John Bird and Eleanor Bron came to stay at Uplyme that Easter, and Bird was further surprised to discover the marked contrast between the Cambridge Peter Cook, who never stopped talking and making others laugh, and the quiet, affectionate, polite and indeed highly respectable Peter Cook, not necessarily the centre of attention, who nestled so comfortably in his family home. He and Peter went for a walk across the local golf course, where the Cook family were all members. Bird recalls: ‘There was a howling gale blowing – it was a clifftop golf course – nobody else was around, and the wind was so loud you could hardly hear, so you had to shout to each other. And I remember stubbing my toe in a rabbit hole or something, and swearing, “Oh, bloody hell!” And Peter saying “Shhhh!” Genuinely, actually saying “Shhh! The members might hear you, you know.”’ The Cook family in their turn were quietly amused to discover that Bird, who always wore black, even sported a pair of black pyjamas.
Even before A Resounding Tinkle had opened, Peter had roped Eleanor Bron into a revue he was putting on at Pembroke. Performed over three nights at the Old Reader from 18 March, it was somewhat cumbersomely entitled The Jolly Good Show involving (to a considerable extent) Music with some Richly Comic Interspersions by the Merry Pembroke Players (Theatrical People) and some Women too (two) Revue. The other female cast member was Louise Burkim, whom he had spotted playing his own former role of Doll Common in The Alchemist. There were twenty-six sketches, all written by Peter, with the exception of a little additional material by Adrian Slade. Almost a year after their first meeting, the President of Footlights was helping out a mere College revue.
Mr Boylett was of course central to the proceedings, there was an early prototypical impersonatf the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and there was a Shakespeare parody prefiguring that in Beyond the Fringe. Entitled The Best of the Bard, it rolled several plays into one with Peter announcing the whole in the character of an American MC:
An authentic anthology of genuine premasticated fact . . . cast your minds back to those versatile days when men were men and women were boys. Come with me to Elsinore, where mad, moody Hamlet paces the battlements overcome by his father’s death, as was his father before him. The idle fool playfully buffets Hamlet’s knee with his bladder . . .
Although well short of the heights attained by the later Fringe parody, the sketch contained a moment that did not fail to bring the house down each night, when Peter entered as a messenger and announced: ‘I bring you safe conduct letters from the French that I may have intercourse with your Queen.’
The Revue also contained the first stage performance of a sketch that was to become a Cook favourite, Interesting Facts. In fact it was the earliest Mr Boylett sketch that Peter later considered good enough to perform throughout his adult life. Then entitled Astounding Facts, it involved Mr Boylett, armed with a diagram of the human intestine, buttonholing a hapless stranger with a barrage of useless and frequently incorrect information:
Boylett:
Did you know you’ve got four miles of tubing in your stomach? You see how far the food has to travel? Four miles it has to go, and it takes four hours. That’s a mile an hour it goes.
Man:
I had no idea.
Boylett:
That means you never get any really fresh food in your stomach. It’s all at least four hours old.
Man:
Fancy that.
Boylett:
No I don’t fancy that thank you very much, I don’t fancy it at all.
Boylett then moved on to discuss the habits of the grasshopper:
Boylett:
Do you know it has a disproportionate leaping ability, due to its very powerful hind legs, and it goes hop hop hop, all over arable land. That is land what is actually tilled by Arabs. And do you know an Arab can actually live for a whole year on one grain of rice?
Man:
A whole year on one grain of rice?
Boylett:
Yes . . . er, no. It’s a mosquito that lives for a whole year on one grain of rice. I always get those two mixed up, because I’ve got them on the same page. See – that’s ‘mosquito’ and ‘muslim’.
In later years Peter improved this joke considerably, by having Boylett claim that he always got Arabs and mosquitoes muddled up ‘because they were next to each other in the dictionary’. What were? queried his victim. ‘Mosquitos and mosques,’ replied Boylett glibly.
