Peter and Dudley wrote the sketches by talking them through in each other’s houses, recording their conversations, playing them back, then recording them again – perhaps five or six times – until a definitive version had been arrived at. The tape would then be handed to a secretary, who would transcribe it exactly: Peter was most insistent that the genuine speech patterns, even the mistakes and hesitations, should be recorded precisely. By the time the sketch was actually written down, it was fully rehearsed. Dudley would then memorise it, professionally and methodically, by writing it out again in longhand until every stutter and every pause was firmly lodged in his mind. Peter, by contrast, would settle for a huge piece of card held up behind his partner, with six or seven headings scrawled on it. He used to delight in leading Dudley up hill and down dale, away from the rehearsed script and back onto it, giving him a taste of freedom then tugging him back, like a bird toying with a worm, watching him twist, turn and splutter his way back to the next familiar stretch of dialogue.
There were no punchlines to speak of. Peter hated the ‘pat’ line reversing all that had gone before, the brass stab from the band and the fade to black. He would rather have sketches tail away to nothing than hint at the formulaic. ‘Peter would dig in on those sorts of things,’ says Joe McGrath, ‘so Dudley would get very frustrated. They used to have arguments.’ Dudley eventually conceded the punchline debate, but in general terms the importance of the old-fashioned discipline that he contributed cannot be overestimated. Where Peter’s material had previously darted about, ignoring internal contradictions – an enjoyable experience to watch but too devoid of structural interest to sustain more than a few minutes’ viewing – Dudley doggedly supplied a backbone. Peter recalled that, ‘Gradually, Dudley developed far more of a role in the writing. I tended to flutter off very quickly, and improvise, and ignore illogicalities . . . Dudley began, when we had an idea, to examine what was logically incorrect, right at the beginning. I would regard this as pernickety, and he would regard it as logical. So the writing process became slower.’10 Dudley concurs: ‘There were arguments about the structure of sketches – I did get very pernickety. But Peter used to be so fecund that he could put in an alternative line at the drop of a hat.’ Dudley had, in effect, harnessed Peter’s comic genius to the mainstream as no one had before. Nearly all great comic writing partnerships consist of one writer who takes the lead, extemporising, while the other edits and reins in excesses. Dudley had simply forced Peter into an established and successful pattern. Furthermore, Dudley’s residual status as star of the show and his relationship with Joe McGrath gave his input an authority which, although technical rather than natural, could not be gainsaid.
McGrath’s method of shooting happily complemented Peter and Dudley’s material. He used just three cameras, and sat for as long as possible on the fascinating cat-and-mouse facial expressions of the two protagonists. Dudley, who had more TV experience than Peter, realised that there didn’t seem to be as much cutting between cameras as there should be, and objected. McGrath replied that ‘The whole ethos of this thing is that I’d love to do a whole Dud and Pete without a cut – just do a Laurel and Hardy – and sit on the two of you throughout.’ Unfortunately he always had to have a wide shot standing by as a ‘safety’ shot, because Pete and Dud’s sketches could march gloriously on for quarter of an hour or more. Great chunks would have to be thrown on to the cutting room floor in order to make the material fit. The shows were recorded in advance, but the idea was to make them as close to a live show as possible; there were no breaks, no going back on mistakes. Only the gravest technical disaster could bring the recording to a halt.
The show was entirely created in the fortnight before transmission: there would be five days’ writing, two days’ filming, and the rest of the time would be given over to rehearsals. Another radical departure was that sets were kept to minimum, just a hint here and there of a saloon bar or a sitting room. This was another happy accident that helped focus the audience’s attention on the strength of the material. Even though they only had to write three sketches a fortnight, Peter and Dudley reserved the right to deliver their material late or change their minds at the last minute; frequently the faintest suggestion of a pub was all the designer actually had time to build. A little more advance preparation went into the remarkable title sequences devised by Joe McGrath. Following on from the car wash idea of the first show, six further sequences were shot, including Dudley as a one man band, Dudley as a gypsy violinist who annoys Peter as he tries to take tea, and Dudley asking Peter to remove his hat in a cinema, a shot which pulled back to reveal that they were the only two people in the auditorium.
Tragically, only the first three of the six programmes have survived, plus the filmed inserts – minus their soundtrack – of show four. Even this paltry reminder of one of the greatest television comedies of all time would not exist, had Joe McGrath not broken several rules in order to make pirate copies. ‘I knew at the time that a lot of the technicians were running off copies and keeping them. So I just did one of those things you could do at the BBC in those times – I signed a form and had some of them telerecorded.’ Telerecording was an immensely primitive process whereby the high-quality studio output and 35mm film inserts were preserved by a 16mm film camera, pointed at a television screen as the show went out. The blurred picture quality and furry – at times indecipherable – sound of the surviving shows bear no relation to the high standards of the original broadcasts. McGrath’s three illegal telerecordings are now all that reside in the BBC library. Even the scripts were thrown away, in an act of shocking bureaucratic vandalism.
