Beyond the Fringe

About 30 years ago, Boston's only classical music radio station used to offer a program (after its Saturday live broadcast of the Boston Symphony) that played lots of recorded British comedy, including excerpts from "Beyond the Fringe." It was from listening to that show every week that I got to learn by heart many of the routines from this legendary stage production that started the careers of Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. This DVD now provides an opportunity to see the quartet in action, and to realize just how brilliant they were, individually and as a team.

The great routines are still great. Peter Cook was a lost genius (lost, ultimately, to drink and dissipation), and his long monologue as the miner who didn't become a judge because he didn't have the Latin is a masterpiece - only in part because his deadpan stare at the audience remains unbroken even while he's speaking the most amazing nonsense. Dudley Moore, it turns out, was also something of a lost genius (lost, in his case, to Hollywood) - his musical interludes are extraordinarily accurate parodies of various classical music styles, including an eerie impersonation of Sir Peter Pears and a set of Beethovenian variations on "The Colonel Bogey March" that gets wildly out of hand.

Another masterpiece is Alan Bennett's vaporous, meandering sermon, which includes a pointless retelling of the time he and a friend went climbing to the top of a mountain, at which point "my friend very suddenly and very violently vomited. I sometimes think life's a lot like that." Jonathan Miller is the least proficient actor of the group - he mugs and gesticulates and mutters a little too much, and it's probably for the best that he gave up performing in favor of medicine and opera direction.

The video has a few technical faults, particularly in its sound, but the camera-work is good. For anyone even remotely interested in British comedy (and in seeing where Monty Python came from), this is a must.

We saw a tape (in glorious Black and White) of the Closing Night of Beyond The Fringe (1964) at the New York Museum of Television and Radio. There was a remark in the Website that the full tape of this show is lost or erased but this tape was 2 hours long.

Although the tape quality was not always good (especially the sound!) and the audience looked oddly wooden we so enjoyed seeing this. Dudley Moore was such a great Parodist and Musician. He does parodies of Brecht, Schubert and Britten (Britten's Little Miss Muffett was especially funny). How sad that both he and Peter Cook are now dead.

We also enjoyed seeing Alan Bennett again doing his bit as the Vicar giving a long rambling sermon based on Ezra "My brother is a hairy man but I am a smooth man..." Was this once once broadcast on PBS?

Could some industry executive PLEASE put this out on DVD as soon as possible!!! And while we're at it what about Bennett's Talking Heads? At present it is only available in the UK.

If you want to laugh then see this show. This is sketch comedy at its finest, as Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook riff on pretty much everything under the sun from religion, Philosophy, music, the end of the world and being a miner. Its a wild mix of nothing is sacred humor with a very clever edge.

If you want to trace the history of British comedy one would start with the music halls move on to the Goons stopping at this show before moving on to people like the Goodies, Monty Python and Eddie Izzard. These are the guys and this is the show that began, in part the draining of the colleges and setting them to work for places like the BBC. Python took the anarchic sketch comedy found here and welded the insanity of Spike Milligan and the Goons. If you need more proof consider that a good number of bits from this show ended up in the Secret Policemen's Balls that were staged by the members of Python for Amnesty International. They used the material because its funny.

Historical importance aside this is a very funny show. Certainly there are bits that have dated since it was first performed but on the whole the show remains relevant, and above all funny. If you like to laugh see this show.

8/10 but 0/10 for whoever wrote the bios on the DVD. In Alan Bennett's bio regarding "Talking Heads", the writer continually refers to "Thora Bird". If you've never heard of her, it's because he means Thora Hird. The DVD itself is a priceless time-capsule for fans of any satirical comedy that came after. Some of it is dated of course, but here are a few definite gems. Cook is by far the star of the show (as was recognized at the time). Moore is not given enough to do other than his masterful piano playing, Bennett shows the roots of his future droll comedy and Miller is a bit too over the top and the weakest performer of the four. The video quality suffers occasionally as does the sound track but not to any great extent. Watch out particularly for the old lady in the audience who never applauds. Perhaps the inspiration for the Pythons' old "pepperpots".

Sketch comedy has a long history – beginning in this country with vaudeville and burlesque, and in England with the music hall ("vaudeville isn't dead; it just moved to England"). In the States, radio and television continued the earlier traditions because the people who first moved to the new mediums were old vaudevillians. The line is clear from vaudeville to Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar (among others) to Saturday Night Live, Mad TV, and their contemporaries and successors.

In England, however, something happened in the middle of the last century that changed radically the course and character of the British comedy sketch. That "something" was "Beyond the Fringe". There the line travels to "At Last the 1948 Show" and its contemporaries, to Monty Python, and onward. Of course the mother country could scarcely fail to influence the colonies. After "The Kids in the Hall" influences tend to become confused and muddled. So today we will not move beyond "Beyond" – of which seminal production we luckily now have some wonderful remembrances in this recording of the final performance of the revue.

The writers and stars – indeed, the entire cast – of Fringe were Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore. They appear in this film uncannily resembling the Beatles at the start of their careers: wearing plain black suits. All of these talented gentlemen went on to considerable careers in stage and/or screen.

Bennett has thus far written or co-written 27 films and appeared in 31. He is the author of the brilliant film (and its stage-play source), "The Madness of King George".

Cook (deceased 1995) appeared in 44 films and wrote or co-wrote 17 – including the wonderful "Yellowbeard".

Miller has been active in all facets of film, including direction of a number of Shakespeare's plays and production of a number of operas.

Moore is the best-known of the quartet. He has appeared in roles in 49 films and TV series, and as himself in 58 others. He has composed 8 film scores, and so on. In Fringe his piano playing suggests talent of concert level, but the only way to be sure is to get his recording of the Grieg concerto.

In a certain way Dudley Moore is the star of this show that really has no star. He performs some of its best material on the piano. His parody of Dame Clara Haskell (the Wanda Landowska of her day, but on the piano) is to die for – but it will be lost on today's audience, most of whom won't know who Landowska was, much less Haskell. In any event, it's a minor event and not the best piano-related gibe. Moore does satires of art songs, of which the finest is a direct hit on Schubert, "Die Flabbergast". The best item has no singing: a fantasia on the March from "Bridge on the River Kwai" in the style of Beethoven. Assuming Moore wrote the piece, his wit is as unerring as his pianism.

Although Fringe had a core of material in more or less constant use, the show tended to mutate over time so that it consisted overall of about 40 or so segments. This version gives us 22 (+ 1 track that is not a sketch) . Among the best is "Aftermyth of War", a longish bit that has people reminiscing about WWII in an hilarious manner that must have seemed irreverent to the Brits, less than 20 years on. Of course, irreverence is the absolute hallmark of the best humor – and this revue is rife with it.

Another hugely funny bit is "Sitting on the Bench", a monologue I've heard in other venues, and often known as "The Coal Miner's Tale". Here a coal miner bemoans his inability to pass the test to become a judge and had to take the coal miner's test instead. "There's only one question, 'What is your name?' I got 75% on that." Some of the best lines, such as the miner's rumination on the absence of falling coal in courtrooms, are missing here.

At least one routine is not to be found on the DVD nor apparently on the available CDs. This concerns Britain being unable to use the U.S. Trident submarine and thus having no remote launch platforms for its nukes. One plan is to run at the Berlin Wall, put up ladders, climbing the ladders, and throwing the bombs over. But there are plenty of others, and the DVD is funny as the dickens.

Cultural references being what they are, a good many viewers will find many of the sketches "dated". This means that they choose to blame the messengers instead of their own limitations in understanding the messages. Still, you needn't have lived through World War II to get some good laughs from "Aftermyth of War". And the good news is, there's 116 minutes of it.

If you like this sort of thing, there's more on CD. The one to get is "Beyond the Fringe: Complete", which has 3 CDs. The others are single CDs, each of which offers a limited selection, mostly duplicating the DVD. The 3-CD set has 42 tracks, but there are some duplications so that the total of different ones is 38, including 14 not found on the DVD. Two sketches from the DVD aren't on the CDs ("T.E.Lawrence" and "Art Gallery Director"), so the total DVD + CDs = 40.

Don't miss this opportunity to experience the great tap-root of the wonderful Pythons.