Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  (off) What?

  Mrs Wentworth:

  It’s Peter Cook on the line! He says you said he was a drug addict!

  Mr Wentworth:

  What? I’m in the bath!

  Mrs Wentworth:

  Well, we’re on!

  Mr Wentworth:

  We’re on what?

  Mrs Wentworth:

  We’re on the television!

  Mr Wentworth:

  I’m in the bath!

  Peter, meanwhile, sat smiling helplessly on camera, twiddling his thumbs. There followed a long, agonising pause while Mr Wentworth came to the phone:

  Mr Wentworth:

  Who’s that?

  Peter:

  Peter Cook. You said I was a drug addict.

  Mr Wentworth:

  Yeah . . . I was . . . er . . . lost for words. Anyway, I can’t linger now ’cos I’m dripping wet. And I’d like to watch the rest of the show.

  The exchange had a certain Mike Leigh charm but it had not really been worth the wait. Peter was left, as he put it in his own idiosyncratic rhyming slang, ‘looking like a right Sir Anthony’.35

  Ironically, Peter had been correct to a certain degree, in that the public did enjoy watching disaster unfold – or at least they enjoyed being appalled by it. The audience had actually risen in size across the three episodes. In a rare display of unity, both the nation’s television critics and the viewing public were later to vote Where Do I Sit? the worst programme of the year, by an overwhelming margin. ‘I loved it,’ recalls Gaye Brown, ‘because it was two fingers up; it enshrined that rather extraordinary amateur quality that he had.’ The BBC was not so impressed. On the Monday morning following the third show, Billy Cotton summoned Peter and Ian MacNaughton to his office and informed them that the remaining nine shows had just been cancelled. It was an achievement almost unique in broadcasting history. Peter railed bitterly at Cotton’s decision, but to no avail. The official announcement declared that: ‘After a great deal of consideration, we have decided that the programme was not doing the job it set out to do. We felt that we had to protect Peter Cook’s reputation and that of the BBC.’ The Corporation’s chat show policy now changed tack, and the young journalist Michael Parkinson was hired to replace Peter.

  ‘We were all very upset,’ remembers Gaye Brown, ‘but Peter was terribly upset. It was very important to him that it would work, that he could be recognised for himself away from Dudley. He was desperately upset. It didn’t matter how much love everybody gave him, and told him how brilliant he was; I don’t think he ever really recovered.’ At Private Eye, Barry Fantoni recalls that ‘I noticed the first major change in Peter after the chat show thing, in which he had his first genuine taste of failure. It presented him with nowhere to run. It was difficult I think for him to talk about it to his friends. I think he laughed it off a bit in the pub, when he would come in and not unnaturally blame other people for the failure, unable to see that he was simply not fit to be a chat show host; and this increased his sense of loneliness and isolation.’ Willie Rushton remembered, too, that ‘Cookie was absolutely amazed by the scale of the reaction.’ A wave of belated press sympathy did little to assuage the pain. Most hurtful of all must have been the Daily Express post mortem that concluded that Peter simply did not have the all-encompassing talent of David Frost.

  In later years his chat show flop became one of his favourite anecdotes, a form of anaesthetising self-deprecation. The programme had, he acknowledged, been ‘disastrous’, his own performance ‘hopeless’. Peter’s personal analysis of the failure, as expressed to Michael Parkinson in 1975, was that ‘I’m very bad at being interested in people.’ He told the Illustrated London News that ‘From the first minute of the first show I realised that I was not going to be interested in anything the guests said.’36 It was a verdict with which others, such as Ned Sherrin and Dudley Moore, were inclined to agree; but perhaps one that is a little unfair. Peter the devourer of newspapers was fascinated by other people and their doings, however trivial. In a one-to-one conversation he was usually solicitous of others’ news, and genuinely cared for his friends and loved ones. But Peter the performer was a man possessed, locked off almost into a trance-like state, unable to interact successfully with those around him unless they were prepared to go with his flow, as a number of performers like John Bird and Dudley Moore had discovered over the years. It was for the same reason that Peter was not a particularly good actor. Like many great comedians, he was a solo performer at heart. The BBC promptly destroyed all trace of Where Do I Sit? soon after the series was axed, leading to rumours that the programme was in fact a lost comic gem. Nonsense, says Auberon Waugh. ‘It was total rubbish’.37

  Given the embarrassment Peter felt following Where Do I Sit?, the only other project he had on the stocks came as something of a relief. This was a pair of special Australian editions of Not Only . . . But Also, requested by ABC in Sydney where Peter and Dudley’s TV shows had become immensely popular. The intention was not to write anything new – the commsion was accepted more as a paid holiday than anything else – but to put together a greatest hits package. The project served as an escape, both from the pressures of Peter’s dying marriage and the perceived humiliation of his chat show failure. There was a brief filming trip in early January, to take advantage of the Australian summer weather, where one new sketch was recorded with the touring England cricket team. It was here that Peter’s divorce was announced.

  Peter, Dudley and Barry Humphries then teamed up to record the shows proper, and added a further splash of new material. There was a sketch in which Pete and Dud were stopped by an Australian immigration official (Humphries), demanding to know whether they had ‘any lizards or water buffaloes about their person’. Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling too made an appearance, in an interview about his plans to domesticate the funnel-web spider, wherein he repeatedly crossed his legs in a violently exaggerated manner, a joke later appropriated by Kenny Everett for his ‘Cupid Stunt’ character. This sketch made plentiful use of the verbal misunderstandings so common in Peter’s earliest work:

  Interviewer:

  Sir Arthur, what is the porpoise of your visit to Australia?

  Sir Arthur:

  There is no porpoise involved . . . I have never become involved with a porpoise. What I think is happening is that you are misreading the word ‘purpose’. The porpoise is a mammal. It suckles its young.

  Interviewer:

  Like a whale.

  Sir Arthur:

  Yes I’d love a whale.

  The bulk of the shows, which were transmitted in this country in June 1971, consisted of old favourites such as One Leg Too Few, Bollard and the Beethoven version of Colonel Bogey from Beyond the Fringe. It is a measure of how completely the press in this country had turned on Peter that the material received mediocre reviews, the critics seemingly unaware of the established pedigree of the sketches they were watching. Australia, by contrast, feted Peter and Dudley in delirious fashion, and they loved every minute of their trip. Peter was on top form: ‘I went on a number of car journeys with him in Australi,’ says Barry Humphries, ‘and he would look out of the window of the car and start reciting the names of shops and the words on advertisements, an endless litany which, just because it was his observation of the world, was so funny.’ The contrast with the relentless misery afforded by England could not have been more pronounced.

  On their return, Judy fell seriously ill with peritonitis, and had to be taken into intensive care at one point. Dudley’s marriage, meanwhile, had followed Peter’s into severe difficulties: he had moved into a small, grubby flat, while Suzy Kendall had begun a much publicised affair with Michael Caine. In a telling diary entry, which revealed that any emotional disturbances bedevilling Peter’s life were as nothing compared to the profound malaise lurking beneath his partner’s jolly exterior, Dudley wrote of his wife: ‘How does one replace one’s mother with the person she should have been, and get one’s feelings to recognis
e this new face and ignore the old?’ To cap it all, Dudley’s father had suddenly been taken ill with cancer that spring, and had died soon afterwards. Like Peter, Dudley was beginning to find life in England increasingly trying.

