Monday, March 29, 2010

The Absolutely Wonderful Peter Cook & Dudley Moore



One of the most splendorous discoveries of THE FUTURIST!'s recent viewing activities was watching a DVD of collected episodes of NOT ONLY ... BUT ALSO starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. As a THE YOUNG FUTURIST!, he saw a very funny film entitled THE WRONG BOX. The motion picture was based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story about family greed. The film starred Michael Caine, John Mills, Peter Sellers and the wickedly funny Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. It was at this time, THE FUTURIST! became entranced by this comedy duo. It took years and years, but finally a compilation was made of their comedy show from the 60s which lasted into the early 70s. Not many of the episodes are available due to the BBC having criminally erased most of the show's recorded tapes. THE FUTURIST! has written about their great film BEDAZZLED in an earlier post. Peter Cook has to be one of the funniest, most profoundly dry comedians in THE FUTURIST!'s memory. His characterizations are side splitting and the odd tall and small coupling of Cook and Dudley Moore was genius. Every time you see them together in one of their skits, you tend to believe they were entirely improvised; their comedy timing was magic. THE FUTURIST! regrets many things and one is that he was never able to see these two live on stage. When you watch their TV program, you can see how they influenced many other comedians, especially the MONTY PYTHON crew.

3 comments:

christian said...

Absolutely brilliant. These two should be far more celebrated. BEDAZZLED is easily the best comedy of the 1960's as far as I'm concerned.

THE FUTURIST! said...

Christian:

Truly, it is a great comedy of the 60s. And they wrote it, starred in it and Moore wrote the score.

Dara said...

"We're going to groove it... the whole night long... baby."