Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (17 page)

Several years later, the
New York Times
asked Sellers the obvious question: Why Fred? Peter’s response: “You can ruin
anything
with ‘Fred.’ Suppose somebody shows you a painting. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘isn’t it beautiful—it’s
a Rembrandt!’ ‘Beautiful!,’ you say. Then you look a bit closer and you see
it’s signed ‘Fred Rembrandt.’ It’s no good. You can’t take it seriously if it’s
by Fred Rembrandt.”

But it
was
good, and everybody knew it—Spike and Peter, Richard
Lester, Associated-Rediffusion, and ITV. Peter, who had originally been
signed to do
Idiot Weekly
at £100 pounds per program was given a raise,
to £500.

In one of
A Show Called Fred
’s most celebrated incidents, Milligan
wrote a sketch in which Sellers would play
Richard III
—not the character
of Richard III, but
all
the major parts—dressed, madeup, and speaking
precisely as Laurence Olivier. Milligan’s idea was to invite Olivier himself
to end the scene as a lone sentinel on the battlements; having heard Sellers’s
rendition, Olivier would simply shake his head in grief. Unfortunately,
nobody had the nerve to approach Olivier himself, who, when told of it
later, claimed to be disappointed not to have been asked. In any event, Peter
played it all utterly straight, especially the part of Richard.

The pace began to pick up, as did the mania. After
Fred
came
Son of
Fred
. And
The Goon Show
entered its seventh series.

Son of Fred
ran from September 17 through November 5, 1956,
eight programs in all, and with it, Peter and Spike’s disjointed proto-postmodernist video went national. Because of its father’s success,
Son of
Fred
could now be seen in the Midlands and the North. The billing also
changed and lengthened: “Peter Sellers in
Son of Fred
by Spike Milligan.”
Spike, who limited himself mainly to walk-on roles, began aiming instead
for an even sparer, starker comedy style.

An “Idiot’s Postbag” sequence:

We see a simple ship set—with a back-projection tracking shot of
trains.

Peter is wearing a Nazi uniform—just the jacket. He’s got on pajama
bottoms as pants.

A mountaineer writes in with a question from the Alps. We see him
hanging on the side of a cliff. He asks Peter what to do. Peter advises him
to take the only course of action an experienced mountaineer could take
under the circumstances: “Fall off.” The mountaineer thanks Peter, lets go,
and plunges to his death.

Max Geldray strolls through the set with his harmonica. A black man
in a hut appears with a violin. Max, playing “Anything Goes,” wanders out
to the street, hails a cab, hops in, and rides away. He ends up in a field and
gets carried away on a stretcher.

Sellers turns up at a Lost and Found department looking for his mate—someone he misplaced on the London tube. Behind the counter there’s a
body with a tag on its toe. But no, that’s not his friend. Sellers, wearing an
oversized hat that sits on his ears, then lies down on a slab himself, along
with Spike and Graham Stark. They each await someone to claim them.

Son of Fred
, episode four:

Peter, wearing tiny black tights, attempts to bang a giant gong to open
the show. (It’s a farcical parody of the great Rank Organization film logo,
the British equivalent of the MGM lion.)

Two musicians prepare to walk backward around the world while playing sousaphones.

A skit set in nineteenth century France: Sellers, playing a character
named Monte Carlo, effects a broad and ridiculous French accent until the
chateau walls, which have obviously been made of fabric all along, are lifted
up to reveal a large television camera. Peter addresses the camera in a British
accent until someone throws a sheet over it to enable Peter to resume
speaking French. An unrelated technician runs onscreen and speaks to the
other
camera—the one that’s actually filming. Suddenly there’s music—the
old Gang Show chestnut, “We’re Riding Along on the Crest of a Wave”—at
which point the chateau backdrop flies up and everybody launches into a
music hall routine.

Max Geldray begins playing “Lady Be Good.”

Cut to Spike’s mouth, in extreme close-up, yammering nonsense syllables.

Cut to Max Geldray, who attempts to finish “Lady Be Good.”

Cut to Peter playing a squirt bottle, squirting in time to “Lady Be Good.”

Michael Palin, interviewed about
The Goon Show
, responded by saying
that “
The Goon Show
didn’t attempt to make any sense,” and that “the
influence of
The Goon Show
on
me
was that when it came to
Python
, we
could write whatever we wanted.” But it was
A Show Called Fred
and
Son
of Fred
that were
Monty Python
’s real precursors. They were visually anarchic
as well as verbally brilliant and mentally abnormal.

And they
really
made no sense.

Other programs featured such things as an underwater violin recital. A
meeting between someone called Fred Nurk and his son’s headmaster—that one ended with a meaningless waltz. There were parody commercials:
one here for “Footo, the Patent Book Exploder”; one there for Muc, a
detergent that chopped down trees.

One (possibly apocryphal)
Fred
story involved a location shoot at a zoo,
where unemployed actors were supposed to serve as understudies for animals on the animals’ days off. Graham Stark is said to have jumped into
the sea lions’ tank and had great fun until one of the sea lions became
aroused by the smell of his crotch. Stark appears to have survived the episode
intact, but there were other tensions all around. Just before filming a
Fred
,
Peter suffered a severe anxiety attack and attempted to alleviate it with half
a bottle of brandy. He managed to speak his lines perfectly without slurring
a word; it was his reaction time that suffered. The show was running eight
minutes over schedule, which forced Dick Lester to cut the final sketch—not that anybody in the audience could tell the difference.

