by John Fisher
His next excursion into a film studio was prompted by Michael Winner’s decision in 1962 to direct a ‘modern musical’ version of The Mikado. It was only the second feature to be made by the colourful director and was rushed into production by producer, Harold Baim in an attempt to be the first to put Gilbert and Sullivan on the big screen once the pair came out of copyright. Tommy was appearing in Blackpool at the time and fitted in his entire scene on a Monday morning before being flown back to the seaside for his evening shows by fellow comic, Stan Stennett in his private plane. Winner remains in awe of Cooper’s professionalism under such pressure. Whereas he found Frankie Howerd, who played the gangster Ko-Ko, surly and uncooperative, Cooper breezed in, did not – as was feared – turn the whole enterprise into an excuse to keep the crew in stitches, and got on with his role as the Detective in a pleasant and efficient manner. He was script-perfect, having added, with the blessing of Winner and co-writer Lew Schwartz, one or two pieces of business to make the part his own. Tommy shared the four minute scene with Hank Mikado, an ex-GI played by Kevin Scott, who consults the detective on how to get rid of Ko-Ko in his attempt to win the unfettered attention of his girl friend, Yum-Yum. It was not the intention that Cooper should be of any great help in this matter.
The Cool Mikado resembles one of those Hollywood ensemble movies where too many entertainers are pulled together in one studio at one time for their own good. Howerd had top billing over Cooper. Other television names of the day like Stubby Kaye, Mike and Bernie Winters, Lionel Blair, and Pete Murray give the movie the air of an overblown television special rather than that of a feature film. It was not a success, one critic making the surprising judgement that ‘this shoddy film contains some enjoyable dancing by Lionel Blair, but little else,’ but today its curiosity value as quintessential Sixties kitsch outweighs any worth, or lack of it, that it might have shown at the time. To Gilbert and Sullivan purists the whole enterprise inevitably showed a severe lapse in creative judgement, but it was never Winner’s intention to cling to the original story. Any pretence at production values was compromised when the budget ran out and the director found himself unable by using chroma-key to overlay shots he had envisaged shooting in Japan against the blue walls of the Shepperton sound stage. The lack of time Cooper had in studio gives itself away. He gallops through his lines, like a poor man’s Groucho on speed, and is at times difficult to comprehend. Tommy interpolates some classic Cooper moments, as when he picks up a briefcase and strikes it with a mallet: ‘I’ve been working very hard on a new case,’ but there is no space left within the dialogue for the audience to laugh.
The next decade would see enquiries by Ken Annakin for a cameo in the Stanley Baxter/Leslie Phillips/James Robertson Justice vehicle, The Fast Lady; by Stanley Baker for a part in his film on the life of the highwayman Jack Sheppard, Where’s Jack?; by Richard Lester for the film of The Bed Sitting Room, the nuclear war fantasy by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus; and again by Lester to play the part of a Gothic villain in Royal Flash based on the Flashman books of George MacDonald Fraser. The requests always seemed to come through relatively late in the day and Cooper’s television and cabaret commitments always seemed to stand in the way. Another possibility of becoming associated with Ray Galton and Alan Simpson presented itself with the starring role in a proposed film version of The Wind in the Sassafras Trees, the play they had written for Frankie Howerd. For no apparent reason the project appears to have gone away almost as soon as it was mooted and was never made. One heaves a genuine sigh of disappointment that several requests for him to feature in an episode of the comic adventure series, The Avengers were all frustrated. Happily a move by Peter Rogers to recruit him to the Carry On team with a cameo in Carry On … Up the Khyber went no further than a lunch between Cooper, Ferrie, the producer and his associates. Miff wrote to Tommy after the meal: ‘I have now been advised that they do not think it would be practical to continue this matter, so, with all the goodwill in the world, they suggest that we disengage from this project and trust that we may be able to get together in the future.’ One heaves another genuine sigh – this time of relief – that they never did.
