Before BLURT, Ted Milton was a poet. His most notorious collection was "The Works", issued at various grades and prices, depending on whether you wanted the cheap edition - normal - or the most expensive - the gerbilised edition so named after being placed in a gerbil cage by Ted himself for 24 hours, where it was nibbled before being re-packaged and sent off, lovingly wrapped in cellophane.
Then came Mr. Pugh's Puppet Theatre and the Blue Show. It not only shocked the primary schools and women's guilds to which he took it, but also the theatres and cultural centres.
"In the theatre world, the puppet world, you come across the most bourgeois bigoted people ever," says Ted, in disgust, He battled in it for two years, the most frustrated years of his lengthy, challenging career.
But the rock audiences he brought it to on a couple of tours with the likes of Ian Dury, proved equally as resistant and they expressed their hate more vociferously. Glasgow, apparently, was one of the worst audiences he faced, when Ted came to the sad realization that it wasn't his show they hated - it was him.
So what was it about the Blue Show that caused such a furore?
"It was about oral nasality in the police force," says Ted, with off-hand relish. "It involved scenes of unparalleled nasal carnage. There were episodes where policemen actually farted their legs off, a la Douglas Bader. And aeroplanes fell out of the sky. They ate prisoners in The Andes. The Black Manias had crashed and the Normals had escaped from the identikit and Lo! they had multiplied. It was a very horrible routine."
All this and Punch and Judy, too. Despite its conventional format, a ploy with which Milton hoped to buy enough time to get heard long enough for a decent assessment, he discovered that people were too latched onto what they'd been bred to expect to tolerate his unique solutions. But after a few years of trying to short-circuit such staunch, stubborn systems of thought, he chanced upon a saxophone and tried a new tack
Being a "performance junkie" he was too resilient to give up, so his discovery turned out to be a valuable lifeline. And he approached the instrument with renewed vigour. Apart from an early lesson at which he picked up one scale, he resisted the normal processes of learning.