Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Morrisey’s first act was to rewrite the script substantially, and award himself a writing credit. He wanted The Hound of the Baskervilles to enjoy the good-natured innuendo and groaning wordplay that had characterised the Carry On films. He also demanded that one quarter of the script at least be made up of classic Peter and Dudley sketches, such as One Leg Too Few, which had absolutely nothing to do with the plot. ‘That was Paul’s idea,’ confirmed Peter apprehensively. ‘We were very worried about that, because we said, “It will just look like we’re rehashing old material,” but he said “No, it’s stuff which works. If you look back to the Marx Brothers, they did stuff on f which they’d done on stage for years and years, and they did it on film because it worked.” I hope he’s right.’9 Morrisey also had the novel idea of flinging a cast of well-known British character actors at the project: Kenneth Williams, Denholm Elliott, Joan Greenwood, Terry-Thomas, Max Wall, Irene Handl, Hugh Griffith, Roy Kinnear, Prunella Scales, Penelope Keith, Spike Milligan and Josephine Tewson were all signed up, along with the singer Dana and the Page 3 girl Viv Neve. The warning bells were already beginning to ring ominously in Peter and Dudley’s minds.

  By the time the final draft of the script was completed, it contained some quite excruciating jokes, such as:

  Watson:

  What time does the train leave for Baskerville?

  Mortimer:

  Twelve o’clock tomorrow, Victoria.

  Watson:

  Oh no, you can call me John.

  Or for instance:

  Watson:

  I saw someone signalling across the moors.

  Barrymore:

  It’s moors code.

  Joan Greenwood had the unenviably embarrassing task of delivering the line: ‘Sir Henry, we were just discussing your uncle’s willy – I mean will’, while Kenneth Williams was given the scarcely superior line: ‘All the Baskervilles have hearty dicks – dicky hearts, I mean.’ There was also a minor subplot about a party of nuns trying to recover a stolen religious relic, ‘in the name of all the flocking blind cripples’. At the end of May, Morrisey sent scripts off to the agents of the cast members. ‘It mademe laugh out loud,’ wrote Kenneth Williams in his diary. ‘Some of it is very funny.’ The actor told the Evening Standard even more enthusiastically that the script was ‘screamingly funny’.

  Whatever merit may have remained in the script after Morrisey’s revisions was to be utterly extinguished by his disastrous attempts at direction. Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show, excited at the presence of the great US director Paul Morrisey working in this country, filmed an entire documentary about the making of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Despite its respectful tone, it must surely have been obvious to the film-makers that they were watching one of the greatest disasters in British cinema history unfold. Viewing their efforts today, Peter and Dudley’s palpable unhappiness radiates from every interview, while it is abundantly clear from the minute he opens his mouth that Morrisey’s understanding of comedy was at best theoretical and divorced from reality, and at worst non-existent.

  Morrisey brought his personal analysis of the success of the Carry On films to the Baskervilles set: ‘The emphasis was on the performers, with the most routine, sloppy, slapdash plots,’ he said. The characters, he went on, should be ‘cut off from analysis of what they’re doing. I think a director is an aid, that’s all. But he doesn’t create the film, that’s the performer.’ As far as Morrisey was concerned, the bigger, the more extreme the performance, the better. Kenneth Williams, whose vanity had been stroked by the favourable comparisons, agreed wholeheartedly that casting and not scripts had been the key to the Carry On films. The two men’s joint philosophy was to prove mutually supportive and extremely damaging to the project. In fact, any weaknesses in narrative tension in the Carry On films had constrained rather than underpinned their success. Williams’s assertion to the South Bank Show crew that ‘There’s something basically funny about people who are able to handle comedy – the persona is the essence of comedy’ ignored the fact that almost all successful comedy films (including the Carry Ons) employ a range of character types, from the most straight or sympathetic to the most comically absurd. The eye-rolling grotesques that Williams had made his speciality only worked as a contrast to the other characters. A whole film full of eye-rolling grotesques, as Morrisey intended, was a recipe for disaster.

  Every cast member was given a comedy characteristic, which they were required to demonstrate as loudly and ostentatiously as possible throughout. There was no sense that actors had been cast in appropriate roles, rather that the film was a series of attention-seeking cameos competing against each other. Peter’s Holmes was a comedy Jew. Dudley played Watson as a high-pitched Welshman, and Watson’s mother Ada as a screeching parody of his own mother (who shared the same name). Kenneth Williams, Spike Milligan, Max Wall and Terry-Thomas all played exaggerated versions of their famous comedy roles. Prunella Scales played a postmistress who could only speak in opposites, like a Two Ronnies character. Even the famous sketches that had been crowbarred in, like One Leg Too Few, had to be performed in silly accents – entirely removing, in the case of that particular sketch, the contrast between Dudley’s tentative optimism and Peter’s restrained delicacy that had made it work in the first place.

