Gradually, it began to dawn on Frost that there was something familiar about the manner in which Rimmer’s character had been fleshed out, especially since Peter had added his contribution to the script: Rimmer liked to stroll about saying ‘Super to see you’ to everyone, and was portrayed hosting a celebrity party at London Zoo which was uncomfortably similar to a celebrity party that Frost had organised at Alexandra Palace. At the time, Peter vehemently denied to inquisitive journalists that these parallels were intentional: ‘There are obviously similarities with someone who gets on very successfully like David in the character of Michael Rimmer, but I think it would be odd if there weren’t. Honestly, the film isn’t really supposed to be about anyone. Anyway, David says “Gorgeous to see you” now.’10 Later, Peter admitted that he had been telling a little white lie: ‘Frost got quite paranoid in that he thought we were exactly mirroring his career, which to an extent we were. Some of the character was based on David. The ultimate irony was that the set designer, who had never seen David’s living room, and which we’d never talked about to her, produced an almost exact replica of David’s room.’11 Certainly there are multiple ironies present in the fact that Frost, who had modelled his early career on Peter, was paying Peter to parody that career on film.
The script was completed by the middle of 1969. The plot was utterly linear, following Rimmer’s progress upwards from his first mysterious appearance, as a junior pollster who is appointed Managing Director of his firm on the strength of a secret time-and-motion study he carries out on his colleagues. He subsequently discredits a rival firm by rigging their poll on the religious habits of Nuneaton: a series of stooge interviewees claim to be Muslims or Buddhists at his instigation. His own firm gains a reputation for accuracy after they interview every voter at a by-election. Rimmer then offers to publish a fraudulent poll showing a national Tory lead, in return for the safe Conservative seat of Budleigh Moor (geddit), and swiftly becomes the party spin doctor. Simultaneously, he persuades the Labour Prime Minister (George A. Cooper as a thinly disguised Harold Wilson) to take part in a deliberately clumsy TV broadcast. So soulless is Rimmer that he even selects his wife from a national popularity poll. Eventually the Conservatives win the 1970 election, and Rimmer is appointed Chancellor, after the original candidate appears in a selection of gay photographs (this was based on a real incident, although the photos – of a senior Tory politician – were offered to Private Eye but never published). A vicious monetarist, Rimmer even cuts conventional military spending in favour of cheaper germ warfare. He finally murders the Prime Minister by pushing him off a North Sea rig, accedes to No. 10 and moves swiftly towards dictatorship.
The script was quite remarkable in its predictive qualities. The election result, the rise of monetarism and classless Toryism, the sacking of Enoch Powell and the increase in media manipulation by politicians were among the wide range of the film’s satirical targets. But there should also have been warning signs. Cleese and Chapman were not screenwriters – not at that stage, at any rate – and neither, in all honesty, was Peter himself. Their speciality was sketch material, and the script was full of verbal gags. Funny situations were thin on the ground. The linear progression of the storyline contained no surprises, no subplots, no dramatic tension and no emotional involvement. There was not a likeable or even put-upon character in sight to engage audience sympathy; Dudley’s absence was to prove telling. All the writers involved were naturally funny men, but the writer has not been born who can create a great film script instinctively. Writing a successful film script involves a substantial learning process, as Cleese later discovered when he attended a screenwriting course before writing A Fish Called Wanda. Instinctive and natural wit like Peter’s was just one part of the equation. The result was that the script for Michael Rimmer put immense pressure on its lead actor to produce a charismatic performance which would hold the whole enterprise together. Perhaps mindful of these deficiencies, Kevin Billington hurled famous haracter actors at the project, a sign of impending doom as clear as a plague cross painted on a front door. Arthur Lowe, Denholm Elliott, Ronald Fraser, Dennis Price, Ronnie Corbett, Michael Bates, Jonathan Cecil, Diana Coupland, Norman Rossington, Frank Thornton, and John Cleese and Graham Chapman themselves took part, and there were cameo appearances from Harold Pinter, Joe McGrath and Percy Edwards.
