Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One Before the Fringe
‘Black and White Blues’ (Radley, 1956)
‘Guilty Party’ (Last Laugh, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1959)
‘Mr Grole’ (Last Laugh, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1959)
‘Balance of Trade’ (Pieces of Eight, Apollo Theatre, London, 1959)
‘Snail Reform’ (Pieces of Eight, Apollo Theatre, London, 1959)
‘If Only’ (Pieces of Eight, Apollo Theatre, London, 1959)
‘Ornithology’ (Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1960)
‘The Ballad of Sir Frederick Snain’ (Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1960)
‘Ordinary Man’ (Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1960)
‘Interesting Facts’ (Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1960)
‘Second Flood’ (Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1960)
‘Wha Hae’ (Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1960)
‘Bletchley First Class’ (Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1960)
‘Oh Yes’ (Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1960)
‘The Lost Art of Conversation’ (One Over The Eight, Duke of York’s Theatre, London, 1961)
‘The Ephemeral Triangle’ (One Over The Eight, Duke of York’s Theatre, London, 1961)
‘Chez Malcolm’ (One Over The Eight, Duke of York’s Theatre, London, 1961)
Chapter Two Beyond the Fringe
‘Sitting on the Bench’ (Fortune Theatre, London, 1961)
‘Black Equals White’ (Fortune Theatre, London, 1961)
‘The Sadder and Wiser Beaver’ (Fortune Theatre, London, 1961)
‘The End of the World’ (Fortune Theatre, London, 1961)
TVPM (John Golden Theatre, New York, 1962)
‘The Great Train Robbery’ (John Golden Theatre, New York, 1964)
‘One Leg Too Few’ (John Golden Theatre, New York, 1964)
Chapter Three EL Wisty
‘The World Domination League’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘Royalty’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘The Tadpole Expert’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘Are You Spotty?’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘CP Snow’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘Peace Through Nudism’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘O’er Hill and Dale’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘A Bee Life’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘The Man Who Invented the Wheel’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘Food For Thought’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘Spindly Legs’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘Man’s Best Friend’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘The EL Wisty Festival of Arts’ (On the Braden Beat, ITV, 1964)
‘EL Wisty in the Afterlife’ (Holiday Startime, ITV, 1970)
‘From Beyond the Veil’ (Mermaid Theatre, London, 1977)
‘Do You Know You Are a TV Set?’ (TV Times, 1980)
Chapter Four Not Only But Also
Tramponuns (BBC2, 1965)
Facts Of Life (BBC2, 1966)
Father & Son (BBC2, 1966)
The Psychiatrist (BBC2, 1966)
Ravens (BBC2, 1965)
Worms (BBC2, 1970)
Flowers (BBC2, 1970)
Chapter Five Pete & Dud
‘Film Stars’ (Not Only But Also, BBC2, 1965)
‘At the Art Gallery’ (Not Only But Also, BBC2, 1965)
‘On the Bus’ (Not Only But Also, BBC2, 1965)
‘Religion’ (Not Only But Also, BBC2, 1965)
‘At the Zoo’ (Not Only But Also, BBC2, 1966)
‘Sex’ (Not Only But Also, BBC2, 1966)
‘The Futility of Life’ (Not Only But Also, BBC2, 1970)
Chapter Six Private Eye
‘The Seductive Brethren’ (1964–65)
‘The Memoirs of Rhandhi P’hurr’ (1965)
Chapter Seven Behind the Fridge
‘Dudley Moore by Peter Cook’ (Cambridge Theatre, London, 1972)
‘Hello’ (Plymouth Theatre, New York, 1973)
‘Crime and Punishment’ (Plymouth Theatre, New York, 1973)
‘Gospel Truth’ (Plymouth Theatre, New York, 1973)
‘Mini Drama’ (Plymouth Theatre, New York, 1973)
‘Frog & Peach’ (Plymouth Theatre, New York, 1973)
Chapter Eight Derek and Clive
‘Alias Derek and Clive’ (Sheffield & North Derbyshire Spectator, 1976)
‘The Worst Job I Ever Had’ (Derek & Clive (Live), 1976)
‘This Bloke Came Up to Me’ (Derek & Clive (Live), 1976)
‘Blind’ (Derek & Clive (Live), 1976)
‘Come Again – Sleeve Notes’ (1977)
‘Joan Crawford’ (Derek & Clive – Come Again, 1977)
‘Horse Racing’ (Derek & Clive – Ad Nauseam, 1979)
‘The Critics’ (Derek & Clive – Ad Nauseam, 1979)
Chapter Nine Monday Morning Feeling
Chapter Ten Not Also But Only
‘More Interesting Facts’ (The Secret Policeman’s Ball, Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, 1979)
‘Entirely a Matter for You’ (The Secret Policeman’s Ball, Her Majesty’s Theatre, London 1979)
‘The World of Ants’ (Peter Cook & Co, ITV, 1980)
‘Inalienable Rights’ (An Evening At Court, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, 1983)
‘Grole’s Last Stand’ (Saturday Live, Channel 4, 1986)
‘Builders of Xanadu’ (Saturday Live, Channel 4, 1986)
‘Lord Stockton’ (Saturday Live, Channel 4, 1986)
‘Norman House’ (Clive Anderson Talks Back, Channel 4, 1993)
‘Sir James Beauchamp’ (Clive Anderson Talks Back, Channel 4, 1993)
‘Alan Latchley’ (Clive Anderson Talks Back, Channel 4, 1993)
‘Eric Daley’ (Clive Anderson Talks Back, Channel 4, 1993)
