Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Peter’s second daughter, Daisy, was born while he was on location, on 10 September 1965. Dudley bought a small refrigerator and put it in the boot of his Maserati, crammed with champagne in waiting for the news of the birth. In the event, Peter rushed to London just beforehand, and the champagne went undrunk. All day Dudley looked lost and miserable without his friend, and made a nuisance of himself complainin that his shoes were too tight. Had he known, Peter would undoubtedly have been touched, although of course he would never have dreamed of admitting so.

  The Wrong Box did not do very well at the box office, but Peter and Dudley emerged with their reputations largely unscathed. It was generally accepted amid the mixed reviews that they had been hamstrung by having to perform substandard lines that they could probably have bettered themselves. The jury was still out on their film careers. Their television careers, which had remained in abeyance during the filming, resumed immediately with the second series of Not Only . . . But Also. So tight were their schedules that they had actually written the TV scripts on the set of The Wrong Box between takes. All the filming for the TV series was scheduled to take place in advance this time, so as soon as one lot of shooting was over, the next batch began, over Christmas and New Year. Time with the family was sacrificed for Peter and Dudley’s booming careers. On 29 December they spent the whole day in pouring rain on Wimbledon Common, filming a boxing sketch with Henry Cooper and the former world middleweight champion, Terry Downes. On the 30th they were lowered over the side of a ship into the freezing Thames near Tower Bridge, twice, fully clothed, while playing a duet on a grand piano. At one point a steel cable temporarily slackened and managed to wrap itself around Dudley’s neck. He succeeded in extricating himself, seconds before he was decapitated.

  Joe McGrath had gone now – he had secured the desired job in cinema, sadly for him as director of Casino Royale. In his place came Dick Clement, who did little to change McGrath’s successful formula: the principal difference was that owing to pressure of scriptwriting time the shows were to be only half an hour in length, the idea of a regular comedy guest being sacrificed to assist the cut. Peter claimed to find Dick Clement ‘more objective’ than Joe McGrath; Dudley had felt McGrath to be ‘more encouraging’. In fact both producers were equally good, the comments merely reflecting Dudley’s long-standing personal friendship with McGrath.

  Sadly, even less survives of the second series than of the first. A new policy had been implemented by the BBC, whereby instead of wiping all comedy shows, the first and last of every series alone were retained. Jimmy Gilbert, who later worked with Peter and Dudley before becoming Head of Comedy, tries to explain: ‘The Head of Comedy simply didn’t know anything about tape retention. When I was Head, Bob Galbraith, who was my organiser, used to come in with these print-outs, and he would say “We’re only allowed to keep eighty shows, so I’m suggesting we have the first and last of this, the first and last of that.” I believe the thinking was, in a hundred years’ time, you’ll at least get a flavour. But the first and last of every series meant absolutely nothing.’ Fortunately, the first and last shows of the second series of Not Only . . . But Also are two of the funniest programmes ever shown on British television. Equally fortunately, this time the BBC did not throw away the scripts of the other programmes.

  The series went out weekly from 15 January 1966. The three sketches that formed the first show – slotted between songs from an impressively beehived and beak-nosed Cilla Black – enshrined Peter’s power over Dudley more substantially than before. The boxing sketch, for instance, was entitled ‘The Fight of the Century’, between ‘Gentleman Jim Cook, the Torquay stylistthan Joe d ‘Dudley Moon, the Dagenham Dodger’. Dudley’s character was shown training furiously for the fight while Peter’s trained horizontally in bed. The commentary posed the question ‘raging on everybody’s lips’:

  Could the Dodger’s inferior height, weight, reach and ability prevail against the greater size, strength and skill of the champion? On the face of it, the answer seemed to be ‘no’.

  The answer was indeed no, as Dudley lost decisively.

  The moral of the fight is clear: a good big ’un will always beat a rotten little ’un.

  The Pete and Dud dialogue took place at the zoo, where – as usual – Peter led Dudley off the rehearsal path into thickets of confusion:

  Dud:

  Y’know I was here last week Pete, I dunno if I told you . . .

  Pete:

  Yes you did.

  Dud:

  And I saw a . . . did I?

  Pete:

  I was here with you.

  Dud:

  I saw . . . er . . . er . . .

  Dudley resorted to chewing fiercely on his lower lip to keep the laughs down. He informed Pete that in a visit to the ‘Topical Fish’ department he had failed to spot a single satirical barb about the current world situation. This, explained Pete, was because he had actually misread the sign for the ‘Tropical Fish’ department, in which one ofhe letters had become dislodged by winter gales:

  Pete:

  I was talking to the keeper about it actually, and he said that very often, during the winter months, his ‘r’s blew off.

  – from which point on Dud was utterly unable to keep a straight face.

