Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  The third show in the series also failed to live up to the standards of Peter and Dudley at their best. A title sequence displayed on a station destination board led into a long sketch in a railway carriage that would have better served The Two Ronnies, in which Peter and Dudley held a conversation synchronised to the rhythms of the rattling train. Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling then spoke of a life spent observing worms, quite a neat idea in which he displayed a series of identical slides purporting to show worms in various states of anger, distress, ecstasy, and so on.

  Sir Arthur:

  Would you like to see one of my worms leap through a flaming hoop?

  Dudley:

  Yes indeed. I would.

  Sir Arthur:

  So would I . . . but they won’t. Damned things won’t even try.

  It was a funny sketch, but was essentially a retread of Sir Arthur’s earlier attempts to tame recalcitrant nature.

  The Pete and Dud dialogue dealt with racial prejudice, Dudley having blacked his face to discover what it is like to be on the receiving end of bigotry. It was an extremely well-meaning item, but would probably not be transmittable today.

  Pete:

  Both black and white have individual talents. If the white man is good at one thing then the black man is good at the other.

  Dud:

  Yer. I heard they were good at that.

  And that was one of the less controversial jokes. The final item in the programme, a rambling dialogue between two Streeb-Greeblingesque buffers in a club who have forgotten each other’s names, was little more than space filler, a sketch that was all middle but had no real beginning or end.

  By the fourth show, Peter and Dudley seemed to have recovered from their mid-series stutter. Although the Hitchcockian opening titles (‘Not Only . . . But Psycho’) did not live up to the promise of the idea, all three sketches were high-quality stuff. The Pete and Dud dialogue found Pete, like his alter ego, in a fit of depression:

  Dud:

  You know what my mother would say?

  Pete:

  No.

  Dud:

  ‘Somebody has got out of the bed on the wrong side this morning.’

  Pete:

  If your mother said that to me today, I’d smash her in the teeth with the coal scuttle.

  Dud tries to analyse Pete’s general malaise:

  Dud:

  Spring is here and perhaps disquieting emotions are seething beneath your mackintosh.

  Pete:

  Nothing is seething beneath my mackintosh save for a general feeling of despair and futility and boredom with you.

  What, Pete asks, can be the purpose of life?

  Dud:

  The purpose of life? Well, we are here on this earth for a brief sojourn; life is a precious gift; the more we put into it, the more we get out of it; and if on the way I can have spread a little sunshine, then my living shall not be in vain.

  Pete:

  Thank you, Patience Strong. Have you ever thought about death? Do you realise that we each must die?

  Dud:

  Of course we must die, but not yet. It’s only half past four of a Wednesday afternoon.

  The sketch was a parody, but an accurate one, of relations between Peter and Dudley’s real selves at that juncture. A genuine sense of pointlessness had settled like a pall over Peter’s life.

  An excellent and perceptive father and son sketch followed, in which Dudley played a sixteen-year-old who asks his father – Peter – for permission to get married. You’re not emotionally mature enough, explains Peter, whereupon Dudley points out that his supposedly emotionally mature parents regularly throw crockery at one another. Thereafter, the final item in the show was a piece of pure Python: a filmed cricket match between Good and Evil (both Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam later admitted that similar Monty Python sketches had been heavily influenced by Not Only . . . But Also). The Evil XI, captained by Adolf Hitler, featured Attila the Hun, Goliath, Long John Silver, Goebbels, the Marquis de Sade, Bluebeard, Al Capone, the Goddess Kali, Stalin, Salome, and Jack the Ripper as twelfth man. The Good XI consisted of Lord Baden-Powell (captain), Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, St Paul, St Francis, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Florence Nightingale and CliffRichard. The umpires were Doubting Thomas and Pontius Pilate. Peter opened the batting as the Marquis de Sade with an enormous spiked bat, which he used to pummel Florence Nightingale’s gentle underarm lobs: ‘He’s punishing the bowling, and he’s even punishing the bowler’ ran the commentary, as the Marquis took Florence (Dudley) over his knee. After a disagreement as to whether Long John Silver’s wooden leg constituted a leg for lbw purposes, Evil declared on 564–4 and quickly reduced Good to 2–9. To save the day, Albert Schweizer prevailed upon his black runner Jomo to do a Zambezi rain dance, in the hope of a postponement. Jimmy Gilbert had the hoses at the ready, but as the rain dance began, a remarkable thing happened: the heavens opened and snow began to fall thickly, quickly carpeting the entire field in white. The script was hastily altered to take account of what had become a spectacular meteorological finale. Bizarrely, when the surviving Not Only . . . But Also material was packaged for reshowing in the early 1990s this first-rate sketch was missing, although it was certainly present in the BBC Archive when the author of this book viewed it in 1982.

