The reason for such an all-consuming social and political shift, other than the simple consequences of world events, lay in the pattern of National Service recruitment and the reactions of those who had been put through it. It was only beginning to dawn on the powers-that-be that inculcating in tens of thousands of young men a venomous hatred of their superiors and a distrustful contempt for the military mind was not socially cohesive. Middle-class boys from schools like Radley had encountered the working classes in the army for the first time, and had experienced guilt. Full-blooded socialism, which still appeared to be a workable principle, became their absolution. Changes in working practices were having their effect too. Traditional areas of Government like the Colonial Service were shrinking, while TV and the media were expanding rapidly, with opportunities for graduates to escape their formerly predetermined lives. Peter’s generation, the first to have little or no consciousness of prewar society, felt themselves in a position to become personally instrumental in sweeping away the old order.
Ironically Peter himself, whose energy and talent were to make him very much the driving force behind the early ’60s satire boom, did not fit this pattern. He was comfortable with the system because he knew how to play it. He had been too smart to do National Service. The pomposity of officialdom had irked him since he was eight, so it hardly came as a revelation to him now. There was nothing to spur him politically leftwards: he was not a socialist. He disliked both Labour and the Conservatives from a position of general cynicism, as opposed to Bird’s position on the extreme left. He remained conservative with a small ‘c’: he was not about to change his public school clothes. The only thing he changed was his upper-middle-class accent, and that is because he wanted people to like him. ‘I felt daft with this peculiar voice that I had. I could have got it back in about a week if I got a job in the Foreign Office, but it was too inhibiting. Have you ever imagined an Englishman with that accent actually in bed? I can’t see it myself.’17 In short, girls in Cambridge in 1959 didn’t go to bed with boys who had posh voices.
The Last Laugh was the first overtly political work to harness Peter’s humour to its cause. Of course Peter’s material fitted Bird’s vision: his comedy mocked the characters and attitudes he had grown up with, and as he had grown up in the bosom of the establishment the match was a good one; but the motivation was different. Only a few weeks before he had been happy to play the same material, for money, to the Young Conservatives and the Duke of Bedford. Peter was not even a rebel in terms of comic taste: when other students aggressively attacked old-style comedians like Terry-Thomas, Peter would stoutly defend their professionalism and the standard of their material.
One thing Bird’s revolutionary vision could not adequately cope with was the notion of Footlights-as-talent-contest, that somehow the year’s best material had to be made to fit his concept. The result was an uneasy alliance between the linking device and a number of the sketches. Some ideas seemed to fit the general scheme: Peter’s Antarctic sketch Polar Bores, a pastiche of a Prisoner-of-War film, and a parody of fox-hunting jargon penned by Peter and Adrian Slade. Other items, such as a Rodgers and Hammerstein version of Oedipus Rex, or the antics of Mr Grole, seemed utterly irrelevant.
According to Bird himself, ‘ Duke oovided the only material that was actually funny.’18 The audience certainly roared their approval for the nine sketches out of twenty-eight that he had written. Many of the sketches, such as Guilty Party, Entitytainment and Mr Moses, were veterans of the Pembroke revue. Most successful was the latest Mr Grole adventure, in which the character informed a fellow railway passenger, Mr Quorn (played by Timothy Birdsall), that the cardboard box on his knees contained a viper. It was most definitely a viper, he was at pains to point out, as distinct from an asp:
Grole:
If anything the viper is more voracious than the asp. My viper eats like a horse.
Quorn:
Like a horse, eh?
Grole:
Oh yes, I’d like a horse. Mind you, you’d never cram it into this little box.
It was the same verbal misunderstanding joke he had used on many occasions, and it seemed to get funnier every time.
Peter’s more satirical material derived from his casting a principally parodic eye over the broadcast performances of officials. In Don’t Ask Me, a version of Any Questions? questioner Arthur Grole of Hoveleigh and Gorlsden asks: ‘Where are the Government road plans?’ Captain L. G. Strile MP replies:
I detest such a question. I regard it as untimely and in the worst possible taste. I refuse to descend to this level of personal abuse.
