The Virtuoso: Dudley Moore

Dudley Moore was born on 19 April 1935. His feet were turned inward and throughout his childhood he had a series of operations to correct his "disability", but his club foot always remained and resulted in him being a target for bullies.

However, he also turned out to have a talent for music. By the age of eight he had learnt to play the organ and also sang in the local church choir. At the age of eleven he was awarded a scholarship to attend the Guildhall School of Music where in addition to honing his already prodigious organ and piano skills, he studied harpsichord, violin and musical theory and composition. every Saturday morning for seven years.

Moore went on to apply for music scholarships at both Oxford and Cambridge. He failed the interview at Cambridge due to nerves, but was accepted at Oxford to study organ. There he also joined the Oxford University Drama Society, a rather more serious group than Cambridge's Footlights, performing in productions of Orpheus In The Underworld, The Winter's Tale and Antony And Cleopatra. He wrote incidental music for a production of The Birds in which he also sang a parody of a western song in a comic falsetto, and for The Changeling, the first time he worked with John Bassett.

Bassett also led a jazz band, The Bassett Hounds, which played all manner of student functions, and invited Moore to join. Moore had little experience of playing jazz, but was a fan of the music and a quick study, and swiftly became one of the band's key players. One man who recognised his talent was Johnny Dankworth, who played at a Magdalen College Ball in June 1958. After Dankworth's band had finished its set, Moore took to the piano and played a selection of jazz pieces, plus a pastiche of Beethoven. Both Dankworth and his singer wife Cleo Laine were impressed, and it was Dankworth who provided Moore with the tip-off that bandleader Vic Lewis was currently seeking a pianist. Moore, who had just completed his course, duly auditioned for Lewis and spent a while touring with the Lewis orchestra, both at home and in the USA - during which time he also managed to write music for the OUDS' production of Coriolanus, posted in batches from America.

With the winding-up of the Vic Lewis Orchestra in 1959, Moore joined Johnny Dankworth's band, becoming a featured soloist, and formed the first version of the Dudley Moore Trio. In addition, he made some tentative steps into cabaret, forming a partnership with Cambridge graduate Joe Melia (later a member of the replacement cast of Beyond the Fringe) called - ho ho! - The Moore The Melia.

When John Bassett needed an Oxford graduate for The Oxbridge Revue, Moore was an obvious choice. Asked to recommend another Oxford alumnus to make up the numbers, Moore suggested Alan Bennett. The two had occasionally appeared on the same bill at Oxford cabaret evenings, but until then didn't really know each other.

The Outsider: Alan Bennett

The oldest of the four, Alan Bennett was the one who never quite fitted in. Bennett was born on 9 May 1934 in the northern industrial city of Leeds, but where Dudley Moore turned his working class roots into a kind of everyman classlessness, Bennett's working class roots have informed his entire career.

Bennett's schooldays seem to have given little indication of his future career path. He was an able scholar but was rejected from Leeds Grammar School after failing Religious Studies. Despite this, he was very religious in his youth, though he would later speak of "regretting the blighted years when I went [to Bible class] Sunday after Sunday".

Bennett was the only member of the Beyond The Fringe cast to do national service (Cook and Moore were both rejected on medical grounds, and as a trainee doctor Miller was exempt). He spent this training to be a Russian translator, and appeared in "mess room cabarets" with Michael Frayn, who in addition to becoming a successful novelist and playwright in his own right, also put his linguistic skills to use by publishing a number of translations of Russian plays. Among the sketches performed by Bennett in these revues was a monologue in the character of a priest, a precursor to one of the most famous routines in Beyond the Fringe.

Following national service, Bennett went up to Exeter College, Oxford, to study history. While there he enjoyed the informal "smoking concerts" at which students performed for their peers, though it took a couple of years before Bennett, encouraged by his friend and future TV host Russell Harty, began to actually take part. Bennett's turns were evidently much enjoyed by his fellow students, and included not only the mock sermons which were becoming his speciality (he would also perform them impromptu in the Exeter College Junior Common Room) but also take-offs of the Queen and various eccentric characters. However this was very much a sideline, and unlike Moore he was not interested in the various societies which might have provided an outlet for his talents. Bennett admitted later, " I had no theatrical ambitions. I might have acted a bit, but I was overawed by the people who did."