  Another filmed item, of which only an unedited fraction has survived, formed the centrepiece of the fifth show: a wonderful, sprawling solo piece by Dudley (something that would have been unthinkable five years previously) in which he portrayed Ludwig van Beethoven as the star of his own Tom Jones-style variety show, and played a symphonic version of Delilah. Peter appeared in brief cameos as Francisco Goya and as William Wordsworth, surrounded by Young Generation-style dancers dressed as daffodils. The other filmed item in the programme has long since vanished, an ingenious title sequence devised by Peter in which Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling planted a row of seeds, which flowered to form the words Not Only . . . But Also. The necessary time-lapse photography proved almost – but not quite – beyond the capabilities of the show’s cameraman.

  Elsewhere in the show there was an excellent sketch in which Peter played an elderly, dying man who refuses to see a doctor, while Dudley played the local GP, who has to pretend to be an electrician to get in to see him, and has to improvise an electrical reason for each of his various medical procedures. The Pete and Dud dialogue was less successful, consisting of the plot details of a Harold Robbins-style potboiler that Dud has started writing, full of racy scenes (‘Heaving thighs across Manhattan’); it concerned a porn magnate who has made his fortune selling ‘a combination of nude ladies and intellectual articles by Jonathan Miller and Kenneth Tynan’ – two targets that Peter never lost the opportunity to have a dig at. ‘We did run out of material for Dud and Pete to discuss,’ confesses Dudley, ‘maybe because we always chose subjects like Sex and Art and Religion.’15

  In keeping with the up and down nature of the series, the sixth show included one of the finest ever Not Only . . . But Also sketches, a savage attack on small-minded, self-aggrandising bureaucrats, entitled Lengths. Peter and Dudley played George and Reg, two nasal, suburban telephonists who have mislaid some (unexplained) ‘Lengths’ and are trying to engender a little self-important panic by using phrases such as ‘We’re up to our eyes’, ‘We’re going mad here’ and ‘We’re working like beavers up here love’:

  George:

  Sylvia, get me Bernard, would you please, on green. Bernard, it’s George here. Sorry to trouble you but we’re in a bit of trouble re. these Lengths. I’ve got Alan on my back. They’ve been through Transit Control and on to Admin but they haven’t been roneoed and there’s no dockets.

  Reg:

  Er Bernard, it’s Reg here, sorry to interrupt.

  George:

  It’s Reg on green, Bernard.

  Reg:

  Yes, I’ve just had a look through here at what we’ve got but there’s nothing at all. We haven’t got a trace of a docket either. Un
less we have a docket we can’t move.

  In addition to whipping up a little drama in their professional lives, the two are equally busy trying to conduct their private lives with discretion. Almost every caller is greeted with the hissed explanation: ‘I can’t talk now, ’cos he’s here.’ The cumulative effect of seven or eight minutes of spiralling bureaucratic absurdity is to create a genuinely original and fiercely well-observed slice of social satire. Eventually George has a brainwave:

  George:

  There’s no trace of the dockets and no sign of the Lengths. I don’t know where to turn.

  Reg:

  No, it looks pretty black, doesn’t it.

  George:

  We might try Lengths, I suppose.

