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somehow to be acquiring more dignity; except that by now I was being asked to perform in other colleges and do cabaret for dances and Commem Balls, and was sometimes even paid. The situation was more delicate because I was supervised in my research by the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane. McFarlane was a man of great austerity and singleness of mind. He was shy, very kind, and the most impressive teacher, and in some ways the most impressive man, I have ever come across. One could go and chat to him without seemingly ever touching on the subject of one’s research and come away convinced that studying one’s tiny slip of a subject (mine was Richard II’s retinue from 1388 to 1399) was the only thing in the world worth doing. He knew a little of my cabaret performances, but they were never referred to. Around this time I recorded some sketches for BBC radio, and told him when they were due to be broadcast; ‘I listened,’ was all he ever said.
    By this time I had been at Oxford some five years, and it was plain to me, if I did not quite admit it to myself, that I was not going to make a don. To begin with I had no memory to speak of, and the notes of my research proliferated without ever congealing into anything approaching a thesis. As for teaching, I could never find sufficient comments to fill the necessary hour, and nor could my pupils. If I ventured on argument I was soon floored, and the tutorials ended in awkward silence. Eventually I took to putting the clock on before my pupils arrived, so there was less time to fill.
    Deliverance came in the summer of 1959. In that year the Oxford Theatre Group first put on a revue on the fringe at theEdinburgh Festival. Feeling immensely old and foolish at twenty-five, I nervously auditioned for the writer and director Stanley Daniels. He was an American, also a postgraduate, who appeared (so much for my qualms) at least forty, with no dignity at all nor seeming to want any. I see his name nowadays in the credits as one of the producers of the excellent American TV series Taxi . We performed at the Cranston Street Hall in Edinburgh, where in the same hall the previous year the Oxford Theatre Group had premièred Willis Hall’s The Long, the Short and the Tall and where another première a few years later was Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead . In any account of university theatre the OTG should figure largely. Our contribution in 1959 was called Better Late . It was a great success, to the extent that the official Festival took note and the following year decided to put on a revue of its own, inviting Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller from Cambridge and Dudley Moore and myself from Oxford to write and perform it. This we did firstly in Edinburgh in 1960 and subsequently in the West End. Though Dudley had been an organ scholar at Magdalen and we had even appeared on the same bill, I don’t think we had ever met until the first script conference for Beyond the Fringe .
    While I was writing this I was puzzled why, when I’d performed so little at university and not been an avid playgoer, I yet remembered Oxford as a place of theatrical excitement. I think it was that I somehow regarded the nightly experience of dining in hall as a kind of theatre, a theatre in which the undergraduates were the audience and the actors were the dons. At Exeter they entered – climbed almost – on to the stage from the mysterious backstage of the Senior Common Room, a room dimly remembered from one’s scholarship interview and not seen again until three years later, when one entered it before one’s Schools Dinner. Fanciful perhaps to compare the bang of the block for grace with the knocks that signal the rise of thecurtain at the Comédie-Française, but there was, as there is in every college, a regular repertory company enlivened at weekends and on guest nights by visitors and the occasional star. Auden I remember seeing once, hearing that quacking voice without