Rent Best of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: Not Only But Also (2003)

"Superthunderstingcar is GO!" - Best of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: Not Only But Also review by Count Otto Black

This disc is a mixed bag of sketches from a comedy duo nowadays remembered mainly for their appallingly foul-mouthed alter egos Derek and Clive (not featured on this DVD), but who were absolutely huge back in the day, dominating the cutting edge of British comedy in the decade between the disbanding of the Goons and the rise of the Pythons. Unfortunately this was the era when the BBC, in its infinite wisdom, used to wipe master tapes to save money and storage space, so a great deal of their television work has been lost forever, and this is supposedly the best of what's left.

I say "supposedly" because some of the sketches are odd choices. Whoever wrote the General Info obviously didn't bother to watch the disc and mentioned Peter Cook's very popular upper-class twit character Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling on the assumption that he'd surely be included in a compilation like this. But he isn't, so you'll look in vain for "Frog & Peach", or the sketch about teaching ravens to fly underwater. Instead we get a version of "Bo Duddley" which is nowhere near as good as the one on "Derek & Clive Live" because they couldn't go that far on television, a weird portrayal of Beethoven as a pop star which looks like an outtake from "Lisztomania" but seems more concerned with showcasing Dud's genuine musical talent than being funny (though it's worth it for the sight of Pete's Wordsworth surrounded by very sixties dancing daffodils), and a spoof of British arthouse cinema which goes on far too long and won't be properly appreciated by anyone who hasn't seen "The Lion In Winter", a film the general public would have been much more familiar with 50 years ago than they are now.

However, we do get several of the legendary Dagenham Dialogues, including the first, in which these two dim-witted nonentities somehow convince themselves that they're being stalked by rampant hordes of the sexiest women in Hollywood, and the most quotable, "Art Gallery", which spawned the once-popular meme "that could confuse a stupid person". Though I wish they'd left out the clip of them trying to recreate the old magic 20 years on, in which it's painfully obvious they don't like each other very much.

We also get a merciless and therefore hilarious spoof of "Thunderbirds" which might well be the high point of the disc, and "The Glidd Of Glood", a bizarre fairy tale left over from Peter Cook's abandoned attempt to write a book for small children, which looks like a clip from an early Terry Gilliam film shot in a parallel universe where he realised that "Jabberwocky" had a lousy script and made this movie instead. I wish he had. And if you can still remember who Greta Garbo was, Pete's savage parody of the Swedish Siren is both very funny and slightly scary, as his comedy characters often were. If he was doing his drag act today, he'd be the perfect deranged gal pal for Pauline Calf.

Several "Best Of..." compilations put out by different companies exist for this series, all of which feature the same obvious choices and an apparently random selection of other material, but this is a perfectly decent greatest hits album where the ratio of genuinely superb to not-so-great comedy is pretty good, and there's nothing terrible, apart from a thankfully brief sketch that isn't from the original series and shouldn't be on this disc. Otherwise it's a fine introduction to the legacy of two comedy greats who aren't quite as well remembered nowadays as they should be. I'd give it three and a half stars if this site's rating system wasn't too clumsy to allow such fine tuning, but when they're at their best, Pete & Dud are so good I have to award them four stars rather than three.