Steve Coogan on Peter Sellers: ‘Selfish, narcissistic – and a genius'

Telegraph

a day ago

My agent has a sign above his office desk. It pictures a jaunty, smiling man with a speech bubble which says simply, 'Remember, don't be a c---.' A simple piece of advice, which Peter Sellers seems to have never heeded.
An emotional tornado of talent caused havoc to all who crossed his path. Tortured genius or spoilt ­narcissist – depends on your point of view. There is a school of thought that says there is an inherent dysfunction that goes hand in hand with clowning. I've sometimes been compared to the troubled, funny man. It's usually meant as a compliment but makes me feel uneasy. I can't think of any of his brilliant performances without thinking of the cost to other people. And he was brilliant.
At his best in I'm All Right Jack or Dr Strangelove, and as his most ­successful character, Inspector Clouseau, he flew. A perfect combination of intuitive ability to inhabit these absurd but recognisable people with the technical skill honed from years in his craft, trying to emulate his heroes, Stan Laurel and Alec Guinness although even Guinness would find his way into the crosshairs of Sellers's sniper rifle, or more accurately, blunderbuss.
Sellers. Shall we call him Peter? It might help him a bit.
Peter took the well-worn path through ENSA, which produced a welter of British talent which dominated through the heyday of radio and onto television in the 1960s and 1970s. It's easy to forget that radio was an intrinsic part of the fabric of British life. Before the internet, before video recorders or even audio cassette recorders were available to mere mortals, the only way to catch your favourite show was to be next to the wireless (radio, the original wireless), or for me, sitting in front of the tele­vision, when your favourite show was broadcast, and The Goon Show was a favourite for everyone.
Arriving at the end of rationing and sober post-war austerity, it was like punk rock in a world of bland pop. Anarchic, disruptive avant-garde, but with enough silly voices to make it popular and inviting. A television in every household was still a decade away and radio could command the kind of audience figures which have all but vanished for any broadcast entertainment today. I caught the tail end of the pre-digital age when I arrived at the BBC in 1991 with my own radio show.
We recorded the first series of Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge at the Paris Studios in Lower Regent Street, London. As I stood at the microphone performing my comedy character in front of a live audience (they laughed, by the way!), I remember seeing images of the Goons lining the walls, often pictured huddled around that iconic BBC microphone.
I remember inviting the ghost of Sellers to haunt the studio where he had recorded The Goon Show and bring us luck. I'm still performing that character 34 years later, but that first show, surrounded by those images of Sellers, has stayed with me.
Standing on the shoulders of giants. I was too young by a good 20 years to have heard of the Goons, but as fortune would have it, my dad was a great fan, he owned a handful of the shows on vinyl along with Bob Newhart, Shelley Berman, and Mel Brooks. Later additions, courtesy of my big brothers , were Monty Python, Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott and Mike Harding.
As a child in the early 1970s, I didn't fully understand the content but understood the comedic power of funny voices and how they make people laugh. By this time, of course, Peter was an international film star and the Pink Panther films were at the height of their success. My memory of him at that time is of the slim, tanned, denim-clad, happy, shiny guest on the BBC's Parkinson. He seemed to bear no relation to the black-and-white photograph of a slightly podgy short-back-and-sides demob fella looking back at me from the record cover. How could he exist in two worlds?
And yet, he did. Looking back, he seemed to step effortlessly from the monochromatic, joyless, overcast world of the 1950s and into the warm Kodak glow of the late 1960s, of Twiggy, the longer-haired Beatles and, err, 'sexual liberation'? He left the old world and joined the new.
He appealed to everyone, a class­less, joyous sophistication. He made comedy glamorous as well as funny. He seemed to have everything an adolescent boy would see as the key to a happy life – money, fast cars, beautiful women, cool clothes, a bit of bounce to the hair, probably expensive aftershave, and always smiling.
But... is there a but?
Yes, I'm afraid there is. Peter spent a lifetime thinking you could find contentment and peace by accessorising yourself into the kind of image you would see in a glossy magazine advert. He swapped his soul for stuff. Lots of stuff. Perhaps he thought if there was enough shiny stuff, the light would drown out the darkness. But it was never quite shiny enough. Like a petulant, spoilt child, Peter never learnt how to behave. I blame the parents. He was selfish, narcissistic and by all accounts a terrible father.
On one occasion he returned home with a brand-new Bentley only to find stone chips on the paint work. Witnessing his father's displeasure, his five-year-old son, Michael, found a tin of house paint and dutifully painted over the blemishes. On discovering this clumsy attempt to please his father, Peter proceeded to smash all of his son's toys.
