A Cook's tour of British comedy

It wasn't just sexual intercourse that began in the 1960s - "between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP", as Philip Larkin noted - it was also satire. Full-on political satire, the sort we've become sensitised to these days but which, back then, caused ructions, resignations and recriminations. "Satire began one night at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1960 when Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore walked out on to the stage of the Lyceum Theatre to present a show called Beyond The Fringe. Two years later Private Eye was first published, the following year That Was The Week That Was was first broadcast," writes the author.

Humphrey Carpenter, in his enthusiasm for his subject, obviously disregards Aesop's and Aristophanes' claims to be the founding fathers of satire in favour of four English post-graduate performers but he is, in fact, largely correct. Before Beyond The Fringe, English humour was mainly lavatorial or seaside camp in its concerns and no one had the temerity to challenge political ineptitude or the hypocrisy of prevailing social mores.

It's just that Carpenter is so fixated on dates and finding symbolic significance where none actually exists. Thus, the 1950s in Britain was a time of "a culture of deference, an era characterised by the patrician Harold Macmillan, National Service, a dying empire, drab fashions, bland food and a polite and formal media". Similarly, at the turn of the decade, the country raced headlong to embrace all things groovy and fab (Mary Quant, The Beatles, The Stones, Carnaby Street, the Pill and soft drugs) and of course, radical political satire.

It might make for a neat fly-leaf intro but cultural change simply doesn't happen that way. Yes, there was no high-profile satire before Beyond The Fringe in 1960 but there were shows like Pieces of Eight (which Carpenter should know because Peter Cook wrote and performed in it), there were also "underground" magazines, anarchist cartoonists and some excellent satirical journalism doing the rounds.

This, though, is one of the few but important gripes to be found with this fascinating and meticulously researched social history of British satire. The roll call of names is formidable: apart from the Beyond the Fringe troupe, there's David Frost, John Wells, Richard Ingrams (ex-editor of Private Eye), Willie Rushton, John Bird and John Fortune (still seen on TV screens in Rory Bremner's show as the Two Johns), Ned Sherrin, Eleanor Bron, Roy Kinnear, Millicent Martin and Lance Percival.

Written in strict chronological order, beginning with that memorable Edinburgh show, what most impresses is how Carpenter recreates the spirit and context of the time (crucial in assessing satire) by reproducing the stage scripts - which are still hilariously funny and beautifully iconoclastic. They also help you play "spot the influence" - from that 1960 Fringe show, I recognised two sketches which two very well-known contemporary comedians have "borrowed" and passed off as their own material.

Equally impressive is how Carpenter reprints numerous press reviews of the time - a lot more informative than it sounds - remember that hard-hitting political satire came as bit of shock to the media establishment, and a whole new lexicon had to be created with which to review it. Bernard Levin's notice in the Daily Express of the 1960 show - "the theatre came of age last night, a revue so brilliant, adult, hardboiled, accurate, merciless, witty, unexpected, alive, exhilarating, cleansing, right, true and good, that my first conscious thought as I stumbled weak and sick with laughter up the stairs at the end was one of gratitude. This satire is real, barbed, deeply planted and aimed at things and people that need it" - is a bit of a masterclass. Also worth noting is that Carpenter gets long and graphic first-hand accounts from people who were there at the time (most of whom, fortunately, seemed to have kept diaries). For example, you get a full and frank description of a pivotal production meeting - who said what to whom, who got drunk and obnoxious, who felt slighted, who was the funniest, etc.

Crucially, Carpenter succeeds in identifying Peter Cook as the most significant player in the action and fingering David Frost as a preening, careerist non-entity (at Cook's funeral, Alan Bennett brought the house down by saying that "Peter's only regret, which he regularly voiced, was that he had once saved David Frost from drowning"). Jonathan Miller says of his first meeting with Cook that "he was an astonishing, strange, glazed, handsome creature who produced stuff the like of which I'd never heard before. After seeing him perform for the first time, I went up and told him that he perfectly reproduced the speech patterns of schizophrenics". Such a quote not only tells you a lot about Cook but also about Miller himself - a great polymath, indisputably, but not someone you'd like to get stuck in a lift with.

