After a brief spell in John Bassett’s spare bedroom, Peter and Wendy moved to a flat in Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea, along with their friends Peter Bellwood and Colin Bell. It was ensemble living, rather like the Prince of Wales pub in Cambridge, except that Peter’s recent affluence and Wendy’s art school pedigree were clearly on display in the fashionability of the decor. The flat was done up in a pioneering 1960s pastiche Victoriana, with polished wooden floors and solid pine furniture, dominated by a huge wooden rocking horse with a real horsehair tail. ‘It was all antiqued up,’ says Roger Law, who remembers it as a cross between a colour supplement and a commune. In the midst of the elegant chaos sat Peter, holding court at high-fashion dinner parties, yet always – as John Wells recalls – with the most impeccable, old-fashioned manners. ‘He was very concerned that people should meet each other, and he’d keep saying “Is your food all right?”, things like that.’
As soon as he’d arrived in London, Peter had set about fulfilling his cherished dream of opening a satirical nightclub, and had sat in Willie Donaldson’s office telephoning around looking for premises. ‘We got on very well together,’ says Donaldson. ‘We saw in each other two uptight public schoolboys who wanted to be attractive to women, and wished they could dance and play the saxophone and be at ease.’ Before long, Peter had decided to start up his own umbrella company to co-ordinate his myriad activities. He joined forces with Nick Luard, the former treasurer of the Cambridge Footlights – whose experience in the post made him the nearest thing to a bona fide businessman that Peter had encountered – and formed Cook & Luard Productions Ltd. ‘I imagined he was a financial wizard,’ said Peter later, with a tinge of regret.27
A stack of hideous notepaper was run up, and an office was secured at 5–6 Coventry Street. Queen magazine ran a profile of Peter, the exciting young entrepreneur. By the time Fringe rehearsals started on 4 April – the day before opening of One over the Eight – the rest of the cast were reasonably refreshed and relaxed, but Peter confessed himself absolutely shattered. It didn’t matter. Like a catherine wheel, he continued to blaze round at full speed, sparks flying. After a few snatched days in Sardinia, he flew into Heathrow on the 4th and took a taxi straight to the Prince of Wales Theatre. The Prince of Wales was becoming something of a motif in his life.
Although the four cast members had kept their comic reflexes sharp, there is no doubt that in the seven-month layoff since Edinburgh, the Beyond the Fringe bandwagon had slowed considerably. People were beginning to forget what all the fuss had been about. Willie Donaldson, who had lost most of his money on his adaptation of The Last Laugh, had actually been unable to finance the show he had bought; in the rush of hype following Edinburgh, he had raised £7,000 of the £8,000 he needed from other enthusiastic backers. Chief among them was the impresario Donald Albery, whose £4,000 stake as good as gave him a controlling interest. Albery’s enthusiasm, however, had waned severely. In an attempt to cut costs, the only rehearsal space he was prepared to offer them was the bar of the Prince of Wales Theatre during daylight hours. A few days into rehearsals Donaldson brought him along to watch a run-through. ‘He thought it was terrible,’ admits Donaldson. Albery asked who the fair-haired one with glasses was. Alan Bennett, replied Donaldson. ‘He’ll have to go,’ muttered the impresario.
Although Donaldson eventually persuaded Albery to rescind that particular edict, it felt like a hollow victory. So profound was the older man’s dislike for the show that he was not prepared to see it open in London. He refused to provide them with one of his theatres, which meant that they would have to set off for the provinces with no London booking. It was a depressing time for all. The newly appointed director Eleanor Fazan, who had previously directed Share My Lettuce, found the cast fractious and hostile to each other. ‘They did not regard themselves as being any sort of team – or even comrades,’ she recalls.28 Only Dudley Moore was upset by the bickering. ‘He wanted everyone to be friends, everything to be jolly and fun,’ says Fazan.29 That is, he wanted everyone to pretend to be friends, rather than face the unpalatable truth.
