Politically, Peter’s preferences were as elusive as his views on the autobiographical content of his work. Partly because he was a very private individual and partly because he did not like to displease his friends, he was something of a chameleon in this respect. People tended to see themselves in him: according to Richard Ingrams, ‘I would define Cook as conservative, Christian and anarchist too, like myself, except that he would deny the Christian bit. But he was obsessed by religion. He was very bothered by it.’11 Fascinated perhaps, but certainly not a believer. Richard Ingrams was given every indication by Peter that he was ‘pretty keen on Thatcher’, a Hampstead rightie alone in Glenda Jackson country. Auberon Waugh – who is very very far to the right – goes further, believing that Peter was ‘very very far to the right’.12 In fact, Peter even accepted an invitation to Sun City in apartheid South Africa, and told the Radio Times in 1977 that he was ‘right wing through and through, probably through sheer greed’. Writing in 1996, Nicholas Luard spoke enthusiastically of Peter’s ‘contempt for socialism, the deceitful flatulence of its rhetoric, its spite and envy against the world’.13
Then again, Peter took part in frequent anti-apartheid, CND and Anti-Nazi League benefits. He told author John Hind in 1987 that he found the Thatcher government ‘more offensive than any other’, and that Mrs Thatcher herself was ‘the Prime Minister that he had most disliked’. He also claimed that the Macmillan government of the early 1960s ‘needed taking apart’.14 He once described the Young Conservatives as ‘awful’, and in 1976 wrote a letter to The Times defending the activities of Militant. He told his friends that he had voted Labour in 1959 and 1964, and on the latter occasion he held an election night celebration party to mark Labour’s victory. In 1970 he assured the journalist Ray Connolly that he had voted for Ben Whitaker, his local Labour councillor. Only seven years later he would tell the Radio Times that ‘I have never voted socialist in my life’.
The Liberals were so convinced that Peter was one of theirs that they kept inviting him to become a Liberal parliamentary candidate. In 1970 they begged him to contest Epping on their behalf, although he respectfully declined, having assured them of his full support. In 1992 Adrian Slade, the former Footlights President who had gone on to become a Liberal councillor, tried again. ‘Peter had always felt more at home with the Liberals than any other party,’ explains Slade, ‘and he told me that he relished the idea of taking on Glenda Jackson. The Hampstead Liberal Democrat candidacy was still vacant and for a short time he was on the verge of being persuaded by me to put himself forward for the next General Election.’15 Peter was busy entertaining himself again, but the idea of him genuinely becoming a Liberal candidate – he was by this time a severe alcoholic – is too fantastic for words.
In fact Peter barely had a party political bone in his body. He was conservative with a small ‘c’, in that he felt the status quo was probably better than the alternative, and that he didn’t want to have to pay 93 per cent income tax; but his political views were in the main motivated by moral considerations. In particular, he detested hypocrisy, the exercise of authority for its own sake, and any kind of corruption (other than obvious and assive corruption – he found pantomime villains like Robert Maxwell so hilarious that their comedy value overrode his sense of indignation). According to Paul Foot, ‘Peter was suspicious of rulers of every description, but in particular he detested the secrecy, pomposity and hypocrisy which sustains them. The point about Peter – and the point about Private Eye – is that they spotted a simple and very elementary fact, which is that the world we live in is run by hypocrites and humbugs, who are mainly helping themselves to money which has been provided by someone else, and then slapping themselves on the back for this brilliant achievement. Whatever his political approach, he recognised this fact, and he also recognised that the most powerful weapon to use against such people, the one that goes really deep into them, is mockery. Nothing hurts important humbugs more than the sound, the huge roar of people laughing at their absurdities.’16 Paul Foot, incidentally, was one of the few people that Peter admired unequivocally, on account of his brilliant journalistic exposés of political corruption in the Eye and elsewhere.
