WRITER Roy Smiles had tried stand-up comedy and failed. "Well, not failed, but not done well," he says, setting himself the task of getting to the bottom of the comic psyche and thereby finding out about the Smiles behind the smiles.

Ying Tong, his affectionate "love letter" to Spike Milligan and The Goons, forms the first of his Dead Comedians trilogy, with his Tony Hancock tribute and study of Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce to follow.

Smiles can laugh at himself, joking that he didn't realise he was depressed until he read Milligan and Dr Anthony Clare's book, How To Cope With Depression. By contrast, Milligan's mental demons burrowed much deeper, troubling him all his life. Ying Tong focuses on one of his hospital stays: at St Luke's Psychiatric Hospital in Muswell Hill, 1960. In Peter McKintosh's design, Milligan cartoon scribbles form on the walls behind him before the show and in the interval to emphasise the sense of Spike being consumed and trapped by his Goon world.

The set, with its bed and doctor's desk, doubles as a hospital room and BBC recording studio.

Again, the effect is to compound how Milligan (an unshaven, mad-haired James Clyde in pyjamas) could not escape the Goons or the demands of co-stars Peter Sellers (Peter Temple) and Harry Secombe (Christian Patterson) to write them one more series. Even his shrink (Jeremy Child) reminds him of The Goons' dapper announcer, Wallace Greenslade (Child again).

Ying Tong director Michael Kingsbury had directed another tribute to radio's golden age, Round The Horne...Revisited. Whereas that West End show re-awoke slumbering scripts, here Smiles writes new Goons' sketches in the anti-establishment, subversive Milligan manner, featuring Seagoon, Bluebottle, Bloodnok et al, and intercuts them with an anguished Milligan wrestling with his mental illness in his straitjacket.

Milligan's Irish-English-Indian upbringing, his part in the war and his suffocating work pressures all vie for lead roles in his descent into depression in Smiles's piercing, superbly acted study of the cruel cost of comic originality: the sharp pains of a Spike.

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Updated: 10:58 Tuesday, November 02, 2004