Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Tentative early friendships were formed over awkward coffees and sherries, in the manner of all first-year students since universities were invented. There was Mike Winterton, because Mike had done his National Service in Gibraltar. There was Clive Simeon, because Clive came from Eastbourne, and Peter could swap stories of eyeing up girls on the front during his trips to see Grandfather Mayo. There was Ogea Aboyade, because he came from Nigeria. There was Jeremy Cotton, who together with Peter, Ogea and a few others had a regular lunchtime competition going, to see who could eat the hottest curry at the local Indian restaurant. There was John Crabbe, who lived in the room upstairs and sometimes joined Peter for late night coffee. There were Ted Neather, Paul Sharpling, Chris Smith and Michael Wild, who shared Peter’s French and German course. There were Tim Harrold, Peter Lloyd and the other members of the regular uproarious card schools that went on into the small hours in Peter’s rooms. And of course, there were the members of the Pembroke College football team.

  Peter was definitely at his happiest and most relaxed when playing football. He always derided his own efforts – ‘I was the worst kind of player,’ he once said, ‘too flashy. I spent hours practising flicking the ball over my head.’3 But his modesty and his somewhat gangly, unco-ordinated appearance were belied by a perfectly respectable level of ability. According to Tony Verity, who patrolled the opposite wing, ‘He was no mean player, and galumphed sturdily up and down the left, occasionally delivering the ball to the serious pros who waited patiently in the goal area. But chiefly he made us laugh – even the pros; quite a skill on the football field.’ If he fluffed a cross or missed a chance he’d simply stop, laugh at himself and apologise. Significantly, in the bar after the game, Peter wasn’t the life and soul of the party. There were three much more conspicuous team jokers. Halfdan Johnso, the side’s Danish captain, reckons that ‘He enjoyed being one of the boys and not being expected to be the centre of attention. In fact it rather surprised us when we realised that he had this other life as a successful humorist.’ It was one of the very few areas of Peter’s life where he felt free of the pressure to keep the laughter going.

  In many respects, being at Pembroke College was like being in the sixth form at Radley, only without the compulsory rugby. The Junior Common Room echoed with laughter as the Prefects’ Common Room had done a year or so before, and people would queue up to read Peter’s latest witty essay in the College Food Complaints Book. There were similar boys’ excursions to the pictures. And of course, the depressing lack of female company had not changed either. ‘My experience of pursuing girls was always so miserable,’ moaned Peter, ‘I remember so many futile treks to places in Cambridge where Swedish, French and German girls were studying English. I remember so many foul ham salad lunches, trying to strike up a conversation in various faltering tongues for a date. Also, it’s rather a strain going out in the evening to parties with the avowed intent of collecting someone worthwhile.’4

  By the end of his first term Peter was well-known throughout Pembroke College, and firmly installed as its comic heart. He continued to be both respectful to authority, and to prod it calculatedly, like a lion-tamer. One night he and a friend, Robin Voelcker, were walking through the streets of Cambridge in their gowns, as was compulsory in those days, when they had the misfortune to run into the University Proctor and two Bulldogs (University Police). Peter’s shabby second-hand gown ‘looked as if most of it had been left on some railings, since so much of it was missing,’ recalls Voelcker. The Bulldogs ordered Peter to present himself to the Proctor, who informed him that he was to be disciplined for being improperly dressed, and demanded to know his name and college. Peter started to flap the remains of his gown slowly up and down, while the trio looked on in astonishment. Then he informed them that he was The Vampire, and flapped off into the dark, leaving Voelcker to explain as best he could.

  On another occasion the same pair were idling away the time in the Anchor Coffee Bar when Peter noticed (perhaps a little wistfully) a courting couple gazing into each other’s eyes at the next table. He began to stare at them intently, and eventually announced in the tones of Mr Boylett, ‘I have been watching you.’ A little while later, when they had done absolutely nothing, he said ‘I saw that’; and shortly afterwards, when they had continued to do absolutely nothing at all, added ‘If you do that again I shall report you to the management.’ Purple-faced with embarrassment at the thought of what crimes they were presumed to have committed, the couple pushed back their chairs and fled.

