Even when dead, Spike Milligan is funnier than the rest of us. His gravestone reads: ‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite’ or, if you’re Irish-language-ignorant like me: ‘I told you I was ill’. It can’t be beat. A decent alternative might be: ‘I demand a second opinion’ but that’s Spike’s gag too, appearing in a single-frame cartoon of his in which an indignant man pops his head out of a coffin as pallbearers carry him away. 

For his own funeral, Spike once suggested he be buried in a washing machine, purely to mystify hapless archaeologists in the distant future. He didn’t try that in the end, perhaps knowing the Church Of England would put their foot down. Indeed, the Diocese Of Chichester, within whose fiefdom he was buried, strongly objected to his epitaph when presented it in English, only waving it through when assurances were made it would be translated into Irish, thus sparing the blushes of the fine people of East Sussex. This made the leadership class of a major British institution look like a bunch of flatulent, imperious snobs: a very Spike move, and one he pulled off more than two years after his death. 

He’s often remembered purely as a surrealist but there was always a great deal of satire built into Spike’s work. He’d thumb his nose at the establishment but never suggested in doing so that he had all the answers or was any kind of moral lodestar. He gave me a lifelong disrespect for the bombastic British blowhard and I love him for it.

Mike Wozniak: The Bench will tour the UK until Thursday 12 November; Wozniak also appears in Dexter Procter: The Ten-Year Old Doctor, available on BBC iPlayer from Monday 1 December.