Chapter Eleven Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling
‘A Partridge in a Pear Tree’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
‘Two Turtle Doves’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
‘Three French Hens’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
‘Four Calling Birds’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
‘Five Gold Rings’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
‘Six Geese a-Laying’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
‘Seven Swans a-Swimming’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
‘Eight Maids a-Milking’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
‘Nine Drummers Drumming’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
‘Ten Pipers Piping’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
‘Eleven Ladies Dancing’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
‘Twelve Lords a-Leaping’ (BBC2, 1990/91)
Why Bother? (BBC Radio Three, 1994) Part One
Why Bother? (BBC Radio Three, 1994) Part Two
Why Bother? (BBC Radio Three, 1994) Part Three
Why Bother? (BBC Radio Three, 1994) Part Four
Why Bother? (BBC Radio Three, 1994) Part Five
Chapter Twelve Sports Reporter
‘The Kick I Get out of Football’ (Sunday People, February, 1968)
‘God’s in His Heaven – and All’s Well with Liverpool’ (Daily Mail, Monday 11 April, 1977)
‘We Are the Champions’ (Daily Mail, Monday 18 April, 1977)
‘The Game That England Have to Win and Dare Not Lose But Will Be Happy to Draw’ (Evening Standard, 8 September, 1993)
‘Swallow a Sultana – It’s Time to Play Our World Cup War Game’ (Evening Standard, 16 June, 1994)
‘Clive Speaks His Mind’ (Vox, 1994)
‘Major Titherly Glibble’ (Peter Cook Talks Golf Balls, 1994)
Chapter Thirteen Small Hours Sven (LBC)
Chapter Fourteen Goodbye-ee
‘Lines on the Occasion of the Queen Mother’s Eightieth Birthday’ (TV Times, 1980)
‘Rock Stars in Their Underpants’ (1980)
‘A Life in the Day’ (Sunday Times, 5 August, 1984)
‘Perhaps and Maybe – a Modern Fable’
‘Neville’
‘Limericks’
Notes
Extract from One Leg Too Few
Copyright
Grateful thanks to the following institutions, which first staged, broadcast, recorded or published much of this material: broadcasters and producers – ATV, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, Channel 4, Hat Trick Productions, ITV, LBC and Talkback; record companies – Atlantic, BBC Worldwide, Capitol, Castle Classic, Decca, EMI, Essex Music, Funny Business, Island, Laughing Stock, Parlophone, Polydor, Pye Cube, Speaking Volumes, Springtime, Transatlantic and Virgin Records; publishers – Methuen, Mandarin, Penguin, Samuel French, Souvenir Press and Virgin Books; periodicals – the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, Golf World, Private Eye, the Sheffield & North Derbyshire Spectator, the Sunday People, the Sunday Times, TV Times and Vox.
Grateful thanks, too, to the following individuals, who helped to write or perform this material: Clive Anderson, Rowan Atkinson, Peter Bellwood, Alan Bennett, John Bird, Clive Bull, John Cleese, Barry Fantoni, Fenella Fielding, Peter Fincham, John Fortune, Sheila Hancock, Richard Ingrams, Ludovic Kennedy, John Lloyd, Rory McGrath, Bernard McKenna, Jonathan Miller, Chris Morris and Dan Patterson; Timothy Birdsall, Dudley Moore, John Wells and Kenneth Williams.
Grateful thanks for their help in compiling this collection to the following institutions: the BBC, the British Library, the Cambridge Footlights, the Associated Newspapers reference library, Golf World, the Literary Review, Martine Avenue Productions Inc, the Press Association, Private Eye and Radley College.
And grateful thanks, too, for all their invaluable help, to all of the following individuals: Julian Alexander, Mark Booth, Leo Cooper, Barry Fantoni, Rena Fruchter, Bruce Hunter, Richard Ingrams, Hilary Lowinger, Tony Money, Harry Porter, Geoffrey Strachan, Tony Rushton, Roger Wilmut, Cy Young – and Lin Cook, without whom this book never would have been published.
Part of the proceeds from the sale of this book are going to support the following charities:
In memory of Peter Cook.
The Peter Cook Foundation for young adults with learning disabilities.
The Peter Cook Memorial Fund, Pembroke College, Cambridge.
In memory of Dudley Moore.
The Dudley Moore Research Fund for Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.
Music For All Seasons, taking music into facilities where people are confined.
Not only for his friends, who were lucky enough to enjoy his strange comic genius in private, but also for his fans, who could only marvel at his virtuoso humour in public, on the stage or screen, Peter Cook was simply the funniest man they’d ever encountered. And eight years after his premature death, eight years short of his old age pension, his reputation as the most talented comedian of his generation shows no sign of shrinking. ‘He had funniness in the same way that beautiful people have beauty,’1 said Stephen Fry. And whenever he was being funny, there was always something quite beautiful about Peter Cook.
