Beyond the Fringe (1963)

British sketch comedy at its finest

Sketch comedy has a long history - beginning in this country with vaudeville and burlesque, and in England with the music hall ("vaudeville isn't dead; it just moved to England"). In the States, radio and television continued the earlier traditions because the people who first moved to the new mediums were old vaudevillians. The line is clear from vaudeville to Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar (among others) to Saturday Night Live, Mad TV, and their contemporaries and successors.

In England, however, something happened in the middle of the last century that changed radically the course and character of the British comedy sketch. That "something" was "Beyond the Fringe". There the line travels to "At Last the 1948 Show" and its contemporaries, to Monty Python, and onward. Of course the mother country could scarcely fail to influence the colonies. After "The Kids in the Hall" influences tend to become confused and muddled. So today we will not move beyond "Beyond" - of which seminal production we luckily now have some wonderful remembrances in this recording of the final performance of the revue.

The writers and stars - indeed, the entire cast - of Fringe were Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore. They appear in this film uncannily resembling the Beatles at the start of their careers: wearing plain black suits. All of these talented gentlemen went on to considerable careers in stage and/or screen.

Bennett has thus far written or co-written 27 films and appeared in 31. He is the author of the brilliant film (and its stage-play source), "The Madness of King George".

Cook (deceased 1995) appeared in 44 films and wrote or co-wrote 17 - including the wonderful "Yellowbeard".

Miller has been active in all facets of film, including direction of a number of Shakespeare's plays and production of a number of operas.

Moore is the best-known of the quartet. He has appeared in roles in 49 films and TV series, and as himself in 58 others. He has composed 8 film scores, and so on. In Fringe his piano playing suggests talent of concert level, but the only way to be sure is to get his recording of the Grieg concerto.

In a certain way Dudley Moore is the star of this show that really has no star. He performs some of its best material on the piano. His parody of Dame Clara Haskell (the Wanda Landowska of her day, but on the piano) is to die for - but it will be lost on today's audience, most of whom won't know who Landowska was, much less Haskell. In any event, it's a minor event and not the best piano-related gibe. Moore does satires of art songs, of which the finest is a direct hit on Schubert, "Die Flabbergast". The best item has no singing: a fantasia on the March from "Bridge on the River Kwai" in the style of Beethoven. Assuming Moore wrote the piece, his wit is as unerring as his pianism.

Although Fringe had a core of material in more or less constant use, the show tended to mutate over time so that it consisted overall of about 40 or so segments. This version gives us 22 (+ 1 track that is not a sketch) . Among the best is "Aftermyth of War", a longish bit that has people reminiscing about WWII in an hilarious manner that must have seemed irreverent to the Brits, less than 20 years on. Of course, irreverence is the absolute hallmark of the best humor - and this revue is rife with it.

Another hugely funny bit is "Sitting on the Bench", a monologue I've heard in other venues, and often known as "The Coal Miner's Tale". Here a coal miner bemoans his inability to pass the test to become a judge and had to take the coal miner's test instead. "There's only one question, `What is your name?' I got 75% on that." Some of the best lines, such as the miner's rumination on the absence of falling coal in courtrooms, are missing here.

At least one routine is not to be found on the DVD nor apparently on the available CDs. This concerns Britain being unable to use the U.S. Trident submarine and thus having no remote launch platforms for its nukes. One plan is to run at the Berlin Wall, put up ladders, climbing the ladders, and throwing the bombs over. But there are plenty of others, and the DVD is funny as the dickens.

Cultural references being what they are, a good many viewers will find many of the sketches "dated". This means that they choose to blame the messengers instead of their own limitations in understanding the messages. Still, you needn't have lived through World War II to get some good laughs from "Aftermyth of War". And the good news is, there's 116 minutes of it.

If you like this sort of thing, there's more on CD. The one to get is "Beyond the Fringe: Complete", which has 3 CDs. The others are single CDs, each of which offers a limited selection, mostly duplicating the DVD. The 3-CD set has 42 tracks, but there are some duplications so that the total of different ones is 38, including 14 not found on the DVD. Two sketches from the DVD aren't on the CDs ("T.E.Lawrence" and "Art Gallery Director"), so the total DVD + CDs = 40.

