Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Neither did Peter try to interfere with editorial decisions. ‘I never believed there could be such a person,’ says Paul Foot. ‘He was the essence of the non-interfering proprietor. Even when his best friends were attacked, or people he thought well of, never once, I am absolutely certain of this, never once did he seek to intervene with Richard Ingrams.’ Auberon Waugh, who joined the magazine in 1970, says that ‘He was proprietor, but his powers were never fully explained, possibly never understood, certainly never exercised.’8 Peter, although undoubtedly the harshest of the lot when it came to attacking anyone in authority, sometimes cavilled slightly when it came to attacks on targets who had no position of power. Ingrams, however, felt that anyone in the public eye was fair game, a philosophy which became the Eye’s ial policy.

  When Ingrams was away Peter edited the magazine himself, assisted by Claud Cockburn, with a mischievousness bordering on recklessness. ‘It was always great fun when he had an issue to edit,’ says Andrew Osmond, who briefly re-joined the magazine ‘because it just spun straight out of control. He would do things that Richard would never do.’ One Cook cover featured a naked girl on all fours belly-up, surrounded by an admiring group of further naked girls: Peter added the caption ‘And where was he standing?’ Inside, he took the remarkably bold step of naming the two anonymous associates of Tory politician Lord Boothby, whom the press had criticised without daring to name: Ronald and Reginald Kray. ‘Either the charges are true,’ wrote Peter, ‘in which case the newspapers should have the guts to publish them . . . or they are untrue, in which case they should stop scaring people with this horror movie of London under terror.’ Peter took the extra precaution of making sure that he was on a plane to Tenerife on publication day, leaving Ingrams’s kneecaps in the firing line. A few years later, during the Oz trial, Peter risked prosecution by putting a Ralph Steadman illustration of a fully-frontal nude Judge Michael Argyle on the cover.

  Private Eye’s old drive had been restored. Cook’s energetic, surreal genius, harnessed to Ingrams’s disciplined facility for building the new characters into a Beachcomberesque family, had swiftly regenerated the magazine to a position where the modern Eye was clearly beginning to take shape. The turnaround in sales was, however, a much more gradual business. When Harold Wilson triumphed at the polls in October 1964, it was Peter’s instinct, and to a lesser extent the instinct of those around him, to attack the new regime as vigorously as they had attacked the old. This alienated the magazine’s natural constituency, who were uneasy about anti-Labour jokes at the best of times and were now undergoing a protracted honeymoon period. Ingrams himself voiced the level of expectation that Wilson had aroused: ‘To those like me who had been brought up on the idea that the troubles of Britain sprang from the fact that the Tories were in charge, and that they would largely disappear once the Labour Party got in, the advent of Harold Wilson was a climactic event. Consciously or not, the satire movement had been working with Wilson.’9

  Widespread public disaffection with Wilson did not follow until the collapse of sterling in 1966, but by that time Private Eye had been pursuing a somewhat isolated anti-Wilson course for two years, concentrating largely on the contrast between his banal suburban Pooterishness and his Kennedyish aspirations. Peter had devised Mrs Wilson’s Diary, a regular airing of the homespun philosophy of the Prime Minister’s wife, inspired by a newspaper item he had read describing her habit of writing up the day’s events. Peter recalled: ‘It was my first experience of the phenomenon whereby you make something up, and Downing Street begin to think you’ve got inside information, that people are leaking facts to you. Harold Wilson was quite sure that somebody was informing to us, because Mary had done exactly this or thought exactly that.’ Richard Ingrams and John Wells eventually took over Mrs Wilson’s Diary, which became a successful stage musical in the West End. Mrs Wilson herself famously said that if she ever met John Wells ‘she would like to bite him’.10

