Latest news with #PeterSellers
BBC News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Lost Goon Show sketch to be performed for first time in 70 years
A lost Goon Show sketch written by revered comedy duo Ray Galton and Alan Simpson will be performed later for the first time in 70 years after being unearthed in a university skit was found among a trove of work by the pair, who created hit shows including Steptoe and Son and Hancock's Half Hour and are often credited with inventing the British on the BBC from 1951 to 1960, the Goon Show featured Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Usher, chair of the Goon Show Preservation Society, said the discovery of the sketch - found amongst a portion of the Galton and Simpson collection owned by the University of York - was "insanely exciting". Gary Brannan, keeper of archives and research collections at the University's Borthwick Institute for Archives, said: "Galton and Simpson invented modern British comedy as we know it, with their wit and humour leaving a profound and lasting imprint on the shows we watch today."Real-world or situation comedy simply didn't exist before them."He described The Case of the Missing Two Fingers sketch, which will be performed later at the York Festival of Ideas, as a Shakespearean parody, believed to have been first written by Galton and Simpson just before Hancock's Half Hour started and the pair became household names."They're just on the edge of their big career moment when here they are writing these Goon Shows, which to me I think are brilliant and are really very funny," Mr Brannan said. Milligan collaborated with other writers during the Goon Show's lifespan, but it was previously unknown that Galton and Simpson had written for the programme."It did feel exciting. [As an archivist] I often find it can be a life of disappointment," Mr Brannan said."I have a record of getting excited and then someone going 'no, we know all about this'."There was a knowledge that Peter [Sellers] had performed these sketches, but no-one knew who had written them and the assumption was naturally that they were Spike Milligan's."Mr Usher, from the Goon Show Preservation Society, will be performing the sketch after a talk by Mr Brannan."I was insanely excited by the idea that these hadn't been seen or performed since 1954," he said."On lots of levels it's ticking lots of boxes for me as a Goon fan, a Peter Sellers fan and somebody who just loves British comedy." In the spirit of the original programme, Mr Usher has created his own sound effects, and will be utilising his impression skills to bring the sketch to life."It features a good spread of Goon Show characters - I'm really looking forward to seeing how it visually translates to an audience, because that's going to be a nice challenge to get my teeth into," he University of York currently owns part of the full collection of Galton and Simpson's life's work, which includes rare early drafts, unseen scripts and institution is now looking to raise £30,000 to buy the rest of the loaned items, to avoid it being split up and sold Brannan's talk 'Innit Marvellous? The world of Hancock and Steptoe' will take place at the Ron Cooke Hub, Campus East, University of York, from 16:00 BST. Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
New European
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Jerzy Kosiński, the writer whose last act was to plagiarise himself
Chance the Gardener, aka Chauncey Gardiner, was the naif whose love of horticulture and television spirited him to the White House in Kosiński's latest novel Being There, which in the summer of 1971 had just become a New York Times bestseller. 'So I rang,' recalled Kosiński, 'and Peter Sellers answered'. Jerzy Kosiński had never received fan mail like it. The telegram contained six words ('Available my garden or outside it') and a telephone number. The sender was listed as C Gardiner, who Kosiński knew quite well because he had created him. And so the strangeness began. 'Peter said that I had invaded his life,' Kosiński said. 'For the next seven and a half years, Peter Sellers became Chauncey Gardiner. The name on his calling card was Chauncey Gardiner, the name on his stationery was Chauncey Gardiner. 'I thought he was joking – here was an actor going after a novelist to try to get a movie made of a novel he liked. Then, one day, he stopped by my house and said: 'You don't understand. I AM Chauncey Gardiner!'' What Peter Sellers certainly wasn't in the early 1970s was a movie star big enough to get a film of Being There off the ground. There was some irony in the fact that, to play one moron, the actor was obliged to re-embrace another, Inspector Clouseau. A string of smash-hit Pink Panther sequels made Sellers bankable again by the decade's end. And all the while, the dialogue with Jerzy Kosiński continued, much to the author's consternation. 'Peter was a simplified man, almost a reductive man. No one knew anything about him. People assumed he was a brilliant actor who was also an intellectual. Well, he was a brilliant actor but he was extremely reductive.' Then, as Hal Ashby bellowed 'action!' on the first day of filming, the truth dawned on Jerzy Kosiński. 