Half a lifetime since his greatest triumphs, Cook’s old colleagues still struggle to define the daft magic of working with him, while modern comics far too young to have enjoyed his work first time around still talk about him like an up and coming contemporary, rather than someone who became famous more than forty years ago. John Cleese called him Peter Amadeus Cook, after Mozart, another prodigy whose precocious creativity felt like the gift of an unusually cheerful god. ‘Most of us would take six hours to write a good three-minute sketch,’ says Cleese. ‘It actually took Peter three minutes to write a three-minute sketch. I always thought he was the best of us, and the only one who came near being a genius, because genius, to me, has something to do with doing it more easily than other people.’2
David Dimbleby wasn’t joking when he called Cook ‘the funniest Englishman since Chaplin.’ And Cook wasn’t joking when he replied ‘Well, this is no time for false modesty.’3 But that easy genius could trip Cook up, as well as liberating him. When Cook succeeded, he succeeded big time. When he failed, he failed just as big. Cook’s compulsion to create instant comedy in real time made him the world’s best chat show guest, but it also made him the world’s worst chat show host – as he demonstrated on his own chat show, Where Do I Sit?, which was cancelled after just three episodes.
Cook wasn’t a natural actor. He wasn’t even an outright satirist. He never wrote any plays or novels. So what was all the fuss about? Well, this book should give you a good idea. It’s a collection of Cook’s finest writing, from university revues via West End and Broadway shows, on to television, and into his own private world of unpublished poetry and occasional late-night radio phone-ins. Of course it’s not a compendium of everything he ever did. Despite the idle image he acquired, Cook produced far more comedy than you could fit into one book. But it is a pretty comprehensive summary of the comic creations that made us laugh for more than thirty years, from the late Fifties to the early Nineties, and still make us laugh today.
Peter Cook’s comic rise and fall has become the stuff of showbiz legend. How he wrote a hit West End show for Kenneth Williams while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge University. How, fresh out of college, he became a star in Beyond the Fringe – the wittiest revue that Britain, or America, had ever seen. How he opened Britain’s first satirical nightclub, The Establishment, importing American comic Lenny Bruce, launching Australian comic Barry Humphries, and resurrecting that Great British comic, Frankie Howerd. How he saved Britain’s sharpest satirical paper, Private Eye. How he starred alongside Dudley Moore in three series of Not Only But Also – arguably the greatest sketch show ever broadcast by the BBC. How he freed British comics from a monotonous diet of trite, hand-me-down one-liners by injecting into live comedy an intelligent, imaginative parody of Anglo-Saxon attitudes that previously had been the province of the comic novel. And how, at an age when most comics are just starting out, he seemed to throw it all away, splitting up with Dudley Moore for a life of solitary drinking in front of the television.
Well, that’s the legend, and like most legends, there’s some truth in it. But like a lot of legends, it’s hardly the whole story. True, Cook’s later routines could never hope to match the frantic creativity of his twenties, when he played a leading role in Britain’s funniest stage show, television series, nightclub and magazine. Yet although Cook didn’t sustain his youthful vigour into middle age, he continued to create brilliant comedy – but only when he wanted to, that’s all. And even though he never dominated another decade as he dominated the Sixties, it’s surprising how many of the gems in this selection are from the Seventies, Eighties and even Nineties.
Cook’s dark Derek & Clive duologues with Dudley Moore, recorded in the late Seventies, didn’t command the same broad appeal as their earlier head-to-heads as Pete & Dud, but they still attracted a huge following, and became an anarchic landmark in British comic history. Derek & Clive’s coarse, repetitive vocabulary – as revolutionary, in its own way, as the working-class naturalism of Harold Pinter’s early dramas – inspired the scatological outpourings of the Alternative Comedy boom. And yet Cook’s classic, timeless sketches on Channel 4’s variety flagship, Saturday Live, in the mid-Eighties, effortlessly eclipsed the trendy, strident stand-up of the Thatcher years. His virtuoso performance, in the early Nineties, on Clive Anderson’s Channel 4 chat show, as four diverse comic archetypes, oozed all the careless elegance of an entertainer at the very top of his game. And Why Bother? – the Radio Three series he made less than a year before his death, with Brass Eye creator Chris Morris – was one of the best things he ever did. After his twentysomething triumphs, the quantity of his comedy certainly tailed off pretty steeply, but right up until his death, the quality was still there.
Cook was a miniaturist. He was happiest when working with just a couple of characters. His speciality was a conversation of only several minutes duration. His quick-fire creativity didn’t lend itself to longer, more structured genres. ‘Most of my ideas are only worth about five minutes,’ he admitted.4 And if his preference was for brief monologues or duologues, it’s this preference that has determined the contents of this book. It’s a book to read, rather than a set of scripts to perform, and so I’ve kept pieces with more than two characters to a minimum. Unless you’re one of those rare people who prefer reading plays to watching them, you’ll find them hard to picture on the page. Some of Cook’s comedy is too visual to really work in print. Other stuff is too dated. But usually, I was pleasantly surprised how comfortably Cook’s humour translated from tape into type. My main problem wasn’t what to include, but what to leave out.
Another pleasant problem was which versions to choose. Improvisation played a major role in many of Cook’s best sketches, and his original scripts were often mere starting points for the impromptu performances that followed. Cook quickly tired of repeating work verbatim, so his most popular and frequently reprised sketches resemble variations on a theme, rather than repeat performances of one definitive version. The different demands of stage and screen also played a part. Some sketches started off onstage, were adapted for television, and then returned to the live stage, mutating en route. Cook’s early performances tend to be more compact and punchy. His later performances are often far more ragged, but feature some glorious fresh asides. The written and live versions share the same relative pros and cons.
