Johnny Bassett
Encyclopedia
Edinburgh International Festival
The Edinburgh International Festival is a festival of performing arts that takes place in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, over three weeks from around the middle of August. By invitation from the Festival Director, the International Festival brings top class performers of music , theatre, opera...
revue, Beyond the Fringe
Beyond the Fringe
Beyond the Fringe was a British comedy stage revue written and performed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller. It played in London's West End and then on New York's Broadway in the early 1960s, and is widely regarded as seminal to the rise of satire in 1960s Britain.-The...
, in 1960.
The beginnings
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
, John Bassett led a traditional jazz ensemble, called the Bassett Hounds. Fellow student, Dudley Moore
Dudley Moore
Dudley Stuart John Moore, CBE was an English actor, comedian, composer and musician.Moore first came to prominence as one of the four writer-performers in the ground-breaking comedy revue Beyond the Fringe in the early 1960s, and then became famous as half of the highly popular television...
, attending agdalen College, Oxford) on an organ scholarship, played piano in Bassett's band. The band performed always on Saturday evenings and usually throughout the week in the Union cellars (a part of the Oxford Union
Oxford Union
The Oxford Union Society, commonly referred to simply as the Oxford Union, is a debating society in the city of Oxford, Britain, whose membership is drawn primarily but not exclusively from the University of Oxford...
buildings and grounds, which had just been opened by Michael Heseltine, at that time the Union President).
After graduating from Oxford, Bassett was hired by the Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International FestivalRobert Ponsonby as his Assistant(on a salary of £11 a week). Ponsonby, himself a one-time Oxford man and organ scholar, was looking for a different type of late evening entertainment for the festival programme. For this time slot, he suggested to Bassett that they should put on their own revue "to beat The Fringe at its own game."
Bassett's had three initial choices for the revue. Firstly his Oxford bandmate, Dudley Moore
Dudley Moore
Dudley Stuart John Moore, CBE was an English actor, comedian, composer and musician.Moore first came to prominence as one of the four writer-performers in the ground-breaking comedy revue Beyond the Fringe in the early 1960s, and then became famous as half of the highly popular television...
, who was not only an brilliant musician in all disciplines, but had gained courage through performing with the band, and had become an outstanding cabaret
Cabaret
Cabaret is a form, or place, of entertainment featuring comedy, song, dance, and theatre, distinguished mainly by the performance venue: a restaurant or nightclub with a stage for performances and the audience sitting at tables watching the performance, as introduced by a master of ceremonies or...
performer. Through booking his band at a number of West End hotels, as well as the May and Commem Balls and various Deb Dances, Bassett had also brought forward Jonathan Miller for the occasional cabaret work (to boost his medical student salary)for what might be called 'a second time', as Jonathan had already made his comic mark while at Cambridge with The Footlights) Bassett knew Miller because Miller's wife had been at the same school (Bedales) as Bassett). Equally, Bassett had also organised a large number of gigs for Alan Bennett, who was at Exeter College, just up the road from Wadham, so much so that Alan had asked him to cut the number down, as he wanted to continue his Post-Graduate studies! In fact,Moore had already appeared on the Fringe in the 1958 Oxford revue. in turn, recommended him. Bassett booked Bennett after seeing him in a bit of cabaret. Miller welcomed the opportunity to join the venture, which was only enviasaged to run a week at the Festival,as a way to make a bit of extra money, and escape the strains of medical work. But Miller turned out to be the talent scout for the last member to be recruited for the revue. He had seen this magical performer at what was called a "Footlights Smoker" an ad hoc performance where sketches are tried out before being publicly performed. The writer/performer was none other than the about-to-become legendary Peter Cook. In fact, he had already written for producer Michael Codron
Michael Codron
Michael Victor Codron is a British film and theatre producer, known for his productions of the early work of Harold Pinter, Christopher Hampton, David Hare, Simon Gray and Tom Stoppard...
some sketches for a revue called, 'Pieces of Eight' and had followed that up by writing an entire revue called 'One over the Eight'. Cook would become the principal writer for the Edinburgh revue 'Beyond the Fringe'imbuing it with a sensibility, in Miller's words, "at right-angles" to all known comedy at the time.
What ensued
The first meeting of the major talent selected for Ponsonby's challenge to The Fringe was tense, according to Bassett, with each participant not wanting to break the ice with a joke, in case the others didn't find it funny. The ice was finally broken when Moore did an imitation of Groucho MarxGroucho Marx
Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx was an American comedian and film star famed as a master of wit. His rapid-fire delivery of innuendo-laden patter earned him many admirers. He made 13 feature films with his siblings the Marx Brothers, of whom he was the third-born...
in the restaurant where they met. "He got up in this Italian restaurant and followed one of the waitresses through the swinging doors to the kitchen immediately coming out of the other swinging doors with another waitress." Bassett considered this moment the contributors relaxed and realised the whole idea of Beyond the Fringe would work.
It is possible that the Festival's finances rather than the talent of the four, were the driving force behind the formation of the revue. Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana....
had been booked in the time slot eventually alloted to the revue. Unfortunately, Armstrong's agent could not keep to the commitment having failed to book other gigs in the UK due to Musician's Union pressure, and therefore could not justify the trip to Edinburgh. This cancellation forced Ponsonby's decision to put together the revue at the last minute.
Beyond Beyond the Fringe
By the time Beyond the Fringe opened in London, Bassett had been 'rowed out' by Cook's Agent (Donald Langdon) and was no longer fully involved. However, he went to the States for the Broadway opening, and kept in touch with all four, right up to the deaths of Cook and Moore, writing monthly to him in the States until his death in 2002. Bassett is still in tenuous touch with Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller.Bassett was also involved as an Assistant Producer in the television programs, That Was the Week That Was
That Was The Week That Was
That Was The Week That Was, also known as TW3, is a satirical television comedy programme that was shown on BBC Television in 1962 and 1963. It was devised, produced and directed by Ned Sherrin and presented by David Frost...
and Late Night Line-Up, and subsequently discovered Eric Chappell (author of Rising Damp, Only when I laugh, Duty Free, and many others) who till that time had been an Internal Audit Clerk for East Midlands Electricity.