The world premiere, Adelaide, 22 Feb 2005

The world premiere of the film "I told you I was ill: The life and legacy of Spike Milligan" took place on February 22nd at the Adelaide Film Festival. The film was the first documentary to receive funding from the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, and as such it was given red-carpet treatment by the festival. My partner and co-producer Jeff Canin and I flew to Adelaide for the festivals' opening night, and we were joined by the Milligans on the weekend. The buzz about the film's upcoming premiere started building, and the following five days were a roller coaster ride of exhileration and emotion.

What is the best thing you can hope for at the world premiere of your film that has taken so much of your energy, commitment, time, money, love and passion? You hope that lots of people will hear about it, will want to come and even that it will be sold out. This happened. The pre-launch publicity was brilliant. We had a full page story in The Australian, and our Spike T-shirts and promotional material were everywhere. Spike's brother Desmond, his eldest daughter Laura and Spike's only granddaughter Georga joined us for a great press launch on the morning before the screening. We managed to find four minis and drove the family and crew in a mini convey to the cinema for photos and interviews, and some Spike fans even turned up for this suitably mad event. This resulted in a full page article in the Adelaide Advertiser. Word spread quickly that opening night was sold out and this made more people want to see it and our second screening started filling up. The opening speech by the premier of South Australia, Hon Mike Rann was generous and funny and the Milligans won over the audience with their natural humour and charm. Then the film started.

Despite a disaster with the cinema's sound system, which meant our beautiful surround sound audio track was seriously distorted, the audience seemed to be very engaged and responded well to the film. They laughed a lot and appeared to enjoy the roller coaster ride it took them on. The questions afterwards revealed that the story of what happened in the Milligan family after Spike died shocked and upset a lot of people and we had many offers of legal and personal help from people wanting to know what they could do to help protect Spike's legacy.

The second screening of the film on Thursday 24th February was also packed and this time the sound was perfect. There was a long Q & A session after the screening and some people even followed us down the street wanting to talk about it and asking what they could do to help the Milligan family. We are working on several ideas now, one of which is to create a space on the web site for audience comments and responses and a place to track the story of the legacy. More about this soon. On Friday The Age newspaper ran a full page story on the film, and over 500 people visited the Spike website. Copies of the press coverage can be found on the news page.

The web site launch

Kerry Sunderland, who produced and wrote the Spike Milligan Legacy web site, gave Edward Borland at RUCC (the company that hosts the site) the green light to 'go live' over a mobile phone in the back of Nina Angelo's car at 11.15pm on Sunday 20 February 2005, while Spike's eldest daughter Laura joined Nina and her friend Trish (who worked as a sound recordist on the Woy Woy shoot) in celebrating. It was a suitably 'virtual' and madcap moment all at once because, while Kerry was on the phone, there was some confusion about which way to turn and the Milligan clan got themselves lost. One hour later, Nina pulled into a petrol station and discovered the group was about 70kms north of where they wanted to end up. Dressed uniformly in Spike Milligan Legacy t-shirts, the petrol station attendant enquired whether we were members of a religious group. The Cult of Latter-Day Milligans was officially born.

The launch of the web site, despite a few early morning hiccups, was a success. In its first week, it attracted almost one thousand unique visitors.

Special thanks must go to Murray Debus, who created the wonderful animations, and the team at Katalyst Web Design (Jason Sidoryn, Chris Joyner, Kipp Brady, Malte Wiegand and Oli) who provided art direction, created the special applications like the quiz and News of the Galaxy and undertook all Flash programming.

On-line edit in Adelaide

I spent three weeks in Adelaide locked in edit rooms with expensive, clever equipment driven by expert, creative people to lift the picture and sound quality of the film and add the 'bells and whistles'. In the past this has been the most enjoyable part of the edit process for me, but this time it was fraught with problems and challenges that took me to new edges of my own endurance and stamina.

There is a vast amount of archive material in the film, and we were still dealing with the problems of clearing rights and getting master tapes of the footage sent from all over the globe. The BBC footage arrived the day we needed it, but other footage was late, and even arrived with bits missing. Jeff's job as co-producer extended to getting clearances for all the material and negotiating payment to all parties involved, and all I can say is, beware, it's a minefield and you have to be smart, quick and persuasive or you will bankrupt the project.

There were technical challenges, last minute changes requested by some of the broadcasters, and the difficulty of editing three versions in the time allotted. Also, I'd never worked with animations before and these presented their own unique challenges. So by the first week of February, the films were finished, the Irish version despatched to Ireland and broadcast five days after delivery, and the Adelaide Film festival had their copy, and I returned home and fell in a heap. I felt as if I'd just given birth to triplets and I wasn't sure if I had the stamina left to nurture and care for them all. For an entire week I promised myself I'd never make another film and would consider other career options. But I did recover, and began to think about the launch of the film, and once again packed my bag and headed back to Adelaide.