Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Harry Thompson

  Harry Thompson worked with Cook on several occasions, on Radio 4’s News Quiz and on Have I Got News For You, of which he was the founding producer and co-writer. He produced and wrote for many other TV shows, including They Think It’s All Over, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Harry Enfield and Chums. His other books include The Man in the Iron Mask: A Historical Detective Investigation, biographies of Richard Ingrams and Hergé, a historical novel, This Thing of Darkness, and the bestseller Penguins Stopped Play, about his infamous cricket team, the Captain Scott XI. He died in November 2005.

  ‘This unputdownable, level-headed and intelligent biography gives one all the facts one needs to make one’s own mind up’

  Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

  ‘Dedicated research is combined with impressive access to Cook’s ex-wives, sisters and private correspondence. Thompson has got the whole story, and knows how to write it’

  Philip Norman, Sunday Express

  ‘The first of many biographers, Thompson has done extremely well . . . succeeds in the difficult task of conveying what it was that make Cook’s weird childhood obsessions so funny’

  John Wells, Sunday Times

  ‘Lively and penetrating . . . Out of Cook’s utterly disordered life, Thompson has constructed a narrative with the compulsive grip of an airport bestseller’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘The finest Cook book since the grandmaster of comedy’s death in 1994’ Time Out

  ‘Eminently readable . . . often extremely funny. A lovingly crafted biography which, seemingly effortlessly, gets beneath the skin of arguably the funniest man of his generation. A superb appreciation of a genuine iconoclast’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘A clear-headed, devoted biography’ Sunday Independent

  ‘A funny book about a sad life and a sad book about a funny, peculiar life . . . Thompson has written a serious portrait, freckled with humour, of a brillant comic and a tortured soul’ Herald

  HARRY THOMPSON

  Peter Cook

  A Biography

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To John Wallis

  1970-1996

  First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Harry Thompson 1997

  The right of Harry Thompson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 71783 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 Raised by Goats: Early Life, 1937–51

  2 I’m Much Bigger Than You Are, Sir: Radley and Abroad, 1951–57

  3 I Could Have Been a Judge, But I Never Had the Latin: Cambridge, 1957–60

  4 So That’s the Way You Like It: Beyond the Fringe, 1960–62

  5 Sorry, Sir, There Is a £5 Waiting List: The Establishment Club, 1961–62

  6 Heaving Thighs Across Manhattan: America, 1962–64

  7 The Seductive Brethren: Private Eye, 1964–70

  8 We’re Always Ready to be Jolted Out of Our Seats, Here at the BBC: Pete and Dud, 1964–67

  9 Nice Though This Be I Seek Yet Further Kicks: Family Life, 1964–71

  10 Learning to Fly Underwater: Pete and Dud, 1968–71

  11 3-D Lobster: The Humour of Peter Cook

  12 I Can’t Talk Now, ’Cos He’s Here: Behind the Fridge, 1971–75

  13 I Don’t Want to See Plays About Rape, Sodomy and Drug Addiction – I Can Get All That at Home: Derek and Clive, 1973–79

  14 You Are to Be a Stud, Dud: Dudley’s Hollywood Success, 1979–83

  15 Whereupon I Immediately Did Nothing: The Single Life, 1983–89

  16 Now That the World Is In My Grasp, It Seems a Fitting Time to Go: The Final Years, 1989–95

  17 Zsa Zsa Man Dies: Death and Aftermath, 1995–97

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  My profoundest thanks and admiration go to Peter’s sister, Sarah Seymour, without whose insight, hard work and kindness this book would have been a waste of time even to attempt. Heartfelt thanks, too, to Peter’s first two wives Wendy and Judy Cook, for the time and trouble they took; to Peter’s daughters Lucy and Daisy, and Daisy’s husband Simon Hardy, for the immense help they gave me; to Peter’s third wife, Lin; and also to Peter’s sister Elizabeth for her assistance, and to Dudley Moore for kindly racking his brains at such length.