The first show had the highest concentration of McGrath/Fuest material, three sketches to Peter and Dudle’s two: these included a rather old-fashioned comedy dance number with Dudley and a stripper who never finishes her act; Tour Gastronomique de la route Circular du Nord, in which Peter plays a French restaurant critic reviewing the Café Fred, Dudley plays Fred (‘Born within the sight of bow legs’) and Barry Humphries plays the Café’s filthy waiter, whose job is to decant the HP sauce; and a sketch in which Peter plays the famous artist Sir Gregory Northumberland, while Dudley plays a studio manager so eager to instruct him in the ways of television that he ends up painting his picture for him. The Pete and Dud filmstars dialogue from the pilot recording was saved until this show, to give it room to play at a fuller length, leaving Peter and Dudley with just one new sketch: a parody silent film and an interview with its star, Tarquin Mordente. This had echoes of One Leg too Few: Mordente, who has become a tramp since the advent of the talkies, can’t see why his career has stalled despite having a ghastly throaty voice. The only other point of note was a second cameo appearance by John Lennon in the Tour Gastronomique sketch. Apparently he had enjoyed himself so much the first time that he had turned up uninvited for a second stab at comedy.
It was really in the second show that Peter and Dudley came into their own. This time there was only one McGrath/Fuest sketch, a parody of the BBC2 documentary series The Great War: a startling contribution to the programme from a visual point of view at least, as filming took place on a rubbish dump off the North Circular in the middle of a fierce blizzard; Barry Humphries (again) and Bob Godfrey appeared in minor roles. Peter and Dudley’s contribution began with a marvellous sketch in which Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling visits a tailor, because his public schoolboy son has ordered him to turn up for a half-term function in a suit that’s ‘with it’ rather than ‘without it’. Dudley, as the tailor, suggests a fourteen-inch bottom.
Sir Arthur:
I think you’ll have some difficulty cramming my bottom into fourteen inches. I was with the camel corps in the desert and I’m afraid that rather stretched my resources.
In a delicious culture clash between two worlds that Peter knew well, Sir Arthur demands a ‘sort of Tamla Motown excitement about the whole thing’. He does not, he explains, want anything effeminate:
Sir Arthur:
My wife is extremely effeminate you know. It’s a ghastly business, I don’t know where she picked it up.
Tailor:
Would you like a vent up the back?
Sir Arthur:
If you have one, yes.
Tailor:
Which side do you dress?
Sir Arthur:
Nearest the window.
Sadly, the end of this sketch is missing – the reel ends before the sketch does.
The Pete and Dud dialogue was a late night discussion, in dressing gowns, about the worst thing that could ever happen to anybody. A direct descendant of the Babar nightmare from Peter’s childhood, his terrible vision of a nocturnal visit from forty-one Nazi officers – who put him in a sack full of killer ants – begins with the familiar ‘Tap! Tap! Tap!’ Dudley retaliates with a visit from Doctor Death: ‘He comes for me when I’m getting some Spam from the kitchen and chops my head off with an axe and I run around the kitchen screaming.’ Pete belittles this as a relative picnic; his killer ants have been trained to eat extremely slowly, he explains. Dud tries again, with the appearance in his garden of a female vampire who vanishes, leaving his socks turned to ice. Pete ridicules this. He once stayed at Daphne du Maurier’s country house, he relates, and slept in a room where fifty years previously a nun had hanged herself – ‘stupid old bag’. There he was attacked ‘by a giant maneating slug of a type rarely found’, an assault that made the hairs of his toothbrush stand on end.
Peter and Dudley’s final contribution was an adaptation of an old standard from the 1958 Footlights written by Bob Sale – a stirring song in honour of Alan A’Dale. Performed in Sherwood Forest costumes with Fringe substitutes and ex-Footlighters Bill Wallis and Joe Melia, along with John Wells, this was the highlight of the programme. Alan A’Dale was essentially a musical shaggy dog story: across six or seven tortuous minutes, filmed almost entirely in a single close-up take by Joe McGrath, the song frequently threatened to arrive at some valid point without ever actually doing so. Dudley managed to extract further comic mileage from an outsized hat. Bill Wallis recalls that ‘Dudley was a very disciplined showman who understood audiences – like an old pro to Peter’s inspired amateur.’
Wallis was taken aback, however, to discover the extent to which Peter and Dudley had been taken over by the Pete and Dud characters. ‘It was around that point that I realised how tiring it was to be with the pair of them. I mean, going to lunch with them during rehearsals in Shepherd’s Bush, they’d got so hooked into Dud and Pete that they could never get out of it. I sat there expecting to have a conversation – I didn’t expect to sit there watching a sort of Dud and Pete workout, and some of the sketches being formed that I wouldn’t see until they appeared on television. It was just an extraordinary thing, that went on and on.’ Dudley, interestingly enough, ascribes the same attribute to Peter alone: ‘If he had a fault, it was that Peter was relentless in making everyone laugh. He had a verbal wit that was second to none, but sometimes he overdid it. At the parties we used to have after recording Not Only . . . But Also, he made sure people were laughing; but he kept on bludgeoning people with his wit. There was a certain relentless quality to him, which was not a good thing.’11
The fact of the matter is that Dudley did share something of Peter’s compulsion to entertain those around him, to make sure that nobody was bored and that everybody was having a good time; but more importantly, he naturally deferred to Peter, and followed his lead in public. The Alan A’Dale rehearsal was the occasion for their first big row, when Dudley and the rest of the cast began to annoy Peter by clashing their staves too loudly and too often while he was trying to work at something else. When he complained, they intensified the noise dramatically as a joke. Peter flew into a terrible rage, rounded on Dudley and ordered him to shut up. It was a crucial moment: Dudley’s obedience on that occasion was to define their relationship for years to come.
