The goons went over the top about Spike

From the Prince of Wales to Eddie Izzard, from Cilla Black to Iain Duncan Smith, the verdict was unanimous: Spike Milligan, the former Goon Show star who died on Wednesday, was a comic genius. He was also, they opined, the father, grandfather or godfather of modern comedy.

Milligan was credited with influencing just about every comic radio and TV series in the past four decades, from Monty Python's Flying Circus to The Fast Show.

All this proves is that when the nation speaks with one voice, it usually gets it wrong. It's true that Milligan's childish sense of humour had an impact on Monty Python, but nostalgia blinds people to that show's undeniable longeurs. Milligan pioneered a form of comedy that is politely described as anarchic when a more accurate description might be infantile and cruel. It developed into a form of irritable self-promotion which was rarely funny at all.

I wasn't even born when The Goon Show (under a slightly different title) began in 1951, but it quickly became a cult and I remember hearing excerpts as I was growing up. It was always presented as the height of comic achievement, a fact that puzzled me when all I heard was a bunch of grown men putting on silly voices. Much of the material emerged from their wartime experience in the armed forces, expressing the conscript's mocking attitude to officers and the upper classes generally, which may explain why the programme appealed more to men than to women. It also involved speaking in sing-song voices and exaggerated foreign accents, a feature no one chose to linger over in last week's obituaries; Peter Sellers's Asian impersonations later became famous, while Milligan was not averse to darkening his face and donning a turban, stunts that now seem more racist than hilarious.

More importantly, The Goon Show was politically incoherent and unthreatening. Nothing exemplifies this more than Milligan's relationship with Prince Charles, whose admiration for the Goons is often cited as a humanising trait. Milligan's behaviour towards the Prince was alternately boorish and fawning; he publicly called Charles a "grovelling little bastard", then asked for a title. He was more court jester than satirist, collusive with the monarchy rather than a critic of it, and not averse to accepting an honorary knighthood. Milligan was also brilliant at passing off disturbed behaviour as eccentricity; in a tribute written before his own death last year, Harry Secombe fondly recalled his fellow-Goon storming off stage in Coventry muttering "I hope you all get bombed again". Peter Lewis described how Milligan once attacked Sellers with a potato knife, as well as breaking all the furniture in an office at Broadcasting House.

Plenty of people recycled clichés last week about a link between humour and depression. But Milligan's story was not one of common-or-garden unhappiness, leavened by excursions into comedy. He was wounded and suffered shell-shock near Monte Cassino in 1944, bringing on the first of many breakdowns. After Michael Bentine's departure from The Goon Show, Milligan threw himself into manic 12-hour working days, writing most of the scripts himself; on two occasions he was taken to hospital and given electro-convulsive therapy. He married three times, had numerous other relationships and fathered six children, two of whom he did not even meet until they were adults.

Milligan was frank about his experience of mental illness in later life, but its shadow is already evident in old recordings of The Goon Show. The fact that his subsequent career was not the success that might have been predicted, in spite of last week's glowing tributes, may well have been a consequence of his erratic behaviour. It was left to an American newspaper to describe him, in its even-handed obituary, as "quite misanthropic", someone who turned on old friends and made them the butt of cruel jokes. I am far from convinced that all the people who praised Milligan last week found him as funny as they claimed. But if that is the case, some of them went to extraordinary lengths to avoid admitting it.

Facts about drugs are the best deterrent, not fear

No one could fail to be shocked by the pictures of a young student, Rachel Whitear, who died of a heroin overdose. A photograph of her dead body appears in a video to be shown to schoolchildren. Her mother and stepfather allowed the photo to be used, as a warning to other young people. Their motives are laudable, but I'm not sure these shock tactics have much effect on their intended audience.

Hundreds of thousands of people continue to use Ecstasy, despite a previous campaign using a photograph of Leah Betts, the teenager who died in 1995 after using the drug at her birthday party. Either they believe that claims about the drug's harmful effects are exaggerated, which may be true in the case of Ecstasy, or they think that heroin is used only by a tiny minority and has nothing to do with them. There is already too much emotion in the drugs debate, and scaring people is not as effective as giving them unvarnished facts.

Men, they're so touchy

Everyone knows that women are martyrs to their hormones. A friend's 12-year-old son recently turned on her, after being asked to perform some peculiarly onerous task such as emptying the dishwasher, and demanded to know if it was "that time of the month". Now, according to research published in the latest New Scientist, it seems that men also suffer from hormonal ebbs and flows. Researchers have found that stress can cause a sudden drop in testosterone levels, producing bouts of rage and nerves. It can happen at any age, but is particularly common in men over 50. So next time your partner or boss is tetchy and unreasonable, go easy on him. The poor lamb may be suffering from Irritable Male Syndrome.

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I am now the proud owner of a Damien Hirst, an object entitled "and then there were four a famous musketeer". I know it doesn't make sense, but I'm just telling you what it says on the box. I was given it as I left an old carpet warehouse in the East End of London at the end of a party to celebrate the launch of a new digital channel, BBC4. So were 1,999 other people. In case you're not one of them, let me describe it in all its glory: it's a white cardboard box, and when you lift the lid (signed by the artist), you look down on a dart (black plastic, not feathers) which points at an onion.

No, I haven't the faintest idea what it means either. But I'm wondering what happens when the onion starts to rot. Does that increase the value of this magnificent artwork, or am I supposed to change it regularly? Would it undermine Hirst's artistic integrity if I replaced his brown onion, which is a bit uninspiring, frankly, with a shiny red one? It was a nice gesture by the BBC, but next time I go to a party I'd rather leave with a Crivelli Annunciation.