Filming took place in the autumn of 1969 at a disused Masonic Temple in St John’s Wood, and was completed by the beginning of December. The film was due to be edited for release the following month. Then, the bombshell dropped. There was a change of management at the studio, and the new bosses weren’t keen on Michael Rimmer. Specifically, they felt that it was too sensitive a topic to air in the run-up to the general election, and that it would be best if the film were responsibly postponed until after the end of the campaign. The whole point of the film, of course, was to predict the course of the election, but studio heads have often been and often will be morons. ‘We were in despair,’ recalls David Frost. ‘Peter in particular. He really wanted people to see this film before the election. He suggested a simultaneous premiere in Huyton, Harold Wilson’s constituency, North Devon, Jeremy Thorpe’s constituency, and Bexley, as Edward Heath’s constituency was then known. Now that was a great idea, but still they wouldn’t do anything.’ The disappointment was utterly, completely crushing. Michael Rimmer was shelved until further notice. Peter’s film career continued to hang in the balance.
In the final weeks of 1969, BBC producer Jimmy Gilbert got a call from the Head of Light Entertainment. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, it seemed, were unexpectedly available in the early months of 1970, and wanted to fill their time with a third series of Not Only . . . But Also (Dudley, in fact, was not free at all, as Play It Again Sam was still running at the Globe, but Peter had persuaded him to record the series on Sunday nights, which were his only evenings off). The BBC, Gilbert was told, had commissioned a series of seven forty-five-minute shows to be transmitted at fortnightly intervals, with a week’s filming and a week’s rehearsal before each show, as in the first series. He was to produce it, and he had approximately one month in which to put it all together. ‘I was appalled that we had to do it as quickly as that,’ remembers Gilbert, ‘it was so fast. There was no time to do any casting for guests. I booked a middle-of-the-road singer called Nanette for the whole series, a pretty American girl, merely on the basis of a photograph. Peter was intrigued because of her looks and because her father had played the piano in the pit in the Chicago of No No Nanette back in the twenties – which is how she got her name.’ Peter insisted that there should be rock groups as well, and Gilbert managed to book Joe Cocker and Yes.
Peter and Dudley went in to the scripting process immediately. There were no more relaxed, laughter-filled sessions like those at Church Row in 1965; there was no time for that. The two men sat in an office at Television Centre and dictated straight into a tape recorder, which was then given to a secretary for transcription. ‘A lot of things used to go on too long; they could have done with a bit of cutting, but they weren’t keen on that,’ says Gilbert. ‘I tried to direct them, because I always feel that until actors have roughly learned something you can’t direct, but it was all so late. The first Pete and Dud sketch we did was one of the strongest, because they’d written it far enough ahead to be able to rehearse it. So of course I said to them “This is great,” and they’d agree, “Yes, yes, great, OK, we’ll do it every week.” But of course they didn’t. They always left everything to the last minute, including all the filming. We’d start each fortnight with nothing, nothing to film.’
Peter, with Dudley tagging along at his side, was just filling in time. Not with any great motivation, as he had done before, his ambition driving him onwards and upwards, but for the sake of it, for the need to work. His heart was no longer in it, his private life lay in tatters. ‘I thought it was rather sad,’ remembers Gilbert. ‘He told me, “All my best work was done before I was eighteen, or before I was twenty any
way.” He was talking about the sketches that he did for the stage revues. Those were the ones that he was most proud of, the ones with Kenneth Williams.’ Awash with sentimental nostalgia, Peter must have known that his bandwagon was slowing to a halt. And yet, despite the personal sadness that underpinned this lack of conviction, and the physical weariness that told on Dudley’s contribution, Peter, Dudley and Jimmy Gilbert produced a fine television series. It did not quite scale the heights of the first two series – that would have been impossible given the lack of preparation – but there was no question that Peter and Dudley were back doing what they did best, in the place most suited to harnessing their talents.
