Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  The film took three days to knock into shape. While it was being edited, Peter asked Ciara to transcribe the soundtrack for him. ‘So I started typing, hours and hours and hours until late at night. I mean no one discussed money or anything, everybody was so bemused that Peter Cook had walked in off the street. And then he started to tell me, sitting by the typewriter one day, dictating more things to me, all about the What? Party. And he told me all about George, who was his neighbour, who was Minister for Confusion, and he asked me to be the Party Secretary.’ Peter returned to the post-production house day after day, until it became clear to all that he had developed quite an attachment to Ciara. She was eighteen, blonde, pretty and clever, and wore a tiny red mohair jumper; his nickname for her was ‘Red Fluffy Jumper’.

  ‘Finally,’ she remembers: ‘he phoned me up one morning and said, ‘Right, I’ve got the What? Party sorted. I’m going on Wogan tonight, at the Shepherd’s Bush Green Theatre.’ He was phoning up about eight times a day at this point on What? Party business, and I was trying to do my job. Anyway, he said, ‘I need some badges made. What? Party badges for everybody to wear and one to give Wogan. Can you make some?’ So I had to get a cab and buy those badges we used to have at school races, and colour them all in and do What? Party logos. Then he phoned again and said, ‘I can’t go on by myself, you’ve got to come on the show with me. Don’t forget to wear your red fluffy jumper.’ I told him that I simply wasn’t going on the show. He said, ‘I’ve already told them that you’re coming on, to talk about the What? Par me, squo; I said, ‘I don’t know anything about the What? Party.’ And he said, ‘That’s exactly right. There’s nothing to know.’

  To Ciara’s immense relief, her increasingly frustrated employers forbade her to leave early.

  Her parents were not very impressed by the burgeoning relationship either. ‘Peter used to phone me incessantly at home – my Mum was going, “What on earth is Peter Cook doing phoning you?” and Dad was having fits.’ Peter dipped into his reservoir of natural charm. ‘He phoned up one day when I wasn’t back from work, and spoke to my Mum. She knew that Dad didn’t approve of him phoning me up, but more to the point she couldn’t get him off the phone because she was laughing so much. When I came home she said, “Peter’s given me a job”. And I said “My God, what are you doing?” And she said, “I’m Minister for Lifts.”’ Ciara became a regular visitor to Peter’s house. He would send a car to pick her up from work, which would then drive her all the way home to Reigate at midnight. If she refused to go, saying that she needed an early night and had to get home on the train, she would arrive home to find the car waiting for her outside her front door.

  Throughout, Peter was a perfect gentleman. ‘He’d say, “Please come on over, we’ve got What? Party business to discuss. George will be there and there’ll be about ten other people.”’ Ciara would arrive to find Perrin’s Walk jostling with random passers-by that Peter had accumulated, none of whom she had seen before or would ever see again. He was filling his lonely life with home-made entertainment and providing himself with a ready-made audience. ‘More often than not, though, it was just me, George and Peter, sitting round talking nonsense, drinking and eating takeaway food. If there was something he didn’t like on television he used to make George and me phone the duty office and complain. He had two telephones, one for incoming and one for outgoing calls, so we’d just sit there endlessly complaining to the BBC in different voices.’ On one occasion Peter made Ciara and George go down to TV-AM in the middle of the night, in a fruitless attempt to persuade the station to transmit a What? Party promotional video he had made.

