The 90s may have been Naughty and the 20s Roaring, but no decade in history has ever been associated with a single adjective in quite the same way as the Swinging Sixties. But even so, nobody really believes it was all swinging. 1960 certainly wasn't, but two events in August of that year, though perhaps not that important in themsleves, were to plant the seeds for what was to come. At Bow Street Magistrates' Court on Friday 19 August, the summons was granted against Penguin Books which would lead to the obscenity trial over Lady Chatterley's Lover. And three days later, on Monday the 22nd, Beyond The Fringe made its debut at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. Nobody knew it yet, but slowly and surely, the sixties were starting to swing.

The Edinburgh production of Beyond the Fringe ran for just one week but was an unqualified success. Attendance during the week ran to 112% of the Lyceum's capacity, with extra standing rows crammed in against fire regulations. Cook's monologue in particular was a huge hit, and already his flair for improvisation was causing him the go wildly off-script, to the delight of audiences. Bennett later recalled that "Peter's monologue [was] scheduled to last five minutes or so but would often last for fifteen, when I would be handed an audience so weak from laughter I could do nothing with them." 

The national critics were more measured in their praise, but the response was largely positive. The anonymous critic in The Times said that "the comedy is ruled by a nice sense of proportion" while the Sunday Times' named counterpart Harold Hobson (who had, incidentally, picked out Dudley Moore as a talent worth watching after seeing him perform cabaret the previous year) suggested the show had "touches of irrational genius". The most effusive review came from Peter Lewis, a junior reporter for the Daily Mail: 

Behind this unpromising title lies what I believe can be described as the funniest, most intelligent, and most original revue to be staged in Britain for a very long time ... Disregarding all the jaded trimmings of conventional sketches, production numbers, dancing, and girls, they get down to the real business of intimate revue, which is satire and parody ... at their best - and this is almost all the 90 minutes - these four high priests of parody make most professional comedians look ham-handed and vulgar.
If the show comes to London I doubt if revue will ever be the same again.

Plans were indeed afoot to bring Beyond the Fringe to London. Donald Langdon may have originally advised Peter Cook not to do the show, but now he went to work on Cook's behalf, persuading impresario Willie Donaldson to invest in the show. Donaldson himself was surprised to be considered ("I think I assumed I wouldn't get it, because its reputation was enormous immediately. I'd just had this terrible flop, so I thought the last person they'd give it to anyway is this fool... ") and the cast were no less skeptical. Not only had Donaldson's last project, Here Is The News, been a disaster, but Miller and Bennett weren't even that keen on continuing with the show since both considered it a one-off diversion from their proper jobs. And even if they wanted to take the show to London, Donaldson hardly seemed the most qualified person to take them on. For one thing, he hadn't actually seen the show. For another, John Bassett was interested in taking the show to London himself, and as the guiding hand behind the show in the first place, he seemed an ideal choice.

However, despite the failure of This Is The News, Langdon (who besides Cook, also represented one of that show's stars, John Wells) had been impressed with Donaldson's handling of the show and was determined that his old friend should get the job.  If Bassett took on the show, then Langdon would (so he claimed) withdraw Cook from the production. In fact he had no right to do so, and even if he had advised Cook to pull out, it is unlikely that Cook would have done so - after all, had he taken Langdon's advice, Cook would never have joined the cast in the first place. Nevertheless  the threat worked. Bassett withdrew and was compensated with a 1% share of the profits from the West End production - not a fortune, but a steady £30 a week for several years. He received no profits from the subsequent Broadway version, but his connection with the success of Beyond The Fringe led to him being headhunted by BBC producer Ned Sherrin to work on Tonight and That Was The Week That Was.

Meanwhile Langdon also went to work on persuading the cast that any other impresario would meddle with the winning formula, whereas Donaldson would allow them to do the show their way.  After an intense spell of negotiation (according to Donaldson, possibly with a little exaggeration, "Langdon locked these four boys in a room. He persuaded them - it took him 24 hours - he shouted at them, and persuaded them that I was the only person in London fit to do this show, on the grounds that I was so stupid and inexperienced that I wouldn't fuck it up by hiring Fenella Fielding and a band and a set"), Langdon triumphed. Beyond The Fringe was on its way to London, and Willie Donaldson would produce.