  The third and final sketch, A Bit of a Chat, was a marvellous tour-de-force from Peter as a bumbling Streeb-Greeblingesque father, nervously trying to explain the facts of life to his son. It gradually transpires that he doesn’t know them either. In order to have a child, he explains,

  It was necessary for your mother to sit on a chair. To sit on a chair which I had recently vacated, and which was still warm from my body. And then something very mysterious, rather wonderful and beautiful happened. And sure enough, four years later, you were born.

  The solution to the mystery, it seemed, lay in the presence of their libidinous house guest, Uncle Bertie:

  Peter:

  He’s been living with us for forty years, and it does seem a day too much.

  Again, Peter had created a joke from the deftest subversion of a polite cliché.

  The script of the second show declared the long-suffering Dudley winner of the Most Boring Man in the World competition, in front of a panel of real celebrity judges – including Alan Freeman, Katie Boyle and Percy Thrower – at the Albert Hall. This was essentially a Miss World parody, in which Dudley had to take part in a mackintosh parade against Mr Switzerland, Mr Chile, Mr St Kitts (‘a really first class coloured bore in a previously white-dominated province’) and Mr Free China. He was judged on his banality of thought, tedium of movement, dullness of appearance and torpor of conversation. At one point Peter was handed a pair of pants:

  Well you’ve joined me at a very exciting moment. These are Alan Freeman’s pants, which have just been bored right off him by the British contestant.

  Dudley, needless to say, won the contest through his ability to converse about his specialist subjects: carpets, and how difficult it is to park in London.

  There was also a sketch in which Dudley played a public school headmaster and Peter his pupil – a sixth former named Rawlings. The setting obviously owed much to the Cook family’s ties with Radley, and Peter’s own experiences at the school, here joyously transformed by wish fulfilment:

  Headmaster:

  As you know, three generations of Rawlings have brought distinction and credit to the school, and your father was Head Boy for four years – giving it a moral tone from which it has never recovered.

  The headmaster explains, Dexter-fashion, that Rawlings is to be caned for possessing a copy of Razzle magazine. There is, however, one problem:

  Rawlings:

  Although you are, you know, much older than me, and much more, much more experienced, Sir . . .

  Headmaster:

  Out with it boy.

  Rawlings:

  I would, you know, I’d just like to point out Sir, I’m much bigger than you are, Sir, and if you lay a finger on
me, um, I’ll smash your stupid little head in.

  Cue a huge round of nostalgic applause from the audience.

  The Pete and Dud dialogue in show two concerned Dud’s cold and the plight of germs: ‘They’re forced to do something they don’t want to. Can you imagine having to fly up people’s noses?’ It contained one joke that Peter had originally intended for himself, and had then passed to Dudley, as it was a line written for a natural victim. Dud explained that he had nearly died at three – he’d gone blue, he said, and no experts could find out what was wrong.

  idth="0">Dud:

  Then they suddenly discovered the cause of it. It was the fact that my father had been holding me underwater for ten minutes.

  Worse was to come for Dud, who recounted his mother’s cure for earache: having a string tied to his ear, attached at the other end to a door handle and the door slammed shut.

  The third show laid hilariously into Dudley on three more fronts. It began with Peter as a monarch, and Dudley as a jester who wasted his time chasing women when he should be entertaining the King. Then Dudley appeared as a man trying to impress his girlfriend in an Italian restaurant, a scheme ruined by the waiter (Peter), who desired that such an obviously intelligent and well brought-up man teach him some English phrases. As he explained, ‘Is good to speak to someone who is speak well, from Oxford.’ Finally, in the Dud and Pete sketch, there were thinly veiled references to Dud’s musical ability:

  Pete:

  I often wish my mother had forced me to learn the piano when young.

  Dud:

  Yeah, me too. If only she’d forced me to play, forced me to be a genius.

  Pete:

  You wouldn’t be here now, would you?

  Dud:

  No, exactly.

  Pete:

  You’d be in Vegas with some blonde girl.

  There were faint stirrings here of rebellion, signs in the word ‘genius’ that Dud was just beginning to assert himself; but only faint ones as yet. Forthe moment, Dud was off on another nostalgia trip, ‘cycling up Chadwell Heath to get some bananas for my mum, and on the way back down Wood Lane I could hear Mrs Woolley’s gramophone blaring out Caruso.’ He told of his old girlfriend Eileen, who lived near Goodmayes Park; she was disguised as ‘Enid Armstrong’ for the purposes of the sketch, but about half-way through Dud forgot to call her Enid and started calling her Eileen instead. Peter too changed horses with ease.

  Pete:

  Eileen had a wonderful ear for music.

  Dud:

  Yeah, oh, wonderful.

  Pete:

  Her left one.

  Dud:

  Yeah, the right one was completely useless.