It was left to a fellow comedian to sense the true potential for Tommy in the cinema when in 1967 Eric Sykes, wearing his director’s hat, featured him in The Plank. This was the nearest he came to appearing in a masterpiece and was the better for avoiding feature length. Its fifty-four minutes chronicled the misadventures of two inept builders, played by Cooper and Sykes, who go in search of one last plank to complete the flooring of the house they are working on. Their attempts to transport the plank from the timber yard on the roof of a cantankerous small car set in motion a chain of minor accidents among other road-users. The piece of wood creates even further chaos when it becomes detached from the vehicle and is finally retrieved by the workmen who throughout have been oblivious of the mayhem caused. Eventually the last nail is hammered in, only for Sykes to start ripping the floorboards apart when he suspects mistakenly that his pet kitten is trapped beneath.
The rapport between the two men had long been cemented in an ongoing friendship of mutual respect. Sykes as a scriptwriter had been one of the prime movers of British comedy from the time he established himself as scriptwriter for Frankie Howerd on radio’s Variety Bandbox in the late Forties, sweeping up additional credits for Educating Archie before emerging as a performer in his own right by the end of the Fifties. He could best be described as a star in a minor key, one who put up with the bother of the spotlight to get his project off the ground, but happier at the creative drawing board, resulting not least in the long running series, Sykes And A …, in which he co-starred with his fictional sister, played by Hattie Jacques, and took the staid form of the domestic sitcom into surreal territory it has seldom entered since. His knowledge of comedy, however much founded upon watching Laurel and Hardy and their peers in his youth, is instinctive. Himself a physical clown of brilliance, he remains the nearest Britain has to a Jacques Tati figure – how strange that name is so evocative of Hattie Jacques – and as such arguably never needed Cooper. But he corresponded to Laurel and Hardy producer, Hal Roach as much as to Stan Laurel and his shrewd comic eye had long recognized that his friend had qualities worthy of cinematic attention. The fact that in Busy Bodies and The Finishing Touch Stan and Ollie had already worked and reworked every carpentry and construction gag known to history makes the freshness of The Plank all the more amazing. Eric later admitted, ‘There was no script, just a concoction of ideas. Nobody knew what I was doing, neither did I.’ In fact he knew perfectly well what he was doing in casting Tommy alongside himself.
Originally Eric had Peter Sellers in mind for the part, but the total budget of £26,000.00 targeted for The Plank was less than what the ex-Goon could command for a major feature. When Hollywood beckoned, Tommy proved the ideal replacement. Eric was totally sincere when he later admitted, ‘It turned out to be one of those lucky choices because, as much as I admired Peter, I don’t think he would have been, for my money, in the same class as Tom.’ Although not technically a silent movie, it had minimal dialogue with imaginative use of sound effects, musical and otherwise. Tommy loved the surreal naturalism of Tati too and fitted the genre effortlessly. Beyond the outer carapace of the crazy conjuring Sykes had discerned his friend’s physical knack of sidestepping life for comic effect: ‘He had that wonderful expression that he could look at things like an idiot – and the people I love are the people who know they’re idiots. It’s the people who don’t know they’re idiots that I’m frightened of. But, you see, if you look at an object, like say I’m looking at you. Now Tom would go – (Eric edgily shifts his gaze several degrees out of kilter) – now that is just that much that differentiates the people who have control of everything. They just say like, “When did you last see your father?” But that’s the quality of Tom.’ The masterclass needs to be seen, but it perfectly conjured up the look that defined the vulnerability of the clown.
It is futile on the basis of the success of The Plank to claim, as several have done, that Cooper was born out of his time. Not even Sykes could dispute that his true métier was in command of a theatre stage or cabaret floor, where one could hear the laughter, listen to the jokes and marvel at his physical dexterity in all its forms. By contrast neither Chaplin nor Keaton had had the opportunity to project themselves properly as individual star talents before the cinema intervened. On the other hand Cooper never came to develop a relationship with the camera as they did. Unlike Charlie (the pioneer of the look to camera), Buster, Stan and Ollie, Morecambe, Howerd, Hancock, Hope, Benny Hill and Jack Benny, he never forged a link through the lens between himself and the home or cinema audience. Even in television the camera reported on what he was doing as if it were a football match. But then no one expected Best or Pelé actually to shoot at the camera.