  Of course there was never any serious intention to enter the What? Party for the next election – it was just another of Peter’s comic fantasies. Rainbow George, however, was a genuine fantasist, and saw in Peter’s creation the capacity to change Britain for the better. He called Peter ‘The Wizard’ – ‘because I associated him with magic; he was somebody that could make things happen’ – and began referring to Perrin’s Walk as ‘The Magic Mountain’. When Peter refused to put forward a What? Party candidate in the 1984 General Election, George formed his own political party instead – Captain Rainbow’s Universal Party (CRUP) – and contested the Enfield and Southgate by-election in December 1984 on a platform of abolishing Parliament. ‘Midway through our earthly association,’ he explains, ‘I found myself being directed by the Wizard to venture out into the world beyond the Magic Mountain, to cause as much confusion as humanly possible.’1 The CRUP, he said, was ‘an idealistic, futuristic, mystically motivated movement that aspires to create a Lennonesque world.’2 Britain would become ‘Rainbowland’, a country organised according to specifications laid down to George by a spirit guide over nine years of detailed conversations. George, who took a lot of drugs, was totally and utterly stunned when he polled just 48 votes, to Michael Portillo’s 16,684. ‘I was convinced I was going to sweep to victory,’ he confesses. ‘Also, I was foolishly anticipating that Peter would get involved, but of course that didn’t happen. That was the beginning of ten years of me trying to get Peter involved. We had this running agreement, that if I dropped his name to the press, or associated him in any way with the Rainbow movement, he would deny all knowledge of what I was talking about.’

  Peter found Rainbow George endlessly amusing, particularly his utter conviction that political success and huge wealth were just around the the corner. His neighbour had returned from his sojourn in Ireland in 1979, but was only a part-time resident of his house in Perrin’s Walk until early 1984, because somebody else had started living there while he was away. From 1984 on, after moving back permanently, George’s life was consumed by a variety of schemes and dreams, all of them doomed to failure from the outset. Although he was not the dirty mac and trilby type – he sported a grey beard, a wool jacket and bottle thick glasses – there was something distinctly Wistyesque about George’s touching optimism and his belief in his own visionary powers. His principal ambition was to stage a gigantic ‘Rainbow concert’ at Wembley Stadium, but he was aware that having absolutely no cash at all presented one or two minor obstacles to his dream. He saw the answer in a competition in the Independent offering a first prize of £30,000 to whoever could best describe in not more than 150 words how the money would change their life for the better. If he could win that, he reasoned, he could easily turn the sum into three million pounds. ‘I would convert the £30,000 into pennies, three million pennies, you see, then we could sell three million “Penny Dream Tickets” for a pound each, and raise three million pounds that way . . . it was just a question of what we would attach these dream tickets to.’ George found himself in a state of amazed disbelief when he failed to win the Independent’s cash prize.

  ‘Peter was interested in the whole scheme,’ insists George, ‘but he was interested to the extent that he said, “You get hold of the £30,000 and we’ll go from there.”’ George conceived the idea of staging a huge party that would cost only a penny to get into, but three pounds to get out of. No one would be able to resist the lure of such a low entrance fee, he reasoned, and would have such a good time that they’d happily pay three pounds at the end of the evening; if ten thousand people turned up he’d be quids in. He hired the Camden Palace on tick, and in the event fifteen hundred people turned up, including Peter, for what all were agreed was an excellent party. Everybody happily paid the 1p entry fee, but unfortunately almost everybody except Peter then refused to pay the exit fee. There was, after all, nobody to prevent their departure, and no sanction that could be applied to make them pay. George ended up with £150 in pennies and a bill for nearly four thousand pounds. Peter was in hysterics. ‘He enjoyed the spectacular nature of my failures really,’ says George. ‘He got great fun and enjoyment out of them.’ George appealed to his mother for financial assistance, even though he’d already devoured a great part of the family fortune; she insisted instead that he see a psychiatrist. Peter eagerly volunteered to play the spectacu Te
utonic psychiatrist in a series of rehearsals, to get George’s performance up to scratch in readiness for the real thing.