  For their colossal exertions in the researching of this book, my heartfelt thanks go to those stalwarts of the Peter Cook Appreciation Society, the late John Wallis (aka Reg Futtock-Armitage) and Paul Hamilton. Many thanks also to Fiona Duff and my father Gordon Thompson, who helped me at great length despite having no choice in the matter; and to Tim Harrold, for his patient and thoughtful work. Thanks too to Neil Trevithick, Louis Heaton, Caroline Wright, Sam Peters, Liz McGrath, Danny Dignan, Peter Rea, David Taylor, Warren Prentice, Alex McLeod, Anna Ransom, Mathew Mellor, Hilary Lowinger, Michael Barfield and Jim Anderson. Peter Cook’s comments in this book are taken from interviews with the author carried out between 1990 and 1993, unless otherwise stated. Thanks especially to the following authors, whose interviews with Peter and others I have quoted from: Ronald Bergan (Beyond the Fringe . . . And Beyond Virgin Books); John Hind (Comic Inquisition Virgin Books); Roger Wilmut (From Fringe to Flying Circus Eyre Methuen); Barbra Paskin (Dudley Moore Sidgwick and Jackson).

  To all those who kindly sat down and conrributed their memories of Peter, or helped in some other way, yet more profound thanks: Douglas Adams; Nigel Ag Geoffrey Allibone; Clive Anderson; James Ashby; Lientenant Colonel J. A. Aylen; David Baddiel; Humphrey Barclay; Michael Bawtree; Alan Bennett; John Bird; Christopher Booker; Deborah Bosley; Richard Brooks; Gaye Brown; Clive Bull; John Butcher; Paul Butters; David Cash; George Clare; Michael Codron; Tim Coghlan; Jeremy Cotton; Richard Cottrell; John Crabbe; Jeremy Crampton; Stephen Dixon; Willie Donaldson; Stanley Donen; John Dwyer; Christopher Ellis; Harry Enfield; Barry Fantoni; Christopher Fenwick; Peter Fincham; Paul Foot; John Fortune; The Rev. Canon Maurice Friggens; David Frost; Jeffrey Frost; Stephen Fry; Harriet Garland; Anthony Garrett; James Gilbert; Kevin Godley; Sidney Gottlieb; Major General Robin Grist, CB, OBE, DL; Robin Gunn; Anthony Hole; Dr Chris Hall; Alexander Hamilton; Claude Harz; Terry Hathaway; David Hill; Ian Hislop; Barry Humphries; Professor John Hunter; Professor Martin Hunter; Eric Idle; Richard Ingrams; Halfdan Johnson; Neil Johnstone; Griff Rhys Jones; Jay and Fran Landesman; Roger Law; Christopher Leigh; John Lloyd; The Rt. Hon. Sir Peter Lloyd, MP; Roddy Loder-Symonds; James Macdonald; Hugh Macdonald; A. J. Macfarlane; Derek Maltwood; Professor John Mattock; Rory McGrath; Joe McGrath; John McLauchlan; Jonathan Miller; Tom Morkill; Ian Napier; Trevor Nunn; Andrew Osmond; Michael Palmer; Ciara Parkes; Sue Parkin; Michael Parkinson; Anthony Penfold; Peter Raby; Nicholas Rau; Ian Robertson; Tom Rosenthal; Jonathan Ross; Keith Ross; the late Willie Rushton; Nick Salaman; Justin Sbresni; Neil Shand; Robert Carter Shaw; Paul Sharpling; Ned Sherrin; Clive Simeon; Noel Slocock; Mel Smith; Dr Chris Smith; Anthony Macdonald Smith; Michael Stubbs; Martin Tomkinson; Tony Verity; Robin Voelcker; Michael Waite
; Bill Wallis; Peter Way; George Weiss; John Wells; Neville Wells; Michael Wild; Michael Winterton.

  Introduction

  Peter wanted to call his autobiography 3-D Lobster. The cover design was to feature himself, attired in cloth cap and mac, in bed with Jayne Mansfield and brandishing a huge embossed lobster. Inevitably, he never got round to writing it. He had other titles – Retired and Emotional, Who Are These People?, Can I Go Now? and I’ve Forgotten among them – but 3-D Lobster was the best, speaking as it did of one of his comic enthusiasms, rather than of weariness or resignation.