Had Cooper flourished during the golden era of silent film comedy he would have missed out on something that Eric understood intuitively, namely that only with the coming of sound was film comedy able to deal effectively with silence itself. As film critic, David Thomson, has pointed out, until that time the technical limitations of the medium forbade this: films were never busier in their efforts to communicate words than they were in their early days. Vide the many captions or ‘titles’ that impeded the action. One of the things that is funny about The Plank is that so little is said. Sykes, following the guiding light of Jacques Tati himself, devised for Cooper the perfect sound space in which the characteristic noises –the laugh, the cough, the muttering – that issued from his throat underscored the soundtrack. With an occasional word here or there it was, given the plot, all we needed to hear. The movie would not have been as effective, would have been positively frustrating, had an aural iron curtain shut us off from this aspect of both men. But this did not take anything away from the visual quality they brought to the screen.
Eric’s stated premise of comedy is to lead an audience to expect one thing and then to deliver the reverse, namely to plant the banana skin on the path and then to have the person walk into a lamppost as, to our surprise, he steps to avoid it. The tone is set when Tommy enters the half-finished room of the house to see Eric kneeling with head bowed in front of the silhouette of a cross depicted on the wall. He gets down on his knees to join in the prayers. The reality is that Sykes is bent over because he has trapped his tie beneath a floorboard, while the religious motif is no more than the shadow of two boards stacked diagonally outside the window. One plot detail involves red paint applied to the plank. This gets transposed to Tommy’s ear. Walking along by himself he trips and falls. Passers-by mistake this as blood and come to the rescue. The soundtrack allows us to hear his protestation, ‘I’m all right. Let me get up. I’m all right. Oh dear!’ Regardless, a crowd quickly gathers. One lady arrives with a bowl of water to bathe his face, another with a cup of tea to revive him –‘Thank you very much’– a third person offers a cigarette –‘Thank you’–while a fourth cushions his head with his folded coat. When the blood fails to shift, they soon realize what it is. All amenities are swiftly withdrawn and Tommy’s head crunches against the pavement. At another point he sits happily eating a banana. A plank is swung forward horizontally from behind, but swings back before hitting him. It swings forward again, this time making contact, but the payoff is not the blow itself, rather the banana that gets stuck on his nose under the force of the impact as the plank pushes him forward. Befuddled he walks out of screen, bleary-eyed and banana-nosed.
Sykes described the three weeks of working with Cooper on the film as ‘more beneficial than a health farm’. His friend was always there to surprise and entertain in the lulls between shooting, and not always with magic tricks extracted from the pockets of the capacious blue overalls he wore throughout. On one occasion cast and crew were having lunch in a pub when Tommy for no reason whatsoever got up from the table and lay down on the floor. After a short while he returned and continued with his meal. ‘What did you do that for?’ asked Eric. ‘I just wanted to do something visual,’ replied Cooper. If he presented the director with a problem it was in being too self-conscious at times in front of the film camera. In one scene all Tommy had to do was walk down the street looking for the plank. Having pretended to shoot a version with Cooper over-reacting, for which the cameras were not rolling, he told him he wanted one last take for insurance, ‘but this time I don’t want you to act. I just want you to look gently and carefully, but I don’t want all the big stuff. So he said, “Just walk down?” I said, “Just walk down, Tom. That’s all I want.” So Tom walked down towards the camera and I said, “Cut and print.” Now Tom said to me, “D’you think I was funny?” I said, “That was very funny, Tom.” He said, “I didn’t do anything.” I said, “Tom, you’re Tommy Cooper. When you walk down a street, you walk down it different to what anybody else does.”’ Cooper couldn’t understand that he was getting paid for just walking down the street. In post-production Sykes dubbed the beat of a snare drum onto one section of the walk to create the effect of a funny little dance. Only when Tommy saw the finished result did he fully comprehend. But it did not really need the accompaniment. Generalizing on great comic originals, Sykes has said, ‘They don’t realize that it is the fact that they are what they are that makes them special.’ Of course, he is too modest a man to include himself in that company, but in that regard – as an inspired performer in his own right – he remains as guilty as Cooper.
