Last night’s TV - December 31, 2004
IT IS a bit like Carnaby Street fashions or the Mersey beat. Anyone under 50, not brought up on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, might wonder what the fuss was about. Peter Cook is commonly cited as the founding genius of 1960s satire and all that followed, but younger generations saw precious little of this genius. Dudley Moore they would know as the loveable shorty in Ten and the bumbling foil to Sir John Gielgud’s butler in Arthur.
Sadly, I doubt if they will have a much clearer idea after watching Not Only But Always (Channel 4) either, even though this dramatised biography of the two performers and their turbulent friendship was, in many respects, beautifully made.
All humour relies on context - being drunk for example - or in this case being young at a time when centuries of deference to authority and conformity was crumbling before our very eyes. Now that context has gone. If anything the pendulum is swinging back. Any young whipper-snapper hearing that groundbreaking parody of Harold Macmillan in Beyond the Fringe would probably wonder “Who was that?”, then “So what?”
Then however well the actors reproduce the original sketches, a biopic can only use it in bite-size fragment McNuggets, so you can’t even enjoy them properly as period pieces. Finally, Terry Johnson’s play was far too busy establishing that Peter Cook was an arrogant, sexist, jealous, self-indulgent, alcoholic, psychological bully to find the time to demonstrate that he was also incredibly funny.
There is, of course, plenty of evidence that Cook was all of the above, at least up to a point, but it simply cannot be the whole story. Cook owned Private Eye and protected his provocative little organ through some extremely difficult times, a fact that was glancingly acknowledged here. In a disappointing preview of the film, the long-standing former editor, Richard Ingrams described the way in which Cook could keep a room full of the most cynical friends and colleagues in stitches for hours on end. I have heard this before from several other sources, but you wouldn’t know it here.
Ah well, perhaps this was really made for us fifty-somethings, who can take our joy at Beyond the Fringe and Not Only But Also as read. In other respects the production had a great deal going for it. The device of having a black-and-white Pete and Dud shuffle through in their long macs and flat caps, bemused observers of their own lives, provided a delightful counterpoint to the action.
It is always difficult for an actor to inhabit a well-known previous performer, but Rhys Ifans as Cook and Aidan McArdle as Moore did a tremendous job. Sometimes Ifans seemed to lack Cook’s wicked glint, but his mannerisms and intonation were uncanny. There were moments when they were re-creating bits of the old “Pete and Dud” sketches, especially when Cook made Moore corpse, when I forgot I was not actually watching the original.
I have no idea how accurate the re-creations of the early meetings of the Beyond the Fringe team were - both Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett may have cause to feel slightly miffed - but they were extremely funny. Miller’s insistence on providing a po-faced analytical commentary on the jokes and their socio- philosophical significance was priceless. Bennett, on the other hand, came across as a dreary northern Eeyore, though as a teenager, I thought his sketches were the funniest in the show.
However nostalgic or well-acted, though, this became a sad, sour story of a man who could not cope when the partner he considered his natural inferior proved to have more durable and popular talents. He also seems to have represented that short gap between the arrival of sexual liberation and the arrival of feminism, when young men expected women to open their legs gratefully, do the washing up and not mind who else they slept with. “All men want their cake and eat it,” said his first wife Wendy resignedly, “but there are precious few who admit it, and far fewer who deserve it.”
Sunday’s South Bank Show is running extracts from a short series Cook and Moore made for ATV, though nobody is pretending it is as funny as the original BBC material, most of which was wiped. In the meantime I shall treasure my BBC video of The Best of What’s Left of Not Only But Also. Grab one if you can.