  I first encountered Peter Cook in 1982, when I was working as a trainee on the BBC’s Children in Need programme. A few years before, some halfwit at the corporation had authorised the destruction of all the Not Only . . . But Also programmes kept on videotape, on the grounds that the tapes themselves represented a reusable resource. Unlike the myriad local news reports from Halifax and Weston-super-Mare, catalogued and stored with the religious fervour that only the great God of News can inspire in the imagination-free TV executive, these marvellous comedy programmes were regarded as trivial by definition, mere ephemera to be discarded without compunction. Besides, union agreements forbade the repeat of programmes more than two years old, so as far as the Corporation was concerned the material was all but useless. Mrs Thatcher, at that time, was no more than a gleam in the Conservative Party’s eye.

  Peter had pleaded with the BBC, offering to replace each tape with a brand new one, and to pay for the future storage cossto the condemned programmes. Impossible, replied the apparatchiks: generous though his offer was, the system was simply not flexible enough to accommodate it. Failing that, he argued, could he not at least retain a cassette copy of each show, so that the programmes would not be lost to posterity? Out of the question, came the reply. The material was BBC copyright. It could not possibly be allowed off the premises, and that went for the limited amount of filmed material that survived as well. Peter’s pleas were in vain, and the tapes were wiped. One shudders to think what was recorded over them.

  Not Only . . . But Also had been my favourite TV programme as a child. As part of my Children in Need duties, I volunteered for the task of choosing ten ‘Classic Comedy Clips’, mainly so that I could gain access to the film library, surreptitiously record the surviving material on to VHS and restore it to its authors. It was nerve-janglingly exciting to dust off the bulky 35 mm film cans, prise them open and thread their contents on to the antiquated viewing machine: in some cases, I was the first person to see these programmes for seventeen years. I even managed to damage one film, which snapped in two (it still bears a clumsy repair) when I laced it up wrongly. I didn’t dare call expert help, as I didn’t really have a convincing explanation for what I was up to. Eventually, the deed was done and two copies were dispatched to Private Eye, one for Peter and one for Dudley Moore. Of course, I kept a copy for myself. Dudley, I discovered during the research for this book, never got his cassette. Relations between Peter and Dudley were not at their best in 1982.

  I was lucky enough to work with Peter many times in subsequent years, on the Radio 4 News Quiz, on Have I Got News For You and The Bore of the Year Awards for BBC Television. He even suggested, jokingly, that I should write his biography. He knew, by then, that 3-D Lobster would never see the light of day. I last saw him in the summer of 1994, when we and a few others sat round watching the World Cup Final on television. I thought by then that I had got to know him a little. I now realise that I barely knew him at all.

  CHAPTER 1

  Raised by Goats

  Early Life, 1937–51

  There are those who say – and Peter Cook himself was among them – that most of his humour was autobiographical. Others – and Peter Cook himself was among them – contend that this simply isn’t the case. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. Peter’s humour was indeed littered with incidents from his own life, but he tended to parody his background, or veer off surreally at a tangent from it, rather than straightforwardly disguise it with a veneer of jokes. Too much significance should not therefore be read into what can nevertheless be an absorbing game, that of tracing back threads of reality through his labyrinthine mental processes. ‘Raised by goats . . . nanny-goats . . . raised by nannies. Bingo! I only just got that one the other day,’ says Peter’s sister Sarah.

  Peter Edward Cook was indeed raised by nannies, or by a combination of ot d grannies at any rate; not as traumatic a father substitute as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling’s flock of goats, but a father substitute for all that. For successive generations the Cook family put service to the Empire above mere family considerations, representing their monarch dutifully in a variety of distant locations, while the sons they produced were sent home to boarding schools to begin the process anew. Theirs was a line of gentle, witty, dutiful and impeccably-mannered men, with melancholy souls that undoubtedly owed much to their lonely, separated childhoods.