More typical of Peter’s contribution was Mr Moses, a biblical variety turn:
First Man:
Hello hello hello, who was that woman I saw you with last night?
Second Man:
That was no woman, that was Elosheba, daughter of Amminadab, sister of Naashon, son of Mushi and Jochabed.
(Cue cymbal crash)
Peter’s contribution aside, the opening night was a disaster. The back projections broke down, and the show had been running for four-and-a-half earnest hours when the theatre manager came backstage and wearily told them to stop. For the first time in the history of the Footlights, the annual revue had been booed by the audience. Reeling from disastrous press reviews, Bird and the cast slashed the show to a tighter, more manageable length from the second night onwards. Luckily for Peter that was the night his parents came to see it. Luckily for all of them, the celebrated broadcaster Alistair Cooke also dropped by once it had been revised, because he wanted some visiting Americans to see what a typical Footlights revue was like. They saw nothing of the sort, but what they did get to see impressed him. He wrote in the Manchester Guardian:
The whole show is acted with never a fumbling line or gesture, and since it is inconceivable that a dozen undergraduates can appear as fully-fledged professionals, the only inference is that in Mr John Bird, the (Footlights) club has a broth of a director. In fact, if the West End does not soon hear of John Bird, Patrick Gowers, Geoff Pattie and Peter Cook, the West End is an ass. In bringing in Miss Eleanor Bron, the Club has passed up the easy guffaws available in all public demonstrations of transvestism. Incidentally, they have got themselves a very fetching dish. She has a wolf-whistle figure, a confident pout, and needs only to practise singing in pitch to be something of a threat to the hoydens of the London Pavilion.19
Alistair Cooke’s piece regenerated the considerable interest that the show had attracted before its first night, and Peter’s agent Donald Langdon managed to persuade two West End producers, Willie Donaldson and Michael Codron, to come and see it. Truth be told, Donaldson was not a real theatre producer, simply a good friend of Langdon’s who’d inherited a large sum of money and had ambitions in that direction. Again, rather fortuitously for Peter, Donaldson didn’t actually like his stuff, but came to the conclusion that Bird was a genius. So he bought up the sketches that Bird had written, hired him as a director, retitled the show Here Is the News, incorporated some new material written by N. F. Simpson and Eugene Ionesco, and reopened it at the New Theatre Oxford with a professional cast, including Sheila Hancock, Cleo Laine and Lance Percival. With disarming honesty, Donaldson admits: ‘I was a complete idiot, who didn’t know what I was doing. There wasn’t any lighting for a start. I didn’t know there was such a thing as lighting. Bird thought the designer Sean Kenny was doing it, and Sean Kenny thought Bird was doing it. It opened in Oxford with no lighting, with just the house lights on. I almost went bust.’ Sheila Hancock later said that it was the angriest reaction from an audience she had ever had.
Langdon’s other guest, however, did come up trumps. The altogether more professional Michael Codron, who had taken the Footlights revue Share My Lettuce to the West End and was looking to mount a new show, thought that Peter’s material was simply hilarious. Again, fortune had smiled: Codron had already booked the star of his new show, Kenneth Williams, and was looking specifically for mat
erial that fitted the buttoned-up, boring, nasal outsider that Williams had made into a popular character in Hancock’s Half Hour. Mr Grole, and particularly the sketch about the viper in the box, was exactly what he had been searching for. Peter, who was a big fan of Williams, jumped at the chance of becoming his writer. The actor was taken out to lunch by Codron, and confided to his diary that afternoon: ‘He has found some v. good material from a boy called Peter Cook from Cambridge.’ A subsequent lunch introduced Williams to Peter, who did enough to secure one of the most amazing commissions ever offered to a student: by the time he returned to Cambridge for the start of his third year, he would be the author of an entire West End show. This was not just a one-week transfer of some Footlights material for the novelty value of presenting a student show: this was an astonishing and unique offer. While it is true that Look Back in Anger had represented some sort of cultural watershed, and that producers were sniffing around the universities for exciting young talent, Codron was putting on a rumbustious old-style revue with dancing girls and glitzy sets. That he chose Peter Cook is a reflection both of Peter’s astonishingly precocious development, the universal appeal of his material, and the tremendous coincidence that the Radley College High Table butler should have been prone to utterances that fitted Kenneth Williams’s stage persona so well.
