Monotonal cod philosopher Pete and deferential sidekick Dud deliver an archetypal dialogue in the reptile house at the zoo. This is one of the so-called “Dagenham dialogues”, featuring “Pete and Dud”, popularised on the show Not Only…But Also, first aired in 1965.
Coming out of the heady iconoclastic success of the satirical stage revue, Beyond the Fringe, Dudley Moore embarked on what was originally intended to be a solo project, Not Only Dudley Moore, But Also His Guests. However, having invited Peter Cook to appear with him in the pilot, the success of their double act quickly led to Cook joining the show permanently.
The dialogues between the flat-capped comedy creations from Dagenham presented Peter Cook with the opportunity to ad-lib and creatively explore the myriad comic possibilities of his character. His ability to sustain long periods of straight-faced comic ramblings that oftentimes bring Moore to the brink of corpsing hilarity, adds a wonderful comic tension to the dialogues. Ever alert to Moore’s struggle to stay in character, Cook enjoys ramping up the comic surreality in order to crack Dud up.
The duo’s relationship was always a bit edgy, but their partnership fell apart during the marathon tour of their two-man show Behind the Fridge, in the early seventies, and they never worked together on a regular basis again, save for some albums and shows featuring the less-than-edifying “Derek and Clive” characters. A flawed bromance they may have been but it’s preferable to remember the good times, and at times those good times were comedically sublime.
The Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) was a series of wars between England and France involving England’s claim to the French throne. In the campaign of 1415, England’s Henry V sailed for France and besieged the fortress at Harfleur, capturing it in September. The English army then marched across the French countryside towards Calais, only to be intercepted by the French army near the village of Azincourt. Henry’s troops were exhausted, hungry, sick, demoralised, and pitiably outnumbered (according to some estimates, by some 36000 to 9000 troops).
It didn’t look good. Henry needed to rouse his men for battle like never before, and he gave them a speech which not only roused them, but spurred them to a victory that would resound throughout the ages as the famous Battle of Agincourt. It was the morning of October 25th (St Crispin’s Day).
That Henry’s speech occurred is agreed by historians to be a factual event. However, it was left to the creative imagination of William Shakespeare, two hundred years later, to envisage Henry’s words and compose the über-galvanising “St Crispin’s Day Speech” that has come down to us in his play, Henry V.
What a speech! If anything could get you up and off to face the French, it’s surely inspirational words such as these:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today who sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother… …gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here And hold their manhoods cheap…
Laurence Olivier famously delivered this call to arms in the 1944 film of the play, made as a morale-booster for the war effort. However, for me there is no better delivery than this mesmerising performance by Kenneth Branagh in the 1989 version. Watch this, and allow yourself to be fired up, but please resist the temptation to hit a Frenchman!
PS almost certainly apocryphal, but a great story nonetheless, is the claim that, in the real life speech, Henry V told his men that the French had boasted that they would cut off two fingers from the right hand of every archer, so that he could never draw a longbow again. After the battle, English archers were showing French captives those fingers as if saying “See – my fingers are still here”. This is now known as the “V” for victory gesture!
In the 1930s, a group of British filmmakers, led by John Grierson, under the aegis of the GPO Film Unit, was behind an influential output of documentary films that became known as the British Documentary Film Movement. Of the films it produced, the best known and most critically acclaimed was Harry Watt’s and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936), featuring music by Benjamin Britten and poetry by W H Auden. Auden wrote his poem especially for the documentary, which follows the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland. The poem acts as a sort of verse commentary over the footage of the steam locomotive, and helped to establish the documentary as something of a classic.
Auden’s language is ingenious; glorious use of metaphor and clever rhymes, four-beat lines rhythmically delivered to mimic the pumping of the rods and pistons of the locomotive. You can almost hear the train chugging along. The personified train is efficient, reliable, steadfast, trustworthy – there is a remit, after all, to sell the merits of the postal service, and Auden satisfies the spec. As the pace picks up to match the acceleration of the train, the rhymes become quick and punchy, and become internal rhymes (Letters of thanks, letters from banks) rather than line-end rhymes; a rapper’s delight.
And read along here:
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to the Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
Stanley Kubrick’s blackest-of-black comedy film, Dr Strangelove, was conceived as a straight thriller, based on Peter George’s book about the threat of nuclear war, Red Alert. The director, however, increasingly found himself struck, during the writing process, by a persistent comedic thread that suggested itself and which eventually forced him to embrace and run with it. A good thing too…and there could have been no better way to run with this comedic element in the fledgling movie than to engage Peter Sellers’ services.
Kubrick had worked with Sellers on Lolita, and it was probably Sellers’ display of characterisation in that movie that motivated Columbia Pictures to insist on casting him in Dr Strangelove in multiple roles. Sellers plays three characters: US President, Merkin Muffley; wheelchair-bound, ingenious mad German scientist, Dr Strangelove; and – the subject of this blog post – British RAF exchange officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake.
The portrayal of Mandrake is a brilliant display of understated comedic acting. The slowly-dawning realisation that his commanding officer, General Ripper (himself brilliantly played by Sterling Hayden), has become unhinged and paranoid and has put in motion a seemingly unstoppable series of events that will culminate in nuclear conflagration; his desperation to extract from Ripper the “recall code” to bring back the nuclear bombers that are swiftly on their way to Russia; and his frantic efforts to contact the President and to avoid nuclear apocalypse when he finds he might hold the only key to do so…Sellers’ duty-bound and stiff-upper-lipped group captain is a performance of sheer genius.
There is such a plethora of superbly written and delivered lines that there are too many to single out. Take ten minutes to enjoy them all – as I guarantee you will – in this montage of Mandrake scenes.
Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE (1964). Credit: Sony Pictures. Playing 5/22-5/28.
Sergei Rachmaninoff’s second Piano Concerto in C Minor stands on its own as a masterpiece of the late Romantic period, but what a great idea it turned out to be, to pair it with David Lean’s classic love story of 1945, Brief Encounter.
It was Lean’s collaborator, producer Noël Coward, on whose one-act play the film was based, who insisted on the use of his favourite piece of music, despite there being a composer, Muir Mathieson, waiting in the wings to write an original score. With all due respect to Mathieson and however his score might have turned out, the use of Rachmaninoff, played by Australian pianist Eileen Joyce and the National Symphony Orchestra, raised the film’s emotional level sky-high.
The film is told in flashback, as the lead character of Laura (Celia Johnson) sits in her living room with her husband, staring into space, listening to the Second Concerto and thinking about her time with another man, Alec (Trevor Howard). She remembers the day they met, at the café in the train station. When a piece of grit gets in her eye, Alec, a doctor, removes it, and a bond starts between them, quickly developing into love as they embark on a series of clandestine assignations.
This love story is doomed, of course, as Laura is a married mother and we are deep in the territory of 1940s middle-class manners. Granted, the strait-jacketed morals and linguistic quirks of the times leave us in no doubt that the film is a period piece, but it rightly remains a hugely popular British movie.
The development, and inevitable demise, of the relationship is subtly underpinned by the repeating strains of Rachmaninoff’s music. The enduring popularity of his piece, meanwhile, is demonstrated by its consistently topping the Classic FM Hall of Fame, firmly securing its status as Britain’s favourite piece of classical music. Watch and listen to a pleasing montage of Brief Encounter to Rachmaninoff’s music below:
Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard
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