Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [52]
Peter was the star of the series, his most consistent character being the editor of a sleazy Victorian tabloid, the headlines of which served as lead-ins to comedy skits featuring Sellers, Spike, and Eric Sykes, along with Valentine Dyall, Graham Stark, Kenneth Connor, and Max Geldray. Spike Milligan wrote the scripts, along with a stabilizing—and very large—backup team that included Sykes, John Antrobus, Brad Ashton, Dick Barry, Dave Freeman, Ray Galton, John Junkin, Eric Merriman, Terry Nation, Lew Schwarz, Alan Simpson, and Johnny Speight. The comedy wasn’t simply manic and self-reflexive like The Goon Show. It was visually so, with purposely strange and ultramodern camerawork to match the vocal and narrative jokes.
There was, in addition, a severe but vitalizing risk involved. Idiot Weekly was broadcast live.
“The one thing we tried to do,” Lester later explained, “was to push the rather narrow bounds of television comedy. Spike and Peter were anxious not to fall into those traps.” What they wanted instead was “to produce material which was as visually anarchic and stimulating as their verbal work had been.” As with The Goon Show, Milligan was what Lester calls “the creative force,” Peter “the performer.” “I think Peter envied—in the best sense—Spike’s need to create. Peter was a wonderful adapter of other people’s ideas. He honed them and made them into something infinitely better than what they could have been. But in terms of raw creation, certainly, Spike was the creator of almost all the ideas that came up.”
Idiot Weekly, Price 2d ran for its allotted six weeks, whereupon a follow-up series, A Show Called Fred, blasted onscreen on five successive Wednesdays in May. It too, was recorded live from A-R’s studios at Wembley. Peter’s name was now above the title: “Peter Sellers in A Show Called Fred.” Spike, having made it through the creation of Idiot Weekly without going unhinged, now retained full control of the writing; the backup team was dropped. Still, A Show Called Fred’s broadcast range continued to be limited to Greater London.
Spike himself was productive; at this point it was only his writing that was unquestionably deranged, but it was deranged in an especially novel and exciting way. And it proved to be popular, striking a chord with the urbane public lucky enough to have been granted access to it. (Michael Balcon was right: England is a land of surface realism dotted with secretly crazed eccentrics.) To say that A Show Called Fred embraced the still relatively new medium of television fully is too mild a claim. It was Laugh-In and Monty Python a decade ahead.
One show featured a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde routine: Peter appears onscreen mixing potions in test tubes and declaring that he wishes to remove all his evil and leave only the good. He sloshes it down; the camera swings wildly back and forth; the image goes drastically in and out of focus. Peter reappears with ghastly makeup. “It went wrong! I’m evil!” He rushes to Hyde Park, attacks a woman, drags her into the bushes, and flings a rubber dummy around. The woman returns, delighted. “Oh you kinky thing!” Back at the lab, Dr. Jekyll asks his assistant (Graham Stark) to drive him home. Stark places a steering wheel against Peter’s forehead and steers him out.
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.