Peter Cook & Dudley Moore - The Best Of… What’s Left Of… Not Only… But Also… (BBC DVD)

 

Picture: C/C+     Sound: C     Extras: C+     Episodes: C+

 

 

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were one of the great comedy teams, but did few feature films together and I was never a fan of Bedazzled or especially its inept remake.  Their form of British humor was unique and not necessarily typical, but it is on display in its more vital form on the new BBC DVD release Peter Cook & Dudley Moore - The Best Of… What’s Left Of… Not Only… But Also… in which their early work is dug out of the BBC archive and compiled here.

 

Some of the bits are amusing, other repetitive, plus there are sudden music breaks that are for entertainment purposes that have nothing to do with humor, but are nice breaks just the same and Moore was also famous for playing piano.  This disc offers the six shows still surviving from their TV show to date, though one would hope more might turn up somewhere.  Nevertheless, the shows from 1965 – 66 are not bad, if not great and worth seeing just to get an idea of how the duo worked and what their chemistry was all about.

 

John Lennon even shows up and there is a funny spoof of the Thunderbirds series called Superthunderstingcar!  This involves mocking the Gerry & Sylvia Anderson SuperMarionation hits (which we have reviewed all on this site) and has the actors pretending to be the advanced puppets.  For fans of those shows, this will be a must-own DVD.  Wonder what else may be lost in the archive.

 

The 1.33 X 1 black and white image on the early shows is soft, either from old videotape, kinescope or 16mm filmed copies, but at least it somehow survived.  The later color footage in the best of pieces looks and sounds better, with consistent color at that, but the black & white remains the same.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is also on the weak side, so expect level differences when playing this back.  The only extras is an additional special from 1974 entitled Success Story about their triumphant Broadway show which is not bad and runs about a half-hour.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo