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Peter screamed when he saw his disfigured Bentley Continental. Then he grabbed his son and dragged him upstairs, whipped him with a belt and sent him to bed hungry, took away all of his toys, and didn’t give them back for several months. “I thought he was going to kill him,” Spike Milligan said.

As totalitarian as Peg could be, hers was a tyranny of baby’s-breath-sucking love. She is never said to have hit her son and, given what has been said, it’s impossible to imagine. Rather than striking, she pampered. Peter’s rage toward Michael, uncontrollable and bordering on psychosis, was clearly of a different order, in one sense the flip side of Peg’s indulgence. Peter had a violent streak even as a child, as the incident involving him shoving his auntie into the roaring fireplace well demonstrates. And because Peg abhorred disciplining him for such outbursts of physical fury, he grew into manhood without several of the key inhibitions that sustain civilization, let alone a healthy family life. He excused himself anything. After all, he was Peter Sellers.

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The Peter Sellers Show, a comedy special written by Eric Sykes, aired on ITV in early February. The April 8th Show (Seven Days Early) appeared two months later on the BBC; Peter starred, with support from Graham Stark and David Lodge. There was a record, too—“The Best of Sellers.”

The Goon Show’s eighth series had been running since September 1957. In March 1958, an episode called “Tiddlywinks” aired. It was based on the real-life match that had occurred on March 2 between the Cambridge University tiddlywinks team on one side and the three Goons and Graham Stark on the other. The college boys had originally thrown their challenge to the Duke of Edinburgh, but the Duke, knowing of his son’s admiration for Sellers, Milligan, and Secombe, gallantly nominated them as his stand-ins. Although they did have the last laugh with their broadcast, the Goons lost the match itself by a lopsided score of 120 to 50.

But Peter Sellers had other winks to tiddle. He was making movies, superindustriously—two completed in 1958, another two started in 1958 and finished in 1959, three started and finished in 1959, and two started in 1959 and released in 1960.

He was working steadily (to say the least) and earning good money, and he still believed—with Dennis Selinger assenting—that he needed as much exposure as possible. Does it matter if some of these movies aren’t masterpieces?

Returning Peter to the drab territory of Orders Are Orders, Up the Creek (1958), directed by Val Guest, is a comedy about the British Navy. It’s both rum and bum. Having fired a homemade rocket through the bathroom window of an admiral (Wilfrid Hyde-White)—it homed in on a sudden rush of water—Lt. Fairweather (David Tomlinson) is exiled to a command in “the mothball fleet,” specifically H.M.S. Berkeley. The ship is virtually dry-docked in Suffolk, and in the absence of a commanding officer, the Berkeley’s shady bo’s’n, Chief Petty Officer Doherty (Peter), has turned it into a money-making operation for himself and the ship’s skeleton crew. Sellers’ bo’s’n is an Anglicized Sgt. Bilko from The Phil Silvers Show (which was then in its third hit season on American television). With Peter’s nasal, fast-talking Doherty keeping the books, the sailors tend chickens on deck, pigs in the cabins; they sell the eggs and bacon to the townspeople. They wash laundry in the boiler and deliver it directly to customers’ doors. There’s rum-running involved. And pork pies. Doherty has requisitioned paint, presumably for the Berkeley, and none of it remains:

FAIRWEATHER: Do you mean to tell me that you sold that, too?

DOHERTY: Well, we couldn’t very well give government property away.

Peter declined to appear in Val Guest’s hastily filmed sequel, Further Up the Creek (also 1958); they replaced him with Frankie Howerd. But he did show up for tom thumb (1958), based on the tale by the Brothers Grimm. A rustic and his wife, granted three wishes by the beautiful Queen of the