Derek and Clive based on Valerie Eliot

 

With the proviso that the easily-offended should not listen to Back of the Cab from the brilliant 1977 Derek and Clive Come Again, it only happens that, 45 years later, it looks like it was based on a letter from Valerie Eliot to The Times, published on 10/2/70. It's quoted on page 468 of Robert Crawford's Eliot After The Waste Land, 

As he got in, the driver said: 'You're T. S. Eliot'....'Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him: "Well, Lord Russell, what's it all about", and, do you know, he couldn't tell me.

 

It has nothing to do with the Eliots or Russell, really, but it suggests that Peter Cook remembered reading a letter to The Times. Very sadly, young Dudley isn't easy to hear on this on You Tube. It's worth finding elsewhere.