The kindest thing you can say about this repulsive behaviour is that he was mentally ill. Certainly, today it is easy to see his behaviour as sociopathic. He wrought havoc on all those he encountered on both a professional and personal level. Women he saw as an acquisition, children an inconvenience. He passed on his dysfunction to his widow, Lynne Frederick, a talented actress who never really recovered from her encounter. And there are countless other tales of woe, recounted in Roger Lewis's forensically insightful biography.
He never learnt that happiness comes from being a functioning human being. From understanding that kindness, unconditional love and the generosity of the human spirit are where contentment lies. But the darkness in his soul is what saves him, because he did have a soul. You see it even now in his performances. The inadequacies and failures of his greatest roles betray a loneliness, a poignancy, that lies at the heart of all great comedy.
There are so many sublime moments where Peter captures the comedic tragedy of human existence. We literally cry with laughter, that guttural, visceral noise we make as an audience, a crowd of strangers. Shining a light on the human condition we seem to know each other clearly for a second, then suddenly the light fades and we forget what it was that we saw. These moments save us from ourselves. I suppose what I mean to say is that we all like a laugh. And so did Peter, he just wasn't very nice.
But when the damage he inflicted and all the bad feelings become fading memories, his comic genius will remain with us, immortalised. Perhaps the best way to remember him is to think of him in those early days. The young man, at the Grafton Arms pub in London, meeting with his comedy friends, before the fame, the money, and the adulation, creating and sharing. Laughing.
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers by Roger Lewis, updated with an introduction by Steve Coogan (Quercus, £30), will be published on July 3
Peter Sellers – his five greatest roles
By Alexander Larman
1. Lionel Meadows, Never Let Go (1960)
There are plenty of roles in which Sellers played it relatively straight, but the only certifiably villainous part he played was as Lionel Meadows, a crooked car dealer, in this gritty slice of late Fifties-set London pulp noir. The film itself is nothing particularly unusual, but Sellers' performance is a fascinating exercise in malevolence and nastiness.
He'd played other buffoonish baddies before, in pictures such as The Ladykillers and (gloriously) the strident shop steward in I'm All Right Jack, but it was as Meadows that he turned his gift for observation and imitation inside out. According to his then-wife Anne Howe, Sellers went 'full Method', becoming a brooding and even violent presence at home. The unlovely results are up there on the screen.
2. Clare Quilty, Lolita (1962)
The first of Sellers's two collaborations with Stanley Kubrick was only a supporting role – he's on screen a total of around 10 minutes – but his appearance as the vainglorious paedophile Humbert Humbert's nemesis is still one of his finest achievements. Kubrick understood that Sellers was not just a master of disguise but someone who buried what little identity he had under make-up, accents and costumes, so casting him as a fundamentally empty – and deeply sinister – figure was both logical and near-genius.
3. Dr Strangelove, Dr Strangelove (1964)
Sellers famously played three parts in his second Kubrick film (and was supposed to play a fourth, as Coogan did on stage, but injured himself beforehand). He's excellent as the hapless stiff-upper-lip British RAF officer Lionel Mandrake, and hilarious as the incompetent US President Merkin Muffley, trying vainly to placate his drunken Russian counterpart.
Yet it's his wheelchair-bound former Nazi Dr Strangelove, forever attempting to frustrate himself from giving stiff-armed salutes, that makes for the film's most memorable character. As with many of the roles Sellers played, it's very funny, but very creepy too. The most iconic moment of all, when Strangelove, revitalised by the prospect of imminent nuclear war, stands up and shouts 'Mein Führer, I can walk!' has been imitated and parodied many times, but never to the same effect as here.
4. Inspector Clouseau, The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)
Sellers's best-loved character is, of course, the accident-prone, wholly impervious Inspector Clouseau, whom he played in five pictures. Any of the films in which Clouseau appeared could be included on this list, save perhaps the first in which he is very much a supporting part to David Niven's suave cat burglar, but for my money, the giddy, mounting hilarity of Sellers' penultimate turn in the part cannot be beaten. Ignore the relatively thin plot, in which Clouseau's insane boss Dreyfus tries, and fails, to murder his nemesis, and revel instead in some of cinema's finest pratfalls. The other great Pink Panther film is the second, A Shot In The Dark, but this one just pips it.
5. Chauncey Gardiner, Being There (1979)
It would have been wonderfully fitting for Sellers's greatest-ever performance to have been his last, but unfortunately he went out with the rather less distinguished The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu instead. For all that, Sellers's appearance in Hal Ashby's unforgettable black comic satire as the simple-minded Chance the gardener, aka 'Chauncey Gardiner', whose gnomic words of horticultural advice are taken up as incisive nuggets of philosophical wisdom, is not just the best thing that he ever did on film, but one of the finest performances any actor has ever given. He should have won an Oscar for it.