  Reg:

  It’s a shot in the dark, isn’t it.

  George:

  Still, give it a whirl. Brenda, get me Lengths would you love. On purple, yes.

  (Reg’s phone rings. He answers it.)

  Reg:

  Hello, Reg Lengths here.

  By contrast, the other two sketches in the show were half-hearted: a long-vanished film item in which Dudley, as a conman, rings on Peter’s door with a wholly unconvincing sob story, and a rambling Pete and Dud dialogue about health foods.

  For the final programme in the series, Jimmy Gilbert pulled out all the stops. The opening title sequence featured the words Not Only . . . But Also painted in huge letters on the deck of HMS Ark Royal, a task that took the ship’s crew three days; the closing sequence saw a pair of tailor’s dummies dressed as Peter and Dudley, together with an upright piano, catapulted up the aircraft carrier’s take-off ramp and into the sea. The latter stunt was the idea of the ship’s captain, who had used the catapult to fire elderly second-hand cars over the side as a means of entertaining his men in the South China Sea. The ship’s officers were delighted to try anything to drum up televised publicity, to ward off the threat of imminent decommissioning. The stunt had a sad ending, however, when one of the Ark Royal’s jets crashed into the sea shortly afterwards at the same point, killing both pilots; the wreckage of the plane unfortunately became intermingled with the wreckage of the piano. A one-hour thank you concert for the crew, which Peter and Dudley had been rather dreading, was cancelled as a result.

  The centrepiece of the final show was a huge documentary attack on the world of films, which Peter had found so impossible to crack. Entitled The Making of a Movie, it tore not just into Great British Acting – a favourite target of Peter’s – but into the self-regarding pomposity of directors, producers and screenwriters as well. Peter played Robert Neasden, a ruminative, pipe-smoking writer redolent of Robert Bolt, while Dudley played the suspiciously Bryan Forbes-like Bryan Neasden, director of the smash hit When Diana Dors Ruled the Earth:

  Voe-Over:

  Neasden describes how the idea for his new film came to him.

  Robert:

  I was in the cinema at the time . . . and I was watching this film, and suddenly I felt, ‘That’s it, a film. A film. A film.’ It was so simple I almost wept.

  Voice-Over:

  Robert Neasden took his idea to famed producer–director Bryan Neasden.

  Robert:

  I see it as a film about people.

  Bryan:

  Yes.

  Robert:

  People who need people.

  Bryan:

  People who need people . . . yes.

  Robert:

  Big people, with universal emotions.

  Eventually Peter O’Neasden (Peter as O’Toole) is cast as the Archbishop of Becontree and Richard Neasden (Dudley as Richard Burton) takes the part of King Henry VIII, in what has become a historical epic:

  Richard:

  I’ve always wanted to work with Bryan, and when I heard that Robert had written the script I didn’t need to read it. The money’s neither here not there. It’s in Geneva.

  A number of marvellous mock-Shakespearean scenes follow, in which Peter and Dudley rail against each other in a variety of roles, always employing that booming, stagey, projected delivery that characterises Great British Acting, a thespian tradition once described by Peter as ‘rubbish’. Much of the dialogue is suspiciously familiar:

  King Henry VIII:

  Please, release me, let me go, for I don’t love you any more. Her lips are warm while yours are cold. Release me my darling, let me go.

  Eventually, when the epic is complete, Bryan returns home with Robert:

  Bryan:

  Oh God, it’s marvellous to be home. Help yourself to a drink. I’ll go and get Vera and the kids. (He goes upstairs shouting for his wife, and comes down again.)

  That’s peculiar, she was here three years ago.

  Robert:

  There’s a note here.

  Bryan:

  (reading) ‘Goodbye for ever, love Vera . . .’ My God, what a fantastic title for a film.

  Robert:

  Yes, I see it as a very contemporary film.

  Bryan:

  A film . . . a film . . .

