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Classic TV Moments: Pete ‘N’ Dud – Bloody Greta Garbo
Among Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s greatest creations were the plastic mac wearing, cloth-capped simpletons, Pete ‘n’ Dud. Cook once recalled: ‘Pete is the informed idiot, and Dud is the uninformed idiot. They’re both idiots, but Pete is always slightly superior. In fact, he knows nothing either.’
The Pete ‘n’ Dud sketches were often lengthy affairs and Cook said: ‘We didn’t have scripts as such, we had a lot of headings. We’d rehearse a lot, and we knew roughly what we were going to say, but not word-for-word.’
The classic examples were set in an art gallery, where the two consumed sandwiches and contemplated how the bottoms in a painting of naked ladies followed them round the room, and more famously in the pub over pints of Guinness where they competed to outdo each other with claims of sexual conquests of film stars: ‘Tap tap tap at the bloody window pane. I looked out. You know who it was? Bloody Greta Garbo.’
These sketches are famous for Dud in particular struggling not to laugh as Pete took things in ever more absurd directions.