You’d be hard-pressed to find any pillar of British comedy that doesn’t owe Spike Milligan a debt of gratitude. Monty Python, Eddie Izzard, The Mighty Boosh; all have credited Milligan’s particular brand of off-the-wall absurdism as an influence on their craft. Spike, currently running at the Oxford Playhouse, chronicles Milligan’s triumphs and tribulations at the height of his run with his hit radio series The Goon Show. Thanks to Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s script and Sam Ducane’s direction, the world of Spike is suffused with the rambunctious energy of one of his sketches; gags at a breakneck pace, frenetic movement and loud booms galore.

This extends even to the set design – we open on a stylised BBC recording booth in which Milligan, along with fellow Goons Peter Sellers (Patrick Warner) and Harry Secombe (Jeremy Lloyd) record their bombastic antics to listeners’ delight and BBC producers’ chagrin. But with each set change (including the lovely touch of backdrop curtains paying homage to Milligan’s illustrations), the recording booth remains ever present, Spike’s ongoing conflicts with and obligations to the BBC a part of the whole absurd gag.

Aside from Robert Wilfort, who embodies Milligan’s gangly gait and rapid-fire wisecracks with aplomb, special mention must be given to Robert Mountford as the BBC’s delightfully unctuous (and ironically, humourless) Head of Comedy, who provides a pitch perfect, monocle-popping foil to the Goons’ inimitable chaos. Margaret Cabourn-Smith as the irrepressibly peppy foley artist Janet also deserve props (in no small part for having to use so many with little margin for error).

But of course, the production hangs on the dynamic between the Goons themselves (and I mean ‘dynamic’ in every sense of the word). The chemistry between the trio of Sellers, Secombe and Milligan crackles like a steam-powered wireless, and having listened to the original episodes that are recreated onstage, all three are uncanny mimics. Longtime fans of the Goons will be astonished at the accuracy with which they recreate the show’s best known-skits (in particular their Orwellian parody, 1985). It’s tough not to grin at how much fun the three are clearly having onstage – their plucky camaraderie and screwball repartee is a joy to watch, and well within the spirit of the original lineup.

The clear affection with which Hislop and Newman wrote the piece does hamper it, however, in representing some of the darker aspects of Spike’s character. It’s not that the two shy away from Milligan’s complexities. His frequent flashbacks to his service in WW2 are a recurring motif, as are the mental breakdowns he regularly suffered, culminating at one point in trying to murder Sellers with a potato peeler (unsuccessfully).

But even in these sequences the comedic delivery doesn’t quite let up; even the attempted potato peeler murder comes off more as the stuff of farce than a man at the end of his rope (which incidentally, is a gag noose). There’s not enough contrast from the fast-paced quipping of the main action to have the impact it deserves. Wilfort can’t quite carry Milligan’s turmoil with the same commitment as his tomfoolery, nor does the script fully allow him to, making it difficult to feel that any real sense of danger or poignancy. ‘Everything’s not a joke’, his wife June insists as he lies in his hospital bed; but when your objective is first and foremost to pay tribute to the jokes, they will win the day, for better or worse.

That’s the crux of it; Hislop and Newman are obviously steeped in the work of Milligan, replicating Goon Show classics with forensic precision. There is clearly a profound respect and gratitude that underpins the entire show, and the personal connection the writers have to Milligan gives it a distinct charm. But there’s little bite beyond that – the commentary on the button-down fastidiousness of the BBC is witty but will hardly make any modern-day TV exec bristle, nor are the sporadic mentions of the Royal Family amount to much more than a light-hearted ribbing. It’s very comfy viewing – dyed-in-the-wool Goon fans will love the fidelity of their homages, and any show that introduces Spike’s prolific influence to a wider audience is a net good. But for a show that centres around one man pushing comedy’s boundaries, it feels a little on the safe side – more of a poke than a spike.