Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [51]
All the while, as Sir Alec remembered, Peter had been playing with his recorder. As the production neared its end in late summer, he showed up with his own limited-edition work of audio art—a spoof trailer for The Ladykillers in which Peter played not only all the central characters’ roles but also the voice of Sandy Mackendrick giving directions. He handed out the recordings as gifts, and they were a hit. Danny Green was amused to hear himself trying out important line readings (“I’m stayin’ with Ma! I’m stayin’ with Ma! I’m stayin’ with Ma!”). Guinness, Lom, and Cecil Parker were respectfully skewered as well. So was Katie Johnson. “It sounded exactly like all of us,” Herbert Lom declares, though other more critical listeners felt that Peter’s rendition of Mrs. Wilberforce bore a discomfiting similarity to Bluebottle.
It was then that Peter presented his critique of Mackendrick. Assuming a neutral narrator voice, Peter announced that listeners would now be offered “a brief glimpse of the brilliant technique of Alexander Mackendrick, director.” The clapper boy (Peter) barks, “Scene 5, take 73!” whereupon Peter, in blithering imitation of Peter, emits a string of rapid-fire gibberish, to which Mackendrick (Peter) responds, “Er, Peter—Peter—that’s, er . . . that’s very good. We’ll do another.”
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Herbert Lom remembers of Peter that “at the end of the film he came to me and said if I could help him get another film part. And he obviously wasn’t putting it on. He meant it. And I meant it when I said, ‘You won’t need my help.’ ”
The Ladykillers was released in December to rave if rather less than perceptive reviews: “The most stylish, inventive, and funniest British comedy of the year”; “captivating”; “accomplished and polished”; “lots of laughs”; “wonderfully funny.”
Typically, it took years before British film scholars pointed out what the reviewers had missed at the time. Neil Sinyard sees in The Ladykillers an “elderly, paralyzed, hallucinatory, hidebound England”; Roy Armes calls it “a black and surreal masterpiece.” Charles Barr reads the film marvelously as a political allegory: the gang of thieves as the postwar Labor government, who mask their radical plan to redistribute wealth by a cover of familiar, recorded classical music: “Their success is undermined by two factors, interacting: their own internecine quarrels, and the startling, paralyzing charisma of the ‘natural’ governing class.”
After The Ladykillers, Alexander Mackendrick left Ealing—and England—and moved to Hollywood, where he made the beautifully rancid The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and was fired from his next two pictures. He didn’t make another movie for six years.
Peter, meanwhile, found himself with no other film offers and turned instead to television.
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While watching TV one evening in December 1955, Peter found himself unusually entertained, so the following day he placed a call to the show’s director. As Richard Lester later reported the conversation, “A voice said, ‘You don’t know me, but I saw your show last night. Either that was the worst show that British television has so far produced, or I think you’re onto something.’ ” Sellers and Lester met, quickly hit it off, and decided to make TV’s answer to The Goon Show. It would not be the radio Goons televised. It would be Goonavision, a radical rethinking of visual comedy in the video age.
Idiot Weekly, Price 2d premiered on February 24, 1956. (2d is two pence, or tuppence.) Notably, Idiot Weekly didn’t appear on the BBC; it was produced independently by Associated-Rediffusion and broadcast on the less hidebound ITV. Still, ITV had its limits. Idiot Weekly