  Peter rather drifted through the rest of the summer. In July, he and Dudley appeared in a late-night television play by John Antrobus entitled An Apple a Day, with Spike Milligan and Kenneth Griffith. Long since wiped, it told the story of a frustrated young accountant (Dudley) who wishes to become a doctor, and the reaction this inspires from his father (Peter); the programme passed largely without comment. In August, Peter edited an issue of Private Eye in Richard Ingrams’s absence; this was the occasion when he put a full-frontal nude drawing of Judge Michael Argyle on the cover. The face alone was obscured, by a black rectangle, and the caption read: ‘To avoid prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act, the obscene parts have been blacked out.’ Browned off and disillusioned with his life though Peter may have been, he never lost his sense of style, his charm, or his generosity. Attending a charity auction at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, he was asked at ten minutes’ notice to stand in for the host, Spike Milligan, who had not turned up. Improvising swiftly, he invited anyone in the audience who had one of the new 50p pieces to try and hit him with it, by flinging it at the stage. Peter went down in a hail of 50p coins, and raised £60.

  Australia continued to beckon. After the success of their TV specials there, the offer came through for Peter and Dudley to embark upon a five-month tour Down Under. They had received many similar offers to tour America during the late sixties and early seventies, and had always turned them down. This time, the circumstances were different. Both men jumped at the chance to get out of Britain. The only problem was, they would actually have to sit down and write a stage show first. They set to work with the tape recorder at Kenwood Cottage, Judy ferrying in an endless supply of tea and biscuits. They decided to call the show Behind the Fridge, after the doorman at Barbetta’s strangled attempts to get his tongue around Beyond the Fringe.

  Creatively, Peter was at the end of his tether, and found it difficult to motivate himself. The coiled spring had almost uncoiled. ‘It was difficult to write with him’, recalls Dudley. ‘He could get very distracted by horses. He loved horse racing, he was always betting. If that was the television and that was me, he used to be, like, “Wait . . . wait . . . wait a minute . . . shit!” And this distraction to me was endless. At one point I remember saying: “Well, I’d better go.” We’d had a miserable morning trying to think of something and couldn’t think of anything at all. And I remember standing by the door, saying “Well I’ll see you later.” And he said, “What about – why don’t we do that thing about the . . .” And we started talking – actually doing it. So I could quite often do something directly I was on my way out, but generally it involved me standing at the door saying: “I can’t stand it.” Sometimes we used to fall about endlessly and sometimes, sometimes it used to be miserable.’38

  Some of the material that resulted was extremely black indeed. Mini Drama was a bizarre, bleak sketch about a Lord (Dudley) in the back of a minicab, the driver of which (Peter) begins to display indications that he might be a homicidal maniac. Peter wore the sunglasses that Satan had sported in Bedazzled, a single black glove in homage to Dr Strangelove, and kept a gun in the dashboard. The car radio referred continually to other weird jobs being carried out that night, including the collection of bits of people’s bodies. The statutory father and son sketch, Closer to Home, featured Peter as a successful film star visiting the home of his working-class parents, only to be told by his father (Dudley) that his sick mother has died before he could get there:

  Son:

  I couldn’t get back because if I’d come back we might have lost the snow.

  Father:

  What do you mean, son?

  Son:

  Well you see, Dad, if I’d gone to Mum’s funeral, by the time I got back to the location, maybe the snow would have melted and the continuity would not have worked out and the film would be messed up.

  Father:

  Of course . . . I understand, son.

  The autobiographical element, as far as Dudley was concerned, was plain to see.

  Hello was a satire on shallow manners, consisting of a dialogue between two people who have clearly never met, but who are afraid to acknowledge the fact in case it turns out they have merely forgotten a previous meeting. Another sketch, Gospel Truth, was designed to rile the Mary Whitehouse element of the audience. It consisted of a newspaper reporter from the Bethlehem Star – Dudley doing an impression of Peter’s impression of David Frost – interviewing one of the shepherds who had been present at the birth of Christ, a Mr Arthur Shepherd. The Dud and Pete sketch – as it turned out, the last proper dialogue between the two characters ever written – was also slightly nearer the knuckle than most of their TV material had been:

  Dud:

  A lady is peppered from head to foot with erogenous zones.