A pre-West End provincial tour had already been booked, consisting of a week in Cambridge and a week in Brighton, to knock the show back into shape and to give the cast a chance to try out some new material. Now they had something to prove as well. Sixty sketches had been prepared in all, including twelve of the original Edinburgh show’s twenty; Old J. J., the initials sketch, was among those to have bitten the dust. The sixty were reduced to thirty-eight in rehearsal, and on the opening night in Cambridge, 21 April, thirty-five of them were performed. The show began at eight and was still going after midnight. The largely undergraduate audience howled and screamed for more. Peter, in particular, was on home turf, and milked the evening for all it was worth. Beyond the Fringe was not going to go down without a fight.
Ten more sketches fell by the wayside over the subsequent fortnight. Among these were Under Canvas, a first-rate Cook–Miller composition, in which Peter (as an art expert) explained that Constable had been principally a painter of nudes, who had been subsequently compelled by the moral climate of the day to paint a lot of haystacks over all the naked ladies. ‘The Hay Wain’, for example, had originally been entitled ‘Passionate Breasts’:
The young lady who modelled for Constable was Alice Lauderdale, who was the young lady who came in and did for Constable. Practically any woman would do for Constable.
Another of Peter’s efforts to be axed was Jim’s Inn, a more prosaic (and therefore more vulnerable) parody of a sponsored ITV show, in which product placement – then perfectly legal – played a substantial part:
Bas(Jonathan):
Good gracious me – out of the corner of my eye I thought you were wearing a good cashmere.
Nige(Peter):
I’m glad you thought it was a cashmere, but it’s not.
Bas:
I’d put my money on it being a cashmere.
Nige:
You’d lose your money, Bas. It’s a Nablock Histamine Non-Iron Oven-Dry Visco-Static Dynaflo, all designed to make a nice sweater with peak purchasing power.
The sketches that were to make it through to the final selection tended, as in Edinburgh, to be of a more satirical bent than these. Peter contributed The Sadder and Wiser Beaver, a thinly veiled and caustic attack on a liberal Cambridge friend of his who had gone to work for the right-wing Beaverbrook Newspaper Co., which in the light of Peter’s putative advertising career was a bit rich; Man Bites God, an attack on trendy vicars co-written with Jonathan Miller, which implored people to ‘get violence off the streets and into the churches where it belongs’; and Black Equals White, an interview with a tyrannical African dictator which owed a lot to the discussions in the Cook household regarding Nigerian independence (‘One man, one vote, that is essential – especially for the nine million black idiots who vote for me.’) Jonathan Miller confirms that ‘The sketch reflected a right-wing attitude on part, in a way which of course is quite unperformable now. It reflected his own experience as a child of someone who had served in black Africa, a contempt for the hypocritical self-serving of black leaders.’
Other directly satirical items included a Miller–Bennett attack on capital punishment, The Suspense is Killing Me, in which Bennett’s Headmasterly Prison Governor gave Miller’s condemned man an encouraging talking to:
Bennett:
You don’t want to be cooped up for life.
Miller:
Yes, I do want to be cooped up for life.
There was also Real Class, an ensemble piece which – by directly addressing the class differences within the group – confidently satirised the liberal pretensions of the audience.
Peter:
I think at about this juncture, it would be wise to point out to those of you who haven’t noticed – and God knows it’s apparent enough – that Jonathan Miller and myself come from good families and have the benefits of a public school education. Whereas the other two members of
the cast have worked their way up from working class origins. And yet Jonathan and I are working together with them in the cast and treating them as equals, and I must say it’s proving to be a most worthwhile, enjoyable and stimulating experience for both of us. Wouldn’t you agree, Jonathan?
Perhaps most controversial of all the new material was another ensemble piece, Aftermyth of War, a satire – as the title suggests – on the treatment of World War Two in flag-waving adventure films of the fifties. It seems mild stuff today, but at the time Britain’s war dead seemed too recently laid to rest for many to stomach any sort of parody:
Peter:
War is a psychological thing, Perkins, rather like a game of football. You know how in a game of game of ll ten men often play better than eleven?
