The Edinbugh International Festival was first staged in 1947, its lofty aim being "to provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit" as Britain looked to the future after the second world war. Bringing together the finest performers from around the world, it was unashamedly highbrow, and a massive and immediate success. Even so, then as now it was overshadowed - nay, swamped - by the unofficial "Fringe" festival going on all around it. While the Festival presented serious and professional drama, ballet, opera and classical music, the Fringe contributed in its own way to the flowering of the human spirit with largely amateur experimental works, jazz and popular music, and comedy, much of it in the form of undergraduate revues.

Professional and cultured the Festival might have been, but "stuffy" was never the intention. In 1958, festival director Robert Ponsonby started down the path that would lead to Beyond the Fringe by engaging comic singer Anna Russell to perform a late-night cabaret at the Freemasons' Hall. "I always had a naughty corner in my mind," said Ponsonby, "and it seemed to me that we were a bit pompous and that late-night entertainment, which of course was flourishing on the Fringe, was something the Festival proper ought to be doing."

Anna Russell

Russell's comic "recitals" were a hit, and she was invited back to do another week at the larger Lyceum theatre the following year. For the second week of the festival, Ponsonby invited Flanders and Swann to perform their revue "At The Drop of a Hat", which in honour of the location was renamed "At The Drop of a Kilt" for the week.  At last the Festival proper was attracting some of the glory which had been diverted to the Fringe, and not a moment too soon. 1959 saw the establishment of the Festival Fringe Society, which provided a central  booking and promotional service, and published a guide to the attractions on offer. The Fringe, which had existed alongside the main festival ever since the first event in 1947, was already gaining as much attention as the Festival itself, and now it was getting organised as well.

It was not an easy job for the Festival proper to compete. Ponsonby had long been critical of the Edinburgh Festival Society's artistic policy, which he felt was preventing him from presenting truly experimental works. In October 1959, he resigned. His contract was due to run out on 31 March 1960, but he was persuaded to stay on for another six months and oversee the 1960 festival as well.

Flanders and Swann

With little to lose, Ponsonby's parting shot was to expand the late-night entertainment at the Lyceum to run for the entire three weeks of the festival. Louis Armstrong would perform in the first week, Les Freres Jacques (basically the french equivalent of Flanders and Swann) in the second, and Beatrice Lillie in the third. However, Ponsonby was left in the lurch when Armstrong could not get other bookings in the UK, since it would not be financially viable for him to come over from America solely for the festival. Ponsonby's assistant John Bassett was duly asked to come up with a replacement, and the two men agreed on an ingenious plan to play the Fringe at its own game - since university revues were one of the most popular features of the fringe, it might be time for the Festival proper to show its mettle by cherry-picking the best performers from Oxford and Cambridge for a more "professional" show. They even had a title for it... The Oxbridge Revue. The title, of course, would not last. And the talent recruited by Bassett was not undergraduate but (with one exception) graduate.

From The Observer, 13 December 1959

In fact, the process of casting could hardly have been more straightforward. The first two performers - one from Oxford, one from Cambridge - were easily chosen, as Bassett already knew and occasionally employed them to perform at private functions. They in turn recommended two fellow alumni, and the quartet was complete. There were no refusals, no substitutions, no drop-outs. Creating a world-beating comedy troupe? Easy!

Read on... Part 2: The Oxbridge Revue