Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Peter entered 1994 in optimistic mood. ‘For years I used to think I can’t really act. Now I think I can,’20 he told the Independent. He embarked upon Why Bother?, a series for Radio 3 that was essentially a retread of A Life in Pieces, but with Chris Morris taking the Ludovic Kennedy role. Morris was one of the few performers able to match Peter for speed of thought and surreal invention, giving the programmes a collaborative edge; furthermore, despite the recording of more preparatory improvisations with Peter Fincham, the programmes were largely improvised in the studio. Morris himself cut the five eight-minute shows from eight hours of recordings. As a result, the series was a considerable improvement on its televisual predecessor. Fincham recalls that: ‘Chris would take Peter off down completely bizarre avenues. For instance, one of them starts with Chris asking about Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling’s discovery of the fossilised remains of the infant Christ, which bowled out of nowhere. When I heard that broadcast, I thought, “I’ll never work again,” because it’s so blasphemous. It was all about cloning Christ, and faxing him in DNA form, and about his various dry runs for the resurrection. We didn’t have any complaints, which is a reflection, presumably, of the size of the Radio 3 audience.’

  Like its predecessor, Why Bother? was packed with parodic autobiographical material; even the title referred to its author’s attitude. Sir Arthur, for instance, discussed his stint as a co-chat show host with Joan Rivers, whom he described as ‘a pain in the arse’. With reference to his childhood, Sir Arthur explained that he once had to spend an entire winter standing in the middle of a frozen lake:

  Sir Arthur:

  It was a learning experience to be a child in my father’s household, or whichever household he put me in. He felt that the best education I could possibly have was to be put in prison and raised by hardened murderers. We were woken at dawn by the sound of hanging.

  Morris:

  Did you hold this against your father at all?

  Sir Arthur:

  We never spoke about it.

  Sir Arthur’s Munchausenesque tales, consisting mainly of extreme hardship, exploration, discovery, bizarre medical experiments and inept or criminal commercial ventures, were generally considered to be uprdship, re with Peter’s best work. The Daily Telegraph, among other publications, pronounced them ‘very funny’. Nonetheless, an air of regretful weariness continued to hang about them. Discussing his role in mowing down ‘as many whites as blacks’ during the LA race riots, and asked the question ‘Do you feel any pride in that now?’, Sir Arthur replied:

  I feel nothing but pride. That’s all I do feel. An empty pride . . . a hopeless vanity . . . a dreadful arrogance . . . a stupefyingly futile conceit . . . but at least it’s something to hang on to.

  The wave of energy that had carried Peter through 1993 was beginning to subside. The success of Why Bother? led to a second series commission for its TV stablemate A Life in Pieces, but Peter had neither the inclination nor the application to see the project through. When Mark Booth of Century Books met him for lunch to discuss commissioning his autobiography, Peter arrived claiming to have the finished book with him in his bag. He produced a few pages of notepaper covered in rough scribbles. ‘Is that it?’ asked Booth. ‘I thought we might flesh it out with a few photographs,’ smiled Peter. If he was disinclined to finish a series of short, collaborative TV scripts, the chances of him sitting down alone to write an entire autobiography were practically non-existent. Peter had been threatening to write the book for years: he had informed viewers of Aspel & Co that ‘I’m not going to tell all that old stuff that everybody knows, about being Golda Meir’s toyboy: “She was a fearsome and aggressive lover.” But any person who’s wittingly slept with me – or unwittingly slept with me – thirty grand in Deutschmarks, large denominations, will probably hush it all up.’21 Joking aside, Peter confessed to Booth that he wouldn’t even consider such a project while his mother was alive.

  Peter still visited his mother regularly and devotedly. He would frequently take a black cab to Waterloo station to catch the Hampshire train, but more often than not, once ensconced in the back with a pile of newspapers, he would order the cabbie to drive him all the way to Milford-on-Sea. Margaret Cook remained active and intellectually alert in her eighties; she took part in regular literary group meetings at which the novels of Trollope, Jane Austen and Bruce Chatwin were discussed. In 1993 she had fallen seriously ill, and for a brief period had not been expected to live. Peter had rushed down to her Southampton hospital in the middle of the night; ‘He came into the ward,’ remembers his sister Sarah, ‘and said “Mum, you’re so pretty.” It was probably the best kind of magical medicine anyone could have administered.’ His mother made a full recovery.