Peter was in a whirl of happiness. The rest of term passed in a haze of parties and shows, including appearances at ‘May Balls’ in Cambridge and in Oxford in June, where he and Michael Bawtree put on a double act at Worcester College. He was elected President of Footlights for the following year. He even stood for President of the Pembroke College Junior Parlour as well – heaven knows how he thought he’d manage it all – but was narrowly beaten to it by his friend John Dwyer. Varsity, the student newspaper, did a profile of Peter, listing his May Ball appearances, which was to be accompanied by a picture of Peter in black tie accompanied by a pretty young girl. Somebody on the staff of the paper knew of a pretty young girl: her name was Wendy Snowden, a student at the Cambridge School of Art with lush red hair. She was asked if she’d be kind enough to borrow a ball gown and appear in the picture. She said yes. Peter was about to meet his first wife.
‘I had to sit on his lap I think, or I had to be draped around him,’ she says. ‘I was involved elsewhere at the time, with my first true love, and I thought Peter was incredibly full of himself. He was continually talking about himself and making a lot of jokes, and he had a bit of an acne problem. He certainly wasn’t anybody that I’d have thought I’d have been spending quite a big chunk of my destiny with, absolutely not.’ Peter later admitted that at that point in his life he was ‘showing off to a greater degree than I ever have since. I was very, very ambitious. I liked buzzing around and being an eager beaver. Quite intolerable I should think.’20 The pair were not to renew their acquaintance properly for another six months.
The Pembroke Players were back off to Germany to tour with Julius Caesar but Peter was too busy to go. He nt the first half of the summer in Uplyme, toiling away at Pieces of Eight, as the Kenneth Williams show was to be called. It was to be his last holiday at home with his family until Christmas the following year. The one disappointing note in all the celebrations was that Peter’s father had taken a job as an Economic Adviser with the United Nations, and had been posted to Libya for twelve months. He had persuaded Margaret to come with him this time, along with their younger daughter Elizabeth: they would be gone by the end of the year. Sarah would stay at boarding school and with relatives during the holidays, while Peter would be left completely on his own. Crucially, his parents would be abroad when the time came to make the big decision about his Foreign Office career.
The script for Pieces of Eight was completed by the middle of August, by which time the cast had just two weeks’ rehearsal time before its pre-West End tour of the provinces. Fenella Fielding was hired as the female lead, and the singer Myra de Groot was taken on to perform the songs, which were written by Sandy Wilson. It was not exactly radical stuff. Among Williams’s offerings was a comic number called True Blue Love Song, featuring the tongue-in-cheek chorus line ‘Don’t let Labour ruin it.’ That was the only political note. Most of Peter’s contribution was based on his Footlights material, all of which had been rejected at one time or another by the BBC, for which he said he was ‘profoundly grateful’. Mr Moses was there, and the viper-in-a-box sketch was the hit of the show. In fact this was not one of Peter’s best Mr Grole sketches, containing as it did some terrible puns:
Man:
Would you be quiet
Grole:
Bees aren’t quiet.
or:
Man:
I’m finding your conversation a bit of a bore.
Grole:
There’s no boar in my box.
Rather, the appeal of the sketc lay in its original conceit, and the lonely life of this strange obsessive character who put animals in boxes.