  George continued to fight elections and by-elections up and down the land as Captain Rainbow, cadging the money for deposits from various amused friends. Peter helped him devise policies, such as closing the country down for redecoration for one year. Drumming up publicity was a problem – during one Euro-election campaign George failed to raise any interest whatsoever, even from local radio or the local press. ‘I got increasingly upset, so a few days before the election I hit upon the idea that the way to get publicity was to get myself arrested.’ George rolled the biggest joint imaginable, made his way to Parliament Square, and proceeded to smoke it in front of the police guarding Parliament. None of them was even slightly interested, so he repeated the experiment outside Downing Street and in Leicester Square, again without success. After a dispiriting and arrest-free day, he marched into Hampstead Police Station the following morning and set fire to another enormous joint. ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked the desk sergeant. ‘Yes, sir,’ the sergeant replied. ‘It’s an illegal substance,’ George pointed out superfluously. ‘Yes, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘So are you going to arrest me?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘We’re not looking for smokers, sir, we’re looking for dealers.’ Eventually, on George’s insistence that he was in fact a dealer, he was offered a caution; this was no good, he insisted, only an arrest would do. Finally, he was detained at his own request for a few hours, then released on the promise that he would be contacted in three months’ time, to be informed whether any further action was to be taken. He never got the call. His efforts secured him a small paragraph in the local paper, published the day after he had been thrashed in the by-election. ‘Peter had a really good laugh at that one,’ recalls George. ‘I loved seeing him laugh, I loved to be able to make him laugh. He was such a sweet man. I was very, very fond of Peter.’

  Inevitably, everything George touched turned to dust. If money did come in, he often gambled it away in the hope of increasing its value. Peter made huge sums simply by placing bets on the direct opposite of whatever George had predicted. Sometimes he helped his neighbour out financially in return: when the Rainbow Party found itself £1,000 in debt, Peter put £1,000 at evens on a horse called Rainbow Quest that was running in the Arc de Triomphe. Rainbow Quest won, and he donated his winnings to George. On another occasion, George managed to lose a further £1,000 on another fund-raising event, the ‘Give Peace A Chance’ party; Peter quietly covered his costs.

  Perhaps George’s finest failure came when he attempted to accompany Peter to an orgy. Peter’s interest in sex remained constant: beneath the pedestal upon which he had placed Ciara Parkes, he was also enjoying a rather earthier relationship with a black model called Sandy Grizzle, who had once had a bit part in EastEnders. He had also taken to attending regular orgies in Muswell Hill. George was always pestering Peter to invite him along, and when Peter drove off with his keys one day he had the perfect excuse to follow. In turn, a friend of George’s begged to accompany him to the event, and volunteered to furnish the transport. When the two men got there the orgy was already underway. The door opened, and their identities were demanded. George explained that he was Peter’s esteemed friend Rainbow George Weiss, and &nash; in one of those bizarre lies that spring needlessly to mind when responding guiltily to sharp questioning – he explained that the man with him was ‘the minicab driver’. A quick visual assessment was made by the assembled guests, and ‘the minicab driver’ was eagerly accepted into the orgy; but George was unanimously rejected. He had to sit in the kitchen drinking a cup of tea until proceedings had exhausted themselves.

  When not flirting with Ciara or seducing Sandy Grizzle, Peter would spend much of his time lounging on George’s floor (most of George’s furniture had been ‘borrowed’ or repossessed), chatting to whoever happened to be passing through the house at the time. Among the regular visitors were two golfing friends, Lawrence Levy and Howard Baws. They were Jewish, so Peter purchased a record entitled Hitler’s Inferno, a collection of the dictator’s favourite tunes, and gleefully put it on the turntable whenever possible. ‘He used to have it blasting out when he knew I was coming round – I’d love to have been left it in his will,’3 laughs Baws. Peter had discovered that his own paternal grandmother had been associated in some unspecified way with an organisation called the ‘British Israelites’, and derived a humorous fascination from the notion that he himself might in fact be part-Jewish.

  Another regular visitor to George’s house was Bronco John, a local tramp festooned with used tea bags, whom Peter appointed Minister for Tea in the What? Party. Until 1986, when he ran out of space, George recorded every word spoken in his house on the portable cassette recorder which was his only possession; one wall of his living room was blotted out by a giant stack of cassettes. Among the more entertaining recordings is one of Peter, George and Bronco John attempting to cook a tin of beans that Peter has brought round from his house at three in the morning; unfortunately, none of them has the faintest idea how to operate George’s cooker. ‘Peter never knew how to operate any cooker,’ says Ciara. ‘I offered to warm up some croissants I’d bought him one day for breakfast, and he said, “I’ve no idea, you sort it out.”’