  Peter was obviously in a biting mood. One of the two other sketches in the show was an equally savage attack on a middle-class dinner party, the well-heeled guests discussing au pairs and the children’s education. The subject matter was uncomfortably close to home, especially when Dudley outlined his character’s marital situation:

  Dudley:

  Verity and I have a very honest relationship. She knows perfectly well that from time to time I may have a bit of a fling, but she also knows that I’ll never get seriously involved with another woman. I mean, I’ve never got involved with her.

  The final sketch of the series was a Pete and Dud dialogue, extremely tired by now, that began by half-heartedly retreading the ground of the famous Art Gallery sketch, drifted off into a discussion of a porn mag ordered by Dud, and ended up dawdling round the houses of Dud’s youth once more. These two characters, at least, had come to the end of the road.

  Peter was not happy with the series, probably because he was just not happy, and described it as ‘textually messy’.16 Certainly Jimmy Gilbert was happy to get the chance to re-edit the programmes down to thirty minutes each for repeat transmission – ‘It was just a matter of cutting the dead wood out. It became a very tight show then, I thought it was great.’ The press reaction had been muted – ‘A disappointment on the whole,’17 said the Daily Mail – which was perhaps fair by comparison with the first two series, but not in any other context. The series had been a definite improvement upon Goodbye Again, and knocked spots off almost every other comedy show on TV at the time. Much of the disappointment stemmed from the dwindling appeal of the Pete and Dud double act. Shortly afterwards, Dudley acknowledged the negative part that he had played in this decline, by altering the chemistry between the two: his character was no longer prepared to be kicked like a faithful dog. He had become ‘too intelligent, too well read. I think at one stage the reactions to things weren’t quite so primitively funny.’ Although he did add, somewhat contradictorily, that ‘Peter’s sarcasm was detrimental to the relationship,’18 referring no doubt to their offstage rather than their onstage relationship.

  Pete and Dud aside, today Dudley believes that ‘We did some of our best work in that series,’ and it would be impossible to contradict him. Willie Rushton, a guest on Poets Cornered, called it ‘excellent, a really good series’. If anything had been lost, other than the amount of preparation time available in previous years, it was a degree of warmth visible in the earlier shows. What it had gained by way of compensation was a slightly experimental quality, as if Peter was restlessly and unconsciously pushing against the boundaries of the sketch show format. There were fewer overt jokes than before, and more in the way of character study. John Wells’s memory of that period is that ‘Peter was constantly pushing, but didn’t know in which direction he ought to push; but he had to push in some direction constantly to try and see which would finally ring a bell. A lot of those sketches like the Greta Garbo one al
most weren’t comedy, they had the air of an expressionist film. I think he’d been slightly seduced into believing that he ought to move into a slightly more serious realm. He thought he couldn’t just go on sitting in a chair making jokes for ever.’

  The whirling social life and after-show parties that had accompanied the first two series had been revived third time around, but perhaps with a slightly more forced air than before. Sid Gottlieb, who came to three or four of the recordings, remembers that ‘Judy was very energetic about those shows, very encouraging, and always very well spruced up, she’d make a great fuss of Peter going to the studio and at the dos afterwards at the Fagin’s Kitchen Restaurant.’ At the parties, Peter and Dudley were more exhibitionist than ever before. Jimmy Gilbert recalls that ‘Peter was very much into attacking Great Acting at the time, so at one party he leaped up onto the table and Dudley onto another – we hadn’t taken the whole restaurant over, there were some rather astonished guests there as well – and they started improvising all these Great Shakespearean speeches in that Great Acting style. In fact it went down exceedingly well with all the diners.’ But when the performance was at an end, Peter sat sadly in a corner with Jimmy Gilbert and mourned all those lost improvised lines that had floated off into the air. ‘He told me, “My greatest tragedy is that I haven’t got a Boswell, if only I had a Boswell going around, because that’s the only way I can write. I invent it, it all happens, I don’t know where it all comes from, but it’s there and I really need a Boswell to write it all down.”’