Whenever Peter travelled abroad, he always sent Bull a postcard from Sven detailing his worldwide search for his wife, and whenever he returned home, Sven would call to complain about the country that he had just visited. He was also a keen contributor to specific debates, such as drug-taking (‘The gudgeon is more harmful than cannabis’) or football hooliganism:
Sven:
I know it’s a very serious subject tonight, but in Norway we have no hooliganeering, I think because we have so many fish programmes on. Every day we have programmes on fish, on TV and on radio. And at the football too. Before the match, people come on, expert fishermen, showing how to catch chub and roach and everything like that.
Bull:
="0">So it’s more of a family occasion.
Sven:
It calms people down. In Norway, we have no hooligans at all, at football. We have no-one at football. Because of the fishing that goes on before.
Much of Sven’s agonising concerned his various launderette-based girlfriends, all of whom – despite their various names – seemed to represent one woman, a young and unapproachably fashionable girl. He wondered whether he should bone up on youth culture to attract her, by finding out about ‘hip sounds’ like Chubby Checker, or Joey Dee and the Starlighters. He didn’t seem to know how to chat her up.
Sven:
Just as an icebreaker I went up to her with some socks and some underwear, and said, ‘You know, this could be the start of something’. And she burnt them. She does not understand Norwegian humour.
Sometimes, Sven could get quite depressed. ‘When he was down he was very down,’ recalls Bull. ‘There was an inkling there of what he really felt as opposed to what Sven thought. When you hear those calls in isolation they sound a bit weird, and not particularly funny.’
Sven:
I just wanted to say, Clive, I mean, I have been so gloomy in the past, always talking about how miserable my life is and how these women are making me miserable, but it is up to me.
Bull:
It is, yes.
Sven:
It is up to me to just go out and say, ‘Look, I am alive, I am a man, I have a mackintosh.’
Bull:
So you’re going to go out there and grab life by the––
Sven:
Grab life by the throat, wrestle it to the ground and kick it to death.
Bull:
Well we’re all thinking of you.
Sven:
Because I get miserable and I feel my mood switching at the moment, I could go downbeat any moment.
Bull:
No, no, you hang on upbeat.
Sven:
For goodness sake try and keep up my confidence Clive.
Bull:
Hang on there upbeat, we’re all rooting for you.
Sven:
Thank you Clive.
By this stage Clive Bull had become aware that his late-night caller was really Peter Cook. Perhaps unfortunately George had told him the truth, out of a well-meaning desire to make sure that the switchboard operator would put the calls through. In fact when LBC lost its franchise and Bull’s programme was axed, then reinstated after complaints from his fans (including Peter), the centralised switchboard system at the new company made it very difficult for Sven to get through, and his calls became less frequent. Peter came clean to Bull (who did not let on that hhad known the secret for some time) and invited him to tea at Perrin’s Walk.
‘Although one should be extremely wary of the autobiographical line of enquiry,’ says Peter’s sister Sarah, ‘I think these calls contained a lot of truth about Peter. Late at night he was often lonely and unhappy. A lot of it was done for the fun of it of course, but they should not be regarded as “performance” in the usual sense.’ It was perhaps inevitable that Peter’s emotions should come out in some sort of performance, because he was so addicted to performing that it was often his only means of expression. Frequently, when he wanted to speak to Judy, he would ring her on one of his phones, then hold the receiver up to the other phone while he telephoned the Russian Embassy or the BBC Duty Office in an assumed voice with some frivolous complaint. One of his favourites was the routine devised in America in which he objected to a pornographic film having been shown on TV too late for his children to see it. The BBC were completely taken in of course, and responded to this parade of bogus obsessives and halfwits with the profound reverence normally reserved for genuine obsessives and halfwits.