  Few of the tapes in George’s possession are worth listening to today. There is the odd enjoyable moment – ‘In the beginning was the word,’ says George in an argument about scripture; ‘and the word got about’ replies Peter – but for the most part Peter sounds drunk or out of his head on drugs. Although George didn’t drink, drugs were all too often suspiciously available at his house. ‘Peter was doing quite a lot of coke,’ George admits, ‘and a bit of Ecstasy. Personally I liked him drunk, he was more accessible when drunk than sober, but of course he could go over the top. Someone once parked an open-topped Rolls Royce across the front of Perrin’s Walk, blocking the entrance. He emptied a dustbin of rubbish into it.’

  Both Peter and George had difficulty sleeping, and became obsessive listeners to LBC, the London radio station. It was George who first had the idea of trying to wangle his way on to the airwaves, to promote his political career: ‘I became a fanatic,’ he explains. ‘In the early days, before they realised, I could be on several times a day on different people’s programmes.’ From there it was but a short step for Peter to begin contributing as well. As E. L. Wisty he telephoned the Steve Jones show to claim that the What? Party had szed control of the media, and that George (who was in the studio with Jones) was ‘holding a gun to your head and making you sound natural. Anyone listening would think you were fully in charge of the programme, as opposed to the What? Party; and to maintain that illusion, I shall shortly get off the line and pretend that you’re getting on with it under no duress whatsoever.’

  It was all too easy, though, to get onto a radio phone-in as a famous Peter Cook character. There was no challenge involved. So Peter set himself the task of interrupting George’s political appearances in a variety of disguises. ‘He really loved doing that,’ says George. ‘I’ve got some early tapes of him trying to get on to phone-in programmes and not being allowed to speak. When they were debating abortion he called in as a priest who had left the fold; then he phoned the Pete Murray Show as a German called Fritz, and started going on about breeding budgerigars.’ Eventually both George (as a guest) and Peter (as a bogus caller) concentrated on the Clive Bull Show, which went out between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. on LBC. Bull was the only presenter prepared to offer George repeated airings, as one of the cast of nocturnal regulars who gave his show a family atmosphere, along with such luminaries as Babs from Bermondsey and Ray and Jan from Rayleigh with their organ requests. He was also individual enough to allow regular calls from Sven of Swiss Cottage, a mysterious Norwegian fisherman who began ringing in soon after George made his debut.

  Sven was one of Peter’s finest creations, enjoyed – in many cases unwittingly – by no more than a few tho
usand listeners, and preserved for posterity only because Peter had finally found his Boswell, in the shape of George and his cassette recorder. Sven was lonely and upset because he had been abandoned by his wife Jutta – the similarity of her name to Judy’s was no coincidence – and blamed himself thoroughly for her departure. To compensate, he picked up a series of girls in launderettes, but found no lasting happiness there either. Clive Bull remembers that ‘It was a sort of growing soap opera. It became a kind of agony hour, and callers would call in advising him on what he should be doing; but the predominant theme was always fish, which would somehow be wangled into every conversation. He started off with this stuff about how men in Norway were judged by women according to how many fish they caught. I knew it wasn’t a real Norwegian fisherman – he was very quick-thinking for a start – but at three o’clock in the morning on that sort of programme it was nothing out of the ordinary to have somebody on claiming to be a Norwegian fisherman.’

  Sven:

  I’m only a visitor here, from Norway, and I listen to the phone-in and think wonderful things, because in Norway these phone-in is mainly devoted to the subject of, you know, like . . . fish.

  Bull:

  Like fish?

  Sven:

  Yes, we have a phone-in––

  Bull:

  That’s a fish phone-in?

  Sven:

  That’s Norway time, when people ring up for one hour, and the gist of it is, things about, you know, is a carp very big, or is a tench very big, or you know, how big is a––

  Bull:

  Very interesting.

  Sven:

  It goes on, all night. And it’s so nice to come to this country and hear people talking about, well, you know, Parliament, and taking clothes off, and singing. In Norway all we get is this fish stuff going on and on.