Spike Milligan: the biography Humphrey Carpenter Hodder & Stoughton, 435pp, £20 ISBN 0340826118

For years, I believed I was the only person in Britain who didn't find The Goon Show funny. But while reading Humphrey Carpenter's new book, I took a straw poll among colleagues and friends. One person in roughly every 30 put their hand up to swear allegiance to Bloodnok and Bluebottle. As for the rest, they all loathed the Goons. Most of all, they loathed Spike Milligan.

Which seems reasonable enough, because Milligan loathed mankind. Anyone who has kept up with the past decade's deluge of comedy biographies will be familiar with the image of the antisocial funny man, but Milligan puts even the most rebarbatively misanthropic comedian to shame. After the 1997 general election Milligan - a father of six children, two of them illegitimate - wrote to the new Prime Minister suggesting that he issue a countrywide ban on new babies.

But then Milligan was as two-faced as the social set-up he claimed to satirise. He campaigned against nuclear weapons, but when an audience at the Coventry Hippodrome resisted granting him a standing ovation, he told them: "I hope you all get bombed again." He claimed to be a pacifist, but he once threatened to shoot his fellow actor Graham Stark and did shoot (with an airgun) a teenage boy who had trespassed on his property. "I would not detest the human race," he told one interviewer, "did I not love them so much."

Milligan got through three wives, none of whom was really much more than a hatchery-cum-housekeeper. Waking late, Milligan would reach for the phone by his bed and ring down to the kitchen to instruct whoever he was currently shacked up with to get busy with the frying pan. As a father, he made a little more effort, leaving notes from the "fairies" strewn about the house for the children to find. But he undid such good work by telling the kids that if it weren't for their existence he would top himself. Milligan thought himself an ideal father because "I have stayed a child all my life", failing to realise that the price - and the payback - of parenthood is saying goodbye to the Peter Pan fantasy.

Milligan's childhood was spent in colonial India, where he was born into an Anglo-Irish forces family in 1918. In 1933, the Milligans returned to England, fetching up in a succession of grimly respectable boarding houses in suburban south-east London. Milligan loathed his mother country from the start - its fogs and frosts and front-parlour froideur - and began to idealise the end-of-empire India he had been forced to leave. Not that he had any time for the Indians themselves. References to wogs abound in his work, and away from the microphone he would feign incomprehension when anyone looked askance as he talked of niggers.

To be fair, The Goon Show was democratic in its ribbing of the races. Milligan was no Evelyn Waugh: he found everyone laughable, whatever their colour. Whatever their class, too. Although it is now nearly impossible to find this stuff funny, there is no doubt that in the fetid, stifling world of austerity-era Britain the Goons' high-blown cacophony must have seemed like fresh air.

Certainly it did to Carpenter, whose basic contention is that Milligan never surpassed The Goon Show. Who could disagree? Does anyone remember anything by Milligan that didn't revolve around the wilful stupidity of Eccles, the benign inanity of Little Jim? The various Q series that Milligan wrote and starred in on BBC Television between 1969 and 1980 were shapeless, shambolic affairs; his film career a hammy embarrassment from first to last; his verse arrhythmic and asinine.

Carpenter can never quite bring himself to acknowledge his subject's flaws. His claim, for instance, that "the Goons are funnier than anything else in the history of comedy; and when I say 'the Goons' in this context, I'm really talking about Spike's scripts" might carry more weight had Carpenter not so assiduously demonstrated that all of Milligan's best scripts were written with help from other people - other people whose contributions Milligan, with characteristic shabbiness, always played down.

"Biography," said Arthur Balfour, "should be written by an acute enemy." Enemy perhaps overstates the case, though an encomiast is no better fitted to the task. Humphrey Carpenter is so close to Spike Milligan's work that he can't get near the man behind it. For which he may well count himself lucky: had he got within range, after all, Milligan would likely have shot him.

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