Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [55]
What’s striking about Sir Jervis Fruit, though, is that while he makes Quentin Crisp look like a rugby player, Peter invests him with the same core dignity he lends all of his most flamboyant creations. He believes in Fruit. There’s no contempt or derision. Like Crystal Jollibottom, Sir Jervis would be a delightful tablemate at a dinner party. The same can’t be said, say, for Spike’s moronic Eccles, who, toward the end of The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn, gets the chance to perform the Dance of the Seven Veils in drag before a captivated Peter. It is an unnerving spectacle.
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Because Peter’s star was rising higher and higher, he was booked to appear on any number of television specials: The Billy Cotton Band Show, Six Five Special, Don’t Spare the Horses, the third of three specials called Secombe Here!, and others. He was supposed to be on Jack Benny in London, too. He was great in rehearsals. In fact, he may have been a little too great, for Benny took the show’s producer aside and told him that he thought Peter’s line deliveries and timing were so similar to his own that Peter’s appearance would be detrimental to the show as a whole, and so, perhaps, they should let him go.
As the comedian Steve Allen points out in regard to this incident, Benny and Sellers “were not at all alike in their natural manner of speech.” Perhaps Benny felt Sellers was upstaging him. Either that or Peter’s routine included a devilish impersonation of Benny, and Benny felt that one of him was enough on his own British television special. In any event, they paid off Peter’s contract and sent him home in disappointment.
For Peter, the rejection stung, but it didn’t hurt his chances in the industry. Far from it. Peter starred in two of his own television specials that year, both called Eric Sykes Presents Peter Sellers.
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The Goon Show’s seventh series began in October, but even before it finished in March 1957, Peter had done yet another television series, not to mention his first appearance on North American TV. Because his contract with Associated-Rediffusion required four short television series and he’d done only three, he was obliged to star in one more despite Spike’s departure after Son of Fred. With Richard Lester having moved on to other work as well, he called on his friend and former Goonmate Michael Bentine. Bentine’s quarrels, after all, had been with Spike, not Peter. Bentine, in turn, brought in the Australian writer-performer David Nettheim, whom he’d met in Australia while working on the radio series Three’s a Crowd. But this time there would be no confusion or dispute as to Bentine’s creative role: On this show he was to be billed as “Creator.”
The result was Yes, It’s the Cathode-Ray Tube Show!, which enjoyed its surreal run on ITV from February 11 through March 18, 1957, six programs in all. It was Fred-like, but in a Bentine way: this time, the surreality was such that the show’s very title disintegrated over the course of the series. In a conceit worthy of both Tristan Tzara and Yoko Ono, one word fell off the title each week. By the last program it was a show called Yes.
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About this time, Peter took a brief trip to North America, his first. His journey to Toronto owed to his appearance on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Chrysler Show. He was booked to do his Richard III bit; Graham Stark accompanied him as the Duke of Clarence. For whatever reason, the show itself terrified Peter.
As Stark describes the scene in his memoirs, “large, well-dressed, cigar-toting Chrysler executives nervously prowled behind the cameras” all day during rehearsals, and Peter became increasingly upset. Moments before filming the scene, he looked at himself, all wigged and behumped, in his dressing room mirror and said in the voice of Laurence Olivier,