These comparisons are interesting, but only up to a point. My solution to this finitely fascinating dilemma has been completely inconsistent. I’ve selected some scripts and some transcripts, some early debuts and some later encores. To show how Cook’s comedy changed, I’ve included an early and a late version of one of his most famous sketches, Interesting Facts – but that’s all. This is a book for people who don’t know so much about Cook’s comedy, as well as those who already do, and I reckon only a truly dysfunctional Peter Cook fan would want every available version of every sketch in one volume.
Naturally, no collection of Cook’s writing can recreate the special quality of his performances – but sadly, more often than not, the writing is all that’s left. Neither of Cook’s Cambridge Footlights shows was recorded for posterity, and although the West End shows he wrote for Kenneth Williams, Pieces of Eight and One Over the Eight, were both released as LPs, they’ve long since been deleted. You can still buy audio recordings of Beyond the Fringe, Derek & Clive and Why Bother? Some Pete & Dud and Not Only But Also sketches, plus some of Cook’s monologues as raincoat fantasist EL Wisty, are also still for sale on cassette tape. However, if you want to actually see Cook perform, rather than just listen to him, you’ll have your work cut out. Hardly any of the material in this book is generally available on DVD or VHS.
This alone is an awful shame, but even worse – far worse – most of Not Only But Also, Cook and Moore’s comic masterpiece, was systematically destroyed by the BBC itself, as part of a routine policy of recycling old master tapes. They even threw away some of the scripts. ‘Has there ever been such corporate vandalism from a company claiming to represent the best of British Broadcasting?’5 asks Eric Idle. In 1990, twenty years after the final series, the BBC belatedly cobbled together six half-hour compilations, under the suitably apologetic title of The Best of What’s Left of Not Only But Also, consisting partly of footage retrieved from the archives of foreign TV companies who’d bought the show from the BBC in the Sixties and fortunately treated it with more reverence than the people who’d flogged it to them. Cook and Moore selected some of these salvaged sketches for a video of the same name, but despite this partial restoration, much of the Not Only But Also material in this book only survived on soundtrack, and some now only exists in script form, published here for the first time.
Plenty of other stuff in this book actually works better on the printed page than it does on the small screen. When he made Peter Cook Talks Golf Balls, Cook had less than a year to live, but the script is sublime, and in print you can imagine him performing it in his prime, rather than the twilight of his life. Like Sixties playwright Joe Orton, who shared Cook’s verbal dexterity, and his impudent delight at the inherent idiocy of language, Cook’s characters specialise in saying funny things rather than doing funny things – which may be why neither of these men ever really cracked the movies. Like Orton’s, Cook’s writing was often far more literary than theatrical, and these idiosyncratic scripts are better reread than re-enacted. Cook was never much cop at reading other people’s lines – and vice versa.
Remarkably, for a man who became notorious for rarely writing anything, quite a lot of this book was never even intended for performance – like the column he wrote for the Daily Mail, ‘Peter Cook’s Monday Morning Feeling’, or his surreal sports reports for its sister paper, London’s Evening Standard. There’s even an EL Wisty monologue in here, written for the TV Times, which works just as well as the ones he performed on ITV over fifteen years earlier. Cook’s work for Private Eye became increasingly intermittent, but from 1964 to 1966 he was a key player in an inspired ensemble, alongside John Wells and Richard Ingrams. ‘The Seductive Brethren’, included here, was one of the pieces Cook had a main hand in – a yarn that reads not so much like swinging Sixties satire, more like Tristram Shandy.
If you try to think of another entertainer who shares some of Cook’s unique prose style, and the parallel universe he created, the names that first spring to mind aren’t those of performers, but writers. And although he’s often regarded as an innovator – of Sixties Satire, Seventies Surrealism or even Eighties Alternative Comedy, Cook’s comedic kindred spirits were born long before him, not soon after. True, it’s hard to imagine That Was the Week That Was, Monty Python’s Flying Circus or The Comic Strip without his influence, but Cook’s own influences stretch far further back. Cook adored The Goon Show, Spike Milligan’s delirious, demented Fifties radio serial, with Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers – who later appeared with Cook and Moore on Not Only But Also. At boarding school, Cook would feign illness so he could listen to Milligan’s meisterwerk in the school sanatorium on Friday nights. Yet the writers whom his work most resembles aren’t from the twentieth century, but the nineteenth – eminent Victorians like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Cook devoured Alice In Wonderland as a child, and as an adult he flattered Carroll with imitation – performing Carroll’s sinister nonsense poem, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, in Not Only But Also, and playing the Mad Hatter in a BBC adaptation of Carroll’s book, directed by Cook’s old Beyond the Fringe partner, Jonathan Miller. He also performed Lear’s poem, ‘Uncle Arly’, in Not Only But Also, with a cricket – his nonchalant nickname for critics – perched upon his nose. Indeed, the more you hear of Cook’s humour, the less he seems to share with his satirical peers. ‘He wasn’t interested in satire at all,’ says Alan Bennett. ‘He was interested in being funny.’6 Like all true artists, in any field, Cook was always far more keen on creating his own fantastic other world than in changing the workaday world around him.
Richard Ingrams categorised Cook as a conservative anarchist, but Cook’s anarchy had nothing to do with overthrowing the state. He had no real quarrel with a system. ‘The idea that he had an anarchic, subversive view of society is complete nonsense,’ says Jonathan Miller. ‘He was the most upstanding, traditional upholder of everything English and everything establishment.’7 Cook supported worthy causes like Amnesty International, but he always recoiled from the sort of comedy that wants to bring down governments. He even felt sad for Margaret Thatcher when she left Downing Street.
