Unfortunately, very few people actually believed that the problem was one of inclination rather than inspiration. According to Jonathan Miller, ‘The thing about comedy, and why so many comedians are driven mad and driven to the bottle, is that it’s an extremely rare commodity, this laughing gas. When it dries up you have nothing to fall back on, and there’s nothing worse than drilling and finding that the well is dry.’20 Peter had not run out of ideas though; if anything, the fear of running out of ideas was a stronger influence on his decision to take a step back. Confidence drained out of him by the day. ‘The most ordinary thing, like appearing on Clve James, fills me with panic,’ he admitted. ‘I’d rather do it for a few people socially, but it would be a bit rude to take up a collection after dinner . . . if others say I’m good at comedy, they probably mean when I’m out to dinner, or with my friends at home, not when I’m performing on stage.’
There was fear, too, that he could never match past glories. In his foreword to the reissued Beyond the Fringe scripts in 1987, a page that took him four months to write, he said: ‘There is only one depressing side effect of re-reading the text – I may have done other things as good but I am sure none better. I haven’t matured, progressed, grown, become deeper, wiser, or funnier. But then I never thought I would.’ The degree of satisfaction expressed that he had fulfilled his own expectations was outweighed by the ‘depressing’ limits he had set on those expectations. Dudley said that the sentence had ‘moved him to tears’.21 The point, of course, was that he had long since hurtled to the limits of his considerable capabilities. ‘He wasn’t just a genius,’ says Clive James, ‘he had the genius’s impatience with the whole idea of doing something again.’22 And not just impatience, but also a fear that he wouldn’t enjoy himself in the process. It simply wouldn’t have been fun to try to do it all again. Given Peter’s natural contrariness, the more that people pushed him to get off his backside and ‘do something worthwhile’, the more they impressed the virtues of the 1980s hard work ethic upon him, the more disinclined he became to stir himself.
To be frank, it is doubtful, also, whether he actually could have matched his past successes, bearing in mind his physical condition. His professional self-discipline was shot. ‘The wit was never diminished,’ says Sid Gottlieb, ‘but there was a lack of physical will.’ The alcohol had undoubtedly taken the edge off his performance. ‘There’s a Dr Johnson quote about Congreve,’ remembers Richard Ingrams, ‘to the effect that he’d never found him actually drunk but that he was always “muddy”. When Peter used to appear on The News Quiz on Radio 4 with me, that’s what I felt, that he was always “muddy”. He wasn’t quite sharp. And you notice it on a programme like that, because it’s a question of knowing when to stop.’ As Willie Donaldson had discovered, there was also a temporary lack of interest in Peter’s work among commissioning editors; not just because he was drunk, but because in the mid-80s surreal comedy was out of fashion, supplanted by a wave of conventional joke-heavy material brought into television by a generation of ex-radio producers, through Not the Nine O’Clock News and other programmes. Professional rehabilitation, if such a term can be applied to such a brilliant and celebrated performer, came in the wake of a renewed interest in Peter’s work inspired by young comedians later in the decade.
Peter did, of course, do some work in the 1980s. The proceeds of his American sitcom The Two of Us had been ample, but insufficient to allow permanent retirement. ‘So I sell my body, mainly on the streets of Hampstead,’ he claimed, ‘but that’s not very profitable. I always have to buy it back.’23 Some of the projects he undertook were interesting or worthwhile, but some were indeed only one step removed from walking the streets. In 1983 he did four jobs, the first of which fitted the former category: An Evening at Court, a celebrity benefit concert for his old Footlights companion Adrian Slade, at the Theatre Royal on Sunday, 23 January. Slade had been falsely accused by the Conservatives of corruption during his successful election campaign to the GLC for the Richmond Liberals, but had been saddled with a huge legal bill in defending himself. Humphrey Barclay directed the show, which also featured Rowan Atkinson, Eleanor Bron, John Cleese, David Frost, John Fortune, the Goodies, Willie Rushton and the young French and Saunders. Peter actually wrote a new E. L. Wisty sketch for the evening, performed with John Cleese, which proved that the well of comic inspiration was far from dry. It was called Inalienable Rights:
Wisty:
Hullo. I see you’re reading The Times.