'During the shooting of Being There, Peter Sellers – for the first time in his life – became himself. Being There was his spiritual portrait. For once, he did not have to pretend.' By the time Being There reached cinemas – to decent box-office and considerable acclaim – Jerzy Kosiński had been 'married' to Peter Sellers for almost eight years. As relationships go, it was longer than all but the first of the actor's marriages. And like those unions, it ended in acrimony, with Kosiński forced to fight for a screen credit and the former Goon furious that the writer spilled the beans about his recent facelift. A fractured relationship, a credit dispute, a wealth of lies and insults, but a beautiful end result – for all Peter Sellers might have insisted that Being There was a commentary on his life, it's impossible to ignore the frightening resemblance between the making of the movie and the life of Jerzy Kosiński… He was born Józef Lewinkopf in Łódź in 1933, adopting the name under which he'd become famous while living in rural Poland and posing as a Catholic while his parents prayed the townsfolk wouldn't dob them in to the Nazis. Kosiński's undeniably fraught childhood was the inspiration for his breakthrough novel, The Painted Bird (1965), in which the six-year-old protagonist is witness to and victim of acts of unspeakable cruelty. It brought him huge fame (he already had fortune, thanks to his marriage to socialite heiress Mary Hayward Weir). But the reality of his childhood was not quite as traumatic as the novel suggested, and the film's release brought the first wave of allegations against the writer. These would grow and come to encompass claims that he had fabricated a sponsorship to get a US visa (true), that his works had been written by someone else (false, but Kosiński did work with uncredited editors), that The Painted Bird had been written by Kosiński in Polish and then translated by another anonymous collaborator (true), that it and Being There had lifted some plot points from obscure Polish novels (possible), that his earlier non-fiction works had been sponsored by the CIA (false) and that he had lied about a near-miss with Charles Manson's Family at Sharon Tate's house (Kosiński had been invited, but was mistaken about the night when the murders took place). The writer and his supporters claimed that, whatever white lies or co-opted stories might be contained within The Painted Bird, the novel as a whole deals with a truth as immense as it is incomprehensible. They have a point, and so did the reviewer of a biography of Kosiński who wrote: 'Nice people who don't tell lies are not likely to write great novels… The pain of using more directly the material he really knew may have been too great for him to bear.' What is also undeniable is that however his works might have been assembled and whatever dissembling he did when talking about his life, Jerzy Kosiński was a master storyteller. He was also a celebrity who relished his status, and his friendships with the likes of George Harrison, Henry Kissinger, Tony Bennett and Warren Beatty, who cast him as the Stalinist Grigory Zinoviev in Reds. His fame was fuelled by a willingness to go on The Tonight Show or David Letterman to discuss his work, or his loathing for Poland's communist regime, or talk about his other enthusiasms – among them polo, alpine skiing, photography and sadomasochism. 'I like to watch' – it's a line that crops up almost as often in Being There as it does in Jerzy's interviews. He was a regular visitor to the sex clubs of Manhattan, though Kosiński's second wife Kiki was always quick to point out that he did so with her blessing. In fact, she described one of Kosiński's 'companions' – 'Cynthia' – as 'wonderful'. 'I really go there to write,' he told a baffled David Letterman, who promptly asked him where he kept his pencil. These kinds of exchanges kept Kosiński in the spotlight, which made it easier for his opponents – including the Polish government and fellow travellers – to hand out the rocks to be thrown at him. One gets the impression Kosiński threw himself at life to avoid being pinned down or being overwhelmed by the events of his past. Little wonder too that he became exhausted. With his health, his reputation, even sexual appetite slipping from his grasp, it's tempting to suggest that his suicide in May 1991 as an act of submission in the face of diminishing returns. As the note he addressed to Kiki demonstrates all too clearly, Jerzy Kosiński's gift for writing remained with him until his last breath: 'Kiki… you are the prime victim of my decrepitude and you are the very last person I would want to hurt now or ever… Embrace our friends and remember that, no matter what ever crossed your mind at times, you and only you mattered as much to me as did my life.' That line – that last line – bears a close resemblance to words Kosiński wrote in Being There. A man who had to face down various accusations of plagiarism, his last act was to plagiarise himself – a final two-fingered salute to a world that never understood how Jerzy Kosiński understood the world.
