Steve Pratt talks to actor Aidan McArdle about the difficulties of bringing famous comic and jazz pianist Dudley Moore back to life and how studying the dwindling relationship with Peter Cook began to impact on his acting partnership with Rhys Ifans.

IRISH actor Aidan McArdle admits he didn't know very much more about Dudley Moore than the rest of us when he set out to portray him in a C4 film. "I didn't know a great deal about the man, although I used to love Dudley Moore as an actor in 10 and stuff like that when I was a kid. He always seemed to be a very nice man," he says.

McArdle did his homework to join Welshman Rhys Ifans, who plays Peter Cook, in a TV movie about the comic double act who also enjoyed solo careers.

The film, Not Only But Always, is writer-director Terry Johnson's take on the pair's partnership and follows them from the birth of their double act in the late 1950s to Cook's death in 1995.

"I just watched as many DVDs and films of his that I could," says McArdle. "I did an awful lot of work for the audition when Terry used an actual Pete and Dud sketch. It was really hard but people seem to think that I've captured him. I feel like I link up with him now because I've seen every bit of footage of him that exists."

The film was made in New Zealand because producers felt the variety of scenery could stand in for London, Cambridge, New York, Los Angeles, and the Bahamas. Cook and Moore came from different backgrounds - Cook was public school, Moore was working class - and their working relationship was sometimes a difficult one. It finally broke up amid jealousy and recriminations.

The essence of their relationship was the fact that they were co-dependent in a weird way, McArdle feels. "Dud was so sick and tired of Pete before the end. He had to redefine himself, a bit like what happened to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis before they broke up. Dudley became one of the biggest Hollywood stars.

"They meant an awful lot to each other, but pretended they didn't care. They were inextricably linked. Rhys and I kept catching ourselves going, 'What are we doing?'. It was very strange, we started copying their dynamic."

Moore was a brilliant jazz pianist, which posed another problem for McArdle. "I took lessons, but the more I listened to him playing, the more I thought, 'You must be joking'. He was a remarkable pianist. He was playing like Errol Garner. It was jazz, jazz, jazz," he says.

"The most difficult thing with Dud, because he was always performing, even off camera, was get to know how he spoke because he was always using different voices. Interviews in which he was himself were invaluable."

Meeting the director of Pete and Dud's TV series, Not Only But Also, was helpful to learn how they behaved together on set. He also viewed a 1959 BBC Monitor programme in which Moore was featured as an up-and-coming pianist.

"An awful lot of their comedy was very advanced for the time. But the tapes of a lot of their programmes have been wiped," he says.

"There was a tape of them on Good Morning being interviewed by Mavis Nicholson in 1994 which was like gold dust because you could see them starting to disagree with each other."

As well as recreating their Not Only sketches, McArdle found himself playing Moore in a scene from his hit movie 10.

He can also be seen in the current cinema release Ella Enchanted, playing an elf, but has been mainly a theatre actor in the past, including seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He's recently been appearing in London in a revival of Shadow Of A Gunman. Next he's off to Germany to film a drama documentary Young Einstein.

He has no little idea why the makers of Not Only But Always chose him to play Moore. "I suppose I'd done so much work for the audition that something clicked," he says.

McArdle's also pleased to report that Cook's family seem to approve of the film. "His widow Lin likes it. I would be upset if the families were upset," he says.

"I was surprised how emotional I felt at the end of filming. I usually think of it as a job, you go on and do it. But this one really crept under my skin."

* Not Only But Always: Today, C4, 9pm.

Published: 30/12/2004