  Other attacks on Wilson included a Scarfe cover cartoon showing the Prime Minister on his knees behind President Johnson, tongue at the ready, the President’s trousers at half mast. ‘Vietnam: Wilson right behind Johnson’ ran the heading. George Wigg demanded that the attendance of his fellow Labour MPs at the Eye’s fortnightly lunches be monitored, and was condemned as ‘A slack-jawed, bleary-eyed bag of condemned offal’. Tony Benn’s record was held up as ‘an unmitigated disaster’. Wilson himself was livid with Private Eye, and thereafter regarded the magazine and all who sailed in her as lifelong enemies. He felt that Beyond the Fringe and the Establishment Club had been on his side, and that the satirists had now inexplicably and treacherously betrayed him. It was nonsense, of course. In 1968 Kathleen Tynan visited the ‘dank and ravaged room’ where Peter strode up and down dictating to Ingrams, ‘sitting at his stalwart desk in a rotting corduroy jacket’. By then she found the last shreds of any political idealism Peter might once have possessed long since blown away: ‘A comedian and a pessimist, he thinks the human race cannot be improved and that there’s no point trying. He believes that everyone, without exception in the whole history of the world, has been exclusively motivated by greed, lust or power mania. He doesn’t think anyone has ever had any other reason for doing anything else. He also thinks this is probably all right.’11 As usual, Peter’s opinion was dressed up in comic hyperbole, but the inherent sincerity with which he held it was nonetheless plain to see.

  Between 1964 and 1969, a series of six further giveaway records were released – an idea devised by Peter Usborne at Oxford University and not, as often reported, by Peter himself – which in large part continued to attack the Prime Minister (‘I am constantly reminded of the words of my great predecessor Ramsey McDonald: “Oh Christ, what are we going to do now?”’). John Bird came in to play Wilson; other cast members, besides Peter, were Dudley Moore, Barry Humphries, Willie Rushton, Eleanor Bron, John Wells, Richard Ingrams and Barry Fantoni. Peter essayed rather good impressions of Enoch Powell, Dr Christiaan Barnard, the Queen, Serge Gainsbourg (to Wells’s Jane Birkin) and David Frost, in an uncompromising attack on his series Not So Much a Programme . . . ‘Peter was by far the best organised,’ recalls John Wells, ‘actually bringing along scripts that he appeared to have dictated to a secretary while the rest of us were in the pub.’12

  So successful were these recordings that the decision was taken to release a commercial LP, entitled Private Eye’s Blue Record. On this occasion however, Peter’s organisational skills let him down, and nobody turned up with any material whatsoever. The whole LP had to be semi-improvised, by Peter, John Wells, Barry Humphries and Willie Rushton; the gaps were filled with excerpts from the existing flimsy records. Most characteristic of Peter and the Eye’s attitude was his appearance as ‘John Osbum’ in a pretentious debate about the artistic validity of a music-hall artist named Arthur Cock, performer of the celebrated ditty Stick Yer Finger up Yer Bum (‘Like Zola, the Gervase syndrome was very prominent’). The LP sounded like a first rehearsal, and was so mediocre that its low sales have made it something of a valuable rarity. Peter’s famous ability to improvise in leaps and bounds by sparking off his audience had simply failed to function when confronted by an nanimate microphone in an empty studio. It was a useful lesson, but sadly not one that he ever took to heart.

  In 1966 Peter came to Private Eye’s rescue once again, although this time he was responding to a calamity of his own making. As far back as June 1962, in one of his semi-ironic, semi-libidinous trawls through a sex bookshop, he had spotted Lord Russell of Liverpool’s book Scourge of the Swastika sandwiched between copies of Miss Whiplash and Rubber News. The book described a number of Nazi atrocities in detail, and Peter had satirised its author in the Eye as ‘Lord Liver of Cesspool’. ‘It was thoroughly prurient, full of naked people, titillating in the most horrible way,’ Peter complained. Three years later, Russell sued for libel. The Eye had never fought a court case before.

  The hearing was an unmitigated disaster. John Wells recalls
that ‘Peter stood in the witness box trying gamely to make jokes. In the atmosphere of the courtroom even he was like a man trying to strike matches underwater.’13 The Eye’s legal team told the satirists to leave it up to them. At one point the magazine’s QC David Turner-Samuels stood up and quoted The Times Literary Supplement: ‘Lord Russell’s works could be said to be pornographic.’ David Hirst, QC for Russell, jumped up and finished the quotation: ‘. . . but they are not.’ Then, as Peter recalled, ‘Lord Liver produced all these war heroes in court so lots of people with no legs came in, which rather swayed the jury to some extent.’ The magazine lost, and was hit with a bill for £5,000 damages plus £3,000 costs. Its total weekly takings at that time amounted to £650.