Incredibly, every single programme in the third series of Not Only . . . But Also was subsequently destroyed by the bureaucrats. Mysteriously, even the regulation first and last shows were not kept. Just a few of the film sequences shot in advance remain; they are virtually the only surviving examples of Peter and Dudley’s work recorded in colour. The unedited scripts, fortunately, are still with us, enabling an approximate picture of each programme to be built up. The principal innovation that distinguished the series from its predecessors was Poets Cornered, a regular finale devised by Peter in which he, Dudley and a comedy guest sat perched on stools above a tank of disgusting sludge. A rhyme would be improvised by one of the participants, the verbal baton passing to the next man whenever Jimmy Gilbert up in the gallery pressed a buzzer. Failure to come up with a rhyme, or undue hesitation, resulted in the performer being catapulted forward into the tank. Eventually one poet would be left, ploughing on desperately until he too was plunged into the sludge. It was a brilliant idea, both comically and because it enabled Gilbert to adjust the show to fit its forty-five-minute slot. If Pete and Dud had been overrunning earlier on, he could easily shorten Poets Cornered. Spike Milligan was the first guest on the Sludge Poetry Competition, as it began its life. Subsequent poets were Willie Rushton, Barry Humphries, Frank Muir, Ronnie Barker, Denis Norden and an extremely reluctant Alan Bennett. Sadly, because it was entirely unscripted, nothing whatsoever remains of Poets Cornered, but it is still fondly remembered by all who saw the shows go out.
Gilbert continued and improved upon the sequence of remarkable title sequences devised by his predecessors. The first programme, recorded on Sunday 1 February, began with Peter and Dudley leaning over the rail of Tower Bridge, which proceeds to open between them, sending them skywards and away from each other as a giant Not Only . . . But Also banner unfurls between the two arms of the bridge. The first sketch on the show trod familiar ground – Dud played a libidinous piano tuner (‘Just like a piano, women need to be tuned very reguarly, kept up to concert pitch and as many hands over their keys as possible’) who visits the house of a Latin teacher played by Peter. It transpires that the piano tuner knows far more about the teacher’s wife than he does, namely that she is extremely promiscuous, and that far from being on a visit to her flu-ridden mother, as her husband supposes, she is walking the streets wearing thigh-length boots, micro-skirt, see-through blouse and an Indian head-band. ‘Dressed up the way she was to kill, something might have happened to her,’ Dudley suggests. ‘She could have just sort of gone out the door, crossed the road and fallen under a West Indian.’ The unusual outcome of this sketch was that for the first time ever, Dudley emerged as the clear victor over Peter. Partly, this reflected Peter’s sense of defeat in his personal life, and partly the fact that Dudley had now developed a far more dominant role in the writing, as Peter subsequently admitted. Dudley now estimated his contribution to the script as being about 30 per cent. The balance of power was shifting back between the two men. Dudley was fast becoming dissatisfied with the media perception of him as Peter’s lovable glove puppet: ‘Cuddly I am not,’ he barked at one reporter. ‘I highly resent being considered as some sort of human Sooty, a plaything for doting matrons. It was an image that grew on me like fur. I now want to shave it off.’12
After a terrible song by Nanette, the second of the three sketches in the opening show was one of Peter and Dudley’s finest ever, a cod Hollywood documentary about the life of Greta Garbo, which – as it was shot on film – survives intact. Dudley was made up to the nines as Joan Crawford, while Peter played the mysterious Emma Bargo, from her earliest film role in Three Thousand Girls Jump into the Sea, to her later life as a recluse, driving down the high street atop an armoured car shouting ‘I vant to be alone!’ According to Jimmy Gilbert, ‘By this stage Peter didn’t enjoy the hard work of having to write it all, but he loved all the performing of it. He and Dudley were incredibly flamboyant and extrovert together when they got into the studio, and gave the impression of a huge sense of enjoyment there. Peter adored the Greta Garbo bit. I remember Peter and I sitting in Lime Grove looking at old Garbo movies; he postponed the actual sitting down and writing of it until the last minute but he loved the dressing up.’ Peter himself concluded, entirely erroneously, that ‘I looked incredibly beautiful – I fancied myself rotten. I thought I looked rather better than she did.’13
The third and final sketch, after a couple of nonsense songs from Spike Milligan, was a Pete and Dud dialogue that was once again heavily influenced by the plot of The Bedsitting Room. Dud had been having recurrent dreams about climbing into a wardrobe:
Pete:
The wardrobe represents your mother, and your desire to get into it shows an infantile yearning to return to the warmth and security of your mother’s womb.