Don't miss this opportunity to experience the great tap-root of the wonderful Pythons.
April 12, 2008

They're blind and deaf or liars or idiots or all of these

THE AUDIO AND VIDEO OF THIS FLICK ARE JUST FINE!!! I find it tame and don't see what ever was so shocking about it. But I'm liking it very much just the same. Guess I'm just jaded by the gap in time. It's warm and amusing and all 4 men are perfect. I prefer Monty Python to whom I see a resemblance. I recommend you rent it before buying it to make sure you like it. I did (because I was scared off by these dishonest nincompoops who said the picture and sound were lousy, they aren't), I ordered a copy about 2 hours ago. October 24, 2007

Still hilarious!

Although the quality of the recording shows its age (hence the rating of 4, not 5), the four guys are still enormously funny. Perhaps funnier to those of us who saw it originally (or were at least alive then!) than it might be to anyone under 50? 55? Many of the numbers are just funny in themselves and delivered with impeccable timing, but a few need some knowledge of the politics and culture of post-war England. Don't be put off by the black and white grainy image. February 6, 2007

"The remains of a great revue in 'Beyond the Fringe'"

"Beyond the Fringe" was the best predecessor to "Monty Python", "SCTV", and current sketch comedy, funnier than those, moves at the pace of "Laugh-In" or "Hellzapoppin", and has fake Shakespeare far more accurate and funnier than "The Reduced Shakespeare Company". So I was at first elated to see that this piece of comedy history had been preserved. Sadly, this fuzzy DVD is an early British version of the show that came to Broadway, and some of the better jokes are missing. (For example, the skit of a one-legged actor trying out for Tarzan ends without the casting call for Long John Silver.) Still, it's a lot better than having nothing. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are probably better here than in their later, more American, appearances, especially Moore's piano playing. Having the visuals is a plus, but fans might want to compare the Broadway CD. January 24, 2007

Excellent

Many of the reviews below are inaccurate. For example, Beyond the Fringe was not inspired by The Goon Show and didn't particularly inspire Monty Python. Beyond the Fringe was unique for a number of reasons. Firstly it brought together four people who were each uniquely talented in their own right. Despite being relatively fresh out of Cambridge University, Peter Cook already had a reputation as an astonishingly funny man and had already written two revues which were performed in London's West End. While at university he had been the star of Footlights and revered by his contemporaries. Dudley Moore was already known as a brilliant musician, having been an organ scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford and then turning to jazz at which he excelled and made his living. Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett had turned their backs on performing careers, Miller to become a doctor and Bennett to pursue a career as a historian. They were tempted back by the impresario who was trying to put together the revue that became Beyond the Fringe and what a blessing that they were - Miller went on to become an outstanding theatrical and operatic director, Bennett went on to become one of the two or three most oustanding post-war playwrights (Forty Years On, A Private Function, The Madness of King George III).

Secondly, Beyond the Fringe was really the first time that highly intelligent products of the establishment (each had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge) mocked that establishment. Sure, the Goons had occasionally made fun of Parliament or the BBC in passing, but it was all harmless fun. Beyond the Fringe was new because it went much further and satirised British institutions and mores for the first time. No one had ever heard an impersonation of the Prime Minister before of the kind that Peter Cook did in TV PM. When Harold Macmillan actually turned up to see Beyond the Fringe in the West End, Peter Cook did the impression while Macmillan sat through it with a (presumably forced) fixed smile, so Peter Cook threw in the line "When I'm at a bit of a loose end, there's nothing I like better than to sit watching four vibrant young performers with a big grin plastered all over my silly old face". Nothing was beyond satire - the RAF ("I want to join the Few", "Sorry, there's too many"), the Church, the anti-nuclear lobby ("We asked our members the following question: "Do you want to see your wife and children go up in smoke?" and 94 percent of them said "No".") and even the Duke of Edinburgh.

Thirdly, theirs was probably the cleverest comedy performance this country has ever produced. Far cleverer than anything the Goons or Monty Python ever did, far wittier than anything before or since (what better way to point out the flaw in the nuclear deterrence argument than Alan Bennett's government official patiently explaining how we would nuke the Russians back if they nuked us, and observing that "this prevents them from attacking.... well, it effectively deters them from..... well, it would jolly well serve them right!") and, at its time, totally original.

Young folk and non-British people probably won't understand some of the references in it. A unique piece of comedy and satire. How many other comedians can boast that their show was so outstanding that the Prime Minister of England and the President of the US (JFK) insisted on going to see it, that top A-listers of the day such as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton made time to attend? November 9, 2006

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