a team in the late 1940s at the Grafton Arms pub in Victoria, central London

· Their first radio show was a series called Crazy People in 1951, which featured the Ray Ellington Quartet, Max Geldray on harmonica and the Stargazers singing group

· Milligan discovered the word Goon in a Popeye cartoon. He deployed the word for anyone he regarded as a lovable, interesting idiot. The show was renamed The Goon Show

· The surreal series struck a chord first with schoolchildren, then with a wider public. It drew millions of fans, and is cherished on audio cassettes and internet script excerpts

· At one point a senior BBC figure misread the show's title and referred to it as The Go-On Show. There were more than 30 attempts to suppress the programme entirely

· The strain of writing and recording the show caused Milligan to suffer four nervous breakdowns

· By the time The Goon Show ended in 1960 there had been a total of 243 programmes

· There were several reunions. Twice in the 1960s the Goons re-performed radio scripts for TV - The Whistling Spy Enigma (1966), and Tales of Men's Shirts (1968)

· In 1972 they recorded The Last Goon Show, to mark the BBC's 50th anniversary. The recording was released on video and cassette in 1997. BBC Television adapted 26 of the radio scripts for a puppet series, The Telegoons, in 1963-64

· The Goons' final collaboration was the single The Raspberry Song/Rhymes in 1978, two years before the death of Sellers

· In 1992, as an Irish citizen, Milligan was made an honorary CBE

· Last year his friend the Prince of Wales, a Goon Show devotee since childhood, bestowed an honorary knighthood on Milligan, though the artist had called him "a little grovelling bastard" on TV in 1994, then faxed him saying: "I suppose a knighthood is out of the question now?"

In his own words

"What I am is a successful failure. It's just that I have this feeling that I've never quite been able to achieve what I wanted to" (1977)

"Peter Sellers and I saw ourselves as comic Bolsheviks. We wanted to destroy all that had come before and to create something totally new"(1995)

Steve Wright (Radio 2 DJ): "You're looking very well, Spike"

Spike: "Rubbish, I've been dead for years, and nobody's brave enough to tell me"

From The Goon Show

"Listen, someone's screaming in agony - fortunately I speak it fluently"

Minnie: You can't shoot elephants in England

Crun: Mnk? Why not?

Minnie: They're out of season

From his books

"The RTO gave me a travel warrant, a white feather and a picture of Hitler marked 'This is your enemy.' I checked every compartment, but he wasn't on the train"
Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1972)

"The Milligan had suffered from his legs terribly. During the war in Italy. While his mind was full of great heroisms under shell fire, his legs were carrying the idea, at speed, in the opposite direction. The Battery Major had not understood.

'Gunner Milligan? You have been acting like a coward.'

'No sir, not true. I'm a hero wid coward's legs, I'm a hero from the waist up.'
Puckoon (1976)

From his poetry

Ant and Elephant
Said a tiny Ant
To the Elephant
"Mind how you tread in this clearing!"
But alas! Cruel fate!
She was crushed by the weight
Of an Elephant, hard of hearing