Rent Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: The Best of Goodbye Again (2005)

The Last Turkey In The Shop - Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: The Best of Goodbye Again review by Count Otto Black

It used to be an unofficial tradition that when popular entertainers at the BBC slipped off the A-list and their contracts weren't renewed, they'd be snapped up by ITV for whom they'd squeeze out a last-gasp series or two. It happened to Morecambe & Wise, it happened to the Goodies, and here, alas, we see it happening to Pete & Dud. Unlike those fading comedy teams, Dud's greatest success was still ahead of him, though poor old Pete never quite recovered. But the partnership was on the rocks, and it shows.

Another problem is that when these shows came out, a bunch of lads calling themselves Monty Python had just turned television comedy inside out and tied a few knots in it, and everybody wanted to be like them. Pete & Dud were not Monty Python and never would be no matter how hard they tried, and here we see them proving it. They try so hard to be Pythonesque that they even steal the concept of "senile delinquents" from the Python "Hell's Grannies" sketch, complete with Dud blatantly copying Terry Jones' "Mrs. Ratbag" voice. And it simply doesn't work.

Possibly this DVD doesn't really do the show justice. Apparently it was compiled from an archive of material previously thought to be deleted that turned up unexpectedly, and it's not clear whether this was the entire run of the series or just a random selection of reels, so perhaps it's not so much "The Best Of" as "The Best Of What Was Left After The Real 'Best Of' Had Been Lost Forever". But if this was the "very best" of however much was left, I'd hate to sit through the worst! The most ambitious sketches tend to go on too long and are more peculiar than funny, while the sketches that do more or less work are mostly "Dagenham Dialogues" just like the ones in their previous BBC series. Though even on this familiar ground they're struggling a bit, since one of these is a rehash of their famous routine about being stalked by gorgeous movie stars who are allegedly in love with them, only not as funny.

The technical presentation is a bit of a muddle too, which doesn't help. Location footage has been preserved on high-quality colour film stock while studio scenes are on grainy black-and-white videotape, so the DVD lurches from one to the other at odd moments, once in the middle of a sketch. Some sketches follow on from each other so randomly that it's impossible to tell whether they were meant to be shown in that order, while the gap between others is filled by ageing B-list celebs who pop up to tell us what brilliant comedians Pete & Dud were, or how funny the sketch we've just seen was, almost as if they're afraid we might not know without being told. One of these blathering fogeys cuts in very abruptly to burble about the brilliance of the joke we heard a few seconds ago, and we never do get to see the end of the sketch he interrupted.

Pete & Dud at their best were very funny indeed, and this isn't by any means their worst (that would probably be "The Hound Of The Baskervilles", a movie which has to be seen to be believed, and if you do you'll wish you hadn't), so there are amusing moments here and there, but this is the tail-end of a franchise which, like so many others, should have called it a day sooner. Even the studio audience don't sound all that enthusiastic. I can't say I blame them.