Dud:
You’re wrong there, Pete. I have absolutely no inclination to get back into the confines of my mother’s womb.
Pete:
Not consciously. I’m not suggesting that you go round to 439 Becontree Avenue and ask your mum for readmission. It’s three o’clock in the morning and anyway it’s illegal.
Gradually Pete’s analysis is accepted so completely by Dud that he comes to believe that his mother actually is a wardrobe.
Dud’s newfound mood of confidence (‘You’re wrong there, Pete’) was evident elsewhere in the sketch. A question about the extent of his reading did not lead to the ritual humiliations of previous series:
Pete:
I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the works of Freud.
Dud:
I do have a cursory knowledge of his theories. I recently skimmed through his lectures to the students of Heidelberg on the phallic implications of the penis.
Pete:
An interesting, if superficial study. Did you read it in the original German?
Dud:
No, I read it in précis form on the back of a box of Swan Vestas.
The second show of the series opened with a blistering attack on the Tom Sloan style of running BBC Light Entertainment. The writer of ’Til Death Us Do Part, Johnny Speight, had been undergoing his customary battles with the management over the number of swear words permitted on air, as indeed had Peter and Dudley themselves. Knowing that theBBC would seek to remove some of the swearing as a matter of course, they and Speight tended to include too much to begin with, then negotiate down to their originally desired position. The sketch featured a thinly disguised Speight, played by Dudley, doing a deal with Peter’s Head of Light Entertainment in his office:
Johnny:
Look, tell you what I’ll do. I’ll lose ten bloodys if you give me two more bums and an extra tit.
Head:
Right, that leaves you seventeen bloodys, eight bums and a pair of doodahs.
Johnny:
Hold on, how many bloodys are there to a bum?
Head:
Let’s say ten.
Johnny:
I raise you one bum.
Head:
You’re really pushing me into a corner . . . but what’s the point of letting one bum stand between us? Another bum it is. I’ll whip the script off to Sooty this afternoon.
‘That sketch was based on an actual meeting,’ recounts Dudley, ‘negotiating tits and bums. We got away with it, though I’m amazed we
did. Peter loved it when we got away with things.’14 In fact Peter had rarely needed to resort to swear words to make people laugh at any point in his career, but the notion of smashing the BBC’s swear word record in such a deliciously ironic manner appealed to him. In a further comment on the whole situation the show’s opening and closing titles promised ‘lavatory humour’ – in fact a series of elderly and inoffensive music hall jokes told in stopframe animation by a rowlettinlking lavatory seats.
That classic sketch apart, the rest of the second programme all too clearly revealed the lack of preparation that had gone into the series. A Joe Cocker number punctuated a feeble Pete and Dud dialogue about Dud’s chances of becoming the new James Bond, and The Glidd of Glood, a filmed version of one of the poems from Peter’s abortive book of children’s verse. The Glidd poem was actually rather good – it too survives to this day – but was only included out of desperation because Peter and Dudley had been unable to write anything else. Filmed at Bodiam Castle, it featured Peter as a medieval ruler so mean that he dresses in a brown paper parcel, and forces his subjects to eat slabs of wood for dinner. Dudley played Sparquin, the tiny jester whose job it is to entertain the Glidd, but who succeeds instead in escaping with all his master’s money. As with the Piano Tuner sketch and the Johnny Speight sketch, Dudley’s character emerged as the unquestioned victor.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 38