Jonathan:
Yes sir.
Peter:
Perkins, we are asking you to be that one man. I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti, don’t come back. Goodbye, Perkins. God, I wish I was going too.
Jonathan:
Goodbye sir – or is it ‘au revoir’?
Peter:
No, Perkins.
Peter was extremely unhappy about the inclusion of Aftermyth of War in the final selection of sketches. Reducing a theatre full of Cambridge students to tears of laughter was one thing, but he feared that his parents’ generation would not be so amused. This instinctive caution, born from years of experience of knowing when to stop and smile politely, came into direct conflict with his desire to tilt at established values. Despite his misgivings, he worked on the sketch enthusiastically, contributing a section concerning the switching of road signs to confuse the Germans as to the relative whereabouts of Great Yarmouth and Lyme Regis, and a character whose reaction to every military disaster is to go and make a nice cup of tea. When his wife informs him that rationing has been imposed, he suggests a nice cup of steaming hot water.
The debate about the advisability or otherwise of alienating sections of the audience divided the cast in half, with Peter and Dudley Moore still ranged against the other two. It wasn’t that Peter had anything against satire; quite the reverse – he wanted to start up a satirical cabaret club of his own. But both he and Dudley, the two who had concrete experience of trying to entertain a wider public for money, felt that their own more controversial material would simply rouse a mainstream audience to anger. Satire had its place. They just wanted to get into the West End; destroying a century of theatrical tradition could not have been further from their minds. Miller and Bennett, who had other careers, were more inclined to use the opportunity to make a few points here and there.
Beyond the Fringe’s disastrous week in Brighton seemed to bear out Peter’s misgivings, and put aential West End opening even further off the scale of probability. The cast performed to the sound of slamming auditorium doors throughout, as audience members stalked out in provincial disgust. One man stood up during the Aftermyth of War sketch and shouted: ‘You young bounders don’t know anything about it!’ before stalking off. Peter’s Cambridge friend Richard Cottrell, who had got a job playing Toad in a touring production of Toad of Toad Hall, was playing the same Brighton theatre in the mornings, and came to see the show on its first night: ‘It was an experience I wouldn’t have missed for anything. The seats banged up throughout the evening, it was wonderful. They were outraged by it.’ The reviewer from the Brighton and Hove Herald thought that the idea of a sketch about the war was ‘vaguely indecent’, the notion of attacking capital punishment was ‘atrocious’, and any mockery of Britain’s preparations for nuclear attack was utterly preposterous. ‘Why be funny about civil defence?’ he asked in genuine indignation.
The show’s reception in Brighton seemed to have sounded its death-knell. Albery was content to go no further; but once more, luck smiled on Peter Cook. Among the audience was a lawyer and small-time promoter named David Jacobs, who was putting on a Bernard Cribbins revue at London’s Fortune Theatre. Cribbins would not be ready to start for six weeks, so rather than leave the theatre expensively unused during that time, Jacobs was looking for a cheaply-mounted short run production to minimise any financial loss. He didn’t think much of Beyond the Fringe, but he reasoned that the excitement it had once generated in Edinburgh would sell enough seats to turn a small profit before the show died a death. So Beyond the Fringe got its London opening after all.
The contract to take the front of house pictures was awarded to Lewis Morley, who by an amazing coincidence happened to be Willie Donaldson’s partner in a London photographic studio. He came down to Brighton to shoot some rebellious poses on the beach and under the pier, following them up with further shots in Hyde Park and at London Zoo. Sean Kenny’s minimalist avant-garde set, just a grand piano, a flying buttress and a flight of stone steps leading to a platform, looking like a cross between a crypt and a wine bar, was installed at the Fortune. Drummer Derek Hogg and Hugo Boyd, the bass player from Edinburgh, were taken on with Dudley as the Dudley Moore Trio. Publicity appearances were arranged with the media, including an interview on Tonight. This was a disaster. Alan Bennett stumped around the TV studio doing an impression of Douglas Bader in an extract from Aftermyth of War. The audience sat in mute embarrassment. Only then did Bennett realise that their interviewer, Kenneth Allsop, was himself a former RAF flier who had lost one of his legs.