It was not an entirely smooth ride, but Donaldson had learned a few lessons from the failure of Here Is The News and immediately secured the services of a professional director, Eleanor "Fiz" Fazan, whose previous experience included Bamber Gascoigne's Share My Lettuce, starring Kenneth Williams and Maggie Smith. Donaldson and Fazan went to see the group rehearsing in London - the first time either had seen the show - which came as something of a shock to Fazan. Donaldson had assured her that it would be an easy job as the show was a proven success in Edinburgh, but Fazan immediately realised that it was, at this stage, far from being West End material. Vast swathes of the script would have to be cut or re-written, much more material created to extend the one-hour show to a suitable length, and perhaps most difficult of all, their easy-going, rebellious and essentially amateur approach made more professional.  There would still be no dancing girls, but it was to be a big challenge. Fazan took it on at £20 a week. Initial writing sessions took place in her flat in Belgravia, and later at the Prince of Wales theatre - not in a proper rehearsal room, which Donaldson could ill afford, but in the bar outside of licensed hours.

The writing sessions were highly productive, though often somewhat combative. The four cast members all had their own ideas and their own material to put forward, and having little in common besides a university education, they were often fighting for their own material rather than pooling and collaborating. However, this cut-and-thrust atmosphere seemed to suit them, and despite some misgivings, particularly from Moore (according to Fazan, "He wanted everyone to be friends, everything to be jolly and fun. He was slightly afraid if it wasn't") a new, improved version of the show emerged from the melee. Many sketches from Edinburgh were dropped or heavily rewritten; into the former category fell Cook's brilliant parody of the TV "admag" Jim's Inn (later to appear, without Cook's permission, in That Was The Week That Was), while into the latter came a reworked version of the philosophers sketch "Words... and Things'', the focus of which changed drastically with the abandonment of the original domestic setting. However one thing that never changed was the closing stretch, with the Shakespeare skit So That's The Way You Like It followed by The End Of The World. This pairing remained the invariable conclusion to the show from the very first night in Edinburgh, all the way through the show's runs in London and New York.

The fab four

Donaldson realised that he alone could not carry the financial burden of the show, and persuaded theatre-owner Donald Albery to invest, using Fazan as a go-between.  Albery was an old-school producer who believed that producers and actors should not get too friendly, and was not liked by the cast, in addition to which Donaldson was so in awe of him that he found it hard to stand up for himself or the cast in the face of Albery's criticism. Upon seeing the show for the first time, Albery was as shocked as Fazan had been."The fair-haired one will have to go", Bennett recalled him saying. Fortunately he was somehow convinced (presumably by Fazan, whose role was now as much that of a diplomatic negotiator as theatrical director - though some reports suggest that on this occasion it was, for once, Donaldson who actually stood up for his boys) that this would be a mistake, and rehearsals continued apace.

Moore's profile enjoyed a timely boost on 26 February 1961, when he was profiled by the BBC-tv arts programme Monitor, as part of an edition which also profiled the up-and-coming composer Peter Maxwell Davies, who would likewise go on to bigger things. There was no mention of Beyond The Fringe, but one sequence did show him performing a variation of "And The Same To You" which ended with Moore and Cleo Laine performing skat vocals over a jazzy coda. 

Meanwhile, Beyond the Fringe's financial problems were not yet over. The production costs came to £8000, of which Albery had put up half. Donaldson still had to find the other half, and since the failure of This Is The News had left him essentially penniless, he sought further backing from producers John Gale and Peter Bridge, who between them put up £3000, and as sleeping partners would eventually see a handsome profit from their investment.

With Fazan keeping order, the writing sessions were phenomenally productive, producing around sixty new items of which about 35 were sent to the Lord Chamberlain for approval. Many of these appeared only in the Cambridge and Brighton try-outs and would be dropped by the time the show reached London. Items swiftly dropped from the running order included an amusing Jonathan Miller monologue on the subject of lunging and a two-hander featuring Miller and Cook in which the latter insists that the landscapes of John Constable are in fact heavily erotic nude portraits, which despite its rather one-joke nature can clearly be seen as a precursor to some of the later Pete 'n' Dud / Derek and Clive sketches.

Cook: You mustn't run away with the idea that Constable was a landscape painter. The thing that Constable really enjoyed was painting in the nude. The nude was Constable's life. Take "The Hay Wain" for example.
Miller: The Hay Wain is surely a landscape.
Cook: You cannot be more wrong. "The Hay Wain" was originally entitled "Passionate Breasts". To satisfy the stringest moral code of his day Constable was forced, much against his will, to fill in his breasts with a load of old hay. Behind the hay naked women are struggling to get out. It's the same with all his paintings. The painting has recently been cleaned at the National Gallery and the hay's away and the breasts stand out a mile.

