Once Beyond The Fringe had established itself as a hit in the West End, talk of a Broadway production inevitably followed. But it was by no means certain that talk would turn into action. For one thing, and despite the success of the South African production, there was the eternal question of how well the show's British humour would travel, and how much would need to be changed for US audiences. For another, it wasn't at all certain that the cast would even want to do it. It would, after all, mean leaving a production which was still running very successfully in London for one which had the potential to flop badly. On the other hand, there were compensations, both financial and artistic. Besides a much-improved royalty rate on Broadway (and this on larger houses too), there was also the possibility of career advancement - Cook seeing the transfer as an opportunity to launch an American version of The Establishment, Dudley looking forward to the opportunity to get into the American jazz scene, and Miller thinking that it might open the door into theatre directing for him.

Two producers, David Merrick and Alexander H. Cohen, made rival bids for the show, and Cohen, with a proven track record in revue, won the tender. Cohen also made it clear that he was perfectly happy to run the show in its original form, unaltered for American audiences. As Miller put it, Americans would "get a sort of ethnic buzz out of little bits of limey eccentricity". For Cohen, there was a built-in snob value in presenting unprocessed English humour, and indeed he had done so very successfully with the even more quintessentially "English" Flanders and Swann. Cohen's faith in the show was all the more remarkable for the fact that he had first seen it at the worst possible time, during the pre-West End tryout in Brighton.

A replacement cast was readied to take over from the originators in London. Following his successful deputising for Dudley Moore the previous year, Robin Ray was now brought in to play the part full-time (though not before future Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams was considered and rejected), but the other three replacements were not so easy to choose. Donaldson's preferred candidates were David Frost (Cook), John Wells (Bennett) and Joe Melia (Miller), but the original cast retained a veto and nixed both Frost and Wells. Cook in particular took exception to the proposal of Frost, whom he felt to have deliberately stolen his style, mannerisms and even his material.  Witnesses report that Frost's cabaret act at the time was almost entirely ripped off from Cook, and he had been the prime mover behind that year's Footlights revue, titled I Thought I Saw It Move after one of Cook's catchphrases. With some justification, Cook dubbed Frost "the bubonic plagiarist" and retained a lifelong dislike of the man - though curiously it didn't stop him appearing on an early edition of Frost's daytime entertainment Through The Keyhole some years later. Ironically, had Frost gone into Beyond The Fringe then he might not have subsequently had the career he did, since it left him free to take up his starmaking TV role as anchor of That Was The Week That Was - though given the man's famous (or infamous) tenacity, one might reasonably suppose that Frost would have risen to stardom one way or another.

Another actor who was considered but never made it into the London cast was Nigel Hawthorne, who had been such a success in the South African production and thereby laid some of the groundwork for the original production to travel abroad. Hawthorne turned up to audition for Donaldson, only to discover that the original London cast were present as well. Starstruck and panicked, Hawthorne simply dried up.

Over in America, the British invasion had yet to get going, though an advance guard had been spotted in the form of Acker Bilk, the bowler-hatted Somerset clarinettist whose languid instrumental "Stranger On The Shore" became the first British record of the modern era to reach number one on the US Hot Hundred  singles chart  when it topped the listings at the end of May 1962. Twenty months later would come the Beatles, and behind them a torrent of transatlantic talent. In between came the creators of Beyond The Fringe.

Arriving in New York on 28 August 1962 on board the luxury liner, the France - a journey which bored the quartet immensely - Bennett, Cook, Miller and Moore embarked on a brief and enthusiastically-received (not to mention highly profitable) pre-Broadway tour beginning on 6 September and taking in Washington DC, Toronto and Boston, finally arriving in New York where a series of preview performances preceeded the official opening at the John Golden Theatre on Saturday 27 October 1962. It was an inauspicious date - a period in the calendar when theatre box office sales were at their lowest, and to make matters worse (very much worse), it was the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when all of Beyond The Fringe's jokes about the bomb seemed all too horribly real. Supposedly, Bennett hid under a table in Moore's apartment on the first night of the crisis. He may as well have climbed into a paper bag.

There were, inevitably, a few minor changes to the show, but they were concerned not so much with appealing to US audiences as with keeping the material fresh and up to date. Miller took the opportunity to revive his ancient send-up of Bertrand Russell, while mention of  the Cuban Missile Crisis slipped into Bennett's Boring Old Man monologue and Cook's Macmillan impersonation.  But by and large the show was the same as that seen in London, and producer Alexander H Cohen was proved absolutely correct in his belief that New Yorkers would love the sheer Englishness of it all. Crucially, the revue retained its intimate feel; although the John Golden had a capacity of 800, compared to the 432 of the Fortune, it was still one of the smallest venues on Broadway. It was a long way from home, but it felt right.

