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Each night, after appearing in small roles in other acts, Peter briefly held the spotlight by himself. He performed a selection of Tommy Handley’s ITMA voices followed by a song written for him by his father. The audience seems not to have resented Peter’s intrusion on the Greco-nudie tableaux vivantes, and at the end of the appointed six-week run, Van Damm was impressed enough to add Peter’s name to a bronze plaque on the Windmill wall. It was labeled “Stars of Today Who Started Their Careers in This Theatre.”

• • •

Some time after the Jersey holiday camp fiasco, Peg had taken Peter by the hand and led him to a Soho office building for a reaquaintance meeting with Dennis Selinger, who seems to have lost touch with Peter after parting ways in Calcutta. After being demobilized, Selinger had returned to London and launched his own theatrical agency. The two men may have been friends in India, but Peg seized control of their reunion, insisting as only Peg could that her son would make a fortune for the hungry young agent. “I was more impressed with Peg than with Pete,” Selinger later declared, which was only natural since Peter spent most of the meeting clearing his throat toward no vocal end and fussing over the pristine crease in his pants and the fine leather gloves he held in his nervous hands. Severe clothes rationing, by the way, was still in force.

Selinger agreed to represent Peter, but it appears never to have been an exclusive arrangement, since Peter had at least one other agent knocking on doors for him at the time, and many others followed suit over the years, either in concert with or apart from Selinger. Still, it was Peter himself rather than his agents or his mother who landed the first audition at the BBC. He’d written to request an audition in January 1948, was granted one in February, and in March he appeared on British television on an amateur hour called New to You. The act consisted of impersonations and included this little jingle:

I’m glad you’ve heard my name—it’s Peter Sellers!

Peter Sellers can be gay as well as zealous!

And now it’s my due, from the program New to You,

As one of Britain’s up and coming fellas—perhaps.

He needed a writer. In any event, the bit survives only because Peter himself went out and bought a disk-cutting recorder, a rare and expensive machine for the consumer market, simply in order to memorialize the occasion of his BBC debut.

Peter did well enough on New to You, but he was not immediately skyrocketed into stardom, and he still needed to find any work he could. When the producer Hedley Claxton needed a straight man to appear with the comedian Reg Varney in his Gaytime revue, Peter auditioned. The final tryout came down to Peter and Benny Hill. Benny Hill won.

Peter set his sights, or rather his ears, back on the BBC—not television, which was still minimal in Britain, but radio. After all, he’d been listening to and mimicking BBC programming since childhood. Indeed, by this point he could have trademarked his ITMA routines had Tommy Handley himself not already done so. Besides Handley, Peter could do Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, and a host of precise but anonymous American travelogue announcers. His renditions of any number of other BBC powerhouses were flawless. And he could prove it.

The setup: In 1948, Kenneth Horne was the star of a hit radio show called Much Binding in the Marsh. Set on an RAF base, Much Binding was one of several war-themed comedy shows that were popular that year. The patrician-sounding Horne played the commanding officer; the chirpy-voiced Richard Murdoch played his assistant. Roy Speer was a successful BBC producer.

“I was pissed off—oh, excuse me!, fed up, right!—with getting nowhere fast,” Peter told Michael Parkinson on the BBC in 1974. “Roy Speer was doing this show called Show Time. The compère was Dick Bentley, and there were lots of new acts, you see? I’d written in I-don’t-know-how-many times