Bennett stayed on at Cambridge after graduation in 1957, becoming a junior lecturer (apparently popular with students due to his down-to-earth personality, but seemingly rather poor at the actual job) and continuing to take part in "smokers" throughout his post-grad years. The highlight of his university performing career came in 1959, when he appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe in the Oxford Theatre Group revue Better Late. Bennett's sermon was not included, but on the final night he arranged with the technicians to let him perform it anyway. It brought the house down. Twelve months later he would be back in Edinburgh, but this time it would not be on the fringe.

The Comic: Jonathan Miller

John Bassett's first pick from Cambridge was Jonathan Miller, a graduate of St John's College, Cambridge. Jonathan's father, Emanuel Miller, was a noted neurologist and psychologist who had himself studied at Cambridge and was taught moral science by Bertrand Russell, a figure who would eventually be lampooned in one of Jonathan's Beyond the Fringe monologues.

Miller, born 21 July 1934, began his performing career while at school. Together with a friend called Michael Bacharach he had appeared in a BBC Radio programme called Under Twenty Parade (they were both 19 atthe time) which aspired to be a showcase for the talent of the future. Miller and Bacharach performed a quickfire routine parodying radio presentation.

Despite his ability as a performer and writer, Miller was never a member of the legendary Cambridge Footlights Society.  This did not stop him from being recruited by then Footlights President Leslie Bricusse to appear in the 1954 Footlights Revue, Out of the Blue. A resounding success, Out of the Blue was the first Footlights revue since the war to transfer to the West End, running for three weeks at the Phoenix Theatre in July 1954. Miller contributed two items: a reworking of his radio spoof, now titled "Radio Page", and a mock-travelogue about Australia called "Down Under". The show garnered good reviews, and Miller himself was singled out for particular praise, especially by Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times.
 
Miller went on to appear in the 1955 revue Between the Lines as well, and delivered a monologue mocking his father's old tutor, Bertrand Russell. More enthusiastic reviews followed, including one in the Daily Telegraph which dubbed Miller "the Danny Kaye of Cambridge", an epithet that rather rankled with Miller despite his own admiration of the star. Miller also took advantage of the summer break to take a part in a radio programme called The Man From Paranoia, and appear in late-night cabaret with fellow Between the Lines star Rory McEwan. Most spectacularly, he took up an invitation to appear on the wildly popular ITV variety show Sunday Night At The London Palladium, on which - in defiance of the show's determinedly populist outlook - he performed his Bertrand Russell monologue.

Miller remained devoted to his studies, and still saw his future in medicine, not comedy. Nevertheless he would still keep his hand in with various performances over the three years he spent as a post-graduate student at University College, London. In 1957 he was invited to do a regular spot on the current affairs show Tonight, which only lasted a few weeks, and a more successful spot on the radio show Saturday Night on the Light. He was also a hit in several college revues. When he was approached by John Bassett to appear in The Oxbridge Revue (Bassett turning up at University College Hospital in the middle of a shift to find Miller with a surgical dressing in his hand), it was on the understanding that it would be a temporary summer job. Little did either man suspect that it would become much more than that.

The Genius: Peter Cook

Born on 17 November 1937, Peter Cook was the youngest member of the Beyond the Fringe team, and the only one who was still an undergraduate when recruited for the show (his finals came during rehearals for the show). Despite this, he was also the only "professional" entertainer among them, insofar as he already had an agent and had written material for Kenneth Williams.

