With the Edinburgh fringe in full flow, here are the five standup sets that catapulted their creators to fame
These days, as BBC comedy controller Shane Allen recently confirmed, “Oxbridge white blokes” are out of comedy fashion. Time was they were the cutting edge, as when Messrs Cook, Miller, Moore and Bennett were cherrypicked to create Beyond the Fringe. A modest success at the Edinburgh festival in August 1960, it then made a huge splash in the West End. Here, as never before, the sacred cows of postwar Britain (the political class; the royal family; the military) were led to the satirical slaughter. Kenneth Tynan’s Observer review set the agenda: this was “the moment,” he wrote, “when English comedy took its first decisive step into the second half of the 20th century.” By design or otherwise, Beyond the Fringe punched a hole through English deference and launched the 60s satire boom. Without it, would we ever have had the Establishment Club and TW3, Monty Python and Private Eye?
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