  Soon after being allowed home, she travelled to the Chewton Glen Hotel in the New Forest where Peter was trying to write the second series of A Life in Pieces with Peter Fincham. The three lunched together. Fincham remembers above all that ‘Peter was absolutely devoted to her, and utterly charming to her. He was extremely solicitous, especially as she’d been unwell. She was a very sweet lady – and I remember thinking what a bizarre son he must have been for her, to have enjoyed such fantastic success at such an early age, and then to have gone through such strange changes in his life. He cut ry ry rococo figure – he was very large, with grey hair, he was wearing bright pink tracksuit trousers with an old jacket, which didn’t go together at all except in his mind, he was trailing cigarette smoke, and in a posh hotel in the middle of the country he presented a pretty weird sight. In fact it was a weird but entirely charming lunch; they just seemed completely devoted to one another.’

  Peter continued working into 1994, and after Why Bother? he appeared in the first ever episode of Fantasy Football League; but his heart was not in it. As a celebrity manager he’d been determined not to take the selection of his notional eleven seriously: at the advance auction he’d spent £4.5 million on the unknown Ipswich keeper Craig Forrest, and he also played his top signing Eric Cantona in goal. On the night, though, he seemed rather overwhelmed and out-of-sorts, unable to get a word in edgeways against the quick wit of Frank Skinner. He dropped out of the series soon afterwards. He was tired. He arranged to meet Ciara Parkes but cancelled, explaining that he was exhausted, and ‘off for a few days’ rest’. George remembers that ‘Often I’d go round and ring on his buzzer and say, “Hello Wizard, it’s Wicked” [Wicked Weiss’ was the name given to George by the News of the World]. And he’d say, “Oh Wicked, I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”’ Lin informed George that Peter didn’t enjoy his company any more. ‘He became quite reclusive in 1994, and I think he must have known that he was not well,’ reflects George.

  Peter sat at home, watching Harry Enfield, Blackadder and Have I Got News for You and ringing his friends. Michael Palin remembers returning home to an elongated answering machine message about a newspaper story that had accused him of cheating at conkers. ‘Why had I done it so publicly? Was it a cry for help? It was the sort of message only someone with time on their hands would have bothered to send.’22 Peter telephoned Dudley, too, in another forlorn attempt to persuade him to come back and do some sketch material. Not Only . . . But Also, he said, was one programme that he was ‘not ashamed of’. Dudley turned him down again.

  Peter drifted back onto the booze, not that he had ever truly left it during his exertions of 1993. ‘He had cut right down,’ explains Jonathan Ross, ‘but then he cut back up again.’ He missed a deadline for a further sports article for the Evening Standard, after a drunken night out with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. He took part in a pro-celebrity golf tournament in Malaga, clanking round the course with two golf bags, one of them entirely full of booze, and had to be rescued by a greenkeeper in a van. One night, drunk, he telephoned one of his old AA friends out of the blue and asked for help. He wanted to go to hospital, he explained, and insisted on ringing the Wellington Hospital to demand admission. When they asked why, he said that he just wanted to lie down. A
s his liver deteriorated once more, he was twice admitted to hospital for more concrete reasons.

  The reason for this latest downturn, if reason were needed any more, was that his mother had fallen ill again. In April 1994 she woke to find that she had lost most of the sight of one eye, but insisted on driving 28 miles that day to a lunch appointment. Her optician could find nothing, and the problem appeared to pass. In May, she and Peter’s sister Elizabeth travelled to Dartmoor for a short holiday, were they stayed at the Lydgate House Hotel in Postbridge, scene of many a family holiday when Peter was a child. One night, she suffered a severe stroke and was rushed to hospital in Exeter. For the following month Elizabeth, Sarah and Peter kept vigil by her bedside on a rota system, as they had done during Alec’s final illness. Peter deflected his pain into jokes. ‘The trouble with my mother,’ he told Barry Fantoni, ‘is that she will insist on driving even though she is completely blind. Of course, she knows the town very well.’ Margaret Cook died a month later, on 6 June 1994.