  Peter immediately set to work raising the money, and dreamed up the idea of a celebrity fund-raising concert, Rustle of Spring. Throughout March and April 1966 he sat in the Eye office phoning celebrities, persuading them to give their services free; he also secured the Phoenix Theatre rent-free for the second week in May. ‘There was a glittering cast’, he later remembered wistfully. ‘Dudley, Spike, probably Lulu and half a Bee Gee.’ In fact the famous of 1966 turned out in droves to appear in the show: Moore and Milligan apart, there were contributions from Peter Sellers, Bob Monkhouse, Bernard Braden, John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, Manfred Mann, Roy Hudd, John Bird and Arthur Mullard. Peter appeared with Dudley Moore in a sketch about leaping nuns that they had performed on TV, while Willie Rushton came on as Arthur Cock and growled out Stick Yer Finger up Yer Bum. The audience sang along to a giant songsheet:

  When yer feeling glum

  Stick yer finger up yer bum

  And the world’s a happier place.

  When yer feeling grotty

  Stick a finger up yer botty

  And a smile leaps onto yer face.

  Sarah Cook, sandwiched between her parents, ‘sat there dying to join in but too embarrassed to do so’. Readers, led by John Betjeman, sent in further unsolicited contributions totalling £1,325, and the £8,000 target was reached in June 1966.

  From the Russell case onwards, the courts were naturally predisposed to be unsympathetic to Private Eye. Along with Oz, it seemed to epitomise the anti-Establishment swinging London culture of the late 1960s. Its attacks on the government were perceived as coming from a fashionably hard-left perspective. The judges and barristers who regarded it with contempt as a consequence never seemed able to grasp that it was staffed almost entirely by young men from their own social background, whence derived its confident criticism of the status quo. By contrast Punch, its chief rival and very much the favourite humour magazine of the Establishment, was largely staffed by outsiders from grammar schools. Judges felt sufficiently threatened by the Eye that they often tended to encourage juries to find expensively against the magazine. In 1969 two Sunday People reporters, Hugh Farmer and Denis Cassidy, wrote a piece about an ex-con who had used the services of a Glasgow prostitute; the Eye alleged that the prostitute had actually been hired for him by the reporters themselves. Farmer and Cassidy sued, employing the detailed alibi that they had been eating a quiet meal in the Epicure restaurant on the night in question. The Eye successfully proved that the restaurant had in fact been shut all that day. The judge nonetheless disregarded this anomaly, and ordered Private Eye to pay £10,000. ‘This time,’ said Peter. ‘I’m thinking of writing a story of my life as a transvestite, or wife-swapping in Hampstead, and selling it to the People.’14 In fact a reader’s appeal, Gnomefam, succeeded in raising most of the required sum.

  Despite such setbacks, the Eye was beginning to establish a reputation for investigative journalism. Fleet Street newspapers either rushed to set up their own investigative teams, or lifted Eye stories wholesale: the People even hijacked a story (by offering the Eye’s freelance reporter more money to divert it their way) which led to a corruption case against the heads of the Flying Squad and the Obscene Publications Squad, and helped precipitate the end of widespread corrupt policing in Soho. Private Eye readers were first to read about BP’s sanction-busting in Rhodesia, the Heath government’s secret talks with the IRA, Israeli links with the mafia, the 1971 Payola scandal (when disc-jockeys were bribed to play certain records) and the safety lapses that had caused the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block. The crowning glory of the investigative journalism that Peter had assiduously nurtured was the uncovering by Paul Foot of the Poulson scandal: a network of bribery which had infiltrated the Conservative Party at national level and local government level across the north of England. In 1970 the Home Secretary Reginald Maudling was forced to resign as a direct consequence of the Eye’s revelations. Soon afterwards the magazine’s readership finally rescaled the heights it had enjoyed during the satire boom. The days when Peter would jokingly boast to the papers that it was ‘The most unpopular magazine in England’15 could be safely consigned to history.