These sentiments applied not just to Peter’s perception of the wider world, but to his personal life as well. Peter’s own personal morality was absolute – not his sexual morality, for he quite clearly distinguished social mores from professional and financial probity – but his application of the standards he expected from those in positions of authority to his own behaviour. Roger Law remembers discussing Spitting Image with him: ‘I said, “You know, no-one’s ever offered me a fucking bribe not to do something. Wouldn’t that be great? They give you the money and you don’t have to do it. It actually happened in the past – I mean, satirical cartoonists like Gillray and Cruikshank were paid not to attack people.” And he got quite sniffy about that idea – like, “Don’t talk rubbish, of course you couldn’t do that” – at which I was really quite surprised, because I thought it was quite a funny idea.’ Alan Bennett recalls that Peter was deeply intolerant of humbug in those around him, and that if he felt he had detected it, ‘He would fly into a huge self-fuelling rage which propelled him into yet more fantasy and even funnier jokes.’17
In some respects, Peter subscribed to the almost puritanical morality of Private Eye, which he shared with Richard Ingrams and Claud Cockburn; again, not (on his part) a sexual puritanism, but a belief that nobody’s feelings must be spared, no reputation should be left unscathed, in the pursuit of a comic target which deserved attack, on the basis of moral criteria. ‘He used to reiterate his theory on satire,’ says Roger Law, ‘which is that you should be completely and utterly unfair.’ Peter himself insisted that there was not a person alive or dead, or institution, or any subject matter, that qualified for exemption from genuinely merited humorous attack: ‘I don’t think there’s any subject which cannot be funny,’ he opined.18 This fierce morality, coupled with his innate sense of mischief, were responsible for Peter’s most satirical moments.
However scathing or pointed his wit, there was never any personal malice behind Peter’s comic attacks on public figures, in Private Eye or elsewhere. His humour utterly embodied George Lichtenburg’s maxim that ‘The finest satire is that in which ridicule is combined with so little malice and so much conviction that it even rouses laughter in those who are hit.’ Clive Anderson records that ‘Without wishing to trample on Peter’s reputation as a savage wit and satirist, I am bound to say that I found him to be not only one of the funniest men in England, but also one of the nicest. This may seem an odd thing to say of someone who once described David Frost as the “Bubonic plagiarist” and who kept up an endless string of insults at the expense of Dudley Moore’s size, class and physical condition, for no real reason except that it was amusing. But there was no malice in his method.’19 Andrew Osmond concurs: ‘He was an immensely kind guy. In other words, I don’t think I ever saw him put down someone to their face, never. He would meet all kinds of absurd or simple people but he would never mock them or wound them in any way. He would do imitations of Macmillan and so on, but I never saw him exercise his wit at the expense of any vulnerable person.’
In fact, Peter was perfectly capable of hurting people quite viciously if he chose; but it was a capability he resorted to only rarely, and when he did so it tended to be at the expense of those he loved the most and was closest to. During the 1970s, Dudley Moore and Peter’s second wife Judy would come in for particular verbal punishment. According to Barry Fantoni, ‘He reminded me of when I’ve been in the company of very, very strong men; I met Mohammed Ali once, and you got the feeling that he had the physical power to destroy you absolutely, I mean, three good punches would see you off the planet. Peter had that in an intellectual sense. Now, there was no more gentle man than Mohammed Ali in the right circumstances; and Peter was gentle, like that, when he sensed that he had power over someone.’ In a perverse way, Peter’s verbal cruelty
to Dudley and Judy marked a loss of power: it was an unfortunate testament to the increasing dependence he felt towards them. Without realising it, he came to fear the intimacy and vulnerability present in his associations with his wife and his partner. As his self-respect dwindled along with his immediate career prospects, he lashed out at those closest to him in a classically self-destructive pattern.
