Swan Dive

I have a lot of box sets that sit on my shelves, starved for attention. A Celebration Of Sellers is one of them. I’m not even sure if this is still in print, but here are a few reasons you should seek it out -

Those who remember Peter Sellers best as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther series may be surprised to learn that, while making those movies, he had a parallel career as a recording artist. This 4-CD box set collects the many albums, EP’s and singles Sellers cut for EMI in the 60s and early 70s. Produced by George Martin, these delightfully warped recordings capture Sellers in all his glory - as a man of a thousand voices.

Highlights include:

Disc One: “The Trumpet Volunteer,” in which a dim-witted pop star tells an interviewer how he’d like to update the classics of Bach and Beethoven; a sniffly old man who sounds like a Cockney cousin of Elmer Fudd warbles the standard “All The Things You Are”; “Party Political Speech,” a brilliant 3-minute filibuster that says absolutely nothing in doublespeak language; and a dead-on Jimmy Durante imitation on “Never Never Land.”

Disc Two: “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” a spoof on My Fair Lady that features an all Hindi cast and sitar-tabla songs such as “Get Me To Taj Mahal On Time” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed To Your Dothi”; and “After The Fox,” a collaboration with The Hollies on a Bacharach-David tune.

Disc Three: the unlikely duo of Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren romp through four campy songs, full of suggestive lyrics and cartoon-ish arrangements; in a medley of the most entertaining Beatle covers you’ll ever hear, Sellers inflates “A Hard Day’s Night” into a melodramatic Shakespearean soliloquy, turns “Help!” into a booming Protestant sermon and renders “She Loves You” as a drunken conversation between two pub-dwelling Cockneys (“She said she loves you.” “Yeah?” “Yeah, yeah.”)

Disc Four: the world’s first morse code version of “Night And Day,” featuring a telegraph with a symphony orchestra; “A Compleat Guide To Accents Of The British Isles” is a tour-de-force for Sellers’ remarkable powers of mimicry; and near the end, Inspector Clouseau makes an appearance, singing “Thank Heaven For Little Girls.”

While some of the material in this box set may be too British for general audiences, there are plenty of moments of comic genius here that will keep you laughing, even on repeated listenings. A Celebration Of Sellers reminds us that when Peter Sellers passed away in 1980, we lost one of the world’s most gifted funnymen.