Chapter One
Beyond the Fringe
Looking back on the comedy they shared, and the lives they led together, it’s almost impossible to imagine Peter and Dudley as strangers. However, they probably never would have got together in the first place if it hadn’t been for Beyond the Fringe. This show changed a lot of people’s lives, none more so than Peter and Dudley’s, and like a lot of life-changing events, its origins owed more to good luck than good judgement. Indeed, ‘the moment when English comedy took its first decisive step into the second half of the 20th Century’, arose out of a parochial tussle between two rival factions at that annual luvvie jamboree, the Edinburgh Festival.
Since 1947, the Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama had been the summer highlight of the British arts calendar. However, during the fifties, the festival’s highbrow plays and recitals, staged in Edinburgh’s grand old theatres, had been increasingly upstaged by a growing crowd of less formal shows, mounted in more informal venues, collectively known as the Festival Fringe. By the end of the fifties, these artistic gatecrashers were fast becoming more newsworthy than the stars of the International Festival, and WILLIAM COOK since the festival shut up shop around last orders every evening, late-night Fringe revues were especially popular. In 1960, the artistic director of the official festival, an Old Etonian and former Guardsman called Robert Ponsonby, resolved to beat these uninvited upstarts at their own game.
In 1959, Ponsonby had booked comical musical duo (Michael) Flanders and (Donald) Swann, and in 1960 he tried to book American jazz legend Louis Armstrong. When that fell through, he decided to stage a revue instead. ‘I was tired of the Fringe continually stealing our thunder with brilliant revues,’ he said. Ponsonby wanted to mount a show that would be way beyond the capabilities of anyone on the Fringe. It was this audacious mission statement that gave this show its convoluted yet catchy title.
Back in 1960, comedy was still a class-bound business. Workingclass comics like Ken Dodd and Tommy Cooper played the old variety theatres, while college troupes like the Cambridge Footlights and Oxford’s Experimental Theatre Club had the run of the Festival Fringe. Ponsonby was an Oxbridge man, as was his young assistant, John Bassett. Bassett proposed a show that brought together the best Oxbridge comics of the last five years and Ponsonby approved.
Bassett’s role as Ponsonby’s assistant was another of life’s little coincidences. His interview for the post had resulted in a dead heat with a rival candidate. Unable to choose between them, Ponsonby consulted his secretaries, who advised him to reject the other candidate, on account of his suede shoes. Ponsonby duly gave the job to Bassett, and invited him out to lunch to celebrate. Bassett arrived wearing a pair of suede shoes.
Bassett had recently come down from Oxford, where he’d played the trumpet in his own jazz band, the Bassett Hounds. They wore stripy blazers and straw boaters. The piano player was a pint-sized chap called Dudley Moore. He’d be perfect for Beyond the Fringe. Not only was he a brilliant musician, he was also an accomplished clown. And though he was now busy plying his trade as a jazz pianist in London, surely he could spare a week in August, for a fee of £100? Bassett sought him out. He could indeed. Dudley recommended a medieval historian called Alan Bennett, whose spoof sermons by banal Church of England vicars had been a hit in Edinburgh the previous summer, with the Oxford Revue. Now all Bassett needed was an equally funny pair from Cambridge.
Again, Bassett’s decent education stood him in good stead. He’d been at school with a girl whose sister had married a young doctor called Jonathan Miller. Miller’s starring role in the 1955 Footlights show had earned him the simplistic yet memorable accolade ‘the Danny Kaye of Cambridge’, and though he was now working fulltime at London’s University College Hospital, as a newly qualified house surgeon, he’d kept his humorous hand in with various appearances on BBC Radio and TV. Bassett collared Miller in the casualty department of UCH, still clutching a sterile dressing, and even though he subsequently claimed that he fiercely regretted this distraction, this reluctant comedian was persuaded to come to Edinburgh too. Dr Miller didn’t just agree to come along. He also recommended the star of the latest (and greatest) Footlights show, Pop Goes Mrs Jessop. This remarkable young man had written most of that show, and the largest slice of Kenneth Williams’ latest West End revue. Incredibly, he was still an undergraduate. His name was Peter Cook. Bassett’s comic quartet was complete.
Even though he was still a student, Peter was already a professional sketch writer, on a retainer of £100 per week (more like £1,000 today). Consequently, his agent, Donald Langdon, didn’t think all that much of Beyond the Fringe. ‘Don’t jeopardise your career by working with these three amateurs,’ he told Peter. Luckily for his career prospects, Peter disregarded Langdon’s advice, but Langdon did manage to negotiate a higher fee for his client. Langdon secured £110, which, after Langdon’s 10 per cent had been deducted, left Peter with £99, a pound less than the others. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth,’ noted Dudley, sagely, still mindful of this episode a decade later.
