TV Cream

TV: N is for...

Not Only… But Also…

"Time for some freeform jazz!" "Fuckwit" "I arrest you in the name of satirical comedy!" "*corpses*"

Much-loved, much-misquoted and, perhaps most importantly, much-wiped PETER COOK and DUDLEY MOORE comic cornerstone now so entrenched in the constantly repeated, never-bloody-changing ‘Story of British Comedy’ you might be forgiven for thinking the posh colonial dandy and the diminutive Dagenham sandwich enjoyer are overdue a dose of revisionism up their collective flue. And a lot of the stuff in the ‘what’s left of’ canon bears this out. ‘Quickfire’ NOBA was not. Many of the sketches, as was the style at the time, go on for bloody ages. Parodies of Greta Garbo and overwrought Shakespearean acting take up a third of the programme, producing a couple of cracking lines but surrounding them with reams of woolly faffing about. Cook’s children’s poetry and Moore’s ivory tinklings are all very well, but often as not belong in some other programme entirely. And even stuff that raises more grins per square inch, such as Le Tour Gastronomique de la Route Circulaire du Nord, are hardly the sort of groundbreaking stuff they’re often cracked up to be (that one in particular being Muir and Norden’s Balham – Gateway to the South sketch reheated over a rissole-encrusted gas ring).

But just when your enthusiasm is flagging, out come the macs, caps and pints of foaming nut-grey ale, and the balance of comedy gold is redressed. Yes, they’re all pretty much the same routine, yes they’ve been over-exposed by the clip show junta, yes David Bowie’s always doing the voice in interviews, but despite all this, the flatly whined dissection of back-of-bus nookie, nymphomaniac Hollywood starlets and – oh, yes – ‘ducks in the morning, ducks in the evening, ducks in the summertime’ somehow refuse to fall into the same pit of worn-out over-familiarity as your Hitler walks, Nazi-related name withholdings and near misses with wine bar furniture. To get deep into a top flight Pete ‘n’ Dud sketch (and you’ve got plenty of time – they go on for longer than anything) is to experience both brilliantly inventive, joyfully combative crosstalk comedy, and also some glimmer of that long-gone feeling of a truly nationally-shared telly experience, as if the rest of the country’s in the room, with maybe Princess Margaret chuckling away behind the pouffe. This is where the pair really excel – never mind the elaborate stunts with aircraft carriers, pare everything down to hats, coats, drinks and sod all else (even the pub set only half-exists) and let them get on with it, and you’ve repaid the price of admission ten times over.

Poets Cornered - Milligan in the blue cornserAway from the well-trodden path, you’ve got the genuinely unpredictable father-son dialogues which combine great lines (‘Your mum worshipped the ground I walked on!’ ‘She worshipped the ground but she didn’t care for you, father.’) with weird twists (are those women hiding in cardboard boxes, or are they actually cardboard boxes themselves?) Then there’s the greatest mistimed musical parody ever in LS Bumblebee, a psychedelic song parody that was spot on sonically, but arrived at least a year too soon, with the result that the audience sits, for once, in mystified silence throughout, only chuckling politely when Dud obligingly points at his bum for a cheap laugh. And, forever turning up like a magnetically erased ghost at the feast of reminiscence, there’s Poets Cornered, the end-of-show I’m Sorry, Whose Clue is it Anyway? progenitor wherein Cook, Moore and guest star try and keep an improvised poem going under pain of being dunked in a pre-Crackerjack tank of gunge. Everyone who recalls this remembers it being screamingly funny, and inevitably not a second of it exists. Much like those after-dinner speeches of Cook’s that had everyone in fits but about which no-one recalls a single gag (‘something about a bee, I think…’) too much of this sort of talk can lead to suspicious looks from those who weren’t privy to the originals – a bit like that Leonardo cartoon, in fact. (‘I couldn’t see the bloody joke.’) But if you can put all that annoying Cookie Club in-crowdery to one side where it belongs, there remain enough specimens in the fossil record to give graduate comedy a good name. Probably Doreen, knowing those two.

8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. Arthur Nibble

    September 28, 2009 at 12:33 am

    “Are you enjoying that sandwich?”

    Poets Cornered – beating Tiswas by a good few years in the gunge stakes!

  2. Paul

    September 28, 2009 at 10:30 am

    They did a song about Alan-a-Dale, wearing Robin Hood hats who’s lyrics pretty much consisted of “Alan-a-Dale” repeated ad-nauseum. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

  3. Lee James Turnock

    May 1, 2010 at 12:36 pm

    “His R’s blew off”. (Cue Dudley pissing himself)

  4. Applemask

    December 3, 2013 at 2:18 pm

    Revisionism for its own sake is pointless self-indulgence that ultimately does no-one any good at all.

  5. Tom Ronson

    March 31, 2022 at 1:56 am

    The three Derek and Clive albums are among the finest comedy artefacts ever created by human minds, and each one is an embarrassment of riches. Even if Cook and Moore had just recorded those and nothing else, their place in history would be secure. It’s just a happy coincidence that they also left behind a load of fantastic telly, one almost perfect film (Bedazzled) and some treasurable talk show appearances. Truly, we shall never see their like again.

  6. Richardpd

    July 19, 2023 at 10:45 pm

    In spite of Pete & Dud’s best efforts the BBC managed to wipe a lot of NOBA.

    They seemed an odd couple both comedy-wise & their relationship was strained after Hollywood came calling for Dud & Pete had almost no chance to succeeding Stateside.

  7. Glenn Aylett

    July 22, 2023 at 10:05 am

    Sad to say, a lot of great shows were wiped or went missing in the sixties. Talk to any Doctor Who fan as many of the great black and white stories are no longer avaiable, and only six of the original Likely Lads episodes survive. Not Only But Also probably fell into the category of not really worth saving as someone probably thought the humour would have dated badly. There is one great sketch, which I don’t know if it’s been saved, where Pete and Dud fire a grand piano off an aircraft carrier.

  8. Richardpd

    July 22, 2023 at 12:00 pm

    I think they did a did a few things with pianos, like being winched into some water while playing one.

    Some of the Likely Lads turned up during an archive search in recent years, but many episode are still missing.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To Top