  Peter could invent a character and disappear into it. Perusing a theatre programme with Michael Wild, he saw the phrase ‘Printed by Smith & Co [or some such], dramatic printers’, at the bottom of the page. That was the cue to strike an exaggerated pose and announce: ‘Oh my God, you’ve lost the galley proofs. How unutterably tragic.’ Peter particularly enjoyed baiting anyone blindly committed to a given point of view. He satirised the college CND faction in the Common Room Book with an impassioned attack on the Dean’s use of string to fence off his rose baising fears of an uncontrolled string escalation. He even developed a catchphrase, as if he were a professional comedian, which he would trot out whenever anything went wrong: ‘Oh, the shame of it.’

  Robin Voelcker found him to be ‘a pleasant and friendly person, with one of the best brains and quickest wits I have ever encountered. Having first been to Imperial College I thought I could hold my own in conversation with almost anybody. However with Peter it was necessary to think carefully before you spoke, since he could make fun of almost any remark.’ He could indeed be a little relentless; but he was so charming, so good-natured, so thoughtful, so relaxed, so delighted to please, so modest and so infectious in his humour that it hardly mattered. ‘He seemed to be fearless about speaking in public or making a fool of himself,’ adds Voelcker, which of course was the precise opposite of the true situation. Peter was just deliberately jumping off the highest board. He had extra cause for insecurity in that by avoiding National Service he had arrived at College much younger than most of his year, who had seen a bit of the world; that they generally looked up to him and not the other way round is a tribute to his talent and his social graces. ‘In fact,’ says another contemporary, Professor John Mattock, ‘I suspect that most of us were rather frightened of him, since he gave the impression of a sophistication to which few of us could aspire.’ Only when that impression broke down would Peter be openly embarrassed. According to Chris Smith, ‘I recall him once arriving at one of our tutor’s excruciating sherry parties with his gown over his dinner jacket. It was a striking sight. And I remember his quite bitter self-reproach at being over-dressed.’ It had not occurred to many of his colleagues that the public face of Peter Cook was partly a means of furnishing comfort to its author. ‘I realise now,’ explains Paul Sharpling, ‘that his flippancy might have been a means of obscuring his real personality.’

  Like Radley College, Pembroke was possessed of first-class drama facilities, which attracted Peter’s performing instincts from the start. The Pembroke Players, with more than a hundred paid-up members, was then the second-largest student drama society in the country after the ADC, the main Cambridge undergraduate theatre company that Peter was too shy to join. Within a month of arriving at the college, he had appeared in the Pembroke Players’ production of Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey in the College Hall. It was not long before his fellow students were encouraging him to take centre stage and put on a comedy show of his own. There was a college tradition, somewhat dwindled, of holding ‘Smoking Concerts’ in the Old Reader: rather like Footlights smokers on a smaller scale, these were dinner-jacketed cabarets in which students tried out their material on each other through a thick fug of tobacco smoke. Audience members tended to mete out a warm reception, in the knowledge that the roles were to be reversed later in the evening.

  Peter resuscitated this ailing tradition, with a series of shows dominated by himself; he unleashed a torrent of high-grade sketch material,
much of which was to find its way on to the West End stage or into Beyond the Fringe which was to find its way on to the West End stage or into Beyond the Fringe within a few years. Arthur Boylett was the principal character, whose doleful monologues were edited down from long Boylett-conversations held with Tim Harrold and another friend, Jack Altman. Before long the entire college had caught the bug, and students would greet each other with the phrase &lsqu;I thought I saw it move’ in reedy, nasal tones. If the characters were familiar, the subject matter was not as parochial as it had been at Radley; Peter’s gallery of dullards and obsessives began to hold forth about more universal themes. He cast about for new influences to cram into the comic maw, and ordered a batch of humorous records from the States, many of them by Mort Sahl. ‘He played them interminably and filleted them,’ according to his occasional collaborator Anthony Garrett. Sometimes the results could be shocking, for Peter loved to rouse the complacent: as part of an outdoor fund-raising street concert on poppy day, Peter wandered about Cambridge with his Nigerian friend Ogea Aboyade on the end of a dog lead. They were begging the inevitable question ‘What on earth are you doing?’, to which Peter would reply, ‘I’m just taking the wog for a walk.’ It was an attack on racial prejudice blunter than any blunt instrument imaginable.