  There can be no question that Peter had come to love Private Eye magazine and its band of writers very dearly indeed. His joke-writing sessions with Ingrams, Fantoni, Rushton, Wells and Booker (now returned to the fold) were the highlight of his week. He felt at home in their midst. Says Wells: ‘I shall always remember Peter as he was when he was imagining his own world: like a medium, head cocked, looking sideways across the room, licking his lips and then droning out some inversion of boring normality that made all our eyes flash and filled the room with laughter. Peter was unique.’16 Occasionally Wells and the others would dare to venture suggestions: ‘He only kept one or two things – he had quite strict quality control – but as I look through the things I wrote with him, I notice little chunks that clearly were mine, and I’d rather he hadn’t put them in.’

  A more cynical view – and Peter never objected to a cynical view – is put forward by Barry Humphries: ‘I was sometimes appalled by the immoderate laughter that greeted all of Peter’s mots,’ he says. (In 1967 Peter cast Humphries in the character of ‘Envy’ in the film Bedazzled.) Humphries traces a direct lineage from Private Eye back to the sixth form at Radley and Shrewsbury schools: ‘The magazine was run by the prefects, who were Cook, Ingrams and Willie Rushton. And the fags were people like Tony Rushton, Willie’s cousin, who did the layout, and Barry Fantoni. Occasionally, ravaged schoolmasters, like Claud Cockburn and Malcolm Muggeridge, were let into the prefects’ study.’17 Certainly the Peter Cook of the 1960s seemed to display the manners of a school prefect. Humphries, who was a heavy drinker at the time, observed that ‘There’s no nicotine on his fingers. He never has a hangover. There’s a certain austerity about him. You know, you can tell at first sight if someone looks like their father or their mother. Well, Peter looks like his auntie.’18

  Peter always fought hard against the accusation that the Eye was little more than a prefects’ common room for grown-ups. According to Paul Foot, ‘I remember one really desperate evening at his house where the other guests were Jonathan Miller and Ken Tynan and their wives; Jonathan and Ken just spent the whole evening attacking Peter for his association with Private Eye. They hated the Eye and they attacked it from the left, from the point of view of being a rotten public school journal that only public school people would be interested in. I remember two things about his reaction to that, one of which was his intense shyness and embarrassment that the argument was taking place at all, and his rather feeble attempts to change the conversation – completely futile because they were really going for the throat. The other was his absolutely unflinching approach, which was that he was going to continue his association with Private Eye, and was going to continue to support it and publicise it and back it up whenever it was in difficulties, and so on.’ Peter abhorred open conflict, but he was never a coward.

  Later in life, whatever the vagaries of his career or the ups and downs of his personal life, however far work had taken him from London and for however long, Peter always came back to Private Eye. It offered him a womb-like, unthreatening atmosphere where he didn’t have to prove himself, fulfil any requirements or mee
t any deadlines. He took no income from it so he had no income to worry about. He could come and go as he pleased – sometimes five days a week, at other times he wouldn’t show for six months – write what he liked and as much as he liked, and always be sure of an enthusiastic reception. To the end of his life, he retained an absolute fondness for the place and a pride in the magazine’s successful independence. The sentimental as opposed to financial nature of his ties to the Eye was to make the magazine his most problematic and emotionally charged legacy.

  CHAPTER 8

  We’re Always Ready to be Jolted Out of Our Seats, Here at the BBC

  Pete and Dud, 1964–67

  In 1964 a conscious decision was taken by BBC Light Entertainment to make Dudley Moore a TV star; he was charming, he was funny, and what was more important to a department with both feet planted firmly in fifties notions of ‘variety’, he was musically talented. His versatility had been given a thorough work-out on the successful BBC2 music show Offbeat, in which he played no fewer than seventeen roles, from the ‘Seven Singing Viennese Sisters’ to a man who falls in love with his violin. Offscreen he seemed to play the TV star role to perfection, with a flat in Shepherd Market, a black Maserati Mistrale and a glamorous new girlfriend in the shape of the actress Shirley Anne Field. At the end of 1964 the BBC offered him a one-off pilot of his own forty-five-minute variety special, The Dudley Moore Show.