by John Fisher
A typical running order shows that Tommy contributed on average six appearances during a single transmission, all with Hobley and all brief, with the exception of his final six minute closing spot before the finale. Muir later commented pompously, ‘I rationed him to thirteen minutes of each forty-five minute show. I felt that this was enough. People either dote on Tommy or can’t stand him.’ The balcony scene went ahead, with no evidence of interference from Tommy. Most of the reviews agreed that if you found Cooper funny you would not dislike the show, only the Evening Standard referring to him as being ‘the odd man out all the time.’ The Daily Mail maintained, ‘He can produce more laughs to the minute on television than anyone else we have seen.’ But McGivern remained jittery. After the second show he sent a memo to Ronnie Waldman, the executive responsible:
The Breughel picture was hopeless.
The last joke (mother and the walrus) was in doubtful taste.
The dancing again.
The programme had more ordinariness than magic.
Whether McGivern was happier with the parade of fire-eaters, table tennis champions, harmonica players, calypso singers, and other diverse attractions that Muir subsequently coaxed through his studio doors, we have no way of telling. Eamonn Andrews even read a poem extolling ‘The Giant’s Causeway’. To bolster the magic content, a guest magician from The Magic Circle was included each week. The show ran fortnightly from 12 March for eight episodes, an option for the final four being picked up along the way. Tommy was paid sixty and Miff twenty guineas a show. The true value was not in the worth of the contract, but in the avalanche of new enquiries for personal appearances that Miff received as a result. There was no rush to repeat the exercise of a series.
Writing in the Television Annual for 1953, editor Kenneth Baily was amazingly less than gracious about Cooper, given the populist fan-based slant of the publication: ‘The result was a hotchpotch which could only have been redeemed if the starring comic had been liberal enough in the inventiveness of his material to keep it fresh and full of surprise each time he appeared. Unfortunately, Tommy Cooper had not that liberality of material.’ In the circumstances, Miff must shoulder a large part of the blame. No recordings survive and the scripts are little more than running orders which give few clues to precise content. However, they do show that he mingled quick comedy sketches with the crazy conjuring and this would have added to the disjointed nature of the whole exercise. It was generally conceded that Tommy needed more experience as a comic to carry such a vehicle. He could only achieve that on the road. Thanks to Bernard Delfont, Miff was able to write to Waldman with a note of triumph in September 1954: ‘You will be glad to know that Tommy has had a most successful summer season at Southport, where, apart from his act, he has been playing sketches and can now safely be classed as a ‘production comic’.
Whatever the flaws of the production of It’s Magic there was no doubting the chemistry that existed between Cooper and Hobley and every effort was made to secure Tommy’s presence on the BBC’s 1952 Christmas Party, hosted by the announcer, televised live on Christmas Day that year. Cooper always looked back on this one appearance as the turning point in his perception by the public. At the beginning of 1950 approximately 350,000 households had television sets; by the end of 1952 that number was fast approaching one and a half million. With only one channel to choose from, it is fairly certain that every single one of those homes would have been tuned into the festivities at Lime Grove at 7.30 that Christmas evening. Tommy would have had to play to capacity at the London Palladium for several years to have gained the audience that saw him most memorably magicking a block of wood – from ear to ear – through the long suffering Hobley’s head. One reviewer wrote, ‘The Television Christmas Party usually depresses me because the enjoyment seems so artificial,’ but concluded that Cooper enhanced the situation. He stole the show in a bill that included Norman Wisdom, Arthur Askey, Frankie Howerd, Petula Clark, and many more.
For the time being high profile guest spots were his one means of staying in front of the viewing public. He teamed up again with Hobley on Kaleidoscope in February 1953 and with bandleader Henry Hall in Face the Music two months later, when he shared with the public his delight at the arrival of his baby daughter, Victoria a few days before on 2 April: ‘I’m getting a big play pen with bars all round. Once I get inside she can’t get at me!’ Most talked about was the occasion in August 1953 when in A Little of What You Fancy he enlisted the services of Gilbert Harding. In a stunt reminiscent of his defining anti-gravity milk bottle trick, he filled a large can with water, covered the mouth with a sheet of cardboard and balanced the can upside down on the head of the provocative host. Tommy explained that when he removed the cardboard, the water would stay suspended in the can. The trick failed and Harding was drenched. The television personality was capable of beaming charm or scathing scorn. Fortunately on this occasion he was in a lighter mood and, when questioned on the incident afterwards, referred to his guest star as ‘a delightful maniac’.
