The Guardian, februari 3rd 2026
He dabbled with art studies in Cambridge, and also the city’s jazz scene,
before eventually falling in, quite literally, with the London bohemian set. “I
went down to this jazz festival. I was rescued from lying in the mud by a
group of beatnik looking people including [poet] Pete Brown. They took me
back to London.” Brown encouraged his poetry, which even made it into The
Paris Review in 1963. As Milton admits, he sometimes invoked the vocation
of struggling poet simply to cadge drinks from strangers.
By the middle of the decade, Milton was living with girlfriend Clarissa in “a period of bohemian debauchery in Long Acre [Covent Garden]. Eric used to come round there quite a lot.” This was Eric Clapton, who recalls in his autobiography how Milton would spin Howlin’ Wolf and channel the music into dance and acting: “I understood how you could listen to music completely and make it come alive … it was a real awakening,” he wrote. Milton never lost this knack for performance. But whereas his old mate Pete Brown worked as lyricist for Clapton’s Cream, Milton reckons he passed up similar opportunities for Pink Floyd, whose managers Andrew King and Peter Jenner were also on the scene..
“If success was presented to Ted on a silver platter, he’d piss on it,” declares Roger Law, co-creator of Spitting Image. He’s at home in Norfolk at a kitchen table piled with books and illustrations, including Milton’s rough-hewn poetry pamphlets. The pair first met at the Cambridge School of Art and raised hell together, and linked up once again in London, sharing their dark sense of humour and appreciation for the absurd. “If you talk to Ted,” says Law, recalling their benders together, “you can’t tell the surreal from the reality.”
In the late 1960s, Milton took a post at a puppet theatre in Wolverhampton. “Then I moved to glove shows.” He mimes a Punch & Judy style performance with his hands. “It’s a whole different dynamic: violence. So I moved to that. I call it performance animation.” Law lauds Milton’s uncanny ability to bring puppets alive; the man behind Spitting Image should know. But for Milton, “puppets’ eyes are dead. They don’t feel challenged, they’re not afraid. This gives you this unrecognised but really potent possibility to get into people, and you can go to places in their head they don’t want you to.”
Milton’s skill in puppetry – showcased on Brighton’s West Pier, and then to numerous school audiences across Europe – led to some of the strangest support slots in 70s rock music, for Clapton and Ian Dury among others. Milton compares it to the urban myth of salesmen hardening themselves up by hawking peanuts on the street. “I was doing support for Clapton [in 1976], we were doing a performance in the round. I got the puppet theatre out there, the puppets are this big – ” he holds his hands a small distance apart “– and we’re talking about 1,000 people. Immediately, a roar comes up: ‘fuck off!’” Dury, meanwhile, would sometimes come to the stage to ask the audience to cool it.
But Milton’s outrageous, profane performances, with their anti-authoritarian message and Brechtian aesthetic, featuring characters such as Deepthroat Porker, Constable Nosey Parker and The Egg Dog, eventually gained a rep. Tony Wilson featured Milton’s puppetry on his groundbreaking So It Goes TV show in 1976, which caught the attention of Graham Lewis and Colin Newman, soon to be of post-punk band Wire. The puppet show slotted seamlessly into the violent medieval anarchy of Gilliam’s film Jabberwocky.