  A further sign that Dudley might be putting his foot down came with the inclusion, at last, of the solo item in which he gradually lost colour in the bath. After another argument Peter conceded the point, and it was reinstated in the third show. The remaining sketch, entitled Blue Movie, was an attack on pretentious film directors; Dudley played Dimitri Craddock, who – it soon emerged – had made no more than a tatty porn film, but who tried to justify the endeavour by using phrases like ‘The divestment is symbolic of the shedding of responsibility by the young generation.’

  The series sagged slightly in the middle, as comedy series tend to do. The fourth show featured several parodies of current adverts, a savage attack on slapstick comedy and the BBC executives who commission it, a not entirely successful song entitled Isn’t She a Sweetie (based on two effete characters who sometimes populated the title sequences) and one famous sketch – Frog and Peach. This was another interview with Sir Arthur, whose surname had inexplicably changed to Streeve-Greevlings, about a restaurant he had started in the middle of Dartmoor which served only grotesque frog- and peach-based dishes. It is difficult to see why it has become so well known, unless for its influence on a similar Monty Python sketch about a disgusting chocolate assortment, as it was little more than a re-run of Sir Arthur’s earlier futile business venture, teaching ravens to fly. It did of course contain some good jokes: the one based on Petersquo;s wartime Torquay neighbour being blown through the window, and another based on Lady Streeve-Greevlings’ experiences abroad during the war:

  My wife was a freedom fighter. She fought freedom for several years, finally won, and became imprisoned.

  The fifth show continued in a familiar vein, with an attack on the film business and its stars: Dudley and Peter played leading man Stanley Moon and leading lady Titania Thurl respectively, although sadly only the first page of that script survives. There was also a sketch parodying Dudley’s visits to his psychiatrist: although he appeared as ‘Roger’, Dudley’s problems – a combination of being madly in love with a girl and various associated feelings of frustration and guilt – sounded familiar. Although the script of this sketch has also disappeared, the soundtrack survives on an LP record. Peter played the psychiatrist, Dr Braintree:

  Braintree:

  What’s the girl’s name?

  Roger:

  Stephanie.

  Braintree:

  Stephanie . . . that’s a lovely name. That’s my wife’s name in fact, isn’t it.

  Roger:

  . . . Yes . . .

  By this time half the audience had guessed the twist; it took the rest of them a little longer to catch up.

  The third and final sketch was an absolute corker, dealing with the Dudleyesque story of a successful middle-class boy returning to his working-class father’s home in Dagenham late at night. The son handled his father’s complaints with supercilious ease, making it very much a role for Peter:

  Dudley:

  ;

  D’you think I fought in the war for you to come here at four o’clock in the morning?

  Peter:

  I don’t know what you fought in the war for father, if indeed you did.

  Dudley:

  (pointing at apparent war wound) What’s this, what’s this then, what’s this?

  Peter:

  That’s your navel, father.

  Dudley’s character explained that he had been ‘verger at St Peter’s Church Becontree for forty-five years’, whereas his son never bothered to worship there.

  Dudley:

  I got a good mind to take my bloody belt off to you.

  Peter:

  I wouldn’t do that father, your trousers will fall down again.

  Dudley:

  (looking skyward) Rosie, d’you see, d’you see what sort of child we have, what a monster. We in our moment of joy spawned this monster.

  Peter:

  Father I don’t know why you keep looking up when you talk about mother. You know perfectly well she’s living in Frinton with a sailor.

  Dudley:

  That’s a terrible thing to say, that’s a bloody terrible thing to say. She wouldn’t leave me, she worshipped the ground I walk on.

  Peter:

  She loved the ground but she didn’t care for you, father.

  In line after line, the son rained put-downs incessantly upon his father’s head, in a way that Dudley would never have dreamed of speaking to his parents in real life. Although Peter was effectively playing Dudley, he was also mocking him. But there were further signs of a stiffening of Dudley’s resolve in the sixth show, with a sketch deriding – for a change – Peter’s inability to play the piano. Peter played a rich, self-made man with a ‘nothing is impossible’ creed, who turns up on the doorstep of a Welsh piano tuner, portrayed by Dudley:

  Peter:

  I’ve had no formal musical training but I have a certain sort of instinctive gift for it. My family are very rhythmical. I know about the piano, I know these are the white notes, these are the black notes. The black notes play the loud ones, I know that much.

  He explains that he wishes to learn Beethoven’s fifth from scratch, in order to play it as a surprise for his wife’s birthday on Tuesday fortnight. Dudley points out that he will require an orchestra.

  Peter:

&nbs
p; I have got an orchestra. I bought one last Wednesday.

  Peter, of course, wins out in the end. He is, he explains, a millionaire at twenty-nine; and Dudley, it transpires, will do anything for a hundred guineas an hour. After that, it was back to normal for Dudley, in a Pete and Dud conversation about sex:

  Pete:

  ="Times

  Have you read Nevil Shute?

  Dud:

  Very little.

  Pete:

  How much of Nevil Shute have you read?

  Dud:

  Nothing.