Having comoc genius Peter Sellers as a father was a mixed blessing. His son Michael tells Lindsay Irvine how the troubled star could swing from being "hilarious" to "a demon."

AFTER Peter Sellers died, his son Michael used to travel regularly up to the north London crematorium where his ashes were interred, revisiting some very mixed feelings. "For a few years I would go up to Golders Green crematorium and talk to him, harangue him," he remembers.

The mixture of enduring love and hate is hardly surprising, since few people know better than Michael how difficult and divided his father's nature was. "He was a hard man to be around, but he was my father," says Michael, now 50.

From Tony Hancock to Michael Barrymore, the tormented clown is a familiar figure, and few people embody the stereotype better than Peter Sellers. A brilliant improviser and uncanny mimic, Peter was almost compulsively hilarious.

But he was also a confused, unhappy and angry man who was inclined to take out his moods on those closest to him.

From a young age, Michael was at the sharp end of these mood swings. On one occasion a five-year-old Michael tried to cheer up his Dad, who was characteristically livid about a tiny scratch on his latest Bentley, by painting over the scratch.

Unable to see past the very amateur paint job, Peter flew into a terrible rage, thrashing the young Michael with his belt.

"My mum says that by the age of eight I was quite versed in gauging his mood, and humouring him accordingly. He must have had a vicious temper to get me so sophisticated by that age."

But by then, Peter's restless unhappiness was leading him away from his first family with Michael's mother Anne Howe, and on to a series of ill-fated romances with much younger women, which resulted in three more marriages - to Britt Ekland, Miranda Quarry and Lynne Frederick.

"They all fall into the same pattern - blonde 21-year-olds. That's all he married - Britt was that age, my Mum was that age, Miranda and Lynne. And then when they start to answer back, he wouldn't like it.

"It would be like, 'Unwrap me another wife, would you?'."

ALTHOUGH Peter did see his children - Michael, Sarah, now 47, and Victoria, 39 - during school holidays, and looked to them to feed his hunger for affection, they were often forgotten as he pursued his flings.

Michael remembers one Christmas when his father was still besotted with his third wife, Miranda Quarry. "He told us things weren't really going too well and he couldn't really afford very much in the way of Christmas presents.

"Then he gave a car to Miranda's sister, and the other sister turns up with 500 quids' worth of new cameras. I'm going, 'I can see why you couldn't afford our presents, Dad...'. Somehow, we went from being the apple of his eye to a hindrance."

When he died, it transpired that he had left everything to his last wife Lynne Frederick, giving his children £800 each from a huge personal fortune "to show he'd thought of it, so we couldn't contest the will".

In spite of all this, Michael is keen to stress that it wasn't all bad.

"You'll see him portrayed as a 'demon' and dark and troubled. And he was. But the pendulum swung the other way: he was also hilarious and funny and bright. He'd have his dark moods and his depressions, but then he'd come out the other side and we'd have great fun."

In any ranking of the UK's greatest comedians, Peter Sellers comes near the top. As members of radio comedy team The Goons, he and Spike Milligan more or less invented the tradition of anarchic surrealism which runs through Monty Python and on to the likes of Reeves and Mortimer.

AS well as breaking new ground in sketch comedy, Peter's uncanny ability to inhabit his characters resulted in a string of brilliantly vivid screen performances: from the self-important union leader in I'm Alright Jack, to crazed Dr Strangelove, to clueless Inspector Clouseau.

And as well as putting up with his black moods, on good days Michael had the benefit of this comic genius focused on entertaining him.

Michael remembers favourite characters from The Goons accompanying the family on outings, Peter dropping in and out of roles to amuse his children. Some of these spontaneous entertainments can be glimpsed in the home movies Peter shot, and which feature heavily in the new DVD The Peter Sellers Story...As He Filmed It.

However many reservations Michael has about Peter Sellers the man, he is an unqualified admirer of his dad as an entertainer.

"I think he's one of the greatest entertainers to come out of England in the last century. It's Chaplin in the early part of the century, and him later on."

And it was Peter's gift for improvising around his characters which made him great.

"Stanley Kubrick said of all the actors he'd ever come across, most of them would take a character and stay within the confines of a script.

"With my father it was different - you'd give him a character and he'd go off down another avenue, and if you didn't follow him you'd miss it. So he used to keep four cameras trained on him."

Even Peter's dazzling gift for 'getting into character' was not an unmixed blessing, as he would often bring his film roles home with him.

"He did a film in the late 50s called Never Let Go, and played a Kray-type thug. My mum said he was horrendous because he didn't drop the character at night - he'd talk to her like a gangland heavy."

IN the right mood, however, Peter could be warm and flamboyantly generous as well as funny. And, in a bittersweet turn of events, Michael remembers that their relationship was growing warmer soon before he died.

A few months before a heart attack killed the star aged just 54 in 1980, Peter rang Michael, having heard that his marriage was in trouble. Given that Peter's own, to Lynne Frederick, was also on the rocks, he was in a good position to empathise.

"He said, 'I've heard about you and Cathy. Shame. What are you up to?'," remembers Michael.

"'Feeling sorry for myself,' I said.

"'Well I'm off to Switzerland,' he said. 'Want to come with?'. He drove over and picked me up at 11, we took a private jet out to Geneva, and we were having tea at his house in Gstaad by four.

"And we started sort of re-engaging as father and son, but as men, on more equal terms. It was a shame, in the few months up to his death we had some good times.

"We probably would have spent more time together and got more friendly but... it was denied."

* The Peter Sellers Story...As He Filmed It is out on DVD from BBC Films, priced £15.99.

l Sellers On Sellers, by Michael Sellers and Gary Morecambe (Carlton Books, £12.99). Available from next month.