Also included in the Cambridge show were a number of "quickies" or "blackout sketches", most of which did not make it to London. One was a rather unsubtle item about racism:

Miller: Excuse me, I am from the London School of Economics and I am looking for lodgings for students.
Bennett (dressed as landlady): I am sorry, I don't take coloured people, but don't think it's because of what the neighbours say. It's me, I'm prejudiced.

A sillier (and thus perhaps funnier) item was performed by a static Peter Cook:

Cook (sings): I'm dancing about in the nude, I'm dancing about in the nude, I'm dancing about in the nude, I'm dancing about...
Voice off: What absolute rubbish. You are fully clothed and you're standing stock still.
Cook: I am essentially a radio performer.

Other new material included the celebrated "Civil War" sketch - an anti-nuclear sketch rather more effective - and incidentally, more satirical - than the previous "Whose finger on what button" skit, Moore's brilliant mock-Schubert solo "duet", "Die Flabbergast", and the "Man Bites God" religious programme parody with Miller as a trendy vicar, very different to Bennett's old-fashioned vicar  but just as ridiculous. Cook's celebrated "One Leg Too Few" also made its first brief appearance on the running order, but was dropped before "Beyond The Fringe" reached London. In this instance the problem wasn't one of quality - the sketch was clearly one of the best items any of the team had yet written - but rather that the sketch could already be seen in the West End, as it was being performed nightly by Kenneth Williams in One Over The Eight, about half of which, including this sketch, was penned by Peter Cook. It would not be until Beyond The Fringe transferred to Broadway that Cook would have the opportunity to reclaim the sketch for himself. Ironically, Williams himself never liked the sketch - indeed, after the read-throughs the previous September, he complained in his diary of being "expected to salvage mediocre material". Unsuited to Williams' persona it might have been (and the recording on the "Pieces of Eight" LP is so misjudged that surely nobody could have picked it out as a classic in waiting), but mediocre it most certainly was not - its author, together with his most celebrated comic foil, would prove that beyond all reasonable doubt. But not just yet.

The preview week, at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, went swimmingly. A largely undergraduate audience welcomed the cast as returning heroes, and the cast in turn threw everything at them, trying out pretty much the entire complement of new sketches along with old favourites from the Edinburgh show. The first night went on for four hours, but the audience were having such a good time that they didn't mind. Among those in attendance were John Cleese, who later called it "the funniest show that I'd ever seen in my life", and  John Wood (later to be known as satirist John Fortune), who gave the show a rave write-up in the Cambridge Review, noting that because the cast wrote their own material (in contrast to traditional revue which had relied on outside gagsmiths), "they had the inuitive feel for it which inspires confidence and ultimate laughter". Critic Tom Bussman, writing in the Cambridge magazine Broadsheet, noted that show "rose to the level of satire", becoming the second reviewer (after Lewis) to use the "S" word about the show. It was a tag they would soon find themselves defined by and unable to shake off.

Under Brighton Pier

Brighton was a different story. As Cook had forecast the previous year, it was Aftermyth of War which caused the biggest storm. Brighton was not then the cosmopolitan town it is now, and the conservative locals who frequented the town's Theatre Royal did not take kindly to jokes about the second world war, even if they were really mocking the treatment of the war in films rather than the events themselves. An anonymous reviewer in the Brighton and Hove Herald reflected the general reaction of Brighton audiences to the show, dismissing the satirical efforts as having "as much sting as a blancmange" yet also clearly feeling stung by the Aftermyth of War sketch, declaring it "vaguely indecent for twenty-year-olds to be making fun of Battle of Britain pilots".

Donald Albery, who had been brought on board mainly because he owned a theatre, had long had misgivings about the content of Beyond the Fringe, and the Brighton audiences' reactions seemed to confirm his fears. While retaining his financial stake in the project, he decided against putting it on in one his own theatres, meaning that if the show was to reach the West End, it would need different accommodation. For a few days, it looked like the London run was off.

During the week in Brighton, London-based American producer Anna Deere Wiman turned up to see the show. Wiman was enjoying success in the West End with the revue And Another Thing starring  Bernard Cribbins, but that show was shortly due to take a break during which it would be refreshed with new material, leaving her on the lookout for a suitable replacement. Unfortunately, on the night she got somewhat drunk, took exception to parts of the performance and irritated not only the cast themselves but even the normally unflappable Fazan. Luckily her lawyer David Jacobs took a different view. He liked the show and though he didn't think it was a blockbuster, it would suit the intimate 432-seater Fortune Theatre well, and with the notoriety it had gained in Edinburgh it ought to run for a few weeks and turn a modest profit. It therefore came as a bit of a surprise when Beyond The Fringe became the hit of the season.

Read on... Part 5: Fortune and fame