  Pete:

  Have you seen this diagram?

  Dud:

  I daren’t look.

  Pete:

  It’s like a map of the Underground.

  Dud:

  I mean, a man is very hard put to know where to start his sexual voyage.

  Pete:

  Well not the Northern Line. You end up in Crouch End.

  The marvellous setting for this sketch was Dud and Pete’s living room, where Pete sat watching Dud iron his plastic mac.

  The material was by and large of a high standard, if not quite their best. There was not a huge amount of it. They had composed perhaps a dozen sketches, topped up with a smattering of old material: for instance, Dud expanded a Brecht-Weill routine he had devised during Fringe days into a full-length number. Such instances of recycling could be forgiven: in the circumstances, to have devised an entire stage show of such quality was a Herculean effort on the part of both men.

  At the end of July 1971, Peter put the Church Row house up for sale for £45,000. It was snapped up quickly. Dudley gave his Hampstead mansion to his wife. In September Wendy and the children moved into Kenwood Cottage, the little house that Peter and Judy had shared, that he had laboured on so uncharacteristically and painstakingly. Peter and Judy put their bulkier belongings into storage, packed their bags, and together with Dudley, set out for Australia and a new life on the road.

  CHAPTER 11

  3-D Lobster

  The Humour of Peter Cook

  By the time he left for Australia in September 1971, Peter had completed the last truly substantial piece of work he would ever write. The rest of his career was studded with individual instances of genius, and he continued to be a dazzlingly funny social companion to his friends, but from this point onwards he seemed incapable of sustained artistic effort. His fragile self-confidence was such a fundamental part of his make-up that when it was damaged, his will to achieve went into a tailspin every bit as irresistible as the ascent that had preceded it. He was later fond of telling people that he had ‘run out of ambition at twenty-four, to which Dudley would retort that he hoped this wasn’t the case, as their double act hadn’t even started out until Peter was twenty-seven. In fact, Peter’s ambition died when he was thirty-three. Where Do I Sit? had been its last decisive flicker, although the corpse would occasionally twitch in the years ahead.

  In little more than a decade he had cut a remarkable swathe through British comedy. There was some good fortune, naturally, in being part of a generation which was crying out for iconoclastic heroes, but one suspects that he would have shot to the top in whatever milieu he had found himself. Never can there have been a comedian who combined such speed of thought, such power of spontaneous invention and such sheer tangential originality. The incredible rapidity with which his mind worked, darting ahead and examining possible avenues and opportunities for wit, is well illustrated by a two-line encounter he once had with a fellow guest at a party. ‘I’m writing a book,’
the man remarked. ‘Really? Neither am I,’ Peter replied. He had mentally edited out the next five or six lines of conversation almost instantaneously, thus creating a marvellous joke that depended on nothing more than anticipation for its comic impact.

  It was his spontaneity, though, and the relentlessness of it, which most impressed his colleagues. ‘It was almost discouraging,’ explains John Cleese. ‘Whereas most of us would take six hours to write a good three-minute sketch, 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 much more easily than other people.’1 Friends speak of the extraordinary rococo palaces of absurdity that Peter culd construct from a single word, such as ‘jojoba’. The constraints of television meant that his most elaborate constructions were reserved almost exclusively for private performances, and the enjoyment of those closest to him. Max Beerbohm once wrote that ‘laughter becomes extreme only if it is consecutive’: on these occasions, Peter’s ability to create laughter was invariably cumulative, joke piled upon joke until those present often found it difficult to stop laughing long enough even to catch their breath. Jonathan Miller likens the effect to those bombing raids that created firestorms – eventually no more ammunition was needed, the flames became self-fuelling until the supply of oxygen was exhausted. Frequently, Peter’s audience laughed so much that the following day they found it hard to recall what he had even said to have sparked off such a reaction. And all of it seemed so controlled, so effortless on Peter’s part.