Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [53]
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