While writing A Bunch of Amateurs, a Burt Reynolds-fronted comedy film from the mid-2000s, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop and his colleague Nick Newman discovered they were being paid less than the production was spending on the star’s wigs. Ouch.
There are resonances here with Hislop and Newman’s new work, Spike. It is a play about Spike Milligan, which is coming to the King’s Theatre in Glasgow this week. While researching the play, the writing duo discovered that Milligan was paid a lot less than his co-stars in The Goon Show, the groundbreaking BBC radio comedy show.
“When we came across this stuff about Spike being paid half of what Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers were getting, we thought, ‘Hello, we’ve been
© Times Newspapers Limited 2022.
Registered in England No. 894646. Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF.