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4 unusual facts about Beyond the Fringe


Beyond the Fringe

The show broke new ground with Peter Cook's impression of then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan; on one occasion, this was performed with Macmillan in the audience, and Cook added an ad lib ridiculing Macmillan for turning up to watch.

Without it, there might not have been either That Was the Week That Was or Private Eye magazine, which originated at the same time, and that partially survived due to financial support from Peter Cook, and served as the model for the later American Spy Magazine.

Humiliation of authority was something only previously delved into in The Goon Show and, arguably, Hancock's Half Hour, with such parliamentarians as Sir Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan coming under special scrutiny — although the BBC were predisposed to frowning upon it.

John Bassett, Wadham College, Oxford graduate and assistant to Ponsonby, recommended jazz band mate and rising cabaret talent Dudley Moore, who in turn recommended Alan Bennett, who had been a hit at Edinburgh a few years before.


Not Only But Always

Focusing primarily on Cook, the film traces the pair from their first meeting through their career as part of the Beyond the Fringe review, their television series Not Only... But Also (from which the film takes its title) and various other projects before their later estrangement as Moore became a successful Hollywood film star and Cook remained in the UK.

Pete and Dud: Come Again

Pete and Dud: Come Again is a stage play about British Beyond the Fringe comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, which was written by Chris Bartlett and Nick Awde.

William Donaldson

He established himself as a central player in the United Kingdom satire boom of the early 1960s as co-producer, with Donald Albery, of Beyond the Fringe (1960), and of dramatisations of J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man (1959) and Spike Milligan's The Bed-Sitting Room (1963).


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