  Peter was utterly destroyed. He found himself full of stupid remorse that he hadn’t been there at her bedside when she’d gone. At her funeral he said that any success he’d had, anything he’d ever been, he owed entirely to his parents. And he cried; he cried and cried, his puffy cheeks soaking up the tears like blotting paper. Meeting Ciara Parkes one morning, he stood racked with helpless sobs in the street. ‘You’re broken-hearted, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘Yes I am,’ he replied, and pushed his way numbly into Safeways for another bottle. Corinna Honan, a journalist who had come to interview him, happened to mention his mother: ‘whereupon he began to weep. Big, shocking tears blurred his vision and then slid slowly down his face. “Hit me for six,” he said, gulping for breath. “Of course, losing your mother is normal, but . . .” For several minutes, he stared at me unblinkingly as I tried to calm him down and return his thoughts to happier memories. The pain in his eyes reminded me of a child’s uncomprehending grief, but he listened almost beseechingly to my inadequate words of comfort. Was she proud of him? He nodded, speechless with grief.’23 He was in a terrible state, recalls Honan: knocking back triple vodkas at 11 a.m., his hair overgrown and standing up in curious tufts, his gait reduced to an inelegant shuffle.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ asked Barry Fantoni one day. ‘I don’t think I’ve been a very good son,’ replied Peter. ‘I asked him whether he loved his mother,’ says Fantoni, ‘and he said yes. And I asked if she loved him, and he said yes. And I said, “So in what sense do you think you haven’t been a good son?” And he said, “I . . .” and left the question hanging in the air.’ According to Lin, ‘His mother’s death completely crippled him emotionally. He couldn’t quite cope with that grief and probably took less care of himself. I could ask him not to drink and nag him to look after himself, but there’s a limit to what someone else can do to help a person. A lot of it is up to that person.’24 Alan Bennett was surprised to find that after his mother’s death Peter regularly referred to himself as an ‘orphan’. ‘This seemed to me so strange and uncharacteristic, both in Peter or in any man in his mid-fifties, that it made me feel that I perhaps hardly knew him at all.’25 That was as confessional as Peter got. ‘I remember just wanting to talk to him about Mum so much,’ says Sarah, ‘but he just wasn’t able to.’ As his mother’s belongings were gathered up and cleared away, Peter asked for just two items from the family home: his father’s desk; and most important of all, the CMG that had been presented to his father by the Queen.

  Peter now threw himself into a little flurry of work, as he had done after his father’s death a decade before. He telephoned Eleanor Bron about the long-forgotten plan of mounting a stage show, and instituted weekly meetings to improvise material into a tape recorder. He appeared on Room 101 to list his pet hates, making a truly brave stab at being funny about cotton wool, push taps, John Patten, low-quality German soft porn, a Nationwide Building Society ad, Gracie Fields, the TV programme Watchdog, unopenable cellophane packaging, pink-eyed pet rabbits and of course the countryside. Host Nick Hancock played him a slowed-down film of the countryside: ‘You’ve deliberately speeded this up!’ accused Peter. Hancock inquired if rabbits’ eyes ceased to be pink in flash photographs. ‘Yes,’ drawled Peter, ‘the only place a rabbit looks really good in is a disco.’

  He also made a Christmas sell-through video, entitled Peter Cook Talks Golf Balls, which was heavily based on his Clive Anderson Talks Back appearance. This time the four characters were Alec Dunroonie, an old, bearded, retired caddie, who told tall tales of ants that attack people in tasteless golf trousers; Dr Dieter Liedbetter, a Teutonic golf psychiatrist who set out to prove that golf was played by prehistoric man; Bill Rossie, a wildly overequipped American caddie with a golf bag full of drink; and best of all, Major Titherly Glibble (Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling again), misogynistic Chief Secretary of the Antler Room, a satire on the type of pompous golf club official likely to raise objections to Peter’s attire:

  In the rules of golf there is no mention of women as such. The rules of golf are enormously long – as indeed is my wife. We have a working arrangement. She works and I arrange things.

