Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

by John Fisher

  Fortunately, his appearance in the special Royal Variety Gala Performance in honour of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in November was, as we have witnessed, a personal triumph. Maybe this instilled a new sense of confidence and self-respect, enough for Gwen to inform Miff on 23 January 1978 that he had not had a drink since New Year. She may have been correct. In that period Tommy had been resting at home, but for a single cabaret at the London Hilton and another in Leeds. He might have been shocked into abstinence – however temporary – by the clause in his new Non-Appearance Insurance cover that came through in early January, carrying as it did an exclusion clause relating to his being ‘in a state of intoxication or whilst suffering from alcoholism directly or indirectly attributable thereto.’

  Any attempt at a revised lifestyle did nothing to keep at bay the old spectre of unreliability. According to the management, he kept the audience at the London Hilton waiting for forty minutes, prompting solicitors for the organizers to demand compensation for the loss of ‘the pace and atmosphere of a very successful evening to that point,’ adding that ‘we had the impression, with great regret, that Mr Cooper did not approach the preparation for his performance with sufficient care both as regards his props and, more importantly, timeliness.’ Similar complaints followed an engagement at the Holiday Inn, Heathrow a month later. After that Cooper appears to have made an extra effort as far as punctuality was concerned, taking wicked delight in calling Miff late in the evening on arrival at a venue, but more often than not sounding drunk when he did so. By the end of the year his health had suffered further setbacks. In an absurd twist of volte-face on behalf of his client, Ferrie found himself writing to all the managements for whom Tommy was booked into the foreseeable future, requesting that his performance time actually be brought forward to 10 o’clock ‘on medical grounds’.

  An all time professional low was reached during the late summer months of 1978 with the recording for Thames of the television series, Cooper – Just Like That from the New London Theatre. As we have seen, the performer transmitted into people’s homes was a sad, sluggish shadow of his former self. Kenneth Tynan observed that towards the end of his life the once dynamic Phil Silvers had been so ‘slowed down by infirmity that he might have been performing underwater’. At times one longed for Cooper to emerge with snorkel and flippers to make the analogy, which now applied equally to the man in the fez, funny rather than sad. Any viewer would have been surprised at the suggestion that he would ever be offered a series again, let alone bounce back on television with something approaching a new spring in his step. However, there was a moment between the nadir of the New London fiasco and his last series for Thames in 1980, Cooper’s Half Hour, when he genuinely did start to pull himself together, even if the long-term damage to his health was now done. The tolerance and affection extended to him by the public – give or take those let down at a few of his live shows – were far stronger than the damage one sub-standard series could inflict.

  Notwithstanding, the recriminations from managements regarding lateness and sobriety persisted into 1979. What may have been a defining moment in helping to change his ways occurred in March when Miff was telephoned by the representative of Geers Gross Advertising Ltd, for whom Tommy had spent three days making a television commercial for Soda-stream immediately after recording the New London series. His performance had been mediocre and inadequate, leading to an almost impossible technical challenge in the editing and a damaging impact on the whole campaign. To bolster the latter, the advertising agency was suggesting a series of local radio advertisements for which they would need the approval of Cooper and Ferrie. It was proposed that they would use ‘someone impersonating Tommy Cooper’s voice’. Both artist and manager went along with the plan, but, to Cooper, it must have represented the ultimate indignity. In view of Tommy’s love–hate feeling on the whole impersonator issue the proposal must have stung like iodine on an open wound, even more so than the episode of the television show, Who Do You Do? that, as he used to complain, ‘ended with everyone doing an impression of me – including a bleeding emu!’, a reference to the aggravating arm-extension of puppeteer, Rod Hull that seemed to crop up everywhere during the Seventies. In the end Russ Abbot did the radio honours for Sodastream.