The show was a storming and extremely profitable success. According to one reviewer ‘The cast, in which Eleanor Bron and Peter Cook were outstanding, maintained a consistently high level of entertainment.’13 The only substandard note was Peter’s determination to include a number of songs he had written lyrics for, some of which he also attempted to sing. Hugh Macdonald, who wrote the music and played the piano, says that ‘On the whole he wasn’t happy writing lyrics for music, in fact he had a terrible sense of pitch; I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was tone deaf, but not far off, and we never gave him anything to sing if we could help it.’ Eleanor Bron sang the sultry number that closed the evening, Smoke Rings, which was Peter’s attempt to write a genuine torch song:
Smoke rings blue, smoke rings grey
But never so blue as I feel today.
Smoke rings grey, smoke rings blue
But never so grey as life without you.
Sadly, she too was hardly a diva. In a repeat of the Black and White Blues idea, the Pembroke Players made an LP record featuring excerpts from the show, together with a scene from The Alchemist and West German radio’s choice cuts from The Merchant of Venice; Bron’s decidedly flat performance was thus preserved on vinyl for eternity.
Although Peter did not know it, one member of the audience had come all the way from London to see him perform. At the beginning of term Donald Langdon, a young theatrical agent, had decided to employ a talent scout in Cambridge, and had settled on Tom Rosenthal, the Secretary of the ADC (Amateur Dramatic Company). Rosenthal, now the Chairman of Andre Deutsch books, was then a Pembroke College student, but on account of his interest in university drama had been slow off the mark in checking out the rising talent within his own college. Early in 1959 he had finally caught up with Peter’s act at a Footlights smoker, and had thought him ‘the funniest man I’d ever seen’. He immediately telephoned Langdon on the college payphone, and told him he had to come up and see the forthcoming Pembroke show. Langdon thought the whole idea was ridiculous. ‘You must be joking, why should I come up to some tatty little college production?’ Rosenthal kept shoving coins into the phonebox until Langdon’s resistance was worn down. And so, after the show one night, Peter was greeted by a sleek, sharply tailored, well-fed military type in a British Warm camel overcoat, who offered to become his London agent. He accepted.
The realisation that things might get even bigger prompted Peter to conclude regretfully that he could not continue to misuse the name Arthur Boylett. Boylett was subsequently rechristened ‘A. Grole’. By now, the character had become a Cambridge institution. Roger Law, the future co-deviser of Spitting Image, was then studying at the Cambridge School of Art, and had yet to come across Peter in person. ‘But you heard Peter Cook, through the voice, before you met him. They all did the voice, all the students. You’d hear these young men in the Criterion pub doing this funny voice, that you couldn’t make head nor tail of, because it was usually delivered very badly. It was an epidemic.’ In fact, recalls Eleanor Bron, ‘Peter’s influence became nightmarish – I began to think we couldn’t speak any other way.’14
One of the principal imitators, who even used the Boylett/Grole voice liberally in his own stage act, was an ambitious young first-year comedian called David Frost. Peter’s companions were not overfond of Frost, whom they considered to be the worst sort of hanger-on. Bill Wallis, for instance: ‘I remember having tea in a Cambridge teashop with Peter and a couple of others, when a frail spotty whining youth came and accosted Peter. When not offered a chair (for obvious reasons: his name was David Frost) this
youth knelt at Peter’s knee, and assiduously ignoring the party, gazed up wet-eyed with instant devotion; all the while making that nasal, whining, wittering sound like a chain-saw cutting into candyfloss – and which was, of course, the forerunner of the anodyne question disguised as a knuckleduster.’ There was a standing joke at Camridge, devised in fact by Christopher Booker, that the recipe for a bad joke was ‘D. Frost and leave to Cook for five minutes.’ Anything Peter said or did Frost would be saying it or doing it a few days later. ‘They loathed David Frost, those Footlights people, he was a figure of fun to a whole generation for years and years,’ says Wallis. They loathed everything about him, from his suburban accent to his silly little bicycle clips.
