Alan Bennett on Dudley Moore and jazz

Alan Bennett is happily still with us, but his diaries no longer appear in the Guardian and the London Review of Books. I believe I read somewhere that he has said his life is too uneventful these days to be of interest, but if anything exciting happens he will be in touch.

Here he is in 2003, writing just after the death of his Beyond the Fringe colleague Dudley Moore:

30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on himself: namely, that he was only brought into Beyond the Fringe as a musical afterthought. 

In fact he came in as the acknowledged star of the Oxford cabaret circuit, and right through the run of Beyond the Fringe remained the darling of the audience. Cheerful, extrovert and on his own musical ground very sure of himself, he only started to play up the melancholy and portray himself as a tortured clown, a line journalists are always happy to encourage, after he’d teamed up with Peter and subsequently gone into analysis or psychotherapy. 

Obviously Dudley did get sadder as he got older and coping with Peter’s drunkenness can have been no joke. But portraying himself as shy, put upon and intimidated by Jonathan, Peter and to a lesser extent myself was a construction that came later. On and off the stage during Beyond the Fringe he was sunny, social and effortlessly successful. A sad clown he wasn’t.

Later Bennett thinks again about the subject:

We all professed to like jazz, though it was not as modish as it had been for the generation of Larkin and Amis a few years before. Jazz was no longer the anthem of youth and disaffection. ... 

Still, we would go along to hear Dudley play, particularly when Peter Cook’s The Establishment opened in New York. ...  But knowing nothing of its history or development and never having listened to it much, I was baffled and bored by jazz, while Jonathan Miller’s experience of it didn’t stretch much beyond undergraduate hops where it served as a background to his vigorous though uncoordinated attempts to jive.

Perhaps because he was the youngest of the four of us Peter’s lack of interest in jazz was the most obvious, though he would later have heard a good deal more of Dudley’s playing than Jonathan or I did. When in old clips of Not Only ... But Also Dudley is seen playing or parodying jazz as the play-out at the finish, Peter will sometimes be standing by the piano with a sophisticated smile, clicking his fingers to what he hopes may be the beat. 

This was both a pose and a piss-take but it came closer to the reality than Peter would perhaps have liked to admit. ...

None of which is of much interest except to make plain that whatever the public’s appreciation of his musical talent, Dudley was nevertheless corralled for four years with three other performers who didn’t share his enthusiasm and then for ten or a dozen years more with Peter who regarded his music as at best an interlude between the comedy. 

So when later in life with that slightly aggrieved air with which he discussed his early career Dudley complained of being unappreciated by his colleagues in Beyond the Fringe, this was partly what it was about.

The video above, parodying at once Benjamin Britten's composition and Peter Pears' singing, shows Moore's brilliance.

By all accounts, Pears found it very funny, while Britten was not at all amused - much as John Lennon enjoyed the Rutles much more than Paul McCartney did. But then the piece's title, Little Miss Britten, was surely what we would now call homophobic.