  It is significant that Ferrie should have even contemplated a television commercial for Cooper, having given them a wide berth for the greater part of his career. One important aspect of the wavering pattern of his client’s health was the impact it had on his earnings. With the events in Rome and the change in his working pattern the steady climb to the £169,589.00 that he earned in the financial year ending in April 1977 fell away sharply. From that point his earnings became unpredictable and it is to Miff’s credit that at a time when the club industry was in recession he maintained for his artist the relatively high levels he did. As Tommy grew older, medical certificates to excuse engagements unfulfilled became almost as natural a part of Ferrie’s working routine as contracts and commission notes. For the record, the following are the amounts Cooper earned annually to the end of his life. It is not possible to tell how much he was reimbursed by insurance companies for engagements lost to illness. The sums in brackets represent fees – where available – that he would have received from managements had he appeared: the amounts may still have accrued to him – minus any excess – if the policies were in his favour. There were, of course, many enquiries that had to be declined, interest that in happier times would have evolved into profitable bookings.

  1977–8 £116,158 (£23,416)

  1978–9 £181,464 (£17,500)

  1979–80 £156,500 (£15,500)

  1980–1 £159,792 (£6,500)

  1981–2 £108,097 (£12,500)

  1982–3 £129,306 (£12,000)

  1983–4 £117,150 (£31,250)

  Throughout his long career there had scarcely been a product in the British shopping basket that had not tried to pin its price tag to the Cooper image and since the time of the Cape Fruit campaign Miff had refused them all. Before that campaign Tommy had featured in a little seen television ad for Gibbs toothpaste and in what was described as a Pearl and Dean ‘filmlet’ promoting Currys Stores for showing in the cinema. In the interim Kellogg’s, Nestlé, Cadbury, Mars, Bird’s Eye, Heinz, Kleenex, Tesco, the British Egg Marketing Board – who subsequently got lucky with Tony Hancock – and many more all tugged at the tassel on the fez, only to be politely shown away. With his penchant for poultry jokes, Tommy would have had a field day with the latter, as he would have done with a similar approach made by Kentucky Fried Chicken. At one stage Bisto even wanted to portray Tommy and his wife as a couple of Bisto kids. It would have been neat casting. The exception was a photo campaign for Horne Bros tailoring stores at Christmas 1967. The seasonal catalogue is today a collectors’ item. The photo-session netted Cooper £1,000.00 at the time.

  Now the floodgates were opened and the basket showed an eccentric mix. It is as if Miff had been reserving the commercial advantage as security for a rainy day. As occasional split weeks and one night stands became the pattern in a schedule dominated by periods of ill health and recovery, Miff now had another money machine to milk. It is staggering that 1978–9 should represent Tommy’s best year in financial terms in view of the dip of the previous twelve months. Some of the more affluent clubs were still prepared to pay top dollar, for which he remained happy to play an occasional week, and as we know Thames television was a continuing benefactor. However, for the likes of Cooper live show business generally was not as profitable an area as it had once been. His biggest single fee of the year was £15,000.00 for the Sodastream campaign. In the last six years of his life he lent his name to lucrative marketing campaigns for KP Nuts, McVitie’s Biscuits, Family Hampers, Farfisa Electronic Organs, as well as commercials for Cream Cakes (Milk Marketing Board), Reckitt and Coleman’s Nurture Plant Food, Crackerbread, Yellow Pages, and Co-op’s Christmas gift range. The latter generated even more publicity for the retail group when in
December 1980 the Independent Broadcasting Authority, failing to see the schoolboy nature of Cooper’s humour, banned one of the commercials that showed Tommy stealing a present from Santa Claus’s grotto.

  In this six year period his earnings from product endorsement totalled £177,000.00, approximately a fifth of his income and a fair return given that he was often required to do little more than attend a photographic or voice-recording session. In the final year alone he recorded commercials for Batchelors’ Saucy Noodles, Dexion Shelving, British Telecom and a voiceover campaign for the Daily Express: these four brands accounted for no less than £45,000.00. Ironically the most poignant commercial to feature Cooper did not involve him at all and dated back to 1972. The vignette, for a short-lived charitable scheme named ‘Bottle Losses’, featured two old ladies chatting happily to each other about the Tommy Cooper show they had seen on television the night before. A third old lady hovers in the background. It transpires that she does not have a set. The voiceover explains to the viewers that by returning their empty milk bottles they could help her to acquire one. It is ironic that in part Cooper owed his career to an empty bottle of milk.