On another program Sellers and Stark were to sit on a park bench and
enjoy an absurd conversation, gradually coming to realize that they are
caught in a dream. The question was, whose dream was it? Lester planned
to reveal the answer by tilting the camera down to a St. Bernard asleep
under the bench. Rehearsals went fantastically well; the dog was a pro. But
during the live performance it stood up and attempted to leave. It was
leashed. With increasing annoyance, the dog began dragging scenery to the
floor, including Sellers and Stark. Lester, frantic in the control booth,
pleaded to the broadcast technicians to yank the show off the air. “We
can’t,” was their reply. Lester had no choice. “Tell them to keep going! Tell
them to ad-lib!” Sellers and Stark, evidently more professional than the dog,
did exactly that—not that anyone in the audience could tell the difference.

Apart from his anxiety attack, Sellers’s offscreen emotional state was
relatively normal, especially in comparison to Milligan, who is said by this
point to have been sedated much of the time. The combination of Milligan’s
tenuous emotional state and the increasingly radical absurdity of his comedy
style led ITV to grow more and more nervous during the run of
Son of
Fred
, and at the end of eight weeks the executives pulled the plug. There
were no plans to spawn
Fred
’s grandchild. As for Spike, he had to wait
eight years before returning to British television with
Milligan’s Wake
.

• • •

Peter and Spike returned to the movies. Together with their friend Dick
Emery, Peter and Spike filmed a half-hour comedy quickie at the Merton
Park Studios in deepest southwest London.
The Case of the Mukkinese Battle
Horn
, scripted by the film’s producers with help from Spike, Peter, and
Larry Stephens, was directed by Joseph Sterling, but more important, it was
filmed (as the title sequence tells us) “in the wonder of SchizophrenoScope,
the new split-screen.”

Compared to any of the
Fred
s it’s tame stuff, but
The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn
does have its moments. Peter plays a trenchcoat and
mustache–clad Scotland Yard inspector investigating the theft of the rare
eponymous instrument, a twisted contraption said to be the only one in
existence except for the identical twin kept in the storage room. Spike is
his assistant, Brown, and the night watchman, White; White is Eccles under
another name. Emery is the museum’s curator:

E
MERY:
We had a robbery last night.

S
ELLERS:
A robbery? Anything stolen?

Back at Scotland Yard, a rock comes crashing through the window. There’s
a note attached, etc.

Henry Crun shows up as the doddering owner of a pawn shop; Minnie
shrieks offscreen. A much more fetching Peter turns up lounging on a chaise
under a heavily pomaded platinum wig and a satin smoking jacket, languidly drawing from a cigarette holder. Sir Jervis Fruit was hardly the first
screaming queen in Peter’s repertoire; footage of an early cabaret performance shows him mincing hand on hip across the stage. And one historian
of gay images in British culture claims that Sellers performed these flaming
faggot bits on a routine basis and that at least one gay audience member
was so offended by it that he stood up in the middle of the sketch and told
Peter to stop it.

What’s striking about Sir Jervis Fruit, though, is that while he makes
Quentin Crisp look like a rugby player, Peter invests him with the same
core dignity he lends all of his most flamboyant creations. He
believes
in
Fruit. There’s no contempt or derision. Like Crystal Jollibottom, Sir Jervis
would be a delightful tablemate at a dinner party. The same can’t be said,
say, for Spike’s moronic Eccles, who, toward the end of
The Case of the
Mukkinese Battle Horn
, gets the chance to perform the Dance of the Seven
Veils in drag before a captivated Peter. It is an unnerving spectacle.

• • •

Because Peter’s star was rising higher and higher, he was booked to appear
on any number of television specials:
The Billy Cotton Band Show
,
Six Five
Special
,
Don’t Spare the Horses
, the third of three specials called
Secombe
Here!
, and others. He was supposed to be on
Jack Benny in London
, too.
He was great in rehearsals. In fact, he may have been a little too great, for
Benny took the show’s producer aside and told him that he thought Peter’s
line deliveries and timing were so similar to his own that Peter’s appearance
would be detrimental to the show as a whole, and so, perhaps, they should
let him go.

As the comedian Steve Allen points out in regard to this incident,
Benny and Sellers “were not at all alike in their natural manner of speech.”
Perhaps Benny felt Sellers was upstaging him. Either that or Peter’s routine
included a devilish impersonation of Benny, and Benny felt that one of him
was enough on his own British television special. In any event, they paid
off Peter’s contract and sent him home in disappointment.

For Peter, the rejection stung, but it didn’t hurt his chances in the
industry. Far from it. Peter starred in two of his
own
television specials that
year, both called
Eric Sykes Presents Peter Sellers
.

• • •

The Goon Show
’s seventh series began in October, but even before it finished
in March 1957, Peter had done
yet another
television series, not to mention
his first appearance on North American TV. Because his contract with
Associated-Rediffusion required four short television series and he’d done
only three, he was obliged to star in one more despite Spike’s departure
after
Son of Fred
. With Richard Lester having moved on to other work as
well, he called on his friend and former Goonmate Michael Bentine. Bentine’s quarrels, after all, had been with Spike, not Peter. Bentine, in turn,
brought in the Australian writer-performer David Nettheim, whom he’d
met in Australia while working on the radio series
Three’s a Crowd
. But this
time there would be no confusion or dispute as to Bentine’s creative role:
On this show he was to be billed as “Creator.”

The result was
Yes, It’s the Cathode-Ray Tube Show!
, which enjoyed its
surreal run on ITV from February 11 through March 18, 1957, six programs in all. It was
Fred
-like, but in a Bentine way: this time, the surreality
was such that the show’s very title disintegrated over the course of the series.
In a conceit worthy of both Tristan Tzara and Yoko Ono, one word fell
off the title each week. By the last program it was a show called
Yes
.

• • •