Peter Sellers

Obituary: Paddie O'Neil

Expressive actress and comedienne who worked with Peter Sellers and Dick Vosburgh.

Last Night's TV: Shooting Stars

When my mother was in her early twenties, a boyfriend took her to watch a Peter Sellers film. She sat there, sombre and straight-faced, as beside her, and all around her, an entire cinema of men were laughing so hard that they were choking in their 1960s mod collars.

Thirty years on, I spent my undergraduate years being placed in front of Shooting Stars - the must-see new comedy show of the 1990s - suffering from the same affliction. In some communal TV room of a student house boys were laughing so hard that they were dribbling on to their Pixies T-shirts and, occasionally, their transfixion to Vic and Bob and the "Dove from Above" would be broken for a moment to shoot a pitying glance at me, a leaden, lumpen blob who could not even crack a smile at the funniest thing in the universe as it existed in 1995. I think maybe it's genetic.

Between ourselves, I always thought the Goons got a long way with funny voices, strange noises and the comic potential of the term "batter pudding". But it cannot be denied that Sellers, Milligan and Secombe changed the genre with their comic inventiveness, surrealism and sheer cheek: the BBC once banned a scene that had the effrontery to portray the House of Commons dozing gently.

Most home movies are excruciatingly dull, but Sellers' aren't, partly because the subject himself was such an enigmatic figure (and it's always interesting to watch an enigma kicking off its shoes and arsing about), and partly because the surrounding acquaintances he shot are more interesting than yer average person's Uncle David.

The footage is less interesting than why Sellers' felt compelled to film everything. Perhaps as Harry Secombe suggested, he always had to hide behind something, a voice, a character, a camera. In some sense, he wasn't there at all.