The hilarious comedy team of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were once a staple of British comedy in the 1960s. They were one half of the Beyond the Fringe foursome, which included Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, but Peter and Dudley had their own special rapport. Their rhythm, timing, and attempts to break each other up were a pleasure to behold, and fortunately this television sketch was one of the few that the BBC didn’t idiotically record over.
Click on the video above for a good time.
They also acted in the original “Bedazzled”
That’s become kind of a cult classic, but I haven’t seen it yet.
While Dudley Moore became much more famous than Peter Cook, largely because of Hollywood movies such as Arthur!, the more I read about Cook, the more I am impressed by how much British comedy owes to him.
Ever-Reliable Wikipedia tells us that Cook was instrumental in the rise of David Frost and the influential satire show That Was the Week That Was, as well as Monty Python. He was also probably the first comedian on British television to satirize a sitting British prime minister. Additionally, he was the proprietor of a comic’s nightclub called The Establishment which had many major British comedians (and American ones—Lenny Bruce played there) who did cutting edge comedy.
You can read more about him here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Cook