Beyond the Fringe opened at the Fortune on Wednesday 10 May 1961. Around it in the West End, gaudy theatrefronts advertised comedy revues in which heavily made-up actors stood in line to sing gang-show numbers, where every Noel Coward witticism had to be followed by the anaesthetic of a torch song. There were trouser-dropping farces starring Brian Rix, musicals like My Fair Lady and thrillers like The Mousetrap. There was also, of course, One over the Eight starring Kenneth Williams and Sheila Hancock. The age of the dinosaurs was coming to an end.
Beyond the Fringe took London by storm even more comprehensively than it had destroyed the competition in Edinburgh. Felix Barker in the Evening News called it ‘The perfect revue, for which we have all waited through so many a groaning and fatuous night. This is the best revue I have ever seen.’ Milton Shulman in the Evening Standard reckoned it was ‘A rare delight, brilliant, uproarious and wonderfully mad.’ Bernard Levin in the Daily Express, referring to the cast as ‘The four good, great men who have done this thing to and for and in the name of us all’, described the show as ‘A revue so brilliant, adult, hard-boiled, accurate, merciless, witty, unexpected, alive, exhilarating, cleansing, right, true and good, I shall go and see it once a month for the rest of my life. The satire is real, barbed, deeply planted and aimed at things and people that need it.’ Levin’s screeches of laughter during the first night audience had been so startlingly loud that the cast had actually held an impromptu meeting during the interval to decide what to do about it. Although the show did not actually survive for the rest of Levin’s life, he did have to put up with Peter repeating his screams at full volume whenever they met thereafter, preferably on a crowded pavement. The clinching review, if one were needed, came from Kenneth Tynan four days later in The Observer. He correctly predicted that he had witnessed ‘a revolution in revue’, and added that ‘Future historians may well thank me for providing them with a full account of the moment when English comedy took its first decisive step into the second half of the twentieth century.’ It was an analysis that only Milligan and Sellers could have quibbled with.
Beyond the Fringe’s effect on its audience was no less profound. Tony Hendra, the future editor of National Lampoon, was actually studying to be a monk on the Isle of Wight when he dropped in at the Fortune Theatre on his way back from a trip to Cambridge. ‘I went into the show a monk, and I emerged having completely lost my vocation. I didn’t know things could be so funny. I didn’t realise that authority was so absurd.’30 Others whose lives were significantly affected by the
show included future Pythons Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, who explains: ‘It is not easy nowadays to convey the sensational audacity, the explosively liberating effect of hearing the Prime Minister of the day impersonated, or judges, bishops, police chiefs and army officers mocked. It was shocking and thrilling, but it was done with such skill and intelligence that it could not easily be shot down, dismissed or shrugged off. It was all the more effective for coming from within. Peter’s education and background were the very epitome of the Establishment. He knew what he was talking about.’31
Over at the Duke of York’s, the cast of One over the Eight were not best pleased by the reception accorded to their young writer. Kenneth Williams wrote in his diary: ‘Sheila Hancock furious over the rave reviews for Beyond the Fringe. She is absolutely speechless with rage at these lovely notices for Cook, when this was the man that practically brought our show to disaster. I said it was best to be indifferent to the whole business.’ In fact One over the Eight had received good notices – the Evening Standard had called it ‘snappy and gay’ – but the first gusts of the chill wind blowing from Edinburgh had caught it even before it could get into its stride. The Daily Mail questioned its ‘smart frisky little dance routines’, which ‘swamped’ the comedy. Reviewer Robert Muller complained that ‘The trouble with this revue is iefs s chief author, Peter Cook, has failed to find real targets for his satire.’32 Just a year previously, such a comment would have been unthinkable. Pertinently Muller singled out for praise Bloody Rhondda Mine, a number about miners which had been on the shortlist for Beyond the Fringe until Kenneth Williams had decided to go ahead with it.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 16