The next interest to be shown in featuring Cooper in a series of his own came with the arrival of Commercial Television in 1955. It is hard in retrospect to imagine the monopoly held by a lone broadcaster when it came to promoting talent. Had the second channel not arrived Cooper might have stayed for ever in series oblivion. Fortunately for Tommy many of the most powerful people behind the new enterprise, like the Grades, Jack Hylton, and Val Parnell, were tried and tested variety professionals who understood what he stood for, not – Waldman excepted – civil servants running an entertainment enterprise. The first enquiry came from Associated-Rediffusion Ltd, the company awarded the London weekday franchise, on 24 August 1955, although his theatrical commitments prevented a series from materializing until March 1957. However, his presence at the Prince of Wales Theatre for most of this time placed him in a perfect position to gain exposure on the new wave of variety spectaculars that would stamp their own hallmark on the new channel. He made the first of many appearances on Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium on 16 October 1955. Saturday Showtime was another vehicle that availed itself of Cooper’s talents during this time, a fast car between Piccadilly Circus and the studios at Wood Green just about making this an option in the days of live transmission.
When Miff eventually sat down to lunch with the executives at Associated-Rediffusion in April 1956, he had the uneasy memory of It’s Magic at the back of his mind. Miff was less than impressed by the trial script written by John Antrobus and Dave Freeman. In the first place, although the new format would have more skilfully crafted sketches, it was still variety-bound with guest acts and singers. Script editor at the new company was David Croft, who would one day set his stamp on popular British culture with a string of situation comedies of which Dad’s Army remains the most notable. Miff was adamant in a letter to Croft dated 16 May 1956, in which he emphasized how much thought he had given to the conundrum of presenting his artist on the small screen: ‘That is why I suggested my idea for a series entitled My Life by Tommy Cooper, the copyright of which, incidentally, I should naturally retain. This idea is, in my opinion, the only way of presenting him to viewing audiences to the best advantage, as frankly I am not interested in any ordinary type of show for him. So unless the scripts are written around this idea a lot of everyone’s valuable time will be wasted, and I can see no point in proceeding further.’
Miff’s idea was to show ‘what happens to Tommy Cooper during the course of an ordinary day,’ opening in his home and closing in his theatre dressing room before making his entrance on stage, ‘over which credits should run.’ The main weakness was that it deprived audiences of seeing arguably what they most wanted to see, their hero in all his calamitous splendour on that very stage. However, Ferrie’s tentative movement in the direction of situation comedy, or at least the comedy of situation – irrespective at this stage whether his client could cope with the genre or not – was prescient given that the two British pioneers in t
he field, Tony Hancock and Jimmy Edwards, had still – by a matter of weeks and months respectively – to bring the device to the medium. In addition he made one exceptionally astute observation to Croft about his client: ‘Regarding the trial script, it is far too frenzied. One does not have to create a frenzied situation for Tommy. Just write it smoothly near-normal and he’ll frenzy it up naturally.’ As for his involvement and his paranoia about what he regarded as his copyright, these were drawbacks that television companies would soon learn to tolerate if they wanted Cooper on their screens.
