Story

It’s 1924 and the Boundary Commission from Britain and Ireland is deciding on the new boundary line between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

After months of haggling over every inch of territory, the commissioners are forced to finish the job in hand, after a bicycle incident destroys the surveyor’s equipment.

With all the participants holding down the pencil and much pushing and shoving, the border finds it’s way down the middle of Puckoon, dividing house from outhouse, man from wife, pub chairs from bars, church from cemetery. Our hero Dan Maddigan (Sean Hughes) wakes up from his indolence to find cheap beer on the wrong side of the pub, and on a border patrol demanding passports. Puckoon will never be the same again. Something has to be done….

Based on Spike Milligan’s legendary comic masterpiece, which has sold over five and a half million copies to date, PUCKOON is a politically true(ish), politically incorrect and some believe profoundly funny tale of a divided island and Ireland.

PUCKOON was first published in 1963, the literary debut of a comic talent who had already achieved cult status as a writer and performer on BBC radio with THE GOONS, an unclassifiable and groundbreaking excursion into madness with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine.

In the forward to the book Milligan wrote “ This book nearly drove me mad. I started it in 1958 and doodled with it for 4 years. I don’t think I could go through it all again….this will be my first and last book “.

>> Production story