Cleese:
Yes.
Wisty:
As you are fully entitled to do. That is one of your inalienable rights. Aren’t we lucky in this country to have inalienable rights?
Cleese:
I suppose so.
Wisty:
You only suppose so? In Russia you wouldn’t be allowed to sit on a bench reading The Times. You’d have to sit on a bench reading Pravda.
Cleese:
Or Isvestia.
Wisty:
Or Isvestia. And they are both pretty dull reads. Unless you speak Russian. Do you speak Russian
Cleese:
No I don’t.
Wisty:
No you don’t. And you have an inalienable right not to speak Russian in this country. In Russia they have to speak Russian. I have a smattering – well, just the one word actually.
Cleese:
Just the one, eh?
Wisty:
‘Nyet’. Do you know what that means?
Cleese:
‘No’.
Wisty:
Neither do I.
The sketch was a classic example of Peter’s ability to hit the same word again and again, making it sound more ludicrous with every repetition, the level of audience laughter rising like compound interest each time.
Peter was sufficiently inspired by its success to revive Wisty for a weekly appearance on Russell Harty and Friends, an early evening BBC chat show, from 21 September onwards. He sat oddly among the recipes, celebrity interviews and cute stray dogs, though, and seemed ill at ease. His first appearance, talking about the What? Party, was punctuated by stumbles and losses of concentration, although he did manage to announce one or two amusing policies: capital punishment for parking offences, and clamping for muggers and murderers. The Sunday Times reported that ‘E. L. Wisty’s resurgence was not the hoped-for smash. So the problem of finding Peter Cook something suitable to do on television looks like going unresolved again.’24 In June, he received good notices for a cameo appearance as Richard III in the pilot of Blackadder. In November, he had nothing better to do on his forty-sixth birthdy than appear on After Midnight with Janet Street Porter and Hunter Davies, reviewing the sixties: he was in a bad mood, and expressed the opinion that nothing of any value had taken place since 1973 except the invention of Blu-tac.
In 1984 came what was perhaps the nadir of Peter’s cinema career: an appearance as Nigel the Warlock in Supergirl, a failed female version of Superman. His contribution took four months to film at Pinewood, was extremely well-paid, and was so atrocious that the details are best omitted. In a career littered with ‘lots of trash’, as Peter put it, Supergirl was the only film he was prepared to concede that he sincerely regretted doing. ‘It was awful,’25 he concluded. The death of Peter’s father brought a brief burst of sobriety and an accompanying determination to achieve something worth while. He set to work on a golfing sitcom, The 19th Hole, starring himself as an up-market con man, and wrote a funny article for The Sunday Times about his life:
I’m a fairly moral person. For example, in all my arms dealings I’ve always sold faulty equipment to the side that I wish to lose. I sold a huge consignment of those rockets that didn’t work in the Falklands to Gadhaffi. He said to me rather touchingly over the phone: ‘My bodyguards are your bodyguards, Peter.’ Of course, they’re not much use to me, being in Libya, but it’s a nice thought.26
By the end of the year, however, he still had not finished the sitcom script, and it
dribbled away to nothing like so many other projects.
Peter returned to the bottle in the autumn to make a remarkable, drunken splash at the Nether Wallop Arts Festival. This arose from a newspaper article by Stephen Pile, asking why arts festivals always had to take place in glamorous places: An organisation called Charity Projects answered his challenge by mounting a festival in the Hampshire village, which became the forerunner of Comic Relief. Peter, Mel Smith and John Lloyd devised an act in which Peter and Mel would appear in rubber hats and bathing costumes as a pair of lesbian synchronised swimmers. ‘We drove down in a limo,’ recalls Smith, ‘and we had a fifty quid bet on exactly when we’d arrive. And Peter purposely misdirected the limo in order to win the bet. I couldn’t believe it, because it was late at night and we wanted to get there; all for the sake of fifty quid. We spent half an hour piddling round Middle Wallop and Nether Wallop until he won his bet. He’d bet on anything actually, like how long he could keep an ice cube balanced on a baby’s head.
