If you're middle-aged like me, Pete and Dud were always there, from the new dawn of 1963 when Cook almost single-handedly turned Supermac into Silly Old Mac, and we felt meritocratic Britain had arrived, to the cynical exploitative desperation of Derek and Clive 1976, after Python had run its course, and alternative vision looked just as wonky as all the other optical aberrations.
In between, Stars were real talents that burnt brightly and radiated electromagnetic energy. Miller was Renaissance man, Bennett the new literato, Cook debunker-in-chief and Frost the entrepreneur of a new Britain in a way that oddly pre-parodies New Labour as if Cook had written the ending. And Dud was Pete's mate.
As for America, who knows why Beyond the Fringe worked there: we learn nothing from this piece.
In fact we learn nothing much to form the setting I describe, which I think is what makes this film eery and sad, a portrait of a fading person rather than his timeless talent. Like all such men, Cook's contribution to the canon of British culture is more than the sordid banality of his flawed life, except in the realisation that such works have always demanded the time and pressure at the typewriter that breaks all but the most powerful personal bonds. Or that to be this much of a funny djinn maybe you do have to be vapid on the inside. Above all, I think the production should have followed Cook's own monochrome observation and started at the end. Sad lives that end chronologically in bathos, as most do, do not mean sad work. Vapid? Yes, Dud, I am a man who reads his reviews with the Thesaurus beside me. But I only fleetingly reveal my lack of relationship with my parents even to you.
I can't decide whether it's a flaw of the film. Surely you have to have been there to feel what it means? And surely that doesn't include the magnificent Ifans and McArdle, which makes our surrogate comics' contribution all the more stunning: they hadn't left the nursery long before Bo Derek gave Dud back the ego Pete had wrung from him. But I do wonder if "...but Always" in itself makes Cook accessible to a new generation, and perhaps that's a shame: it would have been easy enough to sew in two or three complete sketches so that we can gauge for ourselves how it works, after all the *writing* at least stands timeless, even if the performances and the man are gone.
As it is, we just had repeated, diminishing echos of MacMillan and the one-legged man, echos that mean something only to those who were there for big bang. Whilst this can make good art it also loses most of the potential audience and is therefore by definition elitist.
Speaking of elitist, Peter Cook was clearly as haughty and arrogant as any, but the Cook portrayed here is a snob of the worst kind to boot, and sneers at Moore and Bennett for being mere Grammar School boys, or is any ammunition acceptable? Well, lack of legs is, so perhaps none of it is as alternative as we might imagine. The Private Eye of Ingrams, Rushton and buddies, into which Cook fitted so deliciously, was only too willing to admit that, satirists or not, the new generation Establishment was merely reinventing itself, irreverent but irrevolute, and irrelevant if wildly entertaining.
Overall, this one could just run. Just because it tantalises, presents an image for the curious, leaves unanswered questions about the man's work for a new generation, portrays a dazzling spectacle of a person nearly in view, perhaps it will invite new interest in his writing and performance. Or perhaps there's nothing there but the ghost of a time long gone, by a savage critic also gone.