  Kenneth Williams adored Morrisey’s desire for huge, theatrical reactions, and poured scorn on the conventional wisdom that good film acting involved the deftest of touches: ‘It’s the conviction that matters, not the style,’ he pronounced. Clearly unconvinced, Peter had doubts about the director’s insistence that he emphasise his own performance: ‘Paul Morrisey has made me as grotesque as I’ve ever been, apart from in private life, which is almost continuously. It’s been very hard to do a take which was over the top for him, because my philosophy was, it’s Clint Eastwood time, the less you do the better, and Paul kept saying “Come on Peter, a slightly bigger reaction”; so I’d go “RUARRGH!” and he’d say “That’s good!” . . . I think in comedy you have to make yourself ridiculous. Which is what I am in life.’10

  By the time filming had kicked off at Bray Studios in early July 1977, with an audition for the part of the hound got up mainly for publicity purposes, Peter had already started back on drink and drugs again. Judy was in despair. ‘He was collected by car every morning at 6.30 a.m. and he would drink a bottle of wine on the way to the set every morning. He was on uppers all the time. Eventually I asked him to move out for the duration because he was driving me mad, he’d be up all night retelling old jokes.’ Peter refused her request. He had also begun to make public jokes at Dudley’s expense once again: ‘Dudley is still not quite sure how to play Dr Watson. I tell him that Dr Watson is basically a small, bumbling, ineffective fool, but Dudley has some objection to playing himself.’11

  Kenneth Williams’s diaries detail the film’s gradual descent into catastrophe. As early as 4 July, Peter was trying to undermine Morrisey’s direction. ‘Peter Cook reiterated: “Sir Henry must be very mild and vulnerable . . . be careful you don’t get that edge into your voice.” It’s ludicrous the way he and Dudley talk about truth in characterisation the whole time . . . the seriousness with which everyone sits around discussing the merit of this word or that word for inclusion in this hotch-potch of rubbish is the sort of thing Cook would have ridiculed in his undergraduate days.’ For all his bluster, Williams was now actively dissociating himself from the script. On 13 July, he wrote: ‘I was surprised watching the rushes today. I looked very good, the light blue summer suit photographed well . . . of course the dialogue is lousy a lot of the time, but the look and the manner are OK. Critics will say “Tired, laboured, unfunny” etc., but it don’t matter, and I do need the money.’

  On 21 July Williams received a surprise. ‘Peter Cook said on the phone: “John Goldstone (the producer) and Dudley and I agree that Paul has made you do things which are over the top and bogus, and we must put it right. I want this picture to be really good. Dudley and I have had
a row with Paul about it, but he was the only one at the rushes who was laughing at your stuff.” He certainly threw me for six.’ On 2 August Morrisey contracted hepatitis and filming was suspended. There were sixty-three minutes in the can so far, and three days later the cast gathered in Central London to view their efforts. Williams reported that ‘It was all rather depressing. Again and again in this script, I’ve thought “That is hilarious”, yet the fact remains, there is nothing hilarious in any of the stuff I saw in the cinema today. There were certain bits (e.g. the one-legged man) which don’t really belo to uhe story at all.’ Peter kept the idle cast entertained with improvisations and jokes at Dudley’s expense; explaining why Dudley enjoyed life in California, he said, ‘It’s the space you see. He loves the space. Californians have a lot of space. Most of it’s between their ears.’

  Behind the barrage of jokes, of course, Peter was extremely upset. When Morrisey finished the film, Peter, Dudley and John Goldstone rejected the cut. ‘I thought it was very bad,’ explained Peter. ‘It was a mess, with some funny moments. The script was a very bad compromise between Dudley, myself and Paul. Dudley and I edited the final version, which I regard as marginally better, but there’s still no making it any good.’12 Peter and Dudley laboriously removed all their old sketches, with the exception of the perennial One Leg Too Few. The film was eventually re-edited yet again for the American market, with several of the sequences put into a different order; the mere fact that such a thing was possible says a lot about its construction. Morrisey had delivered one of the all-time turkeys of the cinema. ‘He was terrible,’ groans Dudley today. ‘I thought he was going to be terrific, but he wasn’t, he was unbelievably strict.’ Dudley thought his efforts ‘dreadful, raucous and unfunny’.13 The film’s release was postponed until further notice. All Peter and Dudley could do was wait for inevitable disaster at the box office. Of course Peter blamed Morrisey, but he also blamed himself. He was incapable, he decided, of coming up with an idea that would sustain for more than five minutes.

  The revitalised Peter had committed himself to so much work at the end of 1976, that in 1977 – in between cameos for The Eric Sykes Show and others – he found himself working flat out on another full-scale project at the same time as The Hound of the Baskervilles. This was Consequences, a triple concept LP by Godley and Creme. The two musicians had invented the ‘gizmo’, a mechanical device that clipped on to the bridge of a guitar and made a variety of sounds using different combinations of tiny wheels; their idea was to use the album, which they had started work on while still members of 10cc, to promote the invention. Unfortunately the concept, such as it was, barely filled a sentence, let alone a whole LP: it was to be a gambling game at which each of the four participants corresponded to one of the elements. After they had completed the first side of the first disc, tunefully but with little sign of the concept in sight, Godley and Creme asked Peter to write a comic play that would run between the tracks and flesh out their idea. Peter’s first act was to change the concept entirely, replacing it with a divorce negotiation taking place at the end of the world. Property would be divided inside the room, entirely pointlessly, as the land outside the room would simultaneously be divided by earthquake and conflagration.