As in London a year earlier, so in New York the great and the good flocked to see the show. Bette Davis, Charles Boyer and that doyen of Englishness Noel Coward all turned up to watch the performance and meet the cast.

Critics, too, were ecstatic. The anonymous reviewer for the New York Times suggested that readers seeing the show would be "shaking so hard with laughter that you'll forget momentarily to tremble with fear", while the New York World Telegram enthused "Nothing so far this season on Broadway had made you laugh so hard or so often. If only American comedians could be so devastating."

The show was a huge success, and the cast were doing well out of it, raking in £750 each per week, plus a share of six per cent of the takings. And the money was just the start, as all four principals had their own projects to pursue Stateside. Miller, who still saw his future as laying in medicine, secured a part-time research placement in neuropsychiatry at Manhattan's Mount Sinai hospital.  Bennett announced he was devoting his spare time to writing a book about Richard II (it never appeared) while Moore did, as he had intended all along, explore the world of American jazz - though like Bennett's book, his other side-project, completing a musical he had started writing back in the UK, never reached completion.

Meanwhile Peter Cook had a concrete plan and put it into action. With The Establishment a roaring success in London, Cook wanted to expand his operations into the USA. And he did, launching a New York branch on 23 January 1963. As in London, Moore happily played jazz with his band in the basement. On 7 February, Jackie Kennedy turned up to see the show (and turned up at the club fairly regularly afterwards), and three days later took the president himself to see Beyond The Fringe,  an occasion which, in a case of truth being even stranger than sketch comedy, necessitated the installation of a special telephone backstage just in case the President needed to authorise a nuclear strike during the interval. Bennett, ever the innocent abroad, ended up talking not to the president but in complete ignorance to one of his security team instead. As if to demonstrate his eternal outsider status, he had previously turned down the opportunity to dine at the White House because he felt would be too shy to enjoy the event.

On 25 April 1963, Beyond The Fringe added to its trophy cabinet with a special award from the New York Drama Critics Circle.  Just three days later, the cast recieved another special prize at the Tony Awards, "for their brilliance which has shattered all the old concepts of comedy". It might be argued that this citation was a little bit over the top, but nevertheless, the fact that it had to be given a special award at all underlines what an unusual success it was, a show whose revue format made it effectively uncategorisable, yet whose quality and success could scarcely be overlooked.

The success of The Establishment led to possibilities for both Cook and Miller, respectively writing (with John Bird) and directing a one-off half-hour TV show based on it, titled What's Going On Here?, aired on 12 May 1963. A moderate success, it led to the threesome being offered a regular slot on The Ed Sullivan Show.  Unfortunately, what appeared to be a golden opportunity proved to be somewhat less so, since then as now US television was conservative to the point of paranoia. In the first programme, one skit mentioned Maryland. Sullivan told them to take it out to avoid offending anyone from the state in question. The slot featured for two episodes but it was apparent that the Brits and the Americans had very different ideas of what satire entailed. Eventually the Brits were paid off.

Back in the UK, the satire boom was moving on apace, and doing so without Cook. The BBC had launched the first really successful satirical TV show, That Was The Week That Was (ITV contractor Associated-Rediffusion had already dabbled in satire with the short-lived What The People Want, which failed to live up to its title), and it was terrible news for Cook; firstly because it had drawn most of his staff away from Private Eye, and secondly, and more bitingly, because the frontman - a role for which Cook would have appeared the natural choice, had he been available - was "the bubonic plagiarist" himself, David Frost. On Saturday nights, when Beyond The Fringe played twice, Cook would be on the phone between houses, hearing which of his sketches and ideas had been ripped off on TW3 that week.

That summer, the quartet - together with some friends and colleagues - took a few days off and rented a country house in Fairfield, Connecticut, where they could just lounge by the pool and take it easy. Their sojourn coincided with the arrival in the US of David Frost himself, who, networking as ever, invited himself along. Peter Cook, somewhat against his better judgement, agreed to Frost visiting them, and upon Frost's arrival suggested he join them in the pool. Frost agreed, and although - unknown to Cook - he couldn't swim, with typical bravado he plunged straight into the deep end, where he immediately started to struggle. It was left to Cook, a strong swimmer, to come to his rival's aid. He later remarked acidly that he thought Frost had been "making a satirical attack on drowning", but he was surely only half-joking when he said that rescuing Frost from drowning was the one sincere regret of his life.