Cook’s comedy is curiously abstract. His characters aren’t rooted in our reality, but inhabit a bizarre hinterland, where a man can spend a lifetime trying to teach worms to talk, flowers to walk, or ravens to fly underwater. Nevertheless, there is one aspect of his output that is entirely realistic. Like him, his principal alter egos, from Pete & Dud to Derek & Clive, from EL Wisty to Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, are typically, unapologetically English. And like all Englishmen, they’re all helpless prisoners of that terribly English caste system called social class. EL Wisty is trapped in the working class, without education or opportunities, but with a wistful yearning for adventure and achievement that he can never hope to fulfil. ‘I could have been a judge,’ says Wisty, ‘but I never had the Latin.’ Conversely, Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling is trapped in the upper class, blessed with the wealth to do whatever he wants – but not the sense to know that what he’s doing is totally futile. ‘I’ve learned from my mistakes,’ says Sir Arthur, ‘and I’m sure I can repeat them.’
Cook usually played down any autobiographical elements in his work. Yet there are personal echoes scattered throughout his writing which make this book a sort of accidental autobiography – albeit one that’s been elaborated and distorted by an unruly imagination. Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling is a quintessential colonial old buffer, not unkind but disconnected, buried in his own work, and alienated from his fellow man. Peter went to boarding school while his father, like his grandfather, worked in remote colonies.
Peter’s father, Alec, served the British Empire with discreet distinction in Nigeria, Gibraltar, Libya and the West Indies, and was decorated by the Queen. But although Alec’s lengthy absences did not diminish the lifelong fondness that endured and flourished between father and son, the immense distances that separated them during Peter’s formative years weren’t just geographical, but emotional. Alec did manage to see Peter briefly as a baby, but Peter’s first clear memory of Alec wasn’t until Peter was already seven, when Alec came back from Nigeria to the family home in Torquay after the Second World War. ‘I didn’t quite know who he was and I was told he was my father,’ remembered Peter, a few years before Alec died. ‘So we shook hands and agreed on it – he was a total stranger to me.’8
Peter’s parents then had two daughters, Sarah and Elizabeth, but they were both significantly younger. Sarah, the elder of the two, wasn’t born until the last months of the war. Peter’s war began when he was a toddler, and didn’t end until the year he went to boarding school. Hitler had made a father-shaped hole in the most formative years of Peter’s childhood. (Cook had two daughters of his own, Lucy and Daisy, with his first wife, Wendy Snowden, whom he met at Cambridge. He subsequently married Judy Huxtable, and finally Lin Chong, becoming a stepfather to her daughter, Nina.)
Cook’s comedy is littered with opaque but tantalising clues. When Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling tells Ludovic Kennedy that his son, like him, was raised by goats, it sounds like yet another typical piece of Peter Cook tomfoolery – until you remember that the name for a female goat is Nanny. Cook’s preoccupation with bees, worms, ants, and all manner of creepy crawlies appears equally random, until you reflect that in his father’s absence, in the enforced matriarchy of wartime, one of his earliest male role models was the gardener. In Alec’s home movies, Peter follows him around the garden, copying his spadework with a tiny toy trowel.
However the inspiration for Cook’s most enduring creation was biographical, not autobiographical. His idiot savant, EL Wisty, was a character he refined throughout his adult life, but this weird park bench philosopher was initially directly based on a real, living person – Arthur Boylett, the butler at Radley College, Peter’s public school. ‘He was an elderly man, mostly cheerful, with a dry manner of speech,’9 recalls Jonathan Harlow, a school friend of Peter’s. Another school friend, Michael Bawtree, paints a more Dickensian picture. ‘He would dress in shabby tails, grey waistcoat and tie, like a waiter in some Hungarian nightclub.’10 Boylett was capable of wry humour. Once, he swept some breadcrumbs off the dinner table and straight into a prefect’s lap. ‘Well, they were your crumbs,’ he said.
But Boylett’s speciality was his supernatural pronouncements. He told Cook he’d seen stones move and twigs hover – that he’d sold a moving stone, and that hovering twigs might well be valuable. ‘I thought I saw it move,’ quickly became Cook’s catchphrase, and Radley’s. ‘The more pathetic and simple the poor man was, the more Peter saw in him an absurdist superhero,’ claims Bawtree.11 Perhaps that was because in this caricature Cook had accidentally unearthed a hidden aspect of himself. ‘I’ve always felt very closely identified with that sort of personality,’12 he said, ten years later, at the very height of his fame. However successful we become, perceived Cook, there’s still a bit of Boylett in all of us – bald, grey and stooping, sweeping up the crumbs from the tables of younger people, destined for better things.
When Cook went up to Cambridge, to Pembroke College, like his father, he left Boylett behind, but he took his impersonation with him, and even though his new friends had never met the subject of his impression, Cook’s Boylett soon became an even bigger hit at university than he had been back at school. First at Pembroke College Smoking Concerts (whose quaint title harked back to the days when smoking was a male-only occupation), then at Footlights Smokers, and finally at The Last Laugh, the 1959 annual Footlights revue, directed by John Bird, which launched Peter’s professional show business career. Renamed Mr Grole, and finally EL Wisty, this wise fool was Cook’s first small-screen success.
