Peter sellers

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Roger Lewis: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

38 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Roger Lewis, whose book The Life and Death of Peter Sellers has been republished to mark 100 years since the comedian’s birth. Roger tells Sam about the difference between Sellers’s public persona and private life, plus his influence on comedy today. They also discuss how Roger reinvented the way biographies were written, and whether the view he had of Sellers as a teenager changed through writing the book. Produced by James Lewis.

Monday

Peter Lydon

Peter Sellers and the comic tragedy of The Producers

It’s October 1994 and I’m rooting around in a garage in a non-descript LA neighbourhood, a few blocks from 20th Century Fox. The garage is piled high with clothes, cameras, audio tapes, reels of film and, in pride of place, a Nazi storm trooper helmet. This was the last resting place for a mountain of paraphernalia belonging to comedy legend Peter Sellers, who was born 100 years ago today. The house was owned by Sellers’s widow, Lynne Frederick, who had been found dead there just six months earlier. Now her mother lived there alone and was the keeper of the trove. After several G&Ts together, she agreed to allow me access.

Thursday

Peter Eyre

The time Spike Milligan tried to kill me

The theatre impresario Michael White rang me one day in 1964, and said he was presenting a play at the Lyric Hammersmith, where there was a small role he thought might suit me. The play was an adaptation of the novel Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, where the eponymous hero spends most of his life in bed, unable to see the point of engaging with the world outside. It was being put on as a vehicle for Spike Milligan, who was said to be jealous of the success of his longtime partner in The Goon Show, Peter Sellers. Sellers had recently made a seamless transition from the world of anarchic comedy

Saturday

Mark Mason

July 24th: why did Peter Sellers once turn up naked at Spike Milligan’s door?

Every weekend Spectator Life brings you doses of topical trivia – facts, figures and anecdotes inspired by the current week’s dates in history … July 18 (Getty) In 1872 the Ballot Act introduced the secret ballot to UK elections. The word ‘poll’ comes from the days when votes were cast in public – it means ‘head’, as voters stood together and their heads were counted. Nick Faldo (born 1957). On a trip to Florida, the golfer asked his Swedish caddy Fanny Sunesson if she would mind buying him a toothbrush, as he’d forgotten to bring one. She returned with two, saying: ‘I did not know if you wanted the hard