That four performers who had initially had little in common beyond a university education and a talent for comedy stuck together for the best part of four years is quite remarkable, but they were never a particularly close-knit group, and it was only their common stake in the project, rather than actual personal friendship, that held them together. Indeed, it seems surprising that they didn't fall apart much sooner. Bennett had disagreements with Miller and Moore, and disliked the others' attempts to make him "corpse", particularly in the Shakespeare skit. Cook too annoying Miller with his ad-libs. On one occasion Miller's wife Rachel was watching from the wings with the couple's newborn baby. Cook took the baby and carried it on stage in the middle of the "Words... And Things" sketch, adopting the manner of a butler: "Excuse me sir, but your wife's just delievered this, sir, and I wondered what I should do with it." To which Miller replied "Oh, bung it in the fridge". It was an inspired piece of ad-libbing which worked in the context of the sketch, but Miller was furious. To make matters worse, his stammer, which he had overcome years earlier, started to return. Miller decided to leave the show.

On 8 January 1964, a revised version of Beyond The Fringe opened on Broadway. Replacing Miller was Paxton Whitehead, who had appeared in a touring version of the show the previous summer andho went on to a solid if not spectacular career as a supporting player on American TV. The New York Times critic declared that Whitehead "reminds you of a man who isn't there", which was harsh but fair. Listening to the recordings, it is apparent that Whitehead approached the role as a very precise impersonation of Miller, giving a performance which is actually quite impressive as an impersonation - but which leaves no room for the performer's own personality to come out.

Meanwhile, the show itself was revamped to include some new items, and now at last an American flavour, or flavor, started to creep in. In place of "Steppes In The Right Direction" - which dated right back to the first Edinburgh show - came "Home Thoughts From Abroad", based on the premise of Moore going to America for the first time.

Moore: Isn't there a very serious colour problem over there?
Cook: Yes there is, Buffy, but you won't have any difficulty. There are a lot of coloured people about, I did notice that.
Bennett: I think there is a danger though of seein the colour problem simply in terms of black and white.
Cook: It's a lot more complicated than that.
Moore: I gather the negroes are sweeping the country.
Whitehead: They are. It's one of the few jobs they can get.

The three remaining original performers all provided new solo spots. Moore's new solo spot was "The Ballad Of Gangster Joe", a pastiche of the Brecht-Weill songwriting style, and effectively the American cousin to the earlier Britten parody. Bennett contributed an amusing if somewhat low-key monologue titled "The English Way Of Death" about a family scattering the ashes of a deceased relative. The 1964 Broadway cast recording reveals an audience utterly baffled by this, partly due to the subject matter, partly due to the fact that there aren't many actual jokes in it, and partly, one suspects, because Bennett chose to deliver it in his normal Yorkshire accent. Regardless of an American audience's (lack of) response to it, the piece stands up very well today and is an obvious antecedent of Bennett's more acclaimed later monologues.

Cook, meanwhile, got to show off his abilities in two of the best-loved sketches from the entire run. One was "One Leg Too Few", dropped from the British show after the pre-West End tryouts, while the other was completely new. "The Great Train Robbery", despite its topical sheen, was really an excuse for Cook to indulge in wordplay and absurd leaps of logic.

Bennett: Who do you think may have perpetrated this awful crime?
Cook: We believe this to be the work of thieves, and I'll tell you why. The whole pattern is extremely reminiscent of past robberies where we have found thieves to be involved – the tell-tale loss of property, that's one of the signs we look for, the snatching away of the money substances – it all points to thieves.
Bennett: So you feel thieves are responsible?
Cook: Good heavens, no! I feel that thieves are totally irresponsible. They're a ghastly group of people, snatching your money away from you...
Bennett: I appreciate that, Sir Arthur, but...
Cook: You may appreciate it, but most people don't. I'm sorry, I can't agree with you. If you appreciate having your money snatched, you must be a rather odd fish.

The show had been refreshed, but the cast had had enough. First Bennett, then Cook, quit  and returned to England (Bennett taking a sojourn on the Isle of Man until April and the end of the tax year), Cook leaving the US Establishment in the hands of business partner David Balding (the show itself ran for another year, though a spin-off company devoted to straight theatre ran successfully into the 1970s). By 19 April, only Dudley Moore remained of the original cast. The show closed on 30 May after 667 performances, whereupon Moore returned to the UK, where he immediately launched straight back into the jazz scene, and hosted the BBC TV series Offbeat.

During the two years the creators of Beyond The Fringe had been in America, the "British invasion" had come about, Beatlemania had spread from the UK, and even that most British of icons, James Bond, had made his film debut. But now it was time to move on.

Read on... Part 8: Now is the end