Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Despite Dudley’s failure to break into the inner sanctum, the recordings of Not Only . . . But Also were among Peter’s happiest times. ‘That was perfect,’ he said later. ‘I don’t know how long it would have gone on but it just seemed by chance perfectly natural. I mean it was ideal. I can’t imagine a comedy relationship being better. I adored Dudley.’24 After the studios everyone would go, in a crowd, round to Sean Kenny and Judy Huxtable’s house, or up to the Fagin’s Kitchen Restaurant in Hampstead where Peter would foot the entire bill. There were some riotous evenings. For the duration of the series Peter and Dudley would spend every minute of every day together; but curiously, when they weren’t working with each other, communications utterly dried up. Dudley remembers that when the series was off air ‘We never used to talk to each other, never went out to dinner. For six months you’re life and death to each other and then you’re nothing. It was strange really. Peter and I had a “thing”, like a love-hate relationship. Anyone else around us probably felt a little excluded, because we did exclude people. We just set each other off, we fitted.’25

  Despite Peter’s leading role in creating the series, Not Only . . . But Also was initially seen very much as Dudley’s success, because it had been billed in advance as his show. In April 1965 the Daily Mail reported that ‘The first comedy success produced by BBC2, Dudley Moore’s Not Only . . . But Also, has come to the end of a brilliant run. So successful has it been that next month it is to be repeated before BBC1’s wider audience. Dudley Moore was one of the originals of the Beyond the Fringe team that shattered London just on four years ago. Despite every prediction, it now seems that Dudley Moore has come the fartest. From limping along lonely in the rear, Dudley Moore has now emerged as the front runner, more consistent, more professional, more universally funny than the rest of the stable that reared him.’26 It was not a view that would endure, but it was certainly prevalent in the press for a short while, and may have contributed to Peter’s somewhat ambivalent behaviour towards his partner.

  Elsewhere, reaction to the series was equally enthusiastic. The Times described it as ‘versatile, inventive and immensely funny’.27 The Sun called it ‘The funniest series on television’.28 Margaret Drabble in the Mail enthused that she ‘found it hard to find praise high enough. Surely no two people have ever before united so many talents so successfully, the verbal wit, the songs, the visual fantasies, the expert performances have poured forth from some seemingly inexhaustible cornucopia of comedy. In comparison, other comedy writers are like that poet whose one good verse shines in the dry desert of a thousand lines.’29 Peter and Dudley were voted ‘Comedians of the Year’ by the Guild of Television Producers and Directors, an award that they managed to lose during the ceremony. They were invited to appear in an ‘Artists against apartheid’ gala in March, they starred in Sunday Night at the London Palladium in September, and they performed before the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance in November. Their success had become utterly mainstream.

  A special Pete and Dud royal dialogue was composed in the Queen’s honour, but when he heard it at rehearsal the producer Bernard Delfont ordered some of the jokes to be cut. Lord Snowdon, for instance, was referred to as ‘The former underwater wrestler, Strong-arm Jones’, who prior to marrying Princess Margaret had been ‘made to run from Land’s End to John O’Groats in a rubber diving suit to get his weight down’. Harold Wilson was described as ‘Always hanging around the palace’. The Queen herself was described, with reference to official medal ceremonies, as ‘hanging one on’ the recipient. Peter may have been the kind of public schoolboy who liked to shock other boys with his antics, but he also knew when to smile and back down in the face of authority. There were no Jonathan Miller-style walk-outs. All the cuts were accepted meekly. The remaining material was nonetheless very funny:

  Pete:

  Do you know that we’re all in line for succession to the throne?

  Dud:

  Really?

  Pete:

  Well, if forty-eight million, two hundred thousand, seven hundred and one people died I’d be Queen.

  It was also pointedly unsatirical and inoffensive:

  Pete:

  Do you know, at this very moment, Her Majesty is probably exercising the royal prerogative.

  Dud:

  What’s that then, Pete?

  Pete:

  Don’t you know the royal prerogative? It’s a wonderful animal, Dud. It’s a legendary beast, half bird, half fish, half unicorn, and it’s being exercised at this very moment.