The son of a diplomat, Cook was expected to follow in his father's footsteps and at one time looked set for a career in the Foreign Office. But comic writing was also one of his traits, and inspired by The Goon Show, he began to submit items to Punch while still a schoolboy at Radley Hall. He also wrote the words for a school musical, Black and White Blues, about a Salvation Army band attempting to convert African natives (which he would later describe as "diabolical... it had a hideously naive premise and was really quite appalling"), as well as a play about Martians landing in surburbia and various sketches for school revues. He was academically successful at Radley and became a prefect mainly by default, though his independent spirit still showed in his refusal to administer beatings (having once himself been caned by then-prefect and future cricketer Ted Dexter for the offence of drinking cider at Henley Regatta). At the end of his time at Radley, he left with a glowing report speaking of "qualities - not least a certain elusiveness - which should render him a most useful member of the Foreign Service". Cook himself, in the space on the report card marked "Plans for the future", wrote "BBC, Films, TV Sherry". Tongue was firmly in cheek, yet this would prove a somewhat more accurate accurate vision of the future than that mapped out for him by his teachers and family.

He was excused national service on medical grounds (namely a childhood allergy to feathers, which apparently renders a man quite incapable of military work) and took a year out before university, during which he travelled to France and Germany. In the latter, he visited a number of satirical nightclubs and though he found them fairly tame, it became an ambition to open something similar in London - an ambition which would be fulfilled thanks in part to the success of Beyond the Fringe.

Going up to Cambridge in October 1957, Cook was initially too timid to audition for Footlights but achieved a dramatic triumph in his first year when he was cast opposite Eleanor Bron in John Bird's undergraduate production of NF Simpson's "theatre of the absurd" play, A Resounding Tinkle - a play thought by its own author to be unstageable. As a result, Bird was offered the post of assistant director at the Royal Court Theatre, and Cook was finally persuaded to audition for Footlights. He performed a monologue based on a porter at Radley named Boylett who would say bizarre things in a dull monotone - a characterisation which would eventually develop into E. L. Wisty. He was accepted with enthusiasm by Footlights president Adrian Slade and invited to contribute to the 1959 revue, The Last Laugh, which would again be directed by the now-professional John Bird.

The Last Laugh was something quite different to previous Footlights revues. Satirical in intent, the show revolved around the theme of nuclear disarmament - though many of the individual items were rather shoehorned in. Cook appeared in 13 of the 28 numbers, writing or co-writing 10 of them, and like Jonathan Miller four years earlier, he stole the show. Despite a poor first night, when the show dragged out to four and a half hours, it soon found its feet and gained an admiring review by Alistair Cooke in the Manchester Guardian. A version of the revue later appeared in Oxford under the title Here Is The News, but impresario Willie Donaldson changed not just the title but much of the content (it was shorn of all of Cook's material - which is to say that it lost almost all of what made it a success in the first place) and the entire cast. It never reached London, and Donaldson always insisted that if it had, it would be Here Is The News, and not Beyond The Fringe, which would have marked the start of the satire boom.

Despite all this comedic activity, Cook did take his studies seriously, but ended up with only a lower second in Modern Languages, below the expected level for consideration by the Foreign Office. However, by then he was well on the way to being a full-time comedy writer. He contributed about half the material to a West End revue starring Kenneth Williams, Pieces of Eight (much of the remainder was written by Harold Pinter, who to Cook's bemusement was already peppering his material with meaningful pauses - which, since sketch writers were paid by the minute, Cook referred to as "pay pauses"). During his last year at Cambridge Cook appeared in a Pembroke College revue, Something Borrowed, and characteristically his contribution to the script, though small, included one of the most memorable items - a sketch titled "Leg Too Few" about a one-legged man auditioning for the part of Tarzan. This would reappear in the Cook-directed Footlights revue, Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, during the summer term. By then, Cook already had his next job lined up - back in January, he had been invited by Bassett, on Miller's recommendation, to appear in Beyond the Fringe. Cook's agent Donald Langdon advised him not to do it, since working with three "amateurs" could be seen as a backwards step. When Cook decided to press ahead, Langdon was at least able to negotiate a pay rise for Cook - from the £100 the other performers were getting, to £110. Which, once Langdon's 10% commission was deducted, left Cook with £99. Said a bemused Cook in later years, "I didn't listen to him much after that."

Read on... Part 3: Steppes in the right direction