The third show of the series was a powerful candidate to be considered their finest ever. The programme oozed confidence in the strength of its own material right from the start, when Peter leaped on and announced:
372 years ago today the Sussex baron Sir Arthur Strumely-Grapps fell to his death in a ditch. Three years later war was to ravage Europe. But we’re not here tonight to dwell in the past.
First up was a film about the leaping nuns of the Order of St Beryl, together with an interview with Peter as the order’s Mother Superior. Originally the film had been intended to stand on its own, but Joe McGrath was in the habit of bringing Peter and Dudley into the cutting room to view the final cut of each insert; Peter would often improvise a commentary to fill the time, in this instance so amusingly that his remarks were turned into an accompanying sketch. Dudley, as the interviewer, struggled with Peter’s beatific superiority:
Interviewer:
Mother Superior – or may I call you mother?
Mother Superior:
I think that would be inappropriate.
Peter ran through the nuns’ leaping day in detail, from their breakfast of hard-boiled fish to their evening ritual of vespers and bandaging:
Mother Superior:
We’re early risers. We get up at four o’clock in the morning. Then go back to bed again at five, when we realise we’ve got up too early.
It is noticeable that Peter always played the superior character, the victor in each sketch. If Dudley played the relative intellectual lightweight of the two, as in the Pete and Dud dialogues, then he would lose out as a matter of course; but if Peter played the halfwit, as in Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling’s visit to the tailor, his character would always be blithely ignorant of his own stupidity, usually in such a way as to leave Dudley’s character tearing his hair out with frustration.
The Pete and Dud dialogue in show three was the famous ‘Art Gallery’ sketch, in which the pair established their own never-to-be-broken record for collapsing with unscripted laughter on screen. It contained a number of memorable slices of art criticism: that the sign of a good painting is ‘when the eyes follow you round the room’; that the sign of a good Rubens nude is ‘when the bottoms follow you round the room’; that the sign of a good Vernon Ward flying duck painting is ‘when the other eye is craning round the beak to look at you’; and that the Mona Lisa ‘has an awful sniffy look about her . . . she looks as if she’s never been to the lav in her life’. Regarding the strategically placed wisps of gauze adorning the Rubens nudes, Dud offered up the observation that:
It must be a million-to-one chance, Pete, that the gauze, y’know, lands in the right place at the right time, when he’s painting. I bet there’s thousands of paintings that we’re not allowed to see, where the gauze hadn’t landed in the right place, y’know, it’s on your nose or something.
The sketch was an object lesson in how to make stupidity funny – by lacing it thoroughly with genuine but half-digested, nuggets of information. Regarding a Leonardo da Vinci cartoon that neither of them could see the joke of, Dud offered the possibility that man’s sense of humour must have changed over the years:
Dud:
I bet when that da Vinci cartoon first came out, I bet people were killing themselves. I bet old da Vinci had an accident when he drew it.
Pete:
Well it’s difficult to see the joke, just that lady sitting there with the children round her. Not much of a joke as far as I’m concerned, Dud.
Dud:
Apart from that Pete, it’s a different culture. It’s Italian y’see, we don’t understand it. For instance, The Mousetrap did terribly in Pakistan.
It was the general air of hilarity and Pete’s piercing stare rather than any specific line that caused Dud to lose control for the first time:
Dud:
I went up to the Manager, I said ‘’ere’ . . . I said ‘’ere’ . . .
At this point he began to laugh so much that he spat sandwich helplessly across the room. Pete moved in for the kill.
Pete:
You didn’t spit
sandwich at him did you?
Dud:
Sorry Pete.
Pete:
Blimey.
Dud:
I’m sorry about that. No, I said ‘’ere’ –
Pete:
You’ll do it again if you’re not careful.
Dud:
I said ‘where . . .’
Whereupon Dud collapsed with laughter again, all hope of being allowed to regain his position in the script abandoned.
Pete pointed out that at a price of half a million pounds, Cézanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses had cost £50,000 per naked lady:
Dud:
You could get the real nude ladies for that price. My aunt Dolly would’ve done it for nothing.
Pete:
She does anything for nothing, doesn’t she, your Aunt Dolly. Dirty old cow.
Dud, gurgling helplessly, attempted to force the sandwich into his mouth to stem the flow of laughter.
Pete:
You enjoying that sandwich?
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 27