One person who didn’t loathe David Frost was Peter Cook. He felt sorry for him, even affectionate towards him, according to Peter’s first wife Wendy, for all the ridicule and contempt that Frost seemed to endure on his account. Of course he joked about Frost’s apparent plagiarism too, but he also gave the young man a leg-up, by agreeing to appear with him at the next Footlights smoker in a double act that Frost had written. He liked it because it was funny, and perhaps because it seemed to enshrine their relationship. Entitled Novel Reactions, it involved Frost acting out a passage from a novel, as read out by Cook, which contained a series of increasingly unpleasant and degrading instructions. ‘He bit his lips until the blood came’, intoned Cook, whereupon Frost would baulk at the idea. ‘Until the blood came,’ Peter would intone more firmly, and Frost would take a deep breath and sink his teeth agonisingly into his lips.
Cook and Frost started to perform together in cabarets. Frost recalls: ‘One of the first ones we did was at the Corn Exchange; the day before there had been a court case in which the Friar House, a rather popular but not particularly high quality restaurant in the centre of Cambridge, had been had up for only having one toilet. Peter bounded on to the stage the next night and said, “I have got good news for you. The Friar House now has two toilets. But they do the cooking in one of them.” A great opening line.’ Frost himself was ordered to appear before the local Magistrates’ Court, to answer a charge of riding a bicycle without lights, and it took all his powers of persuasion to prevent Peter appearing as his defence counsel. Peter’s intended plan was to stand up and announce that his client was not in England on the night in question, or if he was in England he was not in Cambridge, or if he was in Cambridge he did not possess a bicycle, or if he did possess a bicycle he certainly did not possess any lights; and then to become so confused that he would end up demanding the death penalty for his own client.
The Footlights Committee discussed the case of David Frost rather animatedly. ‘Can we really allow this incredibly boring person into the Footlights?’ was one point of view aired. Peter stuck up for him, and it was decided that even if he was boring he was at least harmless. As Peter later explained: ‘They all thought in Footlights that David couldn’t tell jokes, or make jokes up, or do anything funny, and therefore, because he was hard-working, he was given a job of some kind. And of course he was very good at being nice, and doing things like remembering people’s names, and being industrious. He was a very bright lad, and we didn’t know it.’15
Frost was by no means Peter’s only comic partner. By now Peter was tearing about Cambridge like a dervish, appearing almost every night in some sort of show. The more people wanted him to make them laugh, the more he did his best to oblige them. He went on the road for out-of-town cabarets with Geoff Paxton and Hugh MacDonald – ‘My memories of them are clouded intears of laughter,’ says MacDonald. He did a Charity Ball in front of 600 people at the Dorchester with Adrian Slade and Geoffrey Pattie, for which they were paid twenty guineas each. In Footlights smokers he tried out new characters, such as a cockney who referred to everything as ‘Yer actual this’ or ‘Yer actual that’ – a phrase that Cook invented; or Colonel Rutter, a voyeur whose accomplice kept pretty girls chatting while the Colonel lifted their skirts with his walking stick and gazed at their legs.
He also tried out new subjects for sketches, such as the Holy Bee of Ephesus, a routine based on his lunch with Peter Raby and Jonathan Harlow. The young Trevor Nunn was present when that idea made its debut: ‘On the bill was a guy called Peter Cook who was doing his Interesting Facts sketch. He was dressed in the shabby raincoat and the shapeless cloth cap, and the sketch was a complete riot – I mean it was already a famous sketch, obviously, because there was a clamour for all of the well-known lines, you know, that Arabs live on a grain of rice a day and so on. And when he got to the end and took his bow the shouts for more were so huge and so unrelenting that Peter had to come back, and clearly he had to decide, am I going to do an encore or not? And he sat back down again, and the room went quiet. And he launched an improvisation – it was stuttering at first, it was clear that he was feeling around: where am I going to take this? After a few seconds he found a matchbox in his pocket. “I wonder whether you can hear what I can hear?” he said. There was a tremendous hush and concentration, and eventually he said “In here, in this box, I have . . . the Holy Bee of Ephesus.” Which made the audience explode. That led him into this probably blasphemous improvisation, which became riotous, to the point where he said, “And the bee has told me that we are to expect a Saviour – a Messiah – who shall be called Brian.”’
Even though much of Peter’s humour was indeed brilliantly spontaneous (not to mention highly influential), he liked the amazement he created when ideas and sketches seemed to spring forth fully formed. The showman in him was happy to use routines and comic flights of fancy again and again, whether the performance was a public or a private one. There are many people who cherish memories of a favourite moment of Cook spontaneity, which are in fact identical to the earlier memories of others.
