Soupy Sales: the pieman speaks!

Another wonderful moment in the Funhouse, speaking to the Soup in the Friars Club back in 2002. He had had some health problems in the years before the interview, but was very eager to chat about some topics I hadn't heard him talk about that often and, yes, the topic he was always asked about, the throwing of cream pies on his classic Sixties daytime show.


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Still can't believe I met him: the Funhouse interview with Peter Ustinov

I first encountered the multi-talented Peter Ustinov on a show Steve Allen did in the late '70s called Laugh Back, where he showed clips from his 1950s series. I became obsessed with the gent's work, as he embodied something I've always been fascinated with: intelligence tempered with extreme silliness. He was a renaissance man who is now sadly sort of forgotten, although he wrote several hit plays, was a magnificent character actor, directed at least one classic movie (Billy Budd), wrote scads of books, and was an exceptionally funny raconteur (how many raconteurs do we really have these days?).

I was very pleased to meet the gent back in 1999 when he was in NYC promoting the Merchant-Ivory send-up, Stiff Upper Lips. We went off in all kinds of directions in our conversation, which shouldn't've surprised me, but still did.


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