Boylett may have been a sleeping partner in Cook’s comic apprenticeship, but there were many other willing collaborators who helped him along the way. Adrian Slade and John Fortune both wrote sketches with Cook for the Cambridge Footlights. Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore all wrote with Cook for Beyond the Fringe. Cook was by far the busiest writer in this historic comic quartet. Moore reckoned Cook wrote two thirds of their celebrated script, while Bennett and Miller shared the remaining third between them – although modestly, and erroneously, Moore didn’t seem to count his own immaculate musical compositions, which bound this ground-breaking show together. All the Beyond the Fringe sketches in this book are primarily by Cook, but comedy is a promiscuous business, and simply by performing his sketches with him, time after time, Bennett, Miller and Moore couldn’t help but contribute to Cook’s authorship.
It was a similar story when Cook and Moore paired up, in Not Only But Also, Behind the Fridge and Derek & Clive. As their unique comic counterpoint developed, Dudley’s input increased, but even in their later series he still estimated that he only wrote around 30 per cent – less than half of Peter’s contribution. However Moore’s special relationship with Cook can’t be measured in mere percentages. Even in the early days, when Cook did most of the writing, Moore still played a crucial part. ‘Trying to collaborate, let alone compete with Peter was always incredibly difficult,’ recalled Cook’s Private Eye writing partner, John Wells. ‘Any intrusion into his world sounded flat and trivial.’13 Unlike the competitive, self-confident Eye scribes, Moore didn’t contend with Cook – he complemented him, and this balance was what gave their partnership such poise. ‘Dudley’s humour is not very largely verbal,’ says Bennett. ‘He’s much more of a clown and mugs a lot and he’s a very good person to bounce off.’14 ‘It’s very hard to imagine the success of the show,’ adds Miller, ‘without Dudley’s talent as a performer.’15
Even when he wasn’t writing, Dudley’s presence liberated Peter. At last, Cook finally had a partner to write for, a more cute and fragile character – a contrast and an antidote to Cook’s more aloof and condescending style. Moore’s populist, sympathetic appeal opened up countless fresh comic opportunities. Comics tend to be high status, like Cook, saying things you’ve never thought of – or low status, like Moore, saying the things you’re already thinking, but never dared to say. Like Lennon & McCartney, whom they knew, and in some respects resembled, Cook’s caustic wit was balanced by Moore’s softer home-spun humour. Cook, like Lennon, could be too acerbic to appease mainstream opinion, while Moore, like McCartney, was sometimes too saccharine to win critical acclaim. When Cook decided to write the script for Bedazzled on his own, rather than with Moore, the result was stunning, but slightly cold and strangely stilted. On the other hand, after his first two blockbusters, Moore was unable to keep on landing the leading roles that his personable dramatic skills deserved, and most of his later films are probably best forgotten, as indeed they often are. Yet as long as Cook and Moore stayed together, audiences had someone astute and sharp to marvel at, and someone warm and homely to relate to. ‘There was a sort of sweet, proletarian cuddlesome quality about Dudley,’ says Miller, ‘and then a lot of this strange, lunatic patrician obsession on the part of Peter.’16 In Cook and Moore’s comedy, the proletarian and the patrician collided. In a decade where old class barriers were being rapidly demolished, it was a partnership that captured the spirit of its changing times.
‘If there is a class divide in Britain,’ declares Joe McGrath, who produced and directed the first series of Not Only But Also, ‘they straddle it.’17 Cook was middle-class and privately educated. Moore was working-class and state-educated. A piano prodigy with a club foot, he’d won an organ scholarship to Oxford University, but ostensibly, Oxbridge was all they had in common. Even physically, they were poles apart. Cook was over six foot, Moore was barely five. Yet despite these differences, or maybe even because of them, when they were together they behaved like brothers.
‘It was an extraordinary friendship those two men had,’ explains Barry Humphries. ‘It was impossible to get a word in. They were constantly – not just on camera, but all the time – improvising.’18 Yet as well as a meeting of like minds, this extraterrestrial friendship was a personality clash, too. There’s a strong streak of malice in most great comedy, and there was certainly a potent sadomasochistic side to Cook and Moore’s teamwork. This undercurrent helped to give their intimate alliance its momentum, but eventually it tore it apart. As long as this theatre of cruelty was safely confined to the stage, Cook’s ritual humiliation of Moore made for uncomfortable yet riveting viewing, but inevitably, Cook’s unremitting baiting affected him in the end. Ironically, Not Only But Also was originally earmarked as a star vehicle for Moore, with Cook merely cast as Moore’s main guest. It was Moore who made Cook an equal partner, and gave him star billing, even reversing the title of the show from Not Only Dudley Moore But Peter Cook to Not Only Peter Cook But Dudley Moore.
When their smash-hit American stage show, Good Evening, finally closed in 1975, Dudley decided to stay in America, with his new American wife, Tuesday Weld, and try to conquer Hollywood alone. He succeeded, albeit briefly, starring opposite Bo Derek in 10 and Liza Minnelli in Arthur, and becoming, for a while, one of America’s biggest movie stars. Cook returned to London, and a quieter life of comparative inactivity and obscurity. Moore occasionally came back to Blighty, teaming up with Cook on three Derek & Clive LPs, and one last, dreadful, movie – The Hound of the Baskervilles, which Kenneth Williams, its co star, called ‘a hotchpotch of rubbish’, and which Barry Took described as one of the worst films ever made. However their partnership was effectively finished by Moore’s decision to make his home in the USA.