Anyway, having attended to all the writing and rehearsing, which Peter did pretty well under the circumstances, the minute we got on stage in these stupid bathing costumes Peter was immediately off the script, and it was totally and utterly scary to me. I was hanging on by my fingernails. What should have been a two-line speech with me coming in neatly on cue became a sort of monologue; the audience pissed themselves, so I had no complaints. But the really funny thing was trying to do this little bit of synchronised swimming on stage: that took longer to rehearse than the rest of the thing took to write, and he never got it right.’
After the show Peter sat drinking in his hotel with John Wells: ‘Very slowly he had the idea for a practical joke. As we all watched he got up, none too steadily, and closed the door. Then, chuckling to himself, he found a chair, propped it with the back lodged under the handle of the door, and rang for the waiter. A few moments later the waiter tapped on the door, Peter shouted “Come in!”, convulsed with giggles, and the door opened easily, pushing the chair smoothly back with it. Peter said “Damn!” and ordered some more drinks. He fixed the trap, as far as I remember, at least twice more, and every time it failed, the waiter as far as I could see unaware that the chair was even there.’27 Eventually, overcome with frustration at the failure of his joke, Peter smashed the chair.
In January 1985 he appeared as a guest on Bob Monkhouse’s Comedy Showcase, performing Frog and Peach as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling with Monkhouse as straight man. The critics couldn’t help noticing that almost every time he appeared on TV, it was to perform something from the early 1960s. ‘Golly, I thought I was seeing a ghost,’ scoffed the News of the World, which described his contribution as ‘dated, dull and desperately duff.’28 Peter, who paid a cuttings service to send him a copy of everything written about him, must have been wounded. In February he trotted out an old E. L. Wisty routine (it was either that or the Macmillan sketch from Beyond the Fringe, he admitted) for a charity show. He informed The Sunday Times that otherwise, he was ‘doing bugger all at the moment’.29 The rest of the year saw appearances on Tell the Truth, a downmarket ITV game show, The Late Clive James, Who Dares Wins and Kenny Everett’s Christmas Carol. In August he resurrected E. L. Wisty once again for Twenty Years On, a sixties retrospective presented by David Frost that ran for five weeks, then for a further four in 1986. The irony that he should be reduced to appearing as a minor character on a show presented by Frost could not have been lost on him. The only interesting project on offer, a suggestion from the producer of South of Watford (presented by John Lloyd) that they should make a special edition of the show entitled Peter Cook’s London, concentrating exhaustively on the forty yards between his house and the newsagent’s, expired from a lack of application on Peter’s part.
If Supergirl had been the nadir of Peter’s film career, then the nadir of his television career, perhaps even more so than Where Do I Sit?, was the chat show Can We Talk? in 1986. The BBC had no interest in Peter presenting a chat show of his own – that lesson had been learned – but they were keen to entice the American comedian Joan Rivers to do so. Rivers agreed, on the condition that she be allowed to choose her ‘second banana’ – that is, a straight man who takes part in an introductory chat, then sits on the end of the sofa throughout, a post which was standard on US chat shows in pre-Letterman days. She wanted Peter, to inject a bit of ‘British class’, and Peter had no work. He and Neil Shand, who had been asked by the BBC to be one of the show’s writers, flew out to Lake Tahoe to meet Rivers in December 1985.
It was not an enjoyable trip. The BBC had hired a cut-price helicopter to ferry the two men over the last leg from Reno to Lake Tahoe. Shand, who had actuay walked unscathed with David Frost from a helicopter crash in Central Park in 1972, was unimpressed by the size of the vehicle and the shabbiness of the pilot’s T-shirt and jeans. As they flew off into the sunset, the pilot handed Peter a torch, and asked if he would train it on the dashboard instruments; none of the on-board lights were functioning. As they attempted to gain altitude to fly over the mountains, it dawned upon the two passengers that they didn’t seem to be moving. A downdraft was overwhelming the tiny helicopter’s rotor and holding it stationary, facing a wall of rock in the dark. ‘I was going crazy. Peter was calming me down,’ says Shand. Only a fortuitous change in the wind saved them, sending the little craft suddenly plunging over the mountains and down into Lake Tahoe.