  In spite of the bonus income from the commercial sector, the individual salaries earned in each successive year during this period provide a fitting barometer of his general physical condition. Although he was far from a well man, he had at last been forced to accept a more realistic position of self-awareness as far as his health was concerned. In the aftermath of Rome, phlebitis, bronchitis, asthma, pyrexia, chronic sore throat, exhaustion, even suspected mild thrombosis of the leg that required anti-coagulant treatment would all continue to lead to the cancellation of bookings and even the occasional short hospital stay, but on 22 June 1979 Miff was at least able to write to him that the medical report recently submitted for insurance purposes was ‘most encouraging, so keep up the good work’. In Tommy’s rest weeks the Coopers would make ever more frequent visits to Forest Mere, the health resort in Hampshire they had frequented since the early Sixties, principally for his recurring back trouble. Gwen made sure she always had a bottle of gin in her handbag.

  It is quite clear from the files that in the past ‘exhaustion’ had frequently been used by doctors as a euphemism for the side effects of ‘excessive drinking’. However, in October George Savva, the boss of Blazer’s at Windsor, took the trouble to call Miff to tell him not only that Tommy ‘did very well last week’, but to add that there had been a ‘minimum of drinking’. A month later a red letter day was achieved as far as Miff was concerned when Tommy found himself siding with him and not Gwen over making an exception to his regular working routine and performing a run of twelve consecutive shows without a break at the London Room in Drury Lane. Miff annotates the journal entry: ‘Quite pleasant!!!’

  When at last he appeared with Miff’s full approval on the Christmas edition of Parkinson in 1979, his first television appearance since the desultory New London series, he was on the top of his form. For the studio audience his entrance down the famous stairs was tantamount to a real live Santa Claus coming down the chimney, even if the fez was missing:

  Parkinson: What’s that you’ve got on your head?

  Cooper: A bucket.

  Parkinson: That’s not a bucket. It’s a saucepan.

  Cooper: Is it? I’ve got the wrong hat!

  During the course of the interview he shed genuine tears at the thought that he had ‘backed a horse at twenty to one – it came in twenty past four’; frightened Michael out of his skin as he let loose a ‘dangerous man-eating mongoose’ (generis joke-shop) from its cage; and gave all his fans the worry of a lifetime as he explained that new Common Market regulations forbade the wearing of the fez – little more than an excuse to try on an exotic assortment of headgear before cocking a snook at the authorities and persisting with the fez regardless. Crazy inventions and short mime vignettes were interwoven into the interview, which also gave Cooper the opportunity to show off his bona fide sleight of hand skills from the same chair where a few years earlier Fred Kaps, the world’s foremost prestidigitator had enthralled a similar yuletide audience.

  The only false note went undetected by the home audience after Tommy overlooked to set the safety catch on the guillotine illusion into which he cajoled Michael at the end of the show. Cooper’s technical consultant, John Palfreyman spotted the inconsistency only a few gags away from the moment when the blade would have fallen and seriously injured, if not worse, the talk show host. Tommy in the exhilaration of the moment, performing an item that was not a part of his standard nightclub repertoire, had disregarded the detail. As the producer involved, I quickly relayed instructions from the studio floor to the director to cut to a close-up of Cooper while Palfreyman dived in, put the catch in proper position and saved Parky’s life and several professional reputations – my own and Tommy’s included – in the process. It all took a matter of seconds. What the three hundred members of the studio audience thought of the strange man darting on and off the set at lightning speed to tamper with the props remains unrecorded. It did not stop every single one of them, given fezzes for the occasion without Tommy’s knowledge, rising at the end to salute their hero in unison with a communal ‘Just like that’. In a single appearance he had atoned for the mass disappointment of his poor series the year before. Cooper regained his dignity and, happily, Parkinson kept his head.

  After an extended seven week rest period over Christmas and the New Year it was business as usual. As a result of his Parkinson success and in the face of genuine BBC interest to build a series around him, Thames played their own hand and commissioned what would be his last series, six shows to be recorded fortnightly between May and July. Tommy was not overstretched with greater emphasis being placed on the tried and tested routines of the great solo performer of old, any sketches being nostalgic playbacks to his early revue repertoire. Television aside, 1980 would see him perform no more than sixty-two other shows, principally on the pattern of split weeks or one-night stands. However, the enhanced performance and the semi-abstinence could not alter the fact that beneath the surface all was not well.