Although the course of both relationships was to become sticky and complicated, there was never the slightest suggestion of enmity. Peter, in fact, was remarkable in that he was a man without enemies. Partly this was because people feared his wit, partly it was because they admired him, partly it was because they feared the social consequences of placing themselves in an opposite camp, but principally it was because the absence of malice that generally characterised his humour unconsciously communicated itself to his targets. He might write something for Private Eye with Richard Ingrams, and invariably the aggrieved victim would make Ingrams into a lifelong enemy while privately exonerating Peter. When the magazine took on huge, powerful and rich enemies like Maxwell or Sir James Goldsmith, Peter was usually at the forefront of the campaign. Such adversaries were vengeful, and keen to crush the Eye men individually, one by one; but always, Peter was discreetly exempted from their retributions. David Frost, a regular Eye target, explains: ‘If somebody wrote something in Private Eye that you didn’t like, or even loathed, everybody would say, “That wouldn’t be Peter, it must be somebody else you know.” You just had this warm, kindly image of Peter, which was true. He was never abrasive or acerbic in real life you know, he was warm, and generous, and kindly, and that was what everybody wanted to remember about him.’ Frost’s spectacles were rose-tinted indeed.
Being a cynical man, Peter had no illusions about the powerlessness of humour to damage its targets. He shared none of Paul Foot’s ‘We’ll-get-them-this-time’ optimism. Barry Humphries spoke of his ‘rhapsodic cynicism’, and called him ‘a bracing influence for sanity in the sloppy sixties’.20 By and large this was a healthy and intelligent cynicism, but there were times when it threatened to overwhelm him, when he felt that any stance, however heartfelt, was ultimately pointless – that nothing could be achieved. Griff Rhys Jones believes that ‘He was haunted, like so many comics, by the inner demon of nihilism.’
Peter was profoundly disinclined to take anything seriously; this too was fundamentally healthy, but like his sense of nihilism, it was an attitude that conspired against hard work and conventional success. In many respects it is remarkable that he managed to get as far as he did, and a tribute not just to his talents but to the protestant work ethic which had been drummed into him from his earliest days in the public school system. Referring to a comment by Christopher Booker that Peter was secretly ‘extremely proud’ to have saved David Frost from drowning, Alan Bennett remarks that ‘Peter wasn’t extremely proud of anything, and not to appreciate that or to see how drenching irony and a profound sense of the ridiculous informed everything he thought and did (and sometimes blunted his best endeavours) is to miss the point of the man.’21
In that respect, his humour served as a defence against commitment, just as it served as a defence against so many things. For example, it was a highly effective barrier against personal revelation, ‘the classic way of jamming intimacy’22 as Barry Humphries observed. Asked if anyone or anything truly inspired him or fired his imagination, he would generally reply, ‘Dorothy Squires’. When Peter came into Private Eye after a long absence, there would be no word about where he’d been or what he’d been doing. ‘He wasn’t one to confide,’ says Richard Ingrams, ‘although to be fair he probably thought we might find it boring.’ As a result, Peter could be a nightmare for inquisitive journalists. ‘You won’t get me to say anything. Not me. I know what comes of it,’23 he leered with a cockney accent at a lady from the Sun in 1965. Of course there is no reason why he should have discussed his life with the Sun, even in its pre-Murdoch days, but there were a number of occasions when he quite happily agreed to take part in searching biographical interviews on television, deflected all the questions with jokes, and ended up sitting in an atmosphere of strained hostility with his interviewer – most famously with David Dimbleby in 1979. ‘Nobody can be themselves in public,’ Peter explained defensively. ‘Even if they appear to look natural and use their own voice, they’re still not behaving as they would at home.’24 Then, once in a while, usually when he was profoundly depressed in his later years, he would be unable to erect the barriers and it would all come tumbling out, great reams of his innermost thoughts that he had denied to his friends, printed in a newspaper for all to see.