Bassett invited his foursome to lunch at an Italian restaurant in Euston, near enough to UCH for Miller to nip out in his lunch hour. ‘The first meeting was very apprehensive,’ recalls Bassett. ‘They all had an astonishing reputation within university circles and none of them was prepared to jeopardise it by cracking the first joke.’ Yet it didn’t take Peter and Dudley very long to shed their apprehension, in contrasting styles that set the tone for their future partnership. Typically, Peter delivered an unstoppable barrage of invective, while Dudley imitated the stooping gait of Groucho Marx as he followed the waitresses through the swing doors and out into the kitchen. ‘Dudley broke the tension,’ remembers Bassett, ‘and because it was very physical, and very endearing to see, suddenly the atmosphere became very warm, very friendly, and from then on the jokes just flowed thick and fast.’ Yet when Dudley suggested a sketch of his own – a mime about a violin that behaved like a baby – Peter dismissed it as a non-starter, and would often refer to it in the future, to put Dudley in his place. In that first meeting, the parameters of their partnership were established. Peter was the brilliant, intimidating wit, Dudley the lovable fool.
Consequently, Dudley contributed very little to the script of Beyond the Fringe. He reckoned Peter wrote about two-thirds of it, while Alan and Jonathan wrote the other third between them. Dudley’s brief was to provide the score, but his parodies of famous composers were far more than mere curtain music. From ‘Colonel Bogey’ by Beethoven to ‘Little Miss Muffet’ by Benjamin Britten, they were arguably the most sophisticated feature of the entire show, and they bound the whole evening together. Beyond the Fringe would have been very thin without any of Peter’s sketches, but it would have been very dry indeed without Dudley’s erudite melodies. And in their own way, they were just as satirical as Peter’s spoken pieces, especially his send-up of Peter Pears singing Britten’s folk songs. Dudley later chose this as one of his Desert Island Discs. ‘I do this out of absolute love and admiration for Britten and with no malice aforethought at all,’ he told Roy Plomley. However, in the Beyond the Fringe programme, the number was called ‘Little Miss Britten’. Unsurprisingly, Pears didn’t like this title and never went to see the show. Dudley’s music wasn’t as shocking as Peter’s monologues, but it still had bite.
In those days, any theatrical script had to be approved in advance by the Lord Chamberlain, but bizarrely, the censor’s only objection was to some camp stage directions. ‘Enter two outrageous old queens’ was duly changed to ‘Enter two aesthetic young men’, presumably to protect the cast and crew from corruption. By modern standards, a far more daring item was ‘Black Equals White’, Peter’s interview with Mr Akiboto Mbizu, leader of the Pan-African Folklore Party (played by Jonathan Miller), who has straightened his hair and whitened his skin so he can better represent the interests of his people by speaking to the white man on his own ground.
None of them were stars (not yet) and there wasn’t a lot of advance publicity. On the first night, Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre was less than one-third full. However, the show went down a storm, and within days it was sold out, through word of mouth, with punters queuing for returns. ‘You knew you were in the presence of something extraordinary,’ recalls Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington, who saw the first night, as an Oxford undergraduate. ‘You came out feeling physically slightly ill, because to laugh for that length of time is exhausting. And it was a shock, a slap in the face to all of us, because we’d seen nothing like this before.’
The reason students such as Billington had seen nothing like it was because Beyond the Fringe was about real life and real people. The most notorious sketch was Peter’s shocking impersonation of Macmillan, but there was more to it than that. Other revues were safe and self-referential, relying on cosy caricatures with no equivalents beyond the confines of the theatre. Beyond the Fringe was about people you really talked about, people you really knew. It wasn’t about the fantasy land of Shaftesbury Avenue, with its greenroom jokes and backstage gossip. It was about the world you really lived in, and talked about every day.
The broadsheets were complimentary, but the first paper to stick its neck out was the less fashionable Daily Mail. ‘The funniest, most intelligent and most original revue to be staged in Britain for a very long time,’ wrote Peter Lewis, who went on to write for the BBC’s ground-breaking satire show, That Was The Week That Was. ‘Disregarding all the jaded trimming of conventional sketches, production numbers, dancing and girls, they get down to the real business of intimate revue, which is satire and parody,’ he added. ‘If the show comes to London I doubt if revue will ever be the same again.’
It did, and it wasn’t. ‘Satirical revue in this country has been, until now, basically cowardly,’ wrote Bernard Levin in the Daily Express, reviewing the show’s West End opening, at the Fortune Theatre in May 1961. ‘First, it has picked on the easy targets. Second, however hard it hit the targets (and it rarely hit them at all, let alone in the middle), it left its audience alone, to leave the theatre as fat and complacent as it came in.’ The year before, Peter had suggested calling the show One of the Best Revues for Some Time – Bernard Levin. Levin’s real review was even better. ‘It has no slick coffee bar scenery, no glib one-line blackouts, no twirling dancers in tight trousers, no sad ballets for fisherwomen in fishnet stockings,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan in the Observer. ‘English satire advances into the Sixties’ read the headline above his rave. But just how satirical was Beyond the Fringe? Not terribly, if you go along with Bassett, who ought to know.