  Her Majesty was observed laughing heartily in the Royal Box. The newspapers agreed that Pete and Dud had taken the Royal Variety Performance by storm – a prestigious accolade indeed in 1965 – ahead of such seasoned performers as Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. The following year they were invited to perform One Leg Too Few in front of the Queen as part of ITV’s rival Royal Gala Show. At the end of the sketch, as Barry Fantoni relates, ‘an extraordinary thing happened. Dudley started to play the piano in a very Merseybeat sort of way, and Peter sang a song, a psychedelic song, about a bee. I can still clearly see him, holding the microphone in front of this large audience who had enjoyed Frank Ifield, Tony Bennett and Max Bygraves on the same bill, and there he was with his beautiful black eyelashes, acting to all intents and purposes like a pop star. The only thing was, he couldn’t sing. He was dreadful.’ Fortunately, the preceding dialogue had been so funny that nobody cared.

  The song in question was The L. S. Bumblebee, a psychedelic parody subsequently aired on the 1966 Not Only . . . But Also Christmas special. It became one of three pop singles released by the pair, starting with Goodbyee in June 1965, although Dudley sang the lead on the recorded version, as he did on all their singles. As a response Peter issued a solo single in July 1965, The Ballad of Spotty Muldoon, in direct competition to Goodbyee. The two records charted simultaneously, reaching no. 34 and no. 18 respectively, making Peter the first ever comedy artist to have two hit records at once. Goodbyee and the Not Only . . . But Also album subsequently became the best-selling comedy single and album of the year. Peter ad, in a small way at least, made it as a pop singer. The news that The Ballad of Spotty Muldoon had been banned in New Zealand, lest it offend the then Finance Minister (and later Prime Minister) Robert Muldoon, made his success even sweeter. He and Dudley performed live on Ready, Steady, Go! and on the short-lived pop show Now! (presented in his first ever TV role by Michael Palin), and wallowed briefly in the ironic adulation of the pop world. Record-buyers are of course notoriously fickle, and the two follow-up singles, Isn’t She a Sweetie? in 1966 and The L. S. Bumblebee – finally released in 1967 – failed miserably. There were rumours, incidentally, which have since found their way into print, that the latter song was a John Lennon cast-off; but this was definitely not the case.

  On the B-side of The L. S. Bumblebee was The Beeside, a specially recorded Pete and Dud sketch about the evils of drink and drugs, remarkable for its horribly prophetic nature. Pete told of ‘A very nice family man with a lovely wife and two beautiful children what he used to dandle on his knees when he came home . . . then, one evening, he came home and looked around and said, “Nice though this be I seek yet further kicks.”’ The man took to the bottle and to various illicit substances, until:

  Pete:

  His craving got worse and worse. He got more and more drugs down his face, and eventually he became so irresponsible, he left his lovely wife and kids and home behind and went to Hollywood and lay on a beach all day with a lovely busty starlet with blonde hair what come down to her knees.

  Dud:

  That doesn’t sound too bad, Pete.

  Pete:

  No, I don’t think that’s a very good example of the perils actually.

  Dudley Moore, in fact, was not prepared to wait for any future move to Hollywood to get stuck into a series of starlets. With his celebrated compulsion for confessing all to anyone within listening distance, Dudley revealed to The Sunday Times
in October that he was involved with ‘three birds. Each of them knows about one of the others, but never the full complement.’30 Shortly afterwards he found himself with no birds as a consequence, but he lost no time in filling the gap with the beautiful actress and model Suzy Kendall (née Freda Harrison). Peter observed sarcastically that ‘Millions of women would like to adopt Dudley. Nobody wants to adopt me – not even the Duchess of Argyll.o;t tote to her saying I was available, but not a word.’31 Bill Wallis was even asked by a girl at a party if he would sleep with her, because he’d once been in the same room as Dudley Moore. Dudley himself insisted that he would continue to play the field and never get married: ‘It’s the one subject that terrifies me,’32 he insisted. He subsequently married Suzy Kendall on 14 June 1968, in a secret ceremony.