Moore’s crucial role in Cook’s creative process can best be measured by the slowdown of Cook’s output after their boyish partnership fell apart. From Laurel & Hardy to Galton & Simpson (Hancock and Steptoe) or Clement & La Frenais (The Likely Lads and Porridge) an awful lot of the greatest comedy has been written or performed in tandem, and although Cook wrote some great comedy after he and Moore went their separate ways, he wrote it far less frequently.
‘I hadn’t thought of this relationship as an extraordinary marriage,’19 said Moore. Opinions differ as to whether Cook resented Moore’s Hollywood success. Some friends said no. Others said it was inevitable. ‘He must have been jealous,’ concurred Dudley. ‘He never said a word about any of my films – never even said he’d seen them.’20 In fact, Peter had told Dudley he liked Arthur II, but not Arthur – a particularly backhanded compliment, if not a deliberate insult. Arthur was a big hit, Arthur II wasn’t, and whatever the relative merits of each movie, Dudley’s role was pretty much the same in both of them. To be fair to Peter, the drunken anti-hero that Dudley created bore more than a passing resemblance to his partner. When a fan collared the duo in a restaurant, and asked Moore what had inspired his character in Arthur, Cook simply pointed at himself, and Moore realised he was right.
Whatever he really felt about Moore’s success, at the very least Cook must have been exasperated by the invidious comparisons in the press. Whenever he was asked about Dudley’s triumph, Peter was usually charming, and sometimes he cracked a joke, but inevitably these ripostes were more prominently reported than his more affectionate tributes – and inevitably, these jokes looked far more harsh in print. And Dudley wasn’t above firing back the odd public rebuttal from the other side of the pond. Dudley may not have thought of their relationship as a marriage, but as in many marriages, it was the more antagonistic party who was hit hardest by the divorce. ‘I had no idea that I was so cruel to the little bugger,’21 Cook told John Wells.
In Cook’s later, more tender years, this aggressive streak tailed away, and this helped him repair his friendship with Dudley. Lin told Dudley that Peter had mellowed, and their friendship resumed, on a more conciliatory basis. It was bound to take some time for Dudley to overcome his old suspicion and establish a new sense of trust, but sadly, for both men, time was rapidly running out. Dudley outlived Peter by seven years, but his last few years were plagued by illness. ‘I adored Dudley,’22 said Cook, in his last-ever interview, and although that affection wasn’t always apparent, it was utterly sincere. They died an ocean apart, but at least they parted on good terms.
However, apart from the odd chat show or benefit gig, Cook and Moore never worked together again, and Cook never sought another partnership in which he could recreate the chemistry they’d shared, although plenty of other people worked with him on his less and less frequent yet still enthralling flights of fancy. Yet the vast reservoir of Cook’s humour never ran dry. Bernard McKenna helped him write the award winning Peter Cook & Co, for ITV. John Lloyd, Rory McGrath and Peter Fincham all collaborated on A Life In Pieces, Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling’s tangential ruminations on the Twelve Days of Christmas, for BBC2. Chris Morris didn’t just put the sublimely pompous questions in Sir Arthur’s radio series, Why Bother? He also assembled five eight-minute episodes from eight hours of tape. And like a latterday Boylett, small-hours radio presenter Clive Bull played an unwitting role in the cycle of Cook’s creativity, as Cook telephoned Bull’s nocturnal talk show, masquerading as a maudlin Norwegian fisherman called Sven. Cook’s career had come full circle. Thirty years after his comic advent, performing illicit routines to entertain his schoolmates, he’d returned to cracking private jokes for his own amusement and the benefit of a few friends.
Well, almost – but not quite. It’s tempting to see Cook’s career as a standard rise and fall, but the facts aren’t quite as tidy as all that. Cook’s early work was incredibly surefooted for one so young – fluent, self-assured and wonderfully, life-enhancingly funny. And his output was prolific. Yet much of this early material was inevitably fairly superficial – ideal for a short sketch. His later work was often more sustained, and although it was more hit-or-miss, the hits have a comi-tragic depth that his early crowd-pleasers sometimes lack. ‘The sensationalism of the surface has gone,’ argues John Bird. ‘The word which comes to mind is maturity.’23 And he’s right. Cook’s mature output has a remarkable melancholic realism, especially as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, in those late memoirs, A Life In Pieces and Why Bother? Even as Sven, his glum Scandinavian émigré, a practical joke performed incognito, for no fee, for the benefit of a handful of insomniacs, Cook seemed to be playing a living character, rather than looking for easy laughs. ‘There is no striving for effect,’ adds Bird, ‘no whiff of marketing.’24 But Cook didn’t just excel in the short-wave wilderness of local radio. Bird singles out Cook’s TV interviews with Clive Anderson, broadcast less than two years before his death, for special praise. ‘There is in the invention and the performance of these late pieces a sense of complete command. He knows these characters from the inside and through experience, yet this supposedly is the work of a disappointed drunk who gave up the promise of a golden talent.’25
In the early Eighties, Cook became increasingly reclusive. He famously turned down an invitation from David Frost to dine with Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, by quipping that he’d be busy watching television that night. He acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of virtually every conceivable programme – however banal or obscure – but sport, politics and old black-and-white movies were his favourites. He enjoyed frequent trips abroad, to go golfing, or to be somebody’s guest of honour at some festival, or simply to go on holiday, but otherwise he rarely ventured far beyond the confines of his Hampstead home. One of the many projects that never quite materialised was a documentary called Peter Cook’s London, solely about the short stretch of pavement between his newsagent and his front door. He loved to bet, and he’d bet on almost anything – and even when the stakes were small, he’d go to quite ridiculous lengths to win. He supported Tottenham Hotspur, but he often backed the opposition, to give himself a consolation prize if Spurs lost. Then he’d be happy either way. In Who’s Who, he listed his recreations as gambling, gossip and golf – in that order. Cook’s self-imposed absence from the public eye is usually reported in solemn, sombre terms, but though his lifestyle surely had its ups and downs, it actually sounds like rather good fun. After all, it was hardly as if he had to work for a living. ‘I suppose I have some regrets,’ he would quip, ‘but I can’t remember what they are.’