When not phoning radio stations or the BBC Duty Office, he would assuage his boredom by phoning his friends at length. He would ring Barry Fantoni, for instance, during football games or boxing matches on TV, and stay on the phone throughout. He would ring Rory McGrath, an Arsenal supporter, whenever Arsenal got a bad result, especially against Spurs. ‘The minute the game was over,’ recalls McGrath, ‘he’d phone immediately. So if Arsenal won I’d phone him up and say, “Hi Peter, it’s Rory. I’ve been out of the country and I wonder if you know what the Arsenal–Spurs result was?” Once I saw him walking towards me in Hampstead High Street and then suddenly he disappeared, and I realised he was crouching behind a pillar box. I thought, “That’s very odd. Is he avoiding me? Have I got one of his porn films?” Then it dawned upon me of course that Arsenal had beaten Spurs that week.’
Harry Enfield recalls that ‘I would know when Cookie had rung, when the answerphone screen said “one message”, but the 30-minutes’-worth of tape was used up. I would rewind to find him skimming through the day’s events as covered by the tabloids, or questioning the legal validity of Noel Edmonds’ beard. Once he began whimpering like a dog for a full five minutes before finally confessing to visiting Threshers’ off-licence several times and begging me to relieve him of his post as Chancellor of the Exchequer. If I had received a juicy bit of bad press, I could rely on Peter to ring up and relay it to me. “I think it’s outrageous that everyone thinks you’re a cunt. Guffaw, guffaw.”’4
As the evening wore on, Peter’s phone calls would often become more maudlin. ‘It’s a well-known boozer’s trait for some reason, to ring people up late at night,’ suggests Richard Ingrams, who along with Paul Foot received a great many nocturnal calls. According to Barry Fantoni, ‘On a very lonely night he might ring up all his Private Eye mates. I’d speak to Ian Hislop and say, “Did Cookie phone last night?” And he’d say, “Yes, he was quite pissed. I didn’t say much.”’5 Peter’s was a loneliness that could be assuaged but never cured. He made calls for company &sh; never from a need to speak intimately or revealingly of how he felt. ‘Even in the middle of the night, he always put up barriers to any attempt to find out what was really going on inside him,’ remembers Paul Foot. Reunited many years later with Dudley Moore, the two of them discussed the subject of phoning people. Dudley ventured the opinion that ‘People who indulge in comedy tend to be more and more isolated as the years go by. The end product is to be on their own. I rattle around on my own. Do you have any close mates? Do you phone them up when you’re in pain or in trouble? I don’t.’ Peter replied that he wouldn’t phone anybody on those terms, ‘because I haven’t had anything that has happened to me that they could help with. And I don’t like people ringing me up with some ghastly problem, because all I can do is listen. I’ve got no advice to give them.’6
Occasionally Peter’s boredom spilled over into frustration. He would stand in his living room, legs apart, tapping endless golf balls across the carpet into a plastic cup, then snap. ‘I’m so fucked off,’ he announced once to Ciara Parkes, then ‘Catch this!’, with which he tossed a huge, heavy radio at her, which she only just managed to catch as it slammed into her chest. ‘I shouted, “What are you doing?”’ recalls Ciara. ‘He said, “Chuck the radio, see who drops it.” I was livid and chucked it back really hard at him. “You’re just being aggressive,” I said.’ Most of the time, however, Peter fed his boredom with a relentless supply of information, fattening it like a goose into an immobile torpor. He would sit inert in front of
the television, devouring everything from Good Morning with Anne and Nick to hardcore porn videos. ‘I have very little social life,’ he said in 1986. ‘It’s mainly peering at Brazilian soap operas on television and wondering why the telly closes down.’7
Peter became an expert at minority sports, from world championship darts to truck-racing live from Idaho on satellite. Stephen Fry recounts how he would open a conversation with ‘Hope you caught Keith Deller’s nine-dart finish against Jocky at the Lakeside on Saturday.’ His least favourite sport was Rugby League, but he watched even that assiduously enough to acquire an encyclopaedic knowledge. The fact that he actually sat down to watch it at all suggests that he was innately bored, in the way that people who sit through entire TV shows in order to write outraged letters of complaint about them are innately outraged. He also masochistically liked to watch bad sitcoms, and tried to pre-empt the punchlines. According to Alexei Sayle, ‘I only got 100 per cent of his attention when I told him about the late night programme California Highway – three Germans inexplicably cruising the eponymous Highways of California, visiting and badly filming various tourist sites and interviewing minor celebrities such as Lee van Cleef and the woman who was the lead singer with the Fifth Dimension. Peter was truly taken with the idea of the programme and was deeply sorry that he’d missed it. Also, when I mentioned David Stafford, he not only knew that he worked on the Channel Four consumer programme For What It’s Worth, but he also knew the names of the other presenters.’8 As far as Peter was concerned, the more dreadful and lowbrow the programme the better. ‘My idea of hell would be watching an endless series of films recommended by Time Out,’9 he ter was comarked.