The BBC must have heard on the grapevine of the commercial interest. On 30 April the Light Entertainment front office expressed interest in a one-off Cooper half hour to be included in a run of showcases for comedians that would also feature Jack Benny and Max Wall, but nothing more was heard of the project after a meeting with Miff at the Corporation on 2 May. Ferrie might have assumed that the Associated-Rediffusion interest was home and dry, but this was not the case. On 14 August there was cause to get jittery when a complication arose regarding technical facilities for a dummy run, leading Head of Light Entertainment, Michael Westmore to declare the project shelved for the time being. Miff wasted no time in rekindling BBC interest by dropping a line to Ronnie Wald-man, emphasizing that he had ‘finally figured out what is in my opinion the ideal format to enable him to be presented to the fullest advantage.’ Nothing however came of a meeting with his old colleague and had it not been for David Croft’s persistence at the new company Cooper’s television future might have remained at a loose end. Energized by a visit to see Tommy in person at the Prince of Wales, Croft made sure by 10 September that not only had a dummy run been scheduled for 26 October, before Tommy headed north for his autumn season at the Coventry Theatre, but that a deal was in place for a series of twelve half hours at a fee of £350.00 a show to be recorded in the spring of the following year. Sadly Croft would leave the company before he could add his own signature to what he had championed.
By the beginning of 1957 Miff had changed his mind about the title, now endorsing Cooperama, with My Life, Starring Tommy Cooper as a fall-back. The company wanted to proceed with The Tommy Cooper Show. Miff resisted, citing ‘lack of originality’ in his defence: ‘Mr Cooper is a most unusual personality and it is only logical that a series starring such an Artiste should have a title in keeping with such a personality.’ A compromise was reached and the series was called, Cooper, or Life with Tommy. So much for originality! In the absence of recordings and scripts, one is left to imagine the outcome. All the evidence suggests that it was a debacle.
An ominous footnote had been appended to Miff’s proposal: ‘There should be no studio audience.’ There is every indication to show that on this point he and the broadcaster were in accord. A letter from producer, Peter Croft listed the complications that arose if studio space had to be sacrificed. Scenery would have to take a stylized form, while only a small percentage of the audience would be able to see any one particular item. The same company’s A Show Called Fred and Son of Fred – presumably shot in the same studio – had managed without during 1956, but Milligan’s absurdist scripts starring Peter Sellers were so out of the ordinary that the absence of an audience did not seem to detract from their appeal. Tommy’s whole motivation as a performer was audience-based.
On 11 May 1957, two-thirds of the way through the run, Miff wrote to John McMillan, the Controller of Programmes, that ‘Mr Cooper is becoming increasingly unhappy at the prevailing state of affairs, particularly the scripts and the casting, with the result that he wishes an entirely new cast for the next programme.’ Scripts were an uncoordinated affair, with Freeman, Freddie Sadler, Richard Waring, and Patrick Brawn contributing episodes singly or in pairs. Antrobus had wisely left the fold earlier. Miff hardly needed to add that ‘such lack of cooperation was certainly never anticipated, otherwise this series would not have been undertaken.’ A few days later Peter Croft put pen to paper to make a complaint – and a point – of his own: ‘We have so far overlooked the fact that he is continuously late both for morning and afternoon rehearsals, resulting in a loss of approximately five hours per week of rehearsal time.’
As we have seen, Bernard Delfont took television matters into his own hands for the series, Cooper’s Capers, that materialized for Associated Television Ltd the following year. With the master showman at the helm we can be assured that Tommy certainly had the sounding board of an audience on this occasion. The inclusion of the singer, Aileen Cochrane suggests a return to something nearer a variety, rather than a pure sketch format, although again his comedy magic talents were downplayed. The transmission time of 10.15 p.m. on Fridays – a shift from 9.30 p.m. on Mondays – would not have instilled confidence in the star. The director had to be replaced after the first show. Artist and agent could derive some consolation from the fact that Commercial Television had still to reach large sections of the UK. He would not return to television screens in a resident series until 1966, by which time the whole country was immersed in the culture of ITV.
Miff did nothing further about the series situation until the end of December 1959, when he plucked up the courage to write to the Corporation’s new Head of Light Entertainment, Eric Maschwitz about the possibility of a spring or autumn series for the BBC in 1960. The reply was prompt, but not promising, citing his commitment to a large number of series in those periods. As far as the Corporation was concerned Tommy’s best hope for exposure resided at the level of producer, rather than executive patronage. Bill Cotton, by now producing his father’s show, The Billy Cotton Band Show, sensed the chemistry that might exist between the jovial showman and the exuberant magical jester. He was right. Cotton Senior made a willing stooge as Tommy subjected the band-leader to the guillotine illusion – with all the gags he would perpetrate on Michael Parkinson on his show almost twenty years later – and used him as a special audience of one as he made a succession of paper balls disappear before Billy’s very eyes. This sequence had been brought to perfection by the New York master of sleight of hand, Slydini. As the balls became larger, the laughter from the audience became louder. The routine was a brilliant demonstration of applied psychology. Each time Cooper went to make a ball vanish, an upward flick of the wrist propelled it over the bandleader’s head. Cotton had no idea what was happening until the magician asked him to get up from the chair and walked him round to show him the mound of tissue paper that had piled up behind.