Other sketches charted a similar course. If only featured Williams as an elderly working-class man, so bored that he goes to the post box every day to watch the collection take place, listing all the wrong turnings he has taken during his life: if only he’d been born in Shropshire, if only he hadn’t drunk milk, if only he’d had wings, if only he’d had more flesh on him (‘People want to see great mounds of the stuff’), if only he’d had a glamorous name like Arthur Grangely. ‘You are called Arthur Grangely,’ his wife points out. ‘That’s what held me back,’ he opines. The Laughing Grains was another sketch featuring an elderly working-class couple, retired music-hall artistes Mr and Mrs Fred Grain, bemoaning the decline in the theatre since the old days:
Fred:
They had no amplification in them days . . . And do you know, when they sung, the people in the back row couldn’t hear a word. That was part of their attraction – the element of mystery.
The additional material for the show was supplied by the then little-known Harold Pinter, most notably The Last to Go, in which Williams’ elderly, bored news-vendor discusses which paper is usually the last to be sold, in an agonisingly slow, repetitive, drawn-out and pause-riddled delivery. Peter was not best pleased by the enormous length of the Pinter sketch. ‘I was very cross at the time because royalties were awarded on the amount of time your contributions took up. Harold Pinter’s contributions took up an immense amount of time because he’d written all these pauses into his sketches, which I called the “pay pause”. I eventually submitted a sketch to Michael Codron which consisted almost entirely of significant pauses. But he knew perfectly well what I was up to, and it was rejected.’21 Kenneth Williams also supplied an idea for a sketch, which Peter dutifully wrote up, involving a pompous military type who refuses to eat foreign food in a restaurant; no matter how exotic the dish, for instance sheep’s eyes, his sole criterion for deciding whether or not to eat it is the animal’s nationality. There was also one nonsense song in the show, the lyrics of which Peter was allowed to write, the slightly dubious Onu Beeby Frisky.
Peter was immensely proud of his work: ‘I loved that revue. It was old-fashioned revue, which was eventually killed off by Beyond the Fringe. I found nothing wrong with it.’22 The curtain went up for the first time at Oxford’s New Theatre on 1 September 1959, just ten minutes after the end of the dress run. Peter, racked with nerves, plied himself with brandies beforehand in the Mitre Hotel and forgot to post his sister Elizabeth’s birthday present. He need not have worried: the show was received enthusiastically and achieved good notices in the local press.
had been paid to accompany the show on tour in order to make last-minute script revisions. After a successful week in Oxford, Pieces of Eight played a further seven days at the Royal Court in Liverpool and seven more at the Theatre Royal, Brighton before opening at the Apollo in Shaftesbury Avenue on 24 September. The critics were even kinder in Liverpool, where the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Chronicle and the Herald all praised it to the skies. Peter wrote excitedly to his parents from t
he Lord Nelson Hotel to tell them the good news. He was slightly bemused, however, to discover how bitchy the world of showbiz could be: ‘Despite the fact that it has done so well and the show looks like being a hit, the cast all manage to be unbelievably fed up. Great jealousies have sprung up between Kenneth Williams and Fenella Fielding, and hours are spent altering the running order, usually for the worse.’ For the first time in his life, Peter added a kiss to the bottom of the letter, although he then added a few noughts and crosses and drew a line through it, to turn it into a joke.
The London critics were slightly more reserved. Cecil Wilson was of the opinion that ‘Some of the material is brilliant and some of it not funny at all’, while the reviewer from The Times thought that the show ‘tried desperately hard’, but all too often produced ‘the pointless joke that has failed to achieve absurdity’. J. C. Trewin of the Illustrated London News enjoyed himself, and applauded Peter as ‘The sort of writer that hunts for haddocks’ eyes among the heather bright, or goes to sea in a sieve.’ One failing that would not have been apparent to them was that Kenneth Williams had failed to capture the essence of Mr Grole; the nasal whine was there, but Williams mugged, leered and rolled his eyes furiously, and performed the whole with a fixed manic smile. He had none of Peter’s cold, deadpan intensity, the ability to maintain a straight face while all about were losing theirs. The supporting cast too, it must be said, were terrible. Fenella Fielding, Peter Brett and Peter Reeves played their parts with that stagy, eyebrows-raised air of forced surprise that passes for straight comic acting in the British theatre.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 11