Peter’s floor was a mass of videotapes, unlabelled blank ones in a state of hopeless disorganisation and pre-recorded ones hired by the dozen from Video Video in Heath Street. He acquired his hardcore videos – oriental porn was his favourite – from Supermags in Old Compton Street. Rory McGrath used to borrow them in turn: ‘I said to Peter, “What do you feel like when you go into Supermags? Because you must be recognised.” And he said, “Well I go in and they say, aren’t you Peter Cook, and I say yes – have you got any porn?” He was always very upfront about things like that: “I don’t want any kinky stuff, or animals. I want dicks and cunts.” “Oh yes, Mr Cook, we’ll get you that.”’
On one occasion McGrath briefly lent some of Peter’s porn videos to John Trotter, a drummer friend. ‘Peter always left his answerphone on and sat beside it on the sofa, so I rang up and said “Hi Peter, it’s Rory here. I’ve just got your films back and Spurs are fucking useless and you’re a cunt––” So he picked the phone up. I said, “We’re going up to the Three Horseshoes for a drink, d’you wanna come?” So we’re sitting in the Three Horseshoes, and Peter comes in wearing flip-flops, shorts, a very loud shirt, a baseball cap and sunglasses. And he walks in brandishing this cassette and calls out, “Is Kowloon Cunt any good to you?” And the packed pub turns round and thinks as one, “That’s Peter Cook, isn’t it?” Then John said he’d got hold of some cannabis, and he wanted to make some cakes – he makes exceedingly good cakes, electric Kiplings. We went back to Peter’s and John said, “Have you got a pan?” And Peter didn’t have any pans in his kitchen. We got them made eventually, I don’t know what we used, we managed somehow. Then we sat upstairs watching the cricket, and Peter had two cakes, which I thought was a bit of a mistake. And it was rather disquieting, because I didn’t see Peter for another four days. I was rather worried, so I phoned John, and Peter had just rung him. He’d said “Is that John?” John had said yes, and he’d said, “You fucking cunt. I’ve been stuck on the sofa for three days, watching the room move around.”’
Such was Peter’s daily life by the mid-1980s. In many respects he cut a dashing figure to his friends and colleagues. According to John Wells, ‘If the more puritan elements at Private Eye disapproved of some aspects of his life, others saw it as charmed. There were tales of multiple Bunnies, and when he and I went together to his favourite strip-club in St Anne’s Court, I was deeply impressed when the stripper winked at him and threw him her bra.’10 When Peter listed his top ten pleasures for the Independent, he discreetly left out matters sexual. But the remaining pastimes constitute an accurate picture of a prosaically leisured lifestyle:
1)
Gossip.
2)
Reading books.
3)
Watching sport, and occasionally playing it.
4)
Late-night radio phone-ins.
5)
TV.
6)
Comedy (especially Harry Enfield).
7)
Newspapers (especially the Sun, and the Matthew Parris and Alan Coren columns in the Times).
8)
Food and Drink.
9)
Cigarettes.
10)
Other people’s pedantry (specifically the kind of people who write to the BBC to say ‘Dear Sir, LNER did not have lamps on Pullman carriage tables in 1923’).
