The father of Monty Python

Voice off: "I'm a threepenny bit!"

Major Bloodnok: "Now these are all very smart guards ... but what's this!? At the end of the line? All covered in mud and soot! What kind of a guard do you call yourself?"

Eccles: "A mud-guard" And so on ... I don't know whether I've quoted Milliganese correctly but they've been filling up a corner of my brain ever since I first heard them on a crackly radio at home in Claygate, Surrey, when I was still at school.

In those days it was unthinkable not to tune in each week to find out at precisely which point Bluebottle would fall in the water, or to hear Eccles's ever-cheerful admission of incompetence, or listen with tears streaming down our faces to two minutes or more of footsteps as the BBC radio sound effects department gave us its inimitable rendition of Henry Crun answering the door. "Hello, is Mrs Crun there?" Pause. "I'll go and get her." Followed by another age of (somehow hilarious) footsteps.

What so thrilled me about Spike Milligan's humour was the way it deconstructed the very nature of things so we could see them with new eyes. In some ways it performed the function of poetry - but then the best comedy does. And Milligan's was the best comedy.

"Ooh!" exclaims Bluebottle at the end of one Goon album. "Exits through little hole in middle of record!" The sound of the needle skidding across the record is followed by the plop of Bluebottle dropping through the hole. On the reverse side the title was Nothing At All. When you played it you got ... nothing at all. Well, not for a minute. Eventually some footsteps wandered up to the microphone and Spike said: "There's nothing on this side... Nothing at all... So... I wouldn't go on listening to it..." Eventually the footsteps wander off and there is more silence.

When we made the first Monty Python records I thought of Bluebottle's exit though the hole - wondering how could we emulate Milligan. In the end, Bluebottle's exit inspired the scratched-out cover of Another Monty Python Record.

Milligan inspired us in so many ways. I would guess he inspired the majority of my generation to go into comedy. It was in school, the next day - repeating his jokes, vicariously revelling in the power of laughter, that sweet taste of the shared moment of fun - that whetted our appetites and whispered to us: perhaps it's possible to do the same thing? And when years later I found myself banged up with three guys from Cambridge, a chap from Oxford and an American, convinced we were going to make a show like no other but wondering how on earth to do it - it was Milligan who showed the way. Spike's TV series Q5 went on air in 1969, while we were writing the first Python series. I remember watching it and thinking: "Bloody hell! He's done it! He's made a show like no other show that has ever been seen on TV!"

He'd thrown away the traditional sketch format. Spike was producing sublime stuff that started from nowhere and went nowhere. Suddenly the material we'd been writing seemed clich?d. Spike showed us you could do without punchlines - that the imagination could freewheel on TV in the same way he had made it on radio.

It was wild stuff. Spike was the father of Monty Python. Just once he appeared with Python. We were making The Life Of Brian in Tunisia, and word reached us that our guru was on holiday nearby. Spike turned up to watch as we were filming the sequence in which Brian runs out of the city and loses his sandal. Would Spike put on a costume and do something? Yes, he would. But he didn't want any lines. He told us to shoot and he'd find something to do. He simply stood in the middle of the crowd and looked at each character in turn as they argued over Brian's footwear.

It was an inspired piece of improvisation and feels now as if it had always meant to be there. You could say that about Spike's life. It was all an inspired piece of improvisation, but now it's gone, it feels as if it was always meant.