Indeed, whether you or I think his retreat from public life sounds heavenly, or hellish, or – probably – a bit of both, is beside the point. Peter Cook had no responsibilities to his paying public. His family? Yes. His friends? Maybe. But his fans? Hardly. What he did was his business. And if, during the second half of his life, he decided to do a fraction of the work he could have done, well that was his business too. After all, he’d already achieved more in his youth than most folk manage in a lifetime. If he chose to spend his middle age in a state of semi-retirement, then that was up to him. He could have died terribly young, like Timothy Birdsall, the gifted cartoonist with whom he first performed his famous ‘Not An Asp’ sketch, for Footlights, in 1959, killed by leukemia, just four years later, at twenty-six. He could have packed it in at twenty-one, and joined the Foreign Office, like his father. He could have carried on, and carried on, and lost his flair for being funny. He did none of these things. And if his lifestyle hastened his demise, then that’s his affair, not ours. The people who knew him are thankful for the friendship he gave them. People like me who never knew him should be thankful for the fun he gave us, even though its main charm is that it reads like something he did merely to amuse himself. Significantly one of the working titles for the autobiography he never wrote was Retired and Emotional.
But that’s what always happens when someone like Peter Cook does something really remarkable. The rest of us can’t bear the idea that it might just be a one-off. We want them to do it again and again. Perhaps we don’t want our heroes to retire, because that reminds us that their lives are finite? And if our heroes’ lives are finite, where does that leave the rest of us? As the journalist Christopher Hitchens observed, ‘the number of vivid and active years in any given life are depressingly and remarkably few.’26 Maybe Cook was simply smart enough to realise he could have more fun in his inactive years playing instead of working. ‘To the end of his life,’ remarked Michael Palin, ‘he remained the funniest man in the room.’27 And whether that room was a television studio or his own living room was a minor detail about which he became increasingly indifferent.
‘One thinks of one of the stock characters in an old-fashioned Western,’ wrote Alan Bennett. ‘The doctor who’s always found in the saloon and whose allegiance is never quite plain. Seldom sober, he is cleverer than most of the people he associates with, spending his time playing cards with the baddies but taking no sides. Still, when the chips are down, and slightly to his own surprise, he does the right thing. But there is never any suggestion that, having risen to the occasion, he is going to mend his ways in any permanent fashion. He goes on much as ever down the path to self-destruction, knowing that redemption is not for him – and it is this that redeems him.’28
‘I’ve just met the funniest man in England,’ John Bird told his fellow student, Eleanor Bron, after his first encounter with Cook. Billy Connolly went even further. ‘Peter was the funniest man in the world,’ he told Eric Idle. Cook’s comic gift was a public blessing. It could also be a private curse. ‘It was almost an affliction,’ says Bird. ‘At least my mind can take a rest from that. I can and do turn it off when I go home and you felt that somehow Peter never did and never could.’29 ‘The weight’s off my shoulders now,’ said Peter Ustinov, formerly the world’s funniest man, after seeing Cook perform. ‘The accolade, for what it’s worth, belongs to him. It’s a vast relief.’30
Private Eye soon spotted that a talent for perpetual hilarity could quickly become a poisoned chalice, in an uncannily prophetic comic strip that depicted a thinly disguised Cook as a bright young satirist called Jonathan Crake. ‘Young Jonathan Crake shows early talent for raising laughs in School Play,’ ran The Eye’s accompanying commentary. ‘At Cambridge his gay, witty little pieces in all the mags have the chaps in fits. Sparkling revue, Short Back & Sides, mentions Prime Minister. Crake acclaimed as biting young satirist of our time. Instantly besieged by press, TV men seeking views on Monarchy, Mr Gaitskell, Common Market. Stage, TV, film offers pour in. Featured in five glossies simultaneously. Opens satirical nightclub in Fulham. Strain becomes terrific. Cannot open his mouth without everyone collapsing at brilliant satirical comment. Moral – humour is a serious business.’ Ironically, this perceptive and prescient cartoon was drawn by Willie Rushton, who performed at The Establishment, appeared on Not Only But Also, and once even stood in for Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe. Rushton’s cartoon concludes with Crake copying out old jokes from back issues of Punch. Of course Cook never would have ended up like Crake, but there’s some truth in the portrait of a man imprisoned by his Midas touch.
Unlike most comics, Cook didn’t ration his comedy, hoarding it for commercial gain, to be auctioned to the highest bidder. Rare, for any performer, he really was just as funny offstage. Most of the folk who knew him well can recall informal, improvised riffs and rants which were even funnier than the scripted pieces he performed in public. ‘This flow of uncontrollably inventive stuff came out of him,’ says Jonathan Miller, recalling the first time he met Cook, over lunch, to form Beyond the Fringe. ‘It was impossible to compete with him. You couldn’t actually participate. There was no room for one to get in. One simply had to be an audience.’31
For Cook, laughter perhaps was a shield –323334