  On 25 May, with one show of the new series recorded, Gwen phoned Miff to announce that her husband was not well and that the doctor had given him antibiotics. She takes great pains to stress ‘He is not drinking.’ Her calls to Miff became more frequent over the summer, in which the series was his only work commitment. Within three weeks of its completion on 18 August he was admitted to the Royal Masonic Hospital according to his wife, looking ‘like a skeleton’. On 4 September 1980 the medical report diagnosed ‘acute chest infection which has been slow to resolve, complicated by rapid heart rate which has delayed his recovery’. On the same day Gwen wrote to Miff after her visit to the hospital, ‘In himself Tommy looks wonderful and is not smoking.’ He was home within a couple of days. While he was sleeping, she called Ferrie: ‘He is booked into the Royal Masonic Hospital 29 September (but he doesn’t know) for electrical treatment to be carried out under anaesthetic on his heart.’ She added, as if to remind us amid all the seriousness that we were back in Cooperland, ‘He says he wants to go to Las Vegas!’ On 16 September he was well enough to ring Miff himself. All that is reported of the call is: ‘He ended up putting phone down on me, so I called him back and told him!’ Tommy must have been feeling better. Eventually the electrical treatment was not deemed necessary and Manhattan was added to the itinerary of the crazy transatlantic rest-cure Cooper was determined to take. When one reflects on Cooper’s life up to this point, the truly amazing thing is that he still had three and a half more years in which to live, in retrospect a surreal extension to a life that might already appear to have been strained to total exhaustion.

  At great cost, the October holiday was curtailed. The Coopers were summoned back home when their daughter, Vicky was involved in a serious car accident that required a three day stay in Charing Cross Hospital. Tommy lost out on the Nevada climate and his occasional fix of neon lights a
nd state-of-the-art magic, but there was some cheer to welcome him home in the form of a letter from George Savva to Miff to announce that his forthcoming week at Blazer’s in the approach to Christmas was already sold out: ‘Tommy, as you know, opened Cesar’s Palace for me in 1966 and has worked a total of fourteen weeks cabaret for me over the past fourteen years. I can honestly say that each and every one of the weeks have been winners and I offer this letter as my tribute to a great artiste who has continued to “pull them in” for me for almost a decade and a half. Long may he continue to do so.’ It is an important letter, reminding us that for all the aggravation and upset his health problems had caused in recent years the man remained box office and, as the Parkinson appearance proved, was still capable of warming the hearts of the nation as an entertainer. He would play the Windsor club three more times before he died. A further note of optimism was spelt on 3 November with a message from the management of Jollees Club in Stoke-on-Trent attached to their payment for Tommy’s recent appearance: ‘No problems. Pleased to see that he is drinking more moderately and is also getting off to bed at a reasonable hour.’ Later in the month, with Miff about to go on holiday, Cooper’s own hand-written message from Norwich, where he was playing a few nights at the Theatre Royal, was positively cheery: ‘The doctor says that I’m resting very well indeed and if I keep it up he says you will be able to go away for at least another ten holidays. I’m now so relaxed last night I nodded off in the middle of the act. Have a nice time and stay as long as you like.’

  As far as health and career were concerned, the mood surrounding Cooper was more buoyant than it had been for a long time. Before the year ended, the only false note came with the acceptance of possibly the most misguided booking he – or Miff, on his behalf – ever accepted. On 21 and 22 December he was subjected to the challenge of opening for the rock group, Police in a concert staged in a tent on the muddy outer reaches of Tooting Bec Common. Maybe Miff had been misled by the earlier success of comedy veteran Max Wall, who during that lull in his career when he passed out of media recognition had gone on tour with the band, Mott the Hoople. Wall, however, was always allowed to parade a more virulent streak within his public persona. When the raucous mob that often passed for an audience threw beer cans at him, he just slung them back. Four letter words were flung about in the same way. Invariably Max won over the crowd and walked off in triumph. But this was not Cooper’s style. He fitted into the South London extravaganza as comfortably as Harry Corbett’s Sooty at a stag night. Moreover, for all its emotional ups and downs, his career had not really dipped in public perception. Wall had nothing to lose in such circumstances; Cooper’s situation was the reverse. In 1975 Ferrie had already rejected a similar enquiry for Tommy to appear alongside The Who. He should have abided by his original instinct.