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Mention in piece on Derek and Clive

Beyond the grave, Derek and Clive get the last laugh

The alter egos of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, who escaped prosecution for obscenity, gleefully haunt today's comedians
Comments (7)

* Bruce Dessau
16 March 2009 14.46 GMT


Lock up these monsters! No, not the opinion of today's Daily Mail, but the thoughts, just revealed, of obscene publication squads in West Yorkshire and Wolverhampton three decades ago when they got wind of the oeuvre of Derek and Clive, the fetid alter egos of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, recorded for private consumption in New York in 1973 but eventually released on record.

The duo escaped prosecution and the records became cult classics. Without them, an entire generation of schoolboys would not have had anything to giggle at behind the bike sheds. Ribald stream-of-consciousness riffs on subjects such as The Worst Job I Ever Had – which included removing lobsters from Jayne Mansfield's bottom – soon became legendary.

Should the duo have been prosecuted? Obviously not. The records clearly carried warnings about their explicit content. Director of Public Prosecutions officer Graham Grant-Whyte probably had a point at the time, when he called it "fourth-form lavatory humour". True, m'lud, but no reason to haul the twosome before the beak.

This harmless smut came at an intriguing junction in the duo's career. Moore was about to go stellar as a Hollywood sex thimble, while Cook was struggling to sustain his earlier satirical heights. Alcohol played its part in the patter, as did bitterness. Cook's bile-filled barbs about cancer felt like personal attacks on Moore, whose father was dying at the time.

Most of the time, however, the records are simply shockingly silly, pushing toilet humour to the eye-watering hilt. As one commentator put it in the 70s, they made "your average stag club compere sound like the Pope" – particularly apt given their gag about getting sexually aroused at the sight of the pontiff's corpse. And, of course, stag-club comperes are not usually Oxbridge-educated, which allowed them to play the irony card.

Cook once told me over breakfast bloody marys in a Hampstead cafe that John Lydon (better known as Johnny Rotten) ripped him off. But aspiring comedians were clearly paying attention too. Every paedophile-joke-peddling stand-up should pay them a royalty; every time someone pushes a taboo, his ghostly cackle can be heard in the background. Russell Brand worships Cook, while Ricky Gervais has spoken lovingly of Derek and Clive, recalling how he bonded with friends over bootleg copies of the albums.

And the spirit of Derek and Clive is positively thriving on the internet. While broadcasting might currently be under a microscope, podcasting – which lends itself naturally to duologues – revels in its freedom. You can clearly hear echoes of Pete and Dud's devils in the podcasts by Richard Herring and Andrew Collins. If the bile count is lower, their extreme take on the news feels similarly unrestrained.

One can't help thinking that if Derek and Clive came along today, they might struggle for attention – never mind achieve notoriety.