The four men set out from London by car at half past six one morning early in August. It took them eleven hours to drive to Edinburgh, stopping for a picnic on the Yorkshire Moors along the way. They moved into a rented fourth-floor flat at 17 Cornwall Street, opposite the theatre. The flat served as a rehearsal room by day, although Dudley tended to spend his nights with Robert Ponsonby’s secretary Jennifer, with whom he had begun an affair. Economy dictated the style of the production: a total budget of £100 meant there could be no set, no props, just one other musician – a bass player called Hugo Boyd – and no costume changes. Cook claimed later that ‘We’d have been delighted to have had a hundred chorus girls dancing about.’16 Miller, conversely, told The Times that they had purposely ‘tried to rinse away some of this gaudy sentiment. We abandoned decor, dancing and all the other irrelevant dum-de-da of conventional revue, hoping to give the material a chance to speak for itself.’ Although Peter’s interpretation of the show’s staging was clearly tongue-in-cheek, a difference in outlook was undoubtedly present.
The costumes they settled on – white shirts, dark ties, sensible grey pullovers and grey worsted suits – were a highly significant choice, especially as they had to buy them with their own money. For a middle-class audience the four comedians would appear comfortingly attired, like minor public schoolboys forced to sit indoors and play chess on a wet sports afternoon. Their conservative Establishment credentials would not be in doubt. The effect would be to lend a shocking authenticity to their attacks on the society that had reared them: these would clearly not be rebellious outsiders, but young men questioning a system they had been trained to lead. The costumes were undoubtedly chosen with one eye on the minimalist approach that the cast had turned from a necessity into a virtue, but also because that was the sort of clothing they all wore anyway. Only Peter had made the recent transition into an art-school dandy. Ironically, as Miller recounts, ‘He looked better than any of us did in those suits. We looked like a bunch of schlemiels, while he looked like the British Ambassador in Ankara.’
There were other problems even more pressing than the financial limitations. There could be no dress rehearsal in the theatre: the Old Vic cast of The Seagull refused to allow them into the auditorium until five minutes before their first performance. Ticket sales had been poor, as the Festival crowd had no idea who any of the rmers were. Robert Ponsonby became convinced that he had a disaster on his hands. Then, to cap it all, with Peter about to undertake the first professional acting engagement of his career, Equity (the actors’ union) informed him that he would have to change his name. There was, it seemed, already an actor called Peter Coke, and union rules were quite strict about the avoidance of confusion. Peter informed them by return that he would henceforth like to be known as Xavier Blancmange. Equity replied that it was a silly name. Peter replied that it was a silly rule. After various further suggestions, such as Wardrobe Gruber and Sting Thundercock, Equity withdrew in utter disarray.
The cast were nervous. With nine days to go, unable to sleep, Peter wrote to his mother as dawn broke over Edinburgh Castle: ‘There is still a great deal of rehearsal to be done. We keep getting gloomy warnings about the legendary stupidity of the audiences up here, which is a little unnerving.’ He had learnt all his lines, word for word, forwards, backwards, upside down, probably for the last time in his life. All he could do was practise them again. Wendy came up and cooked for everyone. Margaret, Sarah and Elizabeth made their way north a few days later, to lend moral support for the duration of the run. Alec Cook, thousands of miles away, sweated in Tripoli in 110°. His son was about to diverge irrevocably from the family career path. The show opened on the evening of Monday 22 August 1960. On the first night, two-thirds of the seats in the Lyceum lay empty; but from the second night onwards, the theatre would be full to capacity and beyond.