It seemed a foregone conclusion that the success of the project would bring them together again professionally, but Eric would have to wait fifteen years until 1982 before they could reprise the roles of the accident-prone working men. In the summer of 1969 Sykes and Jon Penington, the producer of The Plank, attempted to get a sequel off the ground. The idea was to shoot during the day in Scarborough to take advantage of free time during Tommy’s summer season at the Floral Hall. Both found themselves at loggerheads with Ferrie who declined the offer, citing Tommy’s health – his leg problems were a constant strain – and the fact that he was under exclusive contract, thus precluding him from accepting any other engagements. Tommy, anxious not to have his friendship with Sykes compromised, was caught in the crossfire. On 30 July Eric wrote to Miff, claiming that Cooper wanted to make the movie and making a persuasive argument that the shooting schedule would be its own holiday for the comedian. The action was to take place largely on a golf course, which, as Sykes argued, ‘would be more beneficial than his present situation, i.e. staying in his hotel room all day’. He reasoned that the exclusive contract held by impresario, Richard Stone for the summer season had never been a viable excuse since the film did not compete with the live theatre show and claimed that what was a fairly stock clause could easily be surmounted in the circumstances. Moreover, the publicity attracted by the shoot in the resort would provide valuable coverage for the Floral Hall season. However, Penington had committed the cardinal sin of going behind Miff’s back to clear the matter with Stone himself. Stone was more than happy to support the venture, provided that his production was sufficiently covered with insurance, but irreparable damage had been done as far as Ferrie’s dignity was concerned.
Eric was also humiliated into having to explain his supposedly ‘unethical’ behaviour in even mentioning the project to Cooper before bringing it to the attention of his manager. To save time he had wanted his pal’s reaction before they even approached Ferrie. This was the way projects came together among friends. He conceded that had his agent approached Tommy direct, then that would have constituted unprofessional conduct, but not a sufficient reason for refusing to allow a picture to be made. On that point he had Miff cornered, since he went on to make the point in his letter that in the past Miff had approached him to ask if he would be prepared to write television scripts for Tommy without approaching his agent first! He summed up the situation: ‘All problems can be overcome, whatever arguments, reasons, or excuses put forward. It boils down to one simple fac
t – if you say “yes” we go ahead – if you say “no” we don’t.’ The decision rested entirely with Miff, who remained true to his inflexible self. The film was not made with Cooper. Nor did Tommy protest. Whatever he might have said to Sykes face to face, he does not appear to have been over-enthusiastic about the project. With Jimmy Edwards and Harry Secombe in the cast, it reached cinema screens as Rhubarb in 1970. It never came close to making the impact of The Plank.
Sykes would stay in the background of Cooper’s career until June 1977 when Philip Jones raised the matter of a remake of The Plank for Thames Television. One is puzzled by what could have been gained from the process. The original was already regarded as a minor classic. It had been made in colour, and there were no obvious technical advantages that suggested themselves. Supposedly Cooper had again expressed to Sykes that he wished to cooperate. When money was discussed, an offer of £1,750.00 was dismissed by Miff as derisory. Ten years earlier he had received £1,000.00 from Associated London Films alongside a small percentage of the profits. Now, as Miff emphasized, he could earn £8,000.00 for a mere week in cabaret. He was doing just that in Dublin at the time of the phone call. Ferrie suggested £7,000.00. Thames came back with a best offer of £2,500.00. Miff declined. This time, whatever he said to Eric, Cooper agreed unreservedly, as he made clear in a phone conversation with his manager on 12 July. To his credit Sykes did not give in, trying hard, but unsuccessfully, to make Thames meet Ferrie’s demands. And there the project was left until November of the following year when Cooper, doubtless under prompting from Eric, appears to have suggested the possibility of a new percentage deal. Miff explained that it was a television project as distinct from cinema venture, the finances of which would not be structured in this way. To compensate, he held out with Iris Frederick in the Thames booking office for £14,000.00 for two weeks filming. This was way beyond their budget. After an attempt at gentle persuasion by Philip Jones, arguing what he perceived as the benefit to Tommy’s overall career of such a venture, the project, a lacklustre affair, went ahead without him. This time Arthur Lowe played Sykes’s principal sidekick. Brilliant an actor as Lowe was, Eric could not claim he was in the same league as Cooper for the style of comedy in question.