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to try to get in on the show. No reply. The secretary said that Mr. Speer ‘blah barumpfh hmpf.’ So I’ve got nothing to lose, and I thought, well, I’ll phone up. We were doing these impersonations, and one of the big shows on the air was Much Binding in the Marsh with Kenneth Horn and Dickie Murdoch. I just thought I’d do it. You know, you do things at certain times. You’ve got to get ahead! You’ve got to [car noise] vrummmmm! So I thought if I stay here I’m dead, [and] even if he kicks my ass out of there it doesn’t matter as long as I make some impression. So I phone up, and . . . I thought if I click with the secretary, I’ll get through, right? So, I said [deep, resonant voice], ‘Oh, hello hmmm, this is hmmm Ken Horn. Is Roy there?’ Once she said, ‘Oh, yes he is, Ken,’ I knew that I was alright. So, I got on there and Roy said, ‘Hallo, Ken! How are you?’ I said, ‘Listen, Roy, I’m phoning up because I know that new show you’ve got on—what is it, Show Time or something? Dickie and I were at a cabaret the other night and saw an amazing young fellow called Peter . . . Dickie, what’s his name?’ [High-pitched twit voice:] ‘Uh, Peter Sellers! Sellers!’ [Resonant voice again] ‘Anyway, it could probably be very good if you probably had him in the show, you know. This is just a tip, a little tip.’ He said, ‘Well that’s very nice of you.’ And then he came to the crunch, and I said, ‘Uh . . . I, uh . . . It’s me, it’s Peter Sellers talking and this was the only way I could get to you and would you give me a date on your show?’

“He said, ‘You cheeky young sod! What do you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I obviously do impersonations.’ ”

Speer was correct. Peter Sellers was a cheeky young sod. In other words, he was a natural comedian whose intense insecurity was armored by the hide of a pachyderm. The child who’d gotten whatever he wanted had become an ambitious twenty-two-year-old man who wrote the letters and made the phone calls and white-knuckled his way through one wretched audition after another in pursuit of the blazing career he was convinced he was ordained to have. After his period of postwar malaise, the young Peter Sellers became exceedingly persistent in seeking work that would showcase his enormous talent, and he offended people all along the way.

The piano player at the Windmill found him pushy. A disgruntled Freemason claims that Peter joined the peculiar group in the late 1940s, became an unrepentant social climber, and broke the sacred covenant of secrecy—the code words and wacky handshakes and all the rest. “He bandied the phrases and signals about at the BBC,” the bitter Mason reports. By doing so, he continues, Peter greatly embarrassed the good but gullible Masons who had sponsored him in the first place.

Spike Milligan offered a more empathic explanation for his friend’s peculiarities. Peter, Milligan once said, “was just a nice, very quiet, and very complex simpleton. He was the most complex simpleton in the world.”

• • •

The BBC broadcast Peter’s Show Time program on July 1, 1948. A little over a week later, Leslie Ayre, the radio critic for the London Evening News, gave Peter his first postwar review. It was a very good one with one highly quotable nugget: “In Peter Sellers, radio brings us another really conscientious and excellent artist.” An overjoyed Peg framed the whole review and kept it on the wall for the rest of her life. Dennis Selinger did something more practical: He had it reproduced as a three-column ad and ran it in the trades, complete with a glamorous-looking head shot of the suddenly rising young star, the new master of funny voices.

The ad, the review, Selinger’s phone calls, and most of all Peter’s performances rapidly earned him a slew of variety show bookings and cabaret engagements, not to mention more radio show appearances. Over the course of the next twelve months, Sellers and his proliferating voices turned up on the BBC on Workers’ Playtime, Variety Band Box, Ray’s a Laugh, Petticoat Lane, and Third Division. The seamless flow of dissociation his multiple characters produced was