Posted in: BBC, TV | Tagged: Alan Bennett, Beyond the Frnge, dudley moore, English National Orchestra, John Osbourne, Jonathan Miller, monty python, Peter Cook, shakespeare

Remembering Jonathan Miller: Comedy Pioneer, British Renaissance Man

We lost two giants of British Culture this week, and Jonathan Miller definitely fit that title. His family announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and passed away at his home in London. He was 85 years old.

British Comedy would not have been the same without Miller, yet younger people don't really know about him anymore. Miller studied medicine at Cambridge and joined the comedy troupe The Cambridge Footlights. There he met Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett and they formed Beyond the Fringe. He earned his medical degree in 1959 and actually worked as a doctor in a hospital while performing on stage in Beyond the Fringe. Eventually, the comedy revue had a successful run on Broadway in New York.

Beyond the Fringe was British satire at its finest in the 1960s. It poked fun at the absurdity and pomposity of British politics, institutions and social norms with laser precision. The show and its sketches were a precursor to the likes of Monty Python, who would take its satirical tact to even more extremes of surrealism and absurdity in the 1970s.

The Last British Renaissance Man

Miller hated the term "polyglot", but he was truly one of those multitalented people who did just about everything. Maybe he would prefer the term "Man of Letters" or "Renaissance Man".

By 1962, Miller gave up his career as a doctor to entire the media business. He conceded that it paid better and was less stressful than being a doctor. He became an acclaimed and in-demand theatre director of John Osbourne and Shakespeare. In the 1970s, he started a 40-year career of directing productions at the English National Orchestra.

He was also a prolific broadcaster from the 1970s to the 2000s at the BBC. He kept up his interest in Medicine and produced the acclaimed TV series The Body in Question. He also produced documentaries on Madness, on Consciousness, a series on directing Opera and On Reflection, a show about art. As an atheist, he also produced a documentary series on the history of disbelief.

Miller was a man of immense talent, intellect and thoughtfulness in a country that has a huge anti-intellectual streak. His ability to do more than one thing often made the Establishment dismiss him as a jack-of-all-trades, as if his prolific body of work was a small thing. In the past decade, he withdrew from public life because of his Alzheimer's diagnosis. He is survived by his wife and three children.

And without Beyond the Fringe, we might not have British Comedy as we know it now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AobLKuLszXs

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