The four main characters' lives are fleshed out well, but Carpenter can't stand back enough to detail the fraught tensions and bitter rivalries within the Beyond The Fringe group - and it's a serious omission. It's no comedic secret that Cook wrote most of (and usually their best) material, that Bennett had yet to find his comedic voice (which he later did in the magnificent Talking Heads monologues), and that Miller was a bit of a passenger.

Talking to The Guardian during that 1960 Edinburgh run, Miller said of this sensational new show, which was breaking box-office records and changing forever the face of British comedy, that he "was only taking a summer holiday from his medical studies" and Alan Bennett told the same reporter that he was more looking forward to getting back to his medieval history studies.

They were both to change their mind when Beyond The Fringe was offered a long West End run. "The money they were offering was 10 times as much what I would get as a junior doctor," said Miller; "and 15 times as much as I was getting as a medieval historian," said Bennett. Only Cook and Moore seemed to want to carry on out of a sense of "fracturing the culture of deference" and tilting anew at the Conservative Party windmill. The show later transferred to Broadway, but the satire virus had spread. Private Eye (largely Cook's idea and totally funded by him in the early days) hit the racks, and suddenly stories that were previously not reported were making the front page - corruption, political dishonesty, bribery of public officials - a lot like present-day Ireland, in fact.

Almost as significantly, Cook opened his own comedy club, the legendary Establishment Club in London's Soho, which played a large part in freeing British satire from its public-school common room background into something more robust and resonant. It's impact is not to be underestimated - a few years later Monty Python had replaced the Carry On team in the nation's affections.

Cook wanted to produce a TV version of the Establishment Club, but it was seen by BBC types as a bit too dangerous for live television. Instead, That Was The Week That Was (first broadcast in 1962 as "an experimental two-hour mixture of conversation, satire, comedy, debate and music") was written by the professional anecdotist Ned Sherrin and hosted by David Frost. "There was something ungentlemanly about someone who was so obviously on the make," noted Private Eye's then editor, Richard Ingrams, about Frost's show (and no one in this book has a good word to say about him).

Given that TW3 was more important symbolically than in its patchy content, Carpenter subjects the readers to too much irrelevant behind-the-scenes banter and not nearly enough to the infinitely superior show, Not Only . . . But Also, which introduced the world to Dud 'n' Pete - one of the finest comic duos of all time.

Still, Carpenter evokes the era well, most memorably when he mentions that at the height of the satire boom in 1964, the producers of TW3 were besieged by letters from parents asking what training their children needed to become satirists - as it seemed quite the done thing to do at the time.

As the decade progressed, the Beyond The Fringe team fractured, The Establishment Club closed down and TW3 was axed; only Private Eye was left standing. Carpenter searches for big-sounding cultural reasons, but really there weren't any. Like most movements, it had a time and a place and by the time the Pythons had arrived, satire was yesterday's thing and the Ministry of Silly Walks seemed more appealing.

Up to this point, the book is, despite all the flaws, a valuable and informative history - obviously bolstered by the fact that most of the main characters have contributed long interviews. Unfortunately Carpenter then spends too many pages trying to knit the rise of alternative comedy, Spitting Image and Have I Got News For You into the pattern. It's perfunctory stuff and reeks of a publisher's wish to update for today's audience rather than the author's real intention. More disturbingly, while there are mentions of the very over-rated Rory Bremner and the really quite hopeless Ben Elton, there isn't one mention of the man Peter Cook regarded as his rightful heir - Chris Morris of Brass Eye and Jam fame.

This unforgivable error reinforces the point that Carpenter should have stayed strictly within the confines of the book's subtitle: The Satire Boom of the 1960s. Let's finish with a Cookism. After the demise of TW3, the BBC brought out a number of pale imitations, one of which was called Not So Much A Programme, More A Way Of Life which was abbreviated by everybody to NSMAPMAWOL. In his review in Private Eye, Cook simply wrote "NSMAPMA***KUP".