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“We never had any plan to distribute it when we made it,” Lester claims. “We were just friends who wanted to make a film to enjoy ourselves.” Nevertheless, the “just friends” were hungry, ambitious filmmakers. Peter quickly screened it for Herbert Kretzmer, the London television reviewer and fan of the Freds, who told him “You’ve got to show this around,” a supportive but redundant piece of advice, since that was what Peter was already doing.

They transferred their 16mm home movie to 35mm, had it sepia-toned (“daguerreotype pigment made from condensed yak’s breath,” according to Sellers), and got it into the Edinburgh Film Festival. A scout from the San Francisco Film Festival saw it, and the next thing anyone knew it was nominated for an Academy Award.

The category was Short Subject (Live Action). And since Peter was credited as the film’s producer, if The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film won the Oscar, the little man, naked and golden, would be his.

They were up against a French effort, The Golden Fish, produced by Jacques Cousteau: An Asian boy watches an old, big-nosed man wearing a long black coat and beard, win a beautiful goldfish. It swiftly hides from the evil old man under a rock. After breaking the boy’s milk bottle, the old man gives him a coin. The boy places a bet on the goldfish and wins. The Jew winds up with a crummy minnow. Obviously more heartwarming than The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, The Golden Fish won.

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In America, Frank Sinatra had had a hit album in 1955 called Songs for Swingin’ Lovers. In England in 1959, Peter Sellers recorded one of his own: Songs for Swingin’ Sellers. Sinatra’s album cover featured a dancing couple beaming into each other’s eyes. Peter’s featured a tree on the trunk of which hangs a wanted poster with Peter’s mug on it; from a high limb hangs a corpse wearing cowboy boots and spurs.

The album begins with a pseudo-Sinatra, an impersonation that even Peter Sellers could not do. Speaking as Sinatra might have been possible; duplicating that literally inimitable singing voice was not, so a crooner named Matt Monro was hired for the equivalent of about $50. Monro is credited on the album as Fred Flange.

The actress-comedienne Irene Handl recorded several of the cuts with Peter, including one that skewers BBC radio talk shows. But the highlights are Peter’s sniveling, ham-ridden rendition of “My Old Dutch,” the song his mother forced him to perform onstage in white tie and tails at age two, a fact that might explain why the contemporary version has a distinctly nasty edge. Then there’s a certain Mr. Banerjee’s production of My Fair Lady:

MR. BANERJEE: I am walking through the marketplace one day at Maharacheekee, which is near Bombay, and I am walking by there, and I am saying to my friend, who is with me, “Look! There! Over there is a beautiful and untouchable girl!” And I am saying to her, “Come with me, my dear—I will make you touchable!”

Mr. Banerjee then sings a tabla and cymbals–filled version of Lerner and Loewe’s charming, already-a-chestnut song, “Would That Not Be Lovely” (“warm face, warm hands, warm foot”).

Songs for Swingin’ Sellers ends with “Peter Sellers Sings George Gershwin.” It goes like this: (chord) “George Ge-ersh-win!”

• • •

In September 1959, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan traveled to Balmoral to ask that Parliament be dissolved. Elizabeth II, always a gracious hostess, entertained her guest by showing a movie—I’m All Right, Jack (1959), starring Peter Sellers.

A social satire that reveals the one characteristic common to all the classes in Britain—strident self-interest—I’m All Right, Jack brought Peter such acclaim that the force of his performance successfully distorted the satire. As conceived, written, and directed, the film is a bitter attack on postwar British industrial paralysis, the class-based antagonism, particular to the 1950s, that the historian Arthur Marwick calls Britain’s “industrial cold war.” But as performed by Peter, Fred Kite, the martinet chief shop