Reconciling all this activity with his Modern Languages course was becoming harder and harder. ‘Work is very heavy this term,’ he wrote to his parents, ‘as I have three full length essays to do per week and also a prose, apart from lectures and reading, so I have been burning the midnight oil a bit.’ The truth of the matter was that despite even his tremendous energy, he was struggling to keep all the balls in the air at once: Chris Smith recalls ‘an uncomfortable supervision when Dr Combe asked Peter whether he had in fact handed in an essay in advance, and then told him he might as well go away when he discovered he hadn’t.’ Peter assured his mother and father that he was keeping very fit and healthy nonetheless, and drinking plenty of orange juice. Later that Easter he was admitted to hospital with a leg ulcer so serious it required stitches.
Peter’s leg was healed by the beginning of May, giving him just five weeks to prepare for the Footlights revue on 8 June, or for his exams on 4 June, but certainly not for both with any degree of thoroughness. The smokers, cabaret appearances and other work carried on unabaed, including a disastrous (but well paid) performance in front of Great Yarmouth Young Conservatives, a cartoon strip in the Spectator co-written with Timothy Birdsall, and an appearance by a selection of Footlights performers before the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, to round off a dinner celebrating the publication of the Duke’s autobiography. Peter wrote home: ‘It was a very snob do, only about thirty guests including Lord Mancroft, Lady Barnett, Peter Sellers, Cyril Fletcher, Bernard Braden, Barbara Kelly etc., who had been asked more for their name than the fact that the Duke knew them; it was a marvellous dinner with more liveried footmen than guests. After dinner, that ended at 1.30 a.m., Cyril Fletcher started the ball rolling with the act that he was using at Quaglino’s, very well done but rather old material. We followed and really we seemed to go down better than he; we did a special song about the Duke’s eccentric ancestors, monologues and sketches. Bernard Braden came up to me afterwards and asked to see my script, and we talked for about half an hour about it and possible improvements that could be made; he was very charming and most gratifyingly complimentary; we then had a great time fooling about with Peter Sellers, who was also extremely pleasant, and what was mor
e surprising, easily amused. I suppose we spent about an hour with him drinking liqueurs and didn’t leave ’til 3.30 or so. Altogether a great experience.’
Peter was hugely taken with Sellers, one of his childhood heroes, and was to remain good friends with him.
That year’s Footlights revue, The Last Laugh, was to be a turning point both in the history of the Footlights and in Peter’s career. There would be no room for Flanders and Swann-style musical numbers with John Bird in charge. The show was set in an underground nuclear bunker, where scientists awaited the destruction of the world, and included DIY instructions on how to make your own coffin. Every sketch ended with a stated or implied death. The musical accompaniment was provided by a ten-piece modern jazz group under the direction of Patrick Gowers. The show was technically complicated, including taped inserts and back projections. There would be no easy laughs provided by men appearing in drag either; after a long campaign by Peter and John Bird the Footlights’ traditional males-only rule had been scrapped to make room for Eleanor Bron.
Adopting a political stance far to the left of the Labour Party (and thereby inadvertently achieving a sort of party political neutrality), the show sought to capture and define the mood that had led 50,000 people to gather for a CND rally in Trafalgar Square at Easter. According to Roger Law, ‘It is hard, looking back, to recapture the intensity and anger of that period, but I think it boiled down to a feeling that we had been hoodwinked about the nature and extent of the nuclear threat.’16 All over Cambridge, public school students who had arrived in the city wearing cavalry twill trousers, coloured waistcoats and tweed sports coats were hurriedly casting them off along with their accents, and donning roll-neck pullovers and bogus cockney vowels instead. ‘There was a feeling of throwing off our chains, our bonds,’ says Bill Wallis. ‘I remember being accosted by somebody who was an exact contemporary in the grounds of Pembroke College, who accused me of being a class traitor. And I said “Why?”, and he said “Because all your friends are from public school.”’ The bomb was hanging over the world, and there did not seem to be much future for tradition.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 10