Not only funny, but also magical

10 April 2012

I first met Dudley Moore more than 40 years ago. After leaving Oxford, he spent a while playing the piano in the Johnny Dankworth orchestra, and, in 1960, he appeared in a television show I'd co-written.

He had only one line to say, and he delivered it perfectly. After the show he said goodbye to me, and disappeared off to the Edinburgh Festival to appear alongside three of his friends in a little show called Beyond the Fringe.

A few years later, whilst working as producer/director for the BBC, I was asked to come up with an idea for a comedy show. I suggested a format to Dudley. With great originality, I wanted to call it The Dudley Moore Show. Dudley changed it to Not Only ...But Also. He also suggested we ask Peter Cook to join the programme.

The day before the pilot, I remarked to Dudley that the show didn't have a closing theme. Dudley reacted like a startled hare. "D'yeh know, McGrath. Yer absolutely right," he drawled, in an upper-class accent. I suggested we involve Peter in the song.

Virtually immediately, the performance that was to become Pete and Dud's trademark was created in front of me.

"That concludes our evening soiree for this evening, so ... Now is the time to say goodbye," Dudley sang falsetto. "Now is the time ... Yes! Yield a sigh ... Now is the time to wend our way." He began to sing in a high soprano voice: "Until we meet again ... some sunny day."

He fell off the piano stool, got to his knees and reached for the keyboard. "Goodbye, goodbye," he sang, "We're leaving you, tidley pom. Goodbye. We wish a fond goodbye!"

He finished on an impossibly high note. Silence. He looked at me. "Something like that?"

I nodded, weak with laughter. By that time I had abandoned all critical judgment. I was no longer the director. I was his audience.

The show became a series and went on to achieve cult status.

I'll always remember the sound Dudley made when he found something to be humorous. "Now that's funny!" he'd scream. Tears would flow from his eyes, he'd throw back his head and let out an ecstatic cackle.

When I watch the sketches from Not Only ... But Also now the thing that really strikes me is how good it was. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had a dynamic like Laurel and Hardy. They were magnificent together.

Dudley was a wonderful musician, sometimes he was even a little too wonderful. If he started playing during the rehearsals for Not Only ... But Also the entire cast would stop what they were doing and stand around the piano singing.

The show went out live and we didn't have long to rehearse before the audience turned up and we had to start filming, so it caused real problems. I begged him not to do it, but he would always sneak over to the piano and start playing.

I eventually realised that the only way we could get the rehearsals finished was to lock the piano until it was time for Dudley to play. I even had to make sure that the rest of the cast had been sent off for a cup of tea so that they didn't get drawn into a sing-along.

I worked with Dudley (and Peter) again in 1972, when I directed them in a stage show, Behind the Fridge, the title of which Dudley claimed came from an Italian waiter's misreading of their first success. The show ran successfully for more than a year at London's Cambridge Theatre (the largest we could get) and did equally well in the USA, where it was called Good Evening.

By this time, Peter had established his own tradition of being "tired and emotional", on opening nights and at the London first night the curtain went up forty-five minutes late because of his behaviour. Dudley, hysterical and laughing, got me to join him on stage in "mooning" the slow hand-clapping audience from behind the closed theatre curtain.

During the performance he was at his wits end guiding his befuddled partner through the show. (One theatre critic next day hailed Peter's performance as "magisterial" and Dudley's as "nervous".)

At the after-show party, Sean Connery observed: "A wee bit of trouble with half the cast, eh lads?"

After he and Peter split up, Dudley went to Los Angeles to think things over and play the piano in a club. It was during his time in the states that he went from being a star to being a superstar.

Peter's comment on this was: "Yes, I wish I'd been forced to learn an instrument as a child." He always felt a little irritated by Dudley's international success, but Dudley had a kind of drive that Peter didn't. He didn't want fame like Dudley.

There is something very special about some British comedians and comic actors. Charlie Chaplin, Peter Sellars, Bob Hope and Cary Grant all had it and so did Dudley. It's a kind of power to transfix people with humour and it is magical.

I lost touch with Dudley for a while but from time to time he'd call me and chat and I went along to a couple of his concerts at the Festival Hall.

The last time I saw him was at Peter Cook's funeral, where we chatted and reminisced about old times. By that time Dudley's illness was starting to affect him, but he was still well enough, if a little frustrated.

The last time I saw him on top form was a couple of years earlier when we had Christmas lunch together.

Dudley, who once presented my wife Peta and I with six bottles of 1961 Cheval Blanc, (and helped us to drink them), watched me just about finish a bottle of Echezaux on my own.

As I prepared to pour the last of the wine into my glass, he picked up another and held it out, allowing me to pour half an inch of wine into it. "Happy Christmas," he said and then drained the glass. He pretended to choke. "Send this back immediately!" he spluttered. "It's far too good."

As indeed was dear Dudley.

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