  With television and the pop charts conquered, Peter was keen to move ever onwards and upwards, and storm the world of films. Dudley would come with him: ‘What I do in the future rather depends on what Peter does,’33 Dudley informed the press loyally. In the summer of 1965 he and Peter signed a three-picture deal with Columbia, to carry their double act on to the big screen. The agreement sounded the death-knell, at least in his current incarnation, for E. L. Wisty; The Ballad of Spotty Muldoon turned out to be Wisty’s last act. His final appearance in On the Braden Beat was a memorable occasion. Not once had Wisty’s impassive expression so much as flickered during the series; that night, as the show went out live, Braden and the crew made a concerted attempt to break Peter’s concentration. Cameramen, floor managers, even Braden himself crawled around the floor and popped up suddenly beside the camera, pulling faces and making rude gestures. Finally, Peter cracked, laughed heartily with everyone else, and shook his finger at his near-hysterical tormentors. ‘All right you so-and-so’s, you’ve done it, now let me finish,’ he said, and did. Peter wanted the American satirist Jay Landesman to replace him, but the producers chose the home-grown talents of Tim Brooke-Taylor instead, playing a reactionary bowler-hatted city gent. No matter who replaced him, the programme would never be the same again.

  In the summer of 1965 Peter formed another company, Peter Cook Productions Ltd., with secretarial help provided by the Private Eye staff (Judy Scott-Fox had stayed on in America to try her luck as a theatrical agent). The idea was to get his own projects on to the big screen in the wake of Columbia’s interest. In October he tried to resurrect the Cook/Bird adaptation of Scoop, which had been abandoned in February, and also the post-Fringe project The Curious Gentleman, which had been dropped as far back as mid-1964. Neither idea excited much interest; the film business, even more than the BBC, was and remains resistant to unsolicited ideas. What Columbia wanted Peter and Dudley to do was appear in The Wrong Box, a camp adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne’s light-hearted novel, which was to be shot in Bath and at Pinewood in the autumn. An indication of the commercial importance that Peter and Dudley had attained by this time is evinced by The Sunday Times’ reaction to the deal: ‘Bryan Forbes is directing and the cast includes Ralph Richardson, John Mills and Michael Caine; with Peter Sellers and Tony Hancock making guest appearances. These are big names to brandish at the box office, but there’s no doubt that Cook and Moore are the ones which matter most.’34

  The Wrong Box, sadly, turned out to be a thoroughly incoherent and mediocre piece of work, a classic example of the British film industry’s traditional custom of applying famous comedians en masse to a feeble script in the hope of papering over any cracks. Besides Peter, Dudley, Hancock and Sellers, the at Pinewded Irene Handl, John le Mesurier, John Junkin, Norman Rossington, Leonard Rossiter, Nicholas Parsons and Jeremy Lloyd, not to mention the Temperance Seven as a group of undertakers. All concerned overacted strenuously. The result was what might be called a ‘romp’ (in the worst sense of the word), full of reaction shots to jokes: when one of the cast fell over, for instance, Forbes cut away to a bunch of cute children laughing. Supplying one’s own onscreen approval for a joke is an insecure device that rarely works. The direction was generally turgid, the incidental music too heavy, and the film’s interpretation of Victorian England strictly Carnaby Street. Insofar as it was meant to be a parody of a leaden Victorian melodrama, The Wrong Box failed utterly, by wholeheartedly resorting to the trappings of a leaden Victorian melodrama.

  The highly complicated plot concerned the two survivors of a family ‘Tontine’, a lottery in which all the prize money goes to the last one of the entrants to die. Peter and Dudley played Morris and John Finsbury, the unscrupulous nephews of one of the doddering survivors (Gielgud), both of whom are determined that their uncle should win the Tontine, so that they can get their hands on the money. Unfortunately they believe him to have been killed in a train crash in which Peter loses his trousers (it’s that sort of film), although in reality the dead body belongs to the escaped Bournemouth Strangler, who happened to have been wearing their uncle’s coat. In an effort to conceal the death, they approach the drunken Dr Pratt (Sellers) for an undated death certificate, which they intend to fill in only after the other survivor of the Tontine has passed on. Then, due to a postal mix-up, the box containing the Strangler’s dead body is actually delivered to the rival survivor’s house and has to be retrieved, with extremely unhilarious consequences.

