"Though many found it to be more "hit and miss" than Milligan's earlier work, especially The Goon Show, it is considered by many to be one of the landmarks in British comedy. In particular Q5, which first aired on 24 March 1969, and with its surreal bent and almost stream-of-consciousness format is seen by many as a forerunner to Monty Python's Flying Circus, which debuted a few months later. The Pythons themselves remember that, having seen Q5, they had been forced to scurry around for a new hook for their series, as the format they had been intending to use had now already been done. Michael Palin recalls "Terry Jones and I adored the Q... shows...[Milligan] was the first writer to play with the conventions of television.........Also, in the Pythons' (2004) autobiography, Cleese cites a conversation between himself and Terry Jones: "We both happened to watch Spike Milligan's Q5, and one or the other of us phoned up and said kind of jokingly but also rather anxiously, 'I thought that's what we were supposed to be doing?' And the other one said, 'That's what I thought too.' We felt that Spike had got to where we were trying to get to, but if you'd asked us the previous day, we couldn't have described very well what that was. However, when we saw it on the screen we recognised it, and in a way the fact that Spike had gone there probably enabled us to go a little bit further than we would otherwise have gone"
Only three episodes of Q5 still exist. Episodes 2 and 3 both survive as 16mm black and white tele-recordings. Episode 4 exists in colour in its original form, and a few short clips from this colour episode appeared on the documentary Heroes of Comedy: Spike Milligan, and again on BBC4's "Assorted Q" in December 2014

plus : Spike Milligan in rare stand-up comic mode on a 1964 Billy Cotton Band Show
& a 1960s London Palladium