Peter Cook: A Biography by Thompson Harry

Author:Thompson, Harry [Thompson, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781444717839
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2011-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

We’re Always Ready to be Jolted Out of Our Seats, Here at the BBC

Pete and Dud, 1964–67

In 1964 a conscious decision was taken by BBC Light Entertainment to make Dudley Moore a TV star; he was charming, he was funny, and what was more important to a department with both feet planted firmly in fifties notions of ‘variety’, he was musically talented. His versatility had been given a thorough work-out on the successful BBC2 music show Offbeat, in which he played no fewer than seventeen roles, from the ‘Seven Singing Viennese Sisters’ to a man who falls in love with his violin. Offscreen he seemed to play the TV star role to perfection, with a flat in Shepherd Market, a black Maserati Mistrale and a glamorous new girlfriend in the shape of the actress Shirley Anne Field. At the end of 1964 the BBC offered him a one-off pilot of his own forty-five-minute variety special, The Dudley Moore Show.

Around the same time Peter was finally saved from his enforced comedic exile by Bernard Braden, the Canadian humorist and broadcaster, whose weekly ATV show On the Braden Beat was drawing a substantial audience on Saturday nights. Braden had been an admirer of Peter’s material since the Footlights show put on for the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, and did not like seeing talent languish. He offered Peter four trial weekly slots to appear as the miner character from Beyond the Fringe. The name Mr Grole having fallen into disuse during the Fringe years, Peter rechristened him E. L. Wisty. The character was an instant hit with the viewers, and quickly captured the national imagination; his nasal drone was soon being imitated in pubs and offices across Britain just as it had been at Radley and Cambridge. The trial period was extended into a permanent, open-ended commission.

Wisty was tailor-made for television, perched motionless on a park bench, dressed in shabby raincoat and sombre black hat, transfixing the camera with a glazed stare as he held forth with surreal ignorance. Every Wednesday evening, the night before recording, Peter would spend five hours conversing with his tape recorder in the Wisty persona, before filleting and condensing the results:

It there’s one thing I can’t bear, it’s when hundreds of old men come creeping in through the window in the middle of the night and throw all manner of garbage all over me. I can’t bear that. I think that’s unbearable. Ghastly old men, with great pails of garbage, throw vld be Braing it all over me.

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