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To Lovesick Moore brought many touches from his own experience: he spent 17 years in the office of one shrink or another, trying to come to terms with a childhood that was more than unhappy. His father was a railway electrician, his mother was a shorthand typist, and he grew up in a poor, row-house neighborhood in the London suburb of Dagenham. But poverty was not the problem: it was a clubfoot and a skinny, slightly shorter left leg, which sent him in and out of hospitals from the age of two weeks on. "Psychologically it was made harrowing by the fact that my parents felt guilty about it," he says. "That made me feel as if I had done something wrong. Years later my mother quite honestly said to me, 'I wanted to kill you when you were born, because I felt so angry at myself and so terrible about the pain I knew you were going to have.' I'm not grim, but I'm still basically cringing from the defect. I remember kids sniggering and smirking—they called me Hopalong—and it has only been in recent years that I've pulled myself out of a certain anesthesia."
Only later, as he grew, or failed to grow, did Moore realize that he had another problem. "I felt very humiliated about my height when I was a child. Then, when I became interested in what can only be described as the opposite sex, I felt that being small was a disadvantage. I felt unworthy of anything, a little runt with a twisted foot." His was not a loving home, and his parents, both of whom were also 5 ft. 2 in., seemed to have two basic emotions, fear and anxiety. "They huddled together for some sort of comfort," he says. "I don't know that either of them could express love very well, to each other or to us."
In his early teens Moore learned how to win affection, and the lesson has dominated his life: people like to laugh, and they love those who can make them do so. Having discovered that vintage truth, he became the class clown. Says he: "I think it's every comedian's story." He was developing another crowd-pleasing talent as well; he was a fine pianist who concocted melodies easily. He vaulted over the class barrier by winning a scholarship in music to Oxford; by the time he left with two degrees in 1958, he was an accomplished Garner-style jazzman and the prolific composer of tunes for local skits and cabarets. "Dudley has always had a promiscuous talent as a musician," says his old friend Jonathan Miller. "He secretes music like sweat."