  Peter and Dudley were very much cast according to type – one lordly and cynical, the other libidinous and put-upon – and encouraged to undertake as much melodramatic moustache-twirling villainy as possible. In an effort to attract TV viewers, Dudley’s Not Only . . . But Also catchphrase – ‘funny’ – was incorporated into the script. Peter’s role was much the bigger, and Dudley refused to sign up for the film unless his was enlarged substantially. Despite his demands being met, Dudley had an utterly miserable time; he could smell disaster looming. ‘I disagreed with Bryan Forbes a great deal about his approach to comedy. He used to act it all out all the time; he used to do it for you. Unfortunately, I’ve done that in my time and I think it’s a great mistake. I never used to find what Bryan did too easy to follow – it was like aping movement and facial expression.’35 A bizarre method of directing two comedians who had become enormously popular in part because of their mastery of facial expression. ‘I’ve seen the film a few times,’ says Dudley, ‘and I’ve never been able to understand quite what goes on in it – probably because I was so obsessed with the discomfort I went through.’36

  Peter was initially delighted by the glamour of the location shoot: evidently the four hours spent in a freezing rubbish dump during the filming of Not Only . . . But Also had not taken the gloss off the experience. He kept visitors to the set entertained with a high-quality stream of cinematic invention: ‘Remember Ben Hur? All those battles, with thousands of soldiers running about? Ants. Ants dressed in uniform They make these thousands of tiny uniforms and dress the ants in them. Then they tell them to go out and have a battle, and they photograph them, and blow it up big. And Esther Williams? You know she couldn’t swim a stroke. They used to drop her in a bath of gelatine so she wouldn’t sink. Then they’d speed up the film. And as for Margaret Rutherford, it’s common knowledge that she’s four people . . .’37 and so on, like continuous shell fire. Peter was to a great extent trying to cover his nerves about the size of the undertaking – it was the first time he had acted in anything longer than a short sketch since university; but the barrage of jokes didn’t go down quite as well with a group of attention-seeking actors as it would normally have done with a more receptive audience. The feelings of unfriendly rivalry he – perhaps unfairly – discerned among the rest of the cast led him to unleash a bitter public attack on actors in general: ‘The good thing about a university background is, it keeps you from getting as conceited as most actors. Unlike them, you have a period of intellectual activity. You get curious and you then stay curious. This means you’re less likely to become enthralled with yourself than the actors and actresses with no cultural or intellectual background. Suddenly they’re thrust into prominence. Suddenly
they’re told they’re so important. Everything they do is reported. Usually they just get drunk. They can’t cope. And actors in this country all take such a predictably hip line: liberal with a small “l”. I think I hate them more than anybody else.’38

  Clearly unsure about his own performance and how it would stand up in such illustrious company, Peter allowed Forbes to dictate what he should do in much more detail than Dudley ever did. The results can be seen in his scene with Peter Sellers, the only performer to emerge from the film with credit. Sellers utterly wipes Peter off the screen with a first-rate cameo performance, dripping with small visual details and verbal touches that he appears to have added himself. The drunken doctor’s room is alive with cats (he was actually smeared with fish paste to keep them interested) and he uses one to blot the ink on the undated death certificate. After he has sterilised his hands, he dries them on another live kitten. Whenever Peter’s lines contain the word ‘Doctor’, Sellers says ‘Come in’.

  Forbes felt that both the offscreen Sellers and Tony Hancock, who killed himself soon afterwards, ‘were searching for an elusive bluebird of happiness which ultimately destroyed them both’. He also noted similar traits in Dudley Moore. ‘It must be a great trial for comedians who shoot to such public fame and are always expected to be at the top of their form offstage as well as on. I had many conversations on this subject with Peter Sellers and I am sure Dudley suffers in the same way.’39 Peter, who always was at the top of his form offstage as well as on, seemed on the surface to have fewer such problems, although Forbes said he noticed one or two ‘demons’ there too.