Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [54]
One (possibly apocryphal) Fred story involved a location shoot at a zoo, where unemployed actors were supposed to serve as understudies for animals on the animals’ days off. Graham Stark is said to have jumped into the sea lions’ tank and had great fun until one of the sea lions became aroused by the smell of his crotch. Stark appears to have survived the episode intact, but there were other tensions all around. Just before filming a Fred, Peter suffered a severe anxiety attack and attempted to alleviate it with half a bottle of brandy. He managed to speak his lines perfectly without slurring a word; it was his reaction time that suffered. The show was running eight minutes over schedule, which forced Dick Lester to cut the final sketch—not that anybody in the audience could tell the difference.
On another program Sellers and Stark were to sit on a park bench and enjoy an absurd conversation, gradually coming to realize that they are caught in a dream. The question was, whose dream was it? Lester planned to reveal the answer by tilting the camera down to a St. Bernard asleep under the bench. Rehearsals went fantastically well; the dog was a pro. But during the live performance it stood up and attempted to leave. It was leashed. With increasing annoyance, the dog began dragging scenery to the floor, including Sellers and Stark. Lester, frantic in the control booth, pleaded to the broadcast technicians to yank the show off the air. “We can’t,” was their reply. Lester had no choice. “Tell them to keep going! Tell them to ad-lib!” Sellers and Stark, evidently more professional than the dog, did exactly that—not that anyone in the audience could tell the difference.
Apart from his anxiety attack, Sellers’s offscreen emotional state was relatively normal, especially in comparison to Milligan, who is said by this point to have been sedated much of the time. The combination of Milligan’s tenuous emotional state and the increasingly radical absurdity of his comedy style led ITV to grow more and more nervous during the run of Son of Fred, and at the end of eight weeks the executives pulled the plug. There were no plans to spawn Fred’s grandchild. As for Spike, he had to wait eight years before returning to British television with Milligan’s Wake.
• • •
Peter and Spike returned to the movies. Together with their friend Dick Emery, Peter and Spike filmed a half-hour comedy quickie at the Merton Park Studios in deepest southwest London. The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn, scripted by the film’s producers with help from Spike, Peter, and Larry Stephens, was directed by Joseph Sterling, but more important, it was filmed (as the title sequence tells us) “in the wonder of SchizophrenoScope, the new split-screen.”
Compared to any of the Freds it’s tame stuff, but The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn does have its moments. Peter plays a trenchcoat and mustache–clad Scotland Yard inspector investigating the theft of the rare eponymous instrument, a twisted contraption said to be the only one in existence except for the identical twin kept in the storage room. Spike is his assistant, Brown, and the night watchman, White; White is Eccles under another name. Emery is the museum’s curator:
EMERY: We had a robbery last night.
SELLERS: A robbery? Anything stolen?
Back at Scotland Yard, a rock comes crashing through the window. There’s a note attached, etc.
Henry Crun shows up as the doddering owner of a pawn shop; Minnie shrieks offscreen. A much more fetching Peter turns up lounging on a chaise under a heavily pomaded platinum wig and a satin smoking jacket, languidly drawing from a cigarette holder. Sir Jervis Fruit was hardly the first screaming queen in Peter’s repertoire; footage of an early cabaret performance shows him mincing hand on hip across the stage. And one