  The dining table and the Junior Common Room served as the breeding ground for most of Peter’s new material. More often than not he would sit with the leading lights of the Pembroke Players, Richard Imison, Patrick Hardy, Geoff Paxton and Clive Simeon, but it was always a loose and shifting group. Tony Verity remembers the pattern: ‘Someone – not always Peter, by any means – would say something witty, facetious, acute; Peter would then, with the rest of us chipping in, develop the idea with comic logic, leaping off into the surreal world that was his trademark. He used and developed other people’s material, later refining it and fitting it into his sketches. He also noticed carefully when people laughed during one of his impromptu fantasies.’ When he got a really big laugh he would pause for a moment and jot the successful line down for future use.

  This was how Old J. J., the Initials Sketch, which eventually cropped up in Beyond the Fringe and Not Only . . . But Also, first saw the light of day. John Crabbe recalls ‘the embryo version being batted to and fro across the table, with some extra material being supplied by those of us who had been in the forces.’ Then Peter and Tim Harrold went off to write it all down. By the mid-sixties, it hadn’t changed much:

  Peter:

  What’s HL up to?

  Dudley:

  Oh, minding his Ps and Qs I think. I think he’s mixed up in this NEDC thing.

  Peter:

  I thought it was the EEC.

  Dudley:

  Could be, yes, could be. How’s BN by the way?

  Peter:

  BN? BN? He’s OK. Bit short of the old LSD. I saw TD the other day, at the YMCA.

  Dudley:

  I though he was with TWA in LA.

  Peter:

  No, he’s with BEA in NW3. You’re thinking of DG. DG is a VIP in the USA.

  Dudley:

  Oh, correct, yes.

  Peter:

  You heard about old HK?

  Dudley:

  No, what?

  Peter:

  Oh, he did frightfully well. Picked up the VC in Germany. At least, I think that’s what his mother said.

  ‘He held centre stage in every way,’ remembers Clive Simeon. ‘He had a natural, captivating ambience without being over-dominating. He had a great sense of timing, a great command of the language and was very clever in judging the mood of his audience. Above all, he was never boring.’ Not everyone was so appreciative of his comic talents. Peter sent all the material he wrote to the BBC, and all of it was rejected. One of the reasons so much of it turned up later on television was the delight he took in successfully resubmitting it after he became famous.

  That winter Peter’s old schoolfriends Noel Slocock and Peter Raby obtained a few weeks’ leave from National Service, and together with two other Old Radleians hired The Maid Marguerita, a 42-foot covered launch, which they navigated from Thames Ditton to Henley against the current. Peter preferred to spend an extended Christmas with his family than go on the whole holiday, but in the New Year he joined up with the party for a few days. It was a freezing January, and a series of grumbling lock-keepers had to be enticed out of their cosy bolt-holes to smooth The Maid Marguerita’s passage upstream. At Henley they hosted a magnificent drinks party for forty people, mostly from the Radley area; but that night there was a tremendous amount of rain and the river went into spate, crucially reducing the amount of clearance offered by the arches of Henley Bridge. ‘What happened next was entirely Noel’s fault,’ claims Peter Raby. ‘The following morning we cast off, but it was clear that we weren’t going to get through the arch. So Noel attempted a turn, which merely meant that we took the bridge broadside.’ The river took charge of the helpless craft and sent it spinning at full speed into the arch. With a tremendous crack of glass and splintering wood the entire cabin was ripped off, and The Maid Marguerita wedged itself firmly beneath the bridge.

  The damage ran into thousands. The holidaymakers had to clamber up and over the guardrail of the bridge to escape to safety, where they had no option but to check into the Angel Inn. ‘Our main feeling at the time was not what a disaster it was, but what a wonderful adventure,’ says Slocock, the adrenalin rush and sense of relief he felt temporarily outweighing the fact that he would soon have to face his father. Two canoes and a winch operating from each bank were required to dislodge the vessel, which then took three days to patch up sufficiently to make the return trip. All the way back to Thames Ditton, the cabinless youths had to run the embarrassing gauntlet of several extremely satisfied, grinning lock-keepers.