Beyond the Fringe took Edinburgh by storm inside a week. By the third night the Edinburgh Evening News was printing selections from the show, with the commentary: ‘Are you with it? This is the sort of thing that is convulsing Festival audiences in a late-night show that slays everything it touches. The four young men who are its only begetters have come up with something fresh, something actually fresh, in revue entertainment. They are the theatrical hit of the festival.’17 John Wells, who was appearing as an Oxford student elsewhere on the fringe, went along to see what all the fuss was about: ‘It absolutely cut through all the showbiz rubbish. Other student revues, like our own, still had elaborate costume changes and make-up and pathetic opening numbers, for which we were urged to clean our teeth and grin dazzlingly into the lights. What we saw was four people of our own age slipping in and out of funny voices in the way we all liked to think we did in everyday life, being effortlessly funny.’18 Bevis Hillier, then a student under Alan Bennett’s tutelage, recalls that ‘Quite as revolutionary as the assault on the Establishment was the sophistication of the humour itself. Only those who have sat through hours of 1950s radio comedy programmes will know how novel it was.’19 The Edinburgh audiences especially adored Peter’s Mr Grole character. According to Bennett; ‘I had the spot in the show immediately following Peter’s monologue, which was scheduled to last five minutes or so but would often last for fifteen, when I would be handed an audience so weak from laughter I could do nothing with them.’20 Drunk on success, Peter proposed to Wendy, producing a moss agate engagement ring from his pocket. They went trout fishing on a nearby lake to celebrate their announcement. Wendy was introduced to her future in-laws for the first time. Margaret and her daughters had loved the show too, Sarah so much that she went to see it over and over againandmemorised great chunks off by heart.
Journalists, agents and theatrical producers poured into Edinburgh waving chequebooks, eager for a slice of the new theatrical sensation. About the only people in the business who didn’t book tickets were Peter’s agent Donald Langdon, still disgruntled that Peter had ignored his advice, and his friend Willie Donaldson, still convinced that John Bird would be the hot property of the 1960s. Rather late in the week, it dawned on the pair that they were missing out. Donaldson recounts what followed: ‘Langdon arrived in my office and said, ‘Have you seen these reviews, for this silly little thing that’s opened in Edinburgh?’ And I said no I hadn’t, and he said, ‘Well it looks like a success. I’d better go up and see it, and I’ll get it for you.’ I said, ‘Considering I’m the only impresario in London who’s not up there, and considering I’m the only impresario in London who’s just had a huge flop, I couldn’t be a worse candidate.’ But he was a very confident fellow, Langdon. ‘No no no, I’ll get it,’ he said. And it was the most extraordinary achievement. The other three loathed him. Every other impresario was up there with their chequebooks out. Langdon locked these four boys in a room and he persuaded them – it took him 24 hours – he shouted at them, and persuaded them that I was the only person in London fit to do this show, on the grounds that I was so stupid and inexperienced that I wouldn’t fuck it up by hiring Fenella Fielding and a band and a set. It was extraordinary. This was a sure fire hit, and they’d given it to this bloke in London the same age as themselves, who knew nothing, who’d just had a flop, who was obviously an idiot, who was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and who was the only person who hadn’t been bothered to go up and see them!’
The deal was struck a few days after the end of the run, at the White Tower restaurant in Percy Street, after Donaldson assured them in person that he would make ‘no contribution whatsoever. I think they vaguely mistook me for one of them.’ The four agreed to Donaldson’s proposition that they should appear in the West End for a flat rate of £75 a week each, with Bassett getting less than half that. Considering that the show eventually made its London backers close on half a million pounds, it was one of the greatest rip-offs in the history of showbusiness. Bennett remembers sadly: ‘Despite the success of that week in Edinburgh, with not a seat to be had and long queues for returns, nothing seems to have alerted us to the f
act that play our cards right and there was a fortune to be made here. In the worldly wisdom department we tended to look to Peter. He had already had material in West End revues and besides he wore pointed shoes and had a tailor in Old Compton Street. It followed that he must know what he was doing.’ Bennett and Miller left the restaurant in a taxi: ‘It was the first London taxi I had ever been in, and riding up Half Moon Street we discussed the terms. “They’re very good,” said Jonathan. “It’s ten times what I’d be receiving as a junior doctor.” It was fifteen times what I’d be receiving as a mediaeval historian but something told me even then that this was not really the point. So I kept my mouth shut, taking comfort in the illusion that the others must know what they were doing. So it is in every situation in life: somebody must know, the doctor, the surgeon, the accountant or the Prime Minister. They don’t, of course. They think you do.’21 Certainly Peter didn’t know, however sharp his clothes or apparely assured his manner. Now he was in funds he was absolutely hopeless with money. It was during the London run of Beyond the Fringe that his car was repossessed by bailiffs acting for his unpaid Cambridge landlord.
Peter did have another lucrative source of income to look forward to: One over the Eight, the sequel to Pieces of Eight, which at this stage still appeared to be the more important project. The script had to be completed quickly, in the few weeks after Beyond the Fringe, in time for read-throughs by the end of September. As a consequence of the pressure on Peter’s time, the additional material list was much longer this time: John Bird was roped in, along with Timothy Birdsall, John Mortimer, Lionel Bart, Carl Davis, Stanley Daniels, Kenneth Hoare and Stephen Vinaver. Sheila Hancock replaced Fenella Fielding as the female lead. Peter scribbled away furiously throughout September.
In addition to One Leg Too Few, Peace and Interesting Facts, he supplied Hand up Your Sticks, about an inept bankrobber practising at home then getting it all wrong at the bank, and Bird Watching, advice from a Mr Grole-like ornithologist on the best way to get close to birds in the wild:
The first thing to do is to get right out of your house, get right out of your house, right out of it and into your countryside, and there you’ll find your birds. Hundreds of ’em.
The monologue became more surreal as the ornithologist recommended disguising oneself as a tree, by standing in a rotten tree stump, holding bunches of twigs and wrapping oneself in green netting made by nuns. There was also an extraordinary sketch called Critics’ Choice, which was a huge joke at the expense of David Frost. A writer named ‘David Frost’ was grilled by an interviewer about his latest stage offering, which had received a mixed critical reception, ‘ranging right from “disastrous” all the way up to “abysmal”’. The interviewer, Lance Percival, went on to accuse the hapless ‘Frost’ of putting up highly distorted versions of these criticisms outside the theatre.
Some of the new material supplied by the other writers was chameleon-like in its mastery of the Cook style. John Mortimer’s Nightlife featured another Mr Grole-like character, a travelling string rep who was trying to chat up a nightclub hostess on the basis that his wife had been frigid since Coronation afternoon:
Rep:
I’m up for the show, String and Rope at the Olympia. I am in string.
Hostess:
That’s inteesting, darling.
Rep:
Very interesting stuff, string. Very interesting varied stuff, string. It’s a demanding occupation.
She encouraged him to unburden himself sexually, to ‘let the words pour out in a hot bubbling stream,’ but all he could do was discuss rustic twine and tarred ropette. Eventually, in an impassioned outburst disquietingly reminiscent of Monty Python’s weatherman/lumberjack of more than a decade later, he shouted:
I’m forty-one, and I’ve been twenty-five years in string! Twenty-five years in bloody string! I want to live! I have a right to have a life!
Perhaps irritated by all the fuss that had been lavished on Peter’s performance in Beyond the Fringe, Kenneth Williams pronounced himself profoundly unhappy with the script of One over the Eight. At the end of September he demanded a ‘crisis meeting’ with Peter and Michael Codron, and told them – as he confided to his diary – ‘It’s not right that I should continually have to salvage mediocre material. We must make a stand about this.’ Williams was merely being tiresomely queeny. Whatever the faults of One over the Eight’s script, it was of a virtually identical standard to its predecessor. To describe sketches like One Leg Too Few and Interesting Facts as ‘mediocre’ was nonsense. One Leg Too Few was in fact the sketch that Williams singled out as the worst, and his feathers had to be smoothed before he would undertake to perform it. According to Codron, ‘He said he found it distasteful, hopping around on one leg.’ If there was a problem, it was that Williams was still fruitlessly trying to inject some warmth into the Grole character: he insisted on simpering and adding ‘mmms’ and ‘oohs’ in between each of Peter’s lines. His comic instincts were basically sound in searching out audience sympathy, but of course it took another level of skill altogether to make such a cold and unlovable creation so appealing.
Peter’s principal problem now was how to fill the next seven months. Although both Beyond the Fringe and One over the Eight were ready to go into the West End, no theatre would be free for either production until the following spring. There was a danger of losing momentum. Wound up and on a roll, Peter needed to perform, to taste the feeling of having an audience weak with laughter before him. He turned down the staff job at the BBC, and did no more than a little desultory copywriting for the ad agency here and there. Instead, he returned to Cambridge and resumed life as the university’s king of comedy. He and Wendy moved in together officially, sharing a flat in Warkworth Street.