  As he became drunker, Glibble turned out to be a paedophile, who has returned with several Arab boys from a trip to Morocco to buy sand for the bunkers. ‘Young lads running around stark naked – that’s the game of golf for me,’ he burbled.

  Peter Cook Talks Golf Balls did not, sadly, bear comparison with Clive Anderson Talks Back. Peter looked uncomfortable, sweaty and out of shape, and the production values were poor. It was a joyless performance, which is hardly surprising considering the circumstances. In contrast to his newfound confidence regarding his acting abilities of the previous year, he told the Daily Mail that ‘I don’t think I’m a very good actor.’26 Ciara handled the video’s PR once more, but journalists were more interested in Peter’s condition than in sketches about golf. Somehow he slogged through the round of promotional appearances. Excuses needed to be made: London Tonight’s Ken Andrew told viewers that his interviewee was ‘suffering from a heavy cold’ as Peter, bloated, blurred and heartbroken, mumbled something about popping into the 19th hole.

  He made a number of writing trips to Private Eye, which he described as ‘The only thing I do that I’m interested in.’ John Wells remembers the intense expression in his eyes as he fought to hurl off the blanket of drunkenness: ‘He was clearly being assailed by wave after wave of wildly comic ideas he was at that moment unable to express. He’d been reading a piece in the paper about the Frederick West murder story; the police were removing bodies from Westsquo;s back garden, and his lawyer was complaining that ‘this kind of publicity might well damage his client’s case’. Peter had read out the quote, and we’d laughed, then he sat there thinking about it. He crooked his cigarette up to his mouth, rocking forward, shaking with laughter, half turning away, but when he looked back the expression was still there. It was intense, affectionate, full to overflowing with a kind of glittering amusement. You could regret he’d got himself into that state, but when he looked at you like that you could only love him.’27 Peter continued to visit the Eye up until Christmas 1994, when he composed a trendy church service with the refrain ‘Ooh ah, Cantona’.

  Some days were better than others. There was the day when Peter decided to invite Jurgen Klinsmann to tea, and the Tottenham centre forward politely accepted the invitation. There was a lads’ night out with David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and Jonathan Ross, at which they discussed the idea of setting up a company to abuse young women under the pretext of giving them a start in TV; the evening was great fun, although Ross recalls that Peter knocked back ‘a serious number of Margaritas’. There was also the annual celebrity Perudo tournament at Commonwealth House, which Peter attended for the second year running: over 300 guests gathered to play the South American game of liar’s dice, including Stephen Fry, Keith Allen, Sting, Mariella Frostrup and the equally ever-present Lady Carla Powell. Peter and Sting’s team made it throu
gh to the semi-finals.

  There were, also, more melancholy days. Visiting the supermarket with George, Peter saw an extremely pretty young blonde girl of about eighteen in one of the aisles. There was no suggestion of lust, explains George, just misty regret that she looked exactly like Ciara had done when Peter had first met her (Peter once famously commented that ‘I might have some regrets . . . but I can’t remember what they are’). There was also a Literary Review prize-giving, at which Peter had promised to present an award to the winner of the magazine’s poetry competition. Drunk and depressed, he made a slurred and incoherent speech that no-one really understood about an enormous bee, which thoroughly confused the respectable middle-aged lady who’d won. As if in anticipation of further depression to come, Peter phoned Clive Bull at LBC and warned him to expect more nocturnal calls, this time from a new alter ego named Jurgen the German.

  In September, Peter enjoyed one of his happiest days, at the wedding of his daughter Daisy to Simon Hardy. Lucy had already married in May 1990, a hurried registry office wedding to an American psychotherapist called John Shadley, followed by a blessing and honeymoon with Wendy in Majorca; Peter had been annoyed that the event had made the Daily Mail, so keen was he to protect his daughters from the public glare. Daisy’s wedding was a grander, more traditional, but also more discreet affair, in the Sussex village where she had spent the latter part of her childhood. Peter came alone; Lin, he said, had the flu. The night before the wedding, Simon Hardy found Peter sitting alone in the hotel bar with a bottle of champagne. ‘He had a piece of paper and was jotting down things to say about Daisy in his speech. He looked so vulnerable you wanted to hug him.