  Peter spent most of the rest of his first year at the gainful business of entertaining his fellow Pembroke undergraduates. His work did not suffer; whatever inner conflicts about his future path may have inwardly troubled him, he made it known to all that he was determined to knuckle down and make it to the Foreign Office. Cambridge University, of course, offered more academic flexibility and less immediate discipline than Radley. Paul Sharpling, who studied Racine with him, remembers ‘An incisive literary critic with a very sharp appreciation of language. At one particular supervision he produced a hilarious parody of Racine’s Athalie, in which he cast the present Queen as the heroine and Harold Wilson as the High Priest. He developed this into an equally splendid essay. His contributions at supervisions were as funny as his contributions at the dining table.’ If the tutor concerned had a more forbidding demeanour, however, Peter instinctively kept his head down. Chris Smith, who studied Molière with him under the upright and daunting Dr Combe, remembers him as a quiet, unexceptional student with nothing very extraordinary to say. (He was certainly paying attention, however. Combe’s favourite phrase ‘La condition humaine’ was to crop up, along with a number of other academic references, in subsequent Pete and Dud sketches.)

  Peter’s reaction to academic authority, like his reaction to most things, was to try and keep it pleased with him. At school, under the constant eye of a teacher, this approach demanded areceived a high level of effort. At university, he began to realise that it was possible to slacken off a little, to enjoy himself and use his native wit to bluff his way around the odd sticky moment, without arousing any official ire. Professor John Hunter, then a medical student on Peter’s staircase, says that ‘After a term or so I realised that I wouldn’t pass any medical exam at Pembroke if I joined the Cook entourage, however fun it might be.’

  One day at the end of February 1958 Adrian Slade, the President of the Footlights Club, was sitting in his Cambridge rooms reflecting on the first, disappointing smoker of the new term, when his reverie was interrupted by the arrival of ‘a long, thin, hesitant person with dashing, darting eyes’.5 The stranger enquired haltingly about joining the Footlights. Slade enquired whether he had ever writ
ten anything. Yes, said Peter, and produced a sketch called Polar Bores, that affectionately mocked this country’s proud tradition of Antarctic exploration. It consisted of an interview with Polar adventurer ‘Scribble’ Gibbons, who uttered such variations on stiff-upper-lipped clichés as ‘Communications were to be our only link with the outside world.’ Describing his last expedition, Gibbons explained that he had ‘set up camp and prepared to set out the next morning. But we hadn’t prepared for the polar nights, and for six months we waited for the dawn to break.’

  Slade read the sketch and laughed. Recognising an opportunity when he saw it, he even offered to perform it with Peter at the next Footlights smoker. Where had he been since October? Slade wanted to know. ‘Playing football,’ said Peter. He had been ‘much too frightened to approach the Footlights,’ he said. Slade was intrigued by the apparent contradictions within his visitor. ‘Despite the non-stop wit and nervous energy for which he later became well-known, here was a surprisingly shy extrovert. I believe he remained so. Take him off whatever stage others had put him on and he was often quiet and sometimes ill at ease. Insecurity made him his own worst, and probably only real enemy.’6

  Slade asked him whether he had ever performed on stage – in a school show, for instance. It was as if he had lit the blue touch paper and had forgotten to stand well back. Peter was off, embarking on a two-hour Mr Boylett monologue that ranged from the methods used by ants and bees to organise their working schedules to his own plans for world domination, given that the world was about to come to an end. Slade suggested that Mr Boylett be added to the next smoker too. ‘Why would anyone think it funny?’ asked Peter, not at all disingenuously. Slade assured him that it was, and booked him in. A few days later, in a room above a restaurant in King’s Parade, attired in a dirty mac and battered hat under the title Mr Boylett Speaks, Peter appeared in his first Footlights smoker. The Pembroke crowd all came along to laugh and cheer. ‘The success was instant,’ recounts Slade. ‘A phenomenon was born and the [Boylett] language was immediately universally adopted. From that moment Cambridge cabaret and revue never looked back. A new generation of Footlights writing was born.’7