Monty Python’s Graham Chapman was among a new generation of Cambridge students riveted by the Cook improvisational technique: ‘Although he’d “gone down”, Peter had an obsessive disregard for David Fros and came back to punish him by being funnier and more intelligent at the smoking concerts. I remember one particular sketch where Peter explained to the pilgrims that the Holy Bee of Ephesus was kept in a matchbox, and that it could cure all ills if they placed three shekels through the lid. After they’d given the three shekel piece, and weren’t cured of even one ill, he explained to them that they’d probably stunned the bee.’22 The word ‘stunned’ was the masterstroke in that line, just as it was many years later, in a celebrated sketch about a dead parrot. David Frost, in truth, remained one of Peter’s closest friends that year, and together they wrote a tabloid parody of Britain’s poor Olympic performance for the student magazine Granta, which Frost was editing. The location aside, it could just as easily have been written in 1996:
On the red shale track, it was another black, black day of gloom, despair and despondency for the British lads and lassies who ran their hearts into the ground in the sizzling cauldron that is Rome. Britain must, if she is to maintain her position among the Magic 14 European diving nations, pour £48m into new heated boating rinks up and down our green and pleasant land:23
Frost’s abiding memory of that winter is of Peter assiduously gambling away the proceeds from his two stage shows.
After Christmas there were Fringe cabarets to keep the cast’s hand in. Willie Rushton stood in for Dudley Moore, in a performance at the Dorchester: ‘I was incredibly impressed by the fact that Peter could make a whole room howl with laughter just by saying “Good evening.” He’d just discovered this as a catchphrase, and he couldn’t stop saying it. “Good evening, good evening.” I don’t know why, but it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard in my life.’ Peter also got his own back on the Young Conservatives, offering them a long-winded monologue about the ins and outs of defecation; his performance was greeted with an icy silence by the Tory faithful, who had been rashly hoping for a satirical insight into the politics of the day. One of the Fringe cabarets was at Bennett’s Oxford college, which led to a sticky moment when Peter and the others v
isited his room to find Mahler playing on the gramophone. Peter instantly latched on to the pretension he felt was apparent in Bennett’s musical choice, and the fact that it ‘just happened to be playing’ as they entered. Bennett was wounded by Peter’s jibes; today, he is prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, albeit guardedly.
Peter and Wendy finally left Cambridge in March 1961. The Footlights Revue that year, masterminded and presented by its new star David Frost, was shamelessly entitled I Thought I Saw It Move, in which Frost essayed a passable imitation of his predecessor at every turn. Among the items was Science – Fact or Fiction?, now attributed solely to Frost, although it closely resembled the sketch that Miller had seen in 1959. For years, Peter’s spirit would continue to haunt Cambridge. According to John Cleese, a freshman that year, ‘Everybody was doing him. His presence was still very much alive. Trevor Nunn, who was directing the 1962 Footlights revue, would sit down in the rehearsal breaks and do Peter Cook sketches.’24 Eric Idle went up to Pembroke in 1961, to find it had become ‘the comedy college. His spirit lurked everywhere in the funny voices he had left behind.’25 Clive James, who arrived at Pembroke three years later still, found that ‘his legend haunted the place with an intensity unrivalled even by that of Ted Hughes.’26
In the discreet surroundings of the house at Uplyme, Peter’s status was naturally not subject to such continuous escalation. That Christmas, Alec Cook had returned from Libya and the family had at last been reunited again, together with their future daughter-in-law. The meeting had been a reasonable success. Wendy got on well with Alec and Margaret, and was a great hit with their two girls, to whom she seemed a glamorous role model. She certainly wasn’t the kind of girl they had expected their son to bring home, teetering in on high heels, but that didn’t matter. She in turn found them dauntingly old-fashioned and polite: ‘They were just so different from my parents, where if something went wrong the saucepans would go flying. It was as if Peter’s parents were almost encountering him for the first time, each time they met.’ It was difficult for a stranger to discern the deep bonds of silent affection that continued to hold the often-sundered Cook family together.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 15