"The quartet of Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller created a boom in satirical comedy with Beyond the Fringe, played thousands of shows on both sides of the Atlantic, and enjoyed huge solo success."
Many figures who found celebrity through the satire boom went on to establish subsequently more serious careers as writers including Alan Bennett (drama), Jonathan Miller (polymathic), and Paul Foot (investigative journalism).
[3] BT states, "The ground-breaking revue Beyond the Fringe, starring Oxbridge graduates Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore, opened at the Fortune Theatre, London in 1961 – and started something of a revolution in humour.
"[3] Booker argues that, with the response to the Suez Crisis which effectively marked the end of the British Empire as a great power, an upper middle class generation with public school and Oxbridge educations who had grown up with certain expectations—of following a career in colonial administration or the civil service—suddenly found themselves surplus.
At the same time the emergence of the "angry young men" and "kitchen sink realism" in drama were signs that British culture was increasingly dominated by the concerns of the "common man".