  Peter’s grandfather, Edward Cook, was Traffic Manager for the Federated Malay States Railway in Kuala Lumpur. It was there, one evening in May, 1914, that he went out into the garden and blew his brains out with a revolver, in a fit of depression brought on by nervousness at a forthcoming promotion to acting General Manager. Tributes in the Malay Mail spoke of an immensely popular character, able, energetic, kindly and thoughtful, but whose cheerful and amusing exterior skilfully concealed an easily depressed temperament. It is a description that will be familiar to anyone who knew the young Peter Cook. Like Peter, his grandfather had been known as ‘Cookie’ to his friends, one of whom wrote: ‘His last words were “Don’t think unkindly of me, I must have rest.” God send you have found it, Cookie’.1

  His widow Minnie kept the suicide a secret throughout her life; indeed it was not until Peter traced his family history through Debrett’s that the details came to light. He found it a disturbing revelation, as much for the discovery of his grandmother’s lifelong burden as for the unfortunate facts themselves. Often, his own father Alec had sat there examining Edward Cook’s photograph for the hundredth time and wishing aloud that he had known him. Alec had been eight at the time and several thousand miles away, enduring the rigours of life at the Imperial Service College, Windsor.

  The school was a direct descendant of the United Services College, which had spawned Rudyard Kipling and formed the basis for his brutal ‘Stalky & Co.’ stories. It was an institution so cold in winter that boys would sneak off to the boiler room and hang like bats from the hot water pipes. Eventually Alec Cook triumphed through the mud and ice, made a place in the First XI, became Captain of School and won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1924. Money was tight: he and his best friend Bob Church were so poor that they shared the same pair of white gloves, one each in the top pocket, for functions. But the fatherless boy showed ability and determination, and in 1928 won a place as a Cadet in the Colonial Office. He was posted to the Calabar Province of Nigeria, and set sail from Liverpool at once.

  The life of an Assistant District Officer, which Alec became when he had completed his training, was a solitary one. It involved acting as a kind of touring King Solomon, with a detachment of native police in tow, arbitrating on everything from land disputes to problems of male impotence. Contact with other Englishmen, which occurred just once a month, ought to have been an occasion for wild celebration, but being Englishmen a quiet pipe and a scratchy gramophone record were generally the order of the day. ‘My father used to receive news by boat, six months after it was published,’ Peter recalled. ‘He’d open The Times and say, “Good God, Worcester are 78 for 6.”

  2

  Perhaps surprisingly, it was a system that worked. The unscrupulous early colonial adventurers had been replaced, by the 1930s, with a cadre of earnest, dedicated, honest young men. According to Peter’s youngest sister Elizabeth, ‘My father was a product of the age. It would never have occurred to him not to give his life to the Empire in a philanthropic way. But at the same time he was a
witty man, and there’d be a quiet little smile about it all, without questioning the overall principle of the thing.’ A dry, slightly subversive humour lay behind Alec Cook’s scrupulously polite exterior, a characteristic that was to be magnified several times over in his son.

  By 1936 Alec had grown into an attractive and charming man, tall and slim, gangly but graceful, with prematurely grey hair and the Cook family’s prominent asymmetrical ears. A smoker, he was much given to worrying over problems, and had a taste for P. G. Wodehouse and Stravinsky. Colonial officers were given four months’ leave after every eighteen months of continuous duty, so every couple of years he would sail home. On one such break, while staying with Bob Church’s family in Eastbourne, he met, fell in love with and utterly charmed Margaret Mayo, the daughter of a local solicitor.

  Charles Mayo, her father, cut something of a dash in South Coast society, roaring up at court cases by motorbike, a pipe jutting between his clenched teeth. Something of a ladies’ man, he had been rusticated from St John’s College, Oxford for antics that he would never divulge. He had served unscathed and with distinction in the Great War as an officer with the Royal Sussex Regiment, and had actually contributed a humorous article or two to Punch magazine from the trenches. After the war he represented Sussex at rugby, hockey and badminton, before settling down to provincial respectability as President of the Eastbourne West Country Association, Chairman of the Willingdon Golf Club and a freemason so loyal that his family were forced to eat meat from the worst butcher in town. He practised as a solicitor in a firm he helped found, called Mayo and Perkins (‘I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war’ – one of the more memorable passages from Beyond the Fringe).