The six shows were eventually recorded over six days at Television Centre in January 1986, and transmitted weekly from 10 March. Peter’s contribution was an utter disaster. The producers, unfamiliar with the American template they were working from, scheduled precious little by way of opening chat; instead Peter sat at one end of the sofa throughout like a stuffed bear, contributing nothing. No one asked him any questions and he couldn’t think of any questions to ask. The notion that he could have functioned as anyone’s straight man was absurd enough, and made doubly so by the fact that he barely knew Rivers and was given no time to establish a comic relationship with her. Barry Cryer, who also worked as one of the show’s writers, remembers that ‘Peter was very unhappy. He got very depressed and didn’t try very hard in his bits. He rang me in a very emotional state one night, and said “More people have seen this fucking show than anything else I’ve done!” He affected not to care about things, but he did. He used to dread the recordings.’30 One evening Bernard Manning appeared as a guest on the show and remarked: ‘You used to be very funny, Peter.’ Then, turning to the camera, Manning added bluntly: ‘He can’t remember his lines, you see. I work every night.’
The newspapers administered a severe beating, like muggers kicking their victim while he lies in the street. The London Daily News, referring to his ‘impersonation of a heavily doped Chinese illusionist’, described Peter as ‘a man with a great future behind him’. The Times spoke of a ‘fiasco’ containing nothing but ‘showbiz flatulence’. Peter blamed the tight recording schedule, and excused his reticence by explaining that ‘I was there to help Joan out if she got into trouble, but she never thought she was in trouble, so I never helped her out.’31 In private he admitted to Barry Cryer that he was ‘devastated’ by his reviews.
Perhaps the only positive thing to come out of Can We Talk? was the appearance of Dudley Moore, flown over at great expense as a guest. The angry frustration with Dudley that had characterised Peter’s American failure had receded, and he offered his former partner the apologetic hand of friendship. They went out together after the show, and had an enjoyable evening, even if it was slightly clouded by a guardedness on Dudley’s part, and the knowledge on Peter’s part that another of his projects was headed for disaster. Dudley’s fellow guest on Can We Talk?, who hadn’t seen Peter since the Baskervilles fiasco nearly a decade previously, was Kenneth Williams, who confided the details of the evening to his ubiquitous diary: ‘When P. C. was out of the way I told Dudley, “I find one always gets an act from Peter and therefore I’m obliged to act back, but there isn’t the f
undamental ease in the relationship which I used to know.”’
The disaster of Can We Talk? was a great pity in more ways than one, for it obscured a superb performance by Peter on Channel Four’s Saturday Live, which went out on 22 March. He presented the show on a one-off basis, and appeared in a number of sketches – as President Marcos, as German bandleader James Last (a quite devastating imitation) and as Lord Stockton, slumped fraudulently in a chair: ‘There is no more ardent opponent of apartheid in South Africa than myself. Except possibly the 27 million black people who live there.’ Instead, Peter knew that 1986 would be remembered as the year of Can We Talk? He did no further work over the summer; his mood plunged and his weight ballooned.
He was rescued from that particular depression by the nostalgic idolisation of the younger generation of comedians now coming through: he secured a major part as the Prime Minister, Sir Mortimer Chris, in the cinema version of the TV series Whoops Apocalypse, released in March 1987. Owing little to its televised origins and a great deal to Dr Strangelove, the film told the story of a Falklands-type conflict which escalates into full-scale nuclear war because the Prime Minister is gradually going mad. Peter played Sir Mortimer as ‘Sir Anthony Eden on speed’ with Mrs Thatcher’s resolve added: ‘I let my moustache do the work actually. The only thing I felt absolutely certain about was that I had to have a moustache. I don’t think Anthony Eden would have invaded Suez if he hadn’t had a moustache. Look at Margaret Thatcher – a triumph of the depilator’s art. Moustaches give you the confidence to invade people.’32 Peter had, in fact, only narrowly got the part. David Renwick, the co-writer, explained that ‘Dudley Moore had become a big film star and Peter hadn’t, and we had to ask ourselves whether there was any reason for that. In the end, though, it was one of the most significant things he’s done over the past few years.’33 Because Peter was playing what was essentially a comic cameo, albeit an extremely substantial one, with lines that could have been written for Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, his weaknesses as a leading actor never entered the equation.
Biography Of Peter Cook Page 60