‘We had no idea it was satire, and I think even to this day, Jonathan is very vehement that it certainly isn’t satire,’ says Bassett, and Miller agrees - more or less. 'Having been praised for being satirical, I suppose we adopted it with some sort of enthusiasm and said, "Well, that's what we are." But of course we weren't at all. We were just mildly cynical.' Satirical or merely cynical, the British public loved it, and so did American impresario Alexander Cohen. The next year, leaving a replacement cast in London, Peter, Dudley, Alan and Jonathan sailed to the United States.
If anything, Beyond the Fringe was an even bigger hit in America. ‘In many respects, it was much more successful on Broadway than it had been in London,’ said Jonathan Miller. ‘We were rather surprised that people adored it in the United States.’ It stormed Washington, Boston and Toronto and ran for a year and a half on Broadway, repaying the confidence of its American producer, Alexander Cohen, who had refused to dilute this Anglocentric show for American consumption. ‘Alexander Cohen took the absolutely correct view that it would become an immensely chic show in the States, and the fact that it was English and we hadn’t altered a word would be a sort of built-in snob merit,’ said Peter.
The first-night notices bore him out. ‘There is hardly a review this morning that is less than delirious,’ recorded Alistair Cooke, of the opening night on Broadway. ‘This tumult of acceptance is a puzzle to many shrewd theatre men here, who deplored the quartet’s decision not to adapt their material to American themes or their strangulated tripthongs to the ears of a people to whom a vowel is a vowel is a vowel. But they make no concessions, a British trick Oscar Wilde discovered before them.’
Cooke was spot on, as usual. Although a few topical references eventually crept into the script, the cast made no other concessions to any Americans whatsoever, not even the President of the United States. When they were invited to perform the show for John F. Kennedy, in the presidential splendour of the White House, Peter refused. If the President wanted to see the show, said Peter, he could come to the theatre. Incredibly, JFK did just that, even though he was really rather busy at the time, trying to avert the outbreak of World War III. Still, if you had tickets for Beyond the Fringe, there were some office chores that simply had to wait.
‘It is astonishing that the show could have had so much effect, and yet the four participants were totally unaware of the effect they would have, and just fell into it backwards, and saw it as a nice way to pass a week and return with a hundred pounds in their pocket,’ says Bassett. In the end it passed several years, and earned them considerably more than a hundred quid apiece. So why was it such a success? Partly, it was sheer good fortune. As Eric Idle says, the show looked ‘aggressively Sixties’, but its minimalist aesthetic was the result of economic necessity rather than radical chic. ‘We resolved not to have scenery because we didn’t have enough money to put it up, and then we suddenly realised there was a virtue in it,’ revealed Jonathan. ‘Part of the style of the show came from the lack of money,’ agreed Peter. ‘We’d have been delighted to have had a hundred chorus girls dancing about.’ The same went for their matching monochromatic costumes, which predated the Beatles by several years. Yet these sets and costumes (or the lack of them) were merely window dressing. What made the show so special was the unique chemistry between them, which would have lit a fire in any time or place.
With his front foot in Shaftesbury Avenue, Peter was loath to be offensive, but Bennett and Miller had no such vested interests. This was simply a brief interlude before their real careers, or so they thought. For the first time in his life, Peter had come up against two creative and intellectual equals (Alan and Jonathan) plus a wonderful performer (Dudley) whose talents for music and clowning provided the ideal foil for his dry, cerebral wit. The four of them sparked off each other, and created a show that was even greater than the sum of its four parts. It was the perfect combination of complementary talents. ‘They were fooling about on the stage in exactly the same way as they fooled about off it,’ said John Wells. It was as if they'd stepped out of a study bedroom, in mid conversation, and straight into the theatre. By the time the curtain fell, they had the world at their feet.
ROYAL BOX
(Fortune Theatre, London, 1961)
This elegant and understated sketch originated during Peter’s Cambridge Footlights days, mocking Britain’s unending obsession with the Windsors. The first two-hander that Peter and Dudley performed together, it made clever use of its theatrical setting, casting them as members of the audience. This ingenious device took a surreal turn when the Queen came to see Beyond the Fringe in 1962. With her was the Lord Chamberlain, who still had the power to censor any ‘invidious’ public stage portrayal of ‘a living person, or a person recently dead’, or any drama he deemed ‘indecent, blasphemous, or inciteful to crime’. Did this show flout these draconian restrictions? Michael Frayn certainly thought so. ‘Beyond the Fringe did breach the Lord Chamberlain’s guidelines because it featured real political characters,’ he says. However, the only attempt at regal censorship didn’t come from the Lord Chamberlain, or the Palace, but from the theatre’s own management, who asked Alan Bennett to omit the word ‘erection’ from one of his monologues. Bennett ‘priggishly’ refused. ‘I suppose I must be one of the few people who have said “erection” in front of the Queen,’ he says. ‘I wish I hadn’t. I don’t suppose either of us profited from the experience.’
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