Alongside Dixon of Dock Green, Juke Box Jury and Perry Mason, The Billy Cotton Band Show was a comfortable cornerstone of Saturday night viewing in the early Sixties before The Generation Game, The Two Ronnies and Parkinson redefined the face of weekend viewing a decade later. Between January 1960 and March 1962 Cooper made no fewer than four guest appearances with ‘the old man’ for fees starting at 250 guineas and rising to £325.00. Bill would get special approval for this sort of money, extending far beyond what the BBC had been accustomed to pay for guest artists in such circumstances, but inevitable in the face of increased competition from the commercial channel. Around 1960 £350.00 was his standard fee for an appearance on the Palladium show or another production of similar stature on the commercial network. As the ITV audience grew, regular appearances on Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium became more important for his profile, although in actuality, in spite of the persistence of ATV’s legendary booker, Alec Fyne, he turned down more than he did. For all Miff wanted to soft pedal his client’s identification with the comedy magic routine, it did present a gift to a format like the Palladium show, capable as it was of immense variation, unlike so many set comedy sketches and novelty acts. Tommy constantly made the excuse that he never had anything new. The real reason is that when he did have something new he did not want to waste it on the television audience. In 1963 Miff asked Fyne for a fee of £500.00 and top billing. In television they deemed this kind of status more important than in the theatre. They settled for £450.00 and would have to wait until 1967 befor
e achieving the star spot on a bill that also featured Al Read, Peter Nero, and host Bob Monkhouse. For that he received £1,000.00, but by then his television presence had taken a major turn.
In the overall context of his career the most significant enquiry for a guest appearance came in September 1960, for a cameo role as the Mad Hatter in a Christmas extravaganza loosely based on the Alice books. He did not accept the offer, although the idea of Tommy performing the ‘Hats’ routine at his own tea party might not have been as incongruous in Lewis Carroll’s eyes as it first appears. The enquiry initiated a dialogue with ABC Television, a rival to ATV and A-RTV on the franchise map, where it resided as the weekend contractor for the North and the Midlands. In time it would merge with A-RTV to form Thames Television. Virtually ninety per cent of Cooper’s remaining television appearances would be made for the company in one of its two manifestations. Initially they constituted guest star opportunities on ABC’s own showcase spectacular, Big Night Out, but in June 1961 a less likely invitation was extended for Tommy to appear on Thank Your Lucky Stars, the pioneering pop programme that allowed teenagers to give their verdicts on the latest releases.
The show was produced by an ex-radio producer for Radio Luxembourg, Philip Jones. His biggest coup in the role came in January 1963 when having heard over the phone an acetate of a number called ‘Please Please Me,’ he booked an emerging rock group named The Beatles for their first national television appearance. For the moment it was enough to know that Tommy Cooper had made a comedy record –‘How Come There’s No Dog Day?’ on the ‘A’ side, ‘Don’t Jump off the Roof, Dad’ on the flip side – an excuse to add a touch of novelty to the standard fare of Alma Cogan, Michael Holliday, and The Temperance Seven. Within a short while Jones would become Head of Light Entertainment, first at ABC and then at Thames, and as such the most influential individual in Tommy’s television career. A kind, unassuming man with total commitment to the talent he opted to promote, he was a showman on the inside rather that the outside. Performers warmed to this, sensing that he – unlike so many executives and impresarios – had no wish to upstage them or exercise his own ego on the back of theirs. In matters like these Tommy was relatively easy-going, but even so he always appreciated the special quality of Philip Jones.