Item (2) was the surprising one, as barely anyone alive had ever seen Peter read a book. He claimed to like Simenon, Dick Francis, Graham Greene and John le Carré, and always gave books as presents; but when he contributed book reviews to the Literary Review itwas clear, according to the magazine’s editor Auberon Waugh, that he ‘plainly hadn’t read them’. He did tell The Sunday Times, however, that ‘If I really want to go to sleep I read one of Clive James’ long, boring poems.’11
The most obvious omission from the list was gambling, for Peter would bet on anything to alleviate the boredom. ‘I remember going round to his house once,’ says Ian Hislop, ‘and Miss Singapore 1978 was on cable, and we just started betting on it. I mean it was just the sort of thing he did.’ Certain superstitions accompanied his betting habits. Ciara Parkes remembers that ‘I moved a chair once, and he said, “Don’t move that chair, it’s my lucky racing chair!” He’d put this chair next to his precious Tiffany lamp and sat in it to pick his horses. He and George used to bet on racing every day; he never knew whether he’d won or not, he just found out at the end of the week if he was up or down.’ If he cared about a result, for instance if Tottenham were playing, he’d back the opposition, to give fate no chance of beating him on both counts; to help his team’s chances he also had a selection of lucky hats and other accoutrements. He could be quite an astute gambler. He correctly forecast the results of general elections throughout the 1980s and early 1990s – he wagered £1,000 each time – and would annoy his left-wing friends by punching the air with delight on election night when the Tories won. He was, however, conned out of £10,000 by a bogus bookmaker, who persuaded him to invest in a non-existent company in the early 1980s. His favourite gambling occasions were big race days, when he would actually raise himself to visit the course, often in the company of Mel Smith, and combine a little light betting with colossal amounts of alcohol.
About once a year, Peter made valiant but increasingly doomed efforts to kick the bottle. There were periods of abstention in 1984, 1985 and early 1986, the first of these in a brave response to his father’s death; but more often than not the sense of crushing depression brought on by remembering that unfortunate event sent him spinning the other way. In November 1983 he was invited to the new Nicholson Suite at Tottenham, and spent the game crouched behind a pillar. In 1984 he attended a celebrity golfing weekend in Spain with Ian Botham, Patrick Mower and Lennie Bennett, and got so drunk that the police had to be called, after he punched a German tourist. At the New Year wedding of Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, he attempted to seduce the bride, then got into the wrong limousine in the car park. The Stones, of course, were delighted by these antics, and they and Peter formed a sort of mutual appreciation society. He described the band as ‘proper stars: Brian Jones did the right thing for a rock ’n’ roll person, drowned in his own swimming pool. And Keith Richards, he’s a proper star, because although he’s alive, he’s nearly dead. Give me Ru
by Tuesday over Yellow Submarine, all that garbage. I don’t like these fucking kids who don’t smoke, don’t drink and don’t sleep around. I mean, what kind of a rock star is that?’12
In November 1986, on his forty-ninth birthday, he acquired a brand new Honda saloon and drove it drunkenly into the back of a police car on a zebra crossing. He was subsequently fined £200 and banned from driving for a year. By this stage he was drinking triple vodkas for breakfast, or several bottles of Holsten Pils, while simultaneously chainoking Superkings. He seemed to be pushing at the boundaries of alcoholism just as he pushed at the boundaries of everything else. His face puffed up, his looks faded and his weight ballooned: during the 1980s he expanded to 16½ stone. To Jonathan Miller, he seemed ‘a swollen, smoked, rather spirit-logged figure’.13 Drink, Peter admitted, had become ‘not a pleasure but a necessity’. According to Sid Gottlieb, ‘Once he’d become established as an alcoholic there was no gainsaying. The pattern is always pretty well the same. You have to drink to relieve the awful collywobbles and nervous tension, and the drink sets you up, so you drink some more, but then you pass out. And then you wake up awful, so you’ve got to start again. That’s the classic pattern and it was invariably Peter’s pattern.’
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 58