Under normal circumstances, though, he defended himself expertly gainst analysis, turning everything into a joke. No one would ever have dared to analyse him to his face, for they would immediately have been shot down in a fusillade of withering humour. ‘It’s not that everything was a joke to him,’ explains his sister Sarah. ‘When our parents died he did show his feelings. He just had the ability to use humour as a coping mechanism if necessary. From my own experience, such reticence is an old boarding school habit: when you were young, if there wasn’t anybody to talk to when something was really upsetting you, then you got into the habit of not confiding, or thinking that you were being frightfully boring if you went on about it.’ It was this refusal to show vulnerability that prevented him from engendering the sympathies of a mass audience, which was why Dudley’s presence became such a vital part of his comic armoury. But the vulnerability was there, all right. Horace Walpole said that ‘This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.’ In Peter’s case, it was both.
So where did Peter’s comedy come from, what was the source? One certainty is that it was entirely original, entirely personal to him. Of course he was lonely and bullied at school, of course he was part of a confident, iconoclastic generation, but these were shaping influences, not causes. He never sat down to learn how to be funny, either. ‘I didn’t really have any ambitions to learn my craft as a performer,’ he admitted. ‘If it had involved any hard graft I’d have given up very early on. That sounds appalling, I know.’25 He did have a repertoire of comedic tricks, but these were almost certainly instinctive. For instance, he knew how to use comedy specifics – that is, the application of an unnecessarily detailed piece of information to create a joke. In Bedazzled, when Stanley Moon queried the suggestion that Moses had sold his soul to the Devil, and George Spiggott explained that he was referring to Irving Moses, the fruiterer, the basic fact of there being two Moses was transferred into a good joke by the application of the irrelevant but intrinsically funny word ‘fruiterer’. The blizzard of information that Peter absorbed from publications great and small helped in the application of such comic trivia – he knew, for instance, an inordinate amount about the life and marriages of Gracie Fields.
He also knew the value of repeating an amusing word or piece of information until the very relentlessness of the repetition added to the humour. Stephen Fry noted a perfect example of this, when someone remarked to Peter that it wasn’t Elizabeth Taylor’s fault that she was putting on weight, it was her glands:
I know. Poor woman. There she is, in her suite in the Dorchester, harmlessly watching television. Suddenly her glands pick up the phone and order two dozen eclairs and a bottle of brandy. ‘No,’ she screams, ‘please, I beg you!’ but her glands take no notice. Determined glands they are, her glands. You’ve never known glands like them. The trolley arrives and Elizabeth Taylor hides in the bathroom, but her glands, her glands take the eclairs, smash down the door and stuff them down her throat. I’m glad I haven’t got glands like that. Terrible glands.
Jonathan Miller points out that perhaps more than any other comedian, Peter could ‘extract peculiar surrealistic effect from an endless repetition of lower-middle-class clichés.’26 Indeed, the humorous contrast achieved by juxtaposing suburban banality with surrealism was one of Peter’s chief comic weapons.
Sub
verting as well as repeating clichés was of course one of his favourite methods of making people laugh; as in this extract from the Behind the Fridge sketch in which Peter, as Arthur Shepherd, is being interviewed by Dudley’s reporter from the Bethlehem Star:
Shepherd:
Er, basically what happened was that me and the lads were abiding in the fields.
Reporter:
(writing) Abiding in the fields, yes . . .
Shepherd:
Yes. Mind you, I can’t abide these fields.
. . . whereupon Peter went on to repeat the word ‘abide’ over and over again in different contexts. Deliberate misunderstanding was often used to subvert a cliché, or just as a joke on its own. Asked for a capsule description of Dudley Moore, Peter replied ‘He’s a capsule.’ The Great Train Robbery sketch from Beyond the Fringe featured a whole sequence of deliberate misunderstandings:
Interviewer:
So you feel that thieves are responsible?
Sir Arthur:
Good heavens, no, I feel that thieves are totally irresponsible – ghastly people, who go around snatching your money.
Interviewer:
I appreciate that, Sir Arthur.
Sir Arthur:
You may appreciate that but most people don’t. If you like your money being snatched, you must be rather an odd fish, I think.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 43