Half the episodes of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s 1960’s sketch comedy series, Not Only… But Also were wiped by the BBC in order that the videotape stock might be used again. Doctor Who episodes, Spike Milligan’s Q5 series and many other significant moments of British television history were lost to this short sighted “penny-wise, pound-foolish” policy.
Thankfully, this classic sketch, “The Glidd of Glood” did survive. It’s one of my favorite, favorite things ever. This would be a great short to show before a screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Very much in the same vein and very, very funny.
John Lennon made three appearances on Not Only… But Also, the mid-1960s BBC sketch comedy show starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
Also seen here is British actor Norman Rossington, who was in A Hard Day’s Night and the first British “New Wave” film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with Albert Finney. You’ll also catch a glimpse of a young Diahann Carroll at the end.
Roger Mellie - the Man on the Telly first appeared as a cartoon strip in Viz magazine, a Derek ‘n’ Clive piss-take of more mainstream comics, set up by brothers Chris and Simon Donald in 1979. Like many of the Viz cartoon characters (Sid the Sexist, The Fat Slags), Roger Mellie was rude, obnoxious, foul-mouthed, sexist, racist with serious drink and drug issues. A CV like that today would make Mellie perfect TV fodder.
According to the ever reliable Wikipedia, Roger Mellie was:
Born Roger Edward Paul Mellie in 1937 in North Shields, Roger was educated at Fulchester Mixed Infants, Bartlepool Grammar School, and the Oxford Remand Centre. Roger was hopeless at school, and was bottom of the class for every subject. He began his broadcasting career as a cub reporter on the news with Robert Dougall and shot to fame doing genital mutilation routines at the London Palladium. He was soon recruited by Fulchester Television, and became a popular TV personality. He also established his own production company, MellieVision, and it snowballed from there. He now spends most nights in Acton, where he often stays at his favourite lap-dancing club until gone three in the morning. He now lives in Fulchester with his 17-year old Thai wife, and 15 Staffordshire Bull Terriers. Roger is quite a colourful character: He has had five past wives (Two of which were ‘accidentally’ murdered), is an undischarged bankrupt; a convicted rapist; a hopeless alcoholic; a right-wing bigot, and a recovering cocaine addict, among other things. On one occasion in 2006, while requiring a liver transplant (due to chronic alcoholism), Roger became a hit-and-run driver: he ran over and killed a motorcyclist without stopping, later receiving the dead man’s liver for himself, then celebrating the successful liver transplant with a booze-up at the nearest pub.
In 1991, Mellie made the jump from comic strip to TV series, with Peter Cook providing the voice to the foul-mouthed TV star and Harry Enfield as everyone else. It works in places, but like many of Cook’s straight acting roles, there is a sense that Mellie would have been better if Cook had improvised more. But then that would have been Peter Cook and not Roger Mellie - the Man on the Telly.
In the late 1970s, while Dudley Moore was off starting his career in Hollywood, Peter Cook entertained himself and a new generation of fans by hosting one of British TV’s first Punk Rock music shows, Revolver.
Produced for ATV by famed impresario, Mickey Most (best known for producing Herman’s Hermits, Suzi Quatro and Jeff Beck) Revolver had Cook introducing acts like Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Buzzcocks, The Jam, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, who all played live in front of a studio audience. There was also a twat of an in-house DJ, but the less said about him the better. Of course, there was the occasional roster of crap record company acts, but this was the 1970s, when there were only three TV channels in the UK, and the national anthem ended proceedings every night on two of them. It was a new style of program-making, chaotic, rude, funny and at times required viewing - as the BFI explains:
Revolver‘s most innovative element was designed to evoke the confrontational atmosphere associated with punk gigs. Peter Cook was invited to guest on the programme on the strength of the notorious Derek and Clive recordings, which shared with punk a kind of adolescent, deliberately puerile nihilism. In the guise of the seedy manager of the rundown nightclub rented out to the TV company, Cook would appear on a video screen, sneering at the acts and antagonising the studio audience. One guest, Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley, recalled Cook distributing porn magazines, which he encouraged audience members to hold up during sets to put off the bands. Not surprisingly, Cook’s contribution is better remembered than that of nominal host Les Ross.
For all its punk credentials, the show’s music policy was often bewildering - appearing alongside the likes of X-Ray Spex, Ian Dury and Siouxsie and the Banshees were Kate Bush, Lindisfarne, Bonnie Tyler and the avowedly anti-punk Dire Straits.
Revolver‘s engagingly chaotic presentation makes it perhaps an ancestor of Channel 4’s controversial The Word (1990-95), but in 1978 it drew critical derision and failed to impress ITV managers. Unpromoted and buried in a late night Friday slot (ironically the exact post-pub slot in which The Word thrived), the series was starved of an audience and was pulled after just seven editions.
Bonus clips of Siouxsie and the Banshess, The Jam, Ian Dury and The Buzzcocks, after the jump…
At least once a year, I find myself watching the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore version of Bedazzled, a film I find both uproarious and poignant in equal measures. Peter Cook, playing perhaps the most charming devil figure in cinematic history, strikes a deal with hapless fry cook Dudley Moore: seven wishes for Moore’s soul (seeking reentry into heaven, Cook’s working his way to a hundred billion of ‘em). The humor is dry (Cook walks in during a Moore suicide attempt and says, “I do hope this isn’t an awkward moment.”), the direction comes via Singin’ In The Rain‘s Stanley Donen.
The Cook-Moore comedy partnership started in England in the early ‘60s with Beyond The Fringe, and then went on to reach even greater absurdist heights with Not Only…But Also. Many of those early clips have migrated over to YouTube, but just today I stumbled across a Not Only… clip I’d never seen before (above), one claiming to be part of a “prize-winning documentary made for Idaho television.”
In it, Cook and Moore perform their faux Beatles diddy, “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” a song described by the 365 Days Project thusly:
The story goes that a few DJs played the record, “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” claiming that it was an unreleased Beatles’ track, or else an advance from their forthcoming, highly anticipated masterpiece “Sgt. Pepper’s.” True or not, the song managed to sneak its way on to several Beatles bootlegs throughout the 1970s, convincing many more that it was an authentic outtake.
In a letter from December of 1981, Moore offered a bit of insight: “Peter Cook and I recorded that song about the time when there was so much fuss about L.S.D., and when everybody thought that “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” was a reference to drugs. The exciting alternative offered to the world was L.S.B.!, and I wrote the music to, in some ways, satirize the Beach Boys rather than the Beatles. But I’m grateful if some small part of the world thinks that it may have been them, rather than us!”
But what really sticks with you is how perfectly this song captures the lollygaggery of the wondrous hippie fantasy machine that was the late 1960s. Its sparse instrumentation, with distant shimmering pianos, screaming babies, and jangly, seagull-like guitar effects set it apart from other psychedelic satires, but it goes further still. Its inviting lyric is more genuinely hallucinogenic than much of what has been labeled “psychedelic” throughout the years.
Don’t miss the “surprise” guest that pops up at the end. Below you can watch Peter Cook, whom Stephen Fry called “the funniest man who ever drew breath,” singing the Bedazzled theme song.