  Peter’s script, when he finally delivered it, was a thinly veiled and bilious attack on the petty and acrimonious legal arguments surrounding his own divorce. As the atmosphere cracks and groans outside, the hapless Mr Stapleton, who is due to be divorced from his wife Lulu, is being interrogated at length by her lawyer Mr Pepperman about his financial assets:

  Pepperman:

  I’m only too aware of one glaring omission. In this list I can find absolutely no mention whatever of hairpins.

  Stapleton:

  Well, if there are any hairpins, they’re, er, Lulu’s.

  Pepperman:

  (triumphantly) Which is exactly what I’ve been trying to establish!

  Stapleton’s lawyer Hague counters by demanding that Lulu Stapleton hand over her teeth:

  Stapleton:

  I don’t want her teeth.

  Hague:

  You may not want them now, but who knows what the future holds.

  An argument follows about the number of Mrs Stapleton’s teeth. At one point, Hague’s secretary interrupts them via his desk intercom:

  Secretary:

  Just to remind you, Mr Hague, to feed the goldfish.

  Hague:

  Er, let me have that in writing, later.

  Pepperman:

  Have we agreed that the teeth are ex parte?

  Hague:

  Ex parte teeth? I’ll have to drink about that.

  There was also a surreal second strand to the plot concerning Mr Blint, a menacing, middle-aged idiot-savant with strong overtones of E. L. Wisty. Blint is a pianist, who refused to move out when the block was taken over by lawyers and now lives with his piano in a tarpaulin-covered hole in Hague’s office floor. Whenever the word ‘hole’ is mentioned, a holy choir sings. ‘I’ll be downstairs if you need me,’ says Blint darkly, ‘and I’ll still be downstairs even if you don’t need me.’ Eventually it dawns upon Mr Stapleton that the increasingly apocalyptic weather pauses every time Blint plays his piano; only Blint has the answer which will save the world. In a shaggy dog finale, which predated The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer is revealed to be seventeen.

  Unfortunately, unlike The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the numerical punchline was ingeniously set up throughout the plot, Peter’s use of the number seventeen was no more than a device to hide the fact that he couldn’t think of a way to resolve the storyline. He had become increasingly depressed by the Baskervilles fiasco throughout, and the quality of the script audibly subsides during the album, until it meanders, drink-filled, into its puzzled cul-de-sac. This decline was parallelled by an even more pronounced falling-off in the quality of the music, from its pleasant, melodic beginnings, to a series of overblown, overlong, pretentious and tuneless finales. ‘Most of the time we spent during that album we were stoned out of our minds on various substances, both Lol Creme, myself and Peter,’ confesses Kevin Godley with disarming honesty. ‘It turned into a fourteen-month recording session, which cost a fortune and produced a very pretentious album. We didn’t know what the fuck we were doing.’

  Peter was involved for a three-month period during the summer of 1977, coming up to the Manor Studios in Oxfordshire whenever the Baskervilles film schedule allowed it. The original idea had been to cast Peter Sellers and Peter Ustinov in the main roles, but Peter made everyone laugh so much reading out the script that he was given all the male parts, with Judy playing Lulu Stapleton. ‘We were never totally in sync,’ remembers Godley, ‘because Lol and I would work until quite late, one, two or three in the morning, and get up quite late. Peter was an early riser, he’d be up and around by eight, bathed, showered, fresh as a daisy. And he’d be in the studio ready to boogie by the time we staggered downstairs for breakfast at half-eleven, looking like shit. By the time we finally came to, he was going out of it, because he’d start drinking around midday. He was going down as we were coming up, so we’d meet for maybe an hour or so in the middle.’

  Phonogram records, who had been hoping for another Tubular Bells, and who had already begun to plan the stage version, found themselvaddled with one of the biggest and most costly disasters in the history of popular music. It was a turkey as massive in the music industry as The Hound of the Baskervilles was to become in the film business. Today the record has a cult following, and – remarkably – its own website, its small but devoted fanbase dedicated to working out what it all means. ‘I wouldn’t try and read much into it,’ offers Kevin Godley, ‘apart from the fact that there’s three people totally out of it. I don’t think we acted as any kind of restraining or disciplinary force on what Peter was doing, which might have been a mistake.’ Or vice versa, one might add.

  Quite apart from the project’s artistic failures, two othe
r developments doomed it from the start. First, the invention of the gizmo coincided with and was made redundant by the invention of the low-cost, mass-produced synthesiser. Secondly, as Kevin Godley relates, ‘About six months before we finished the project, enter the Sex Pistols. Oh-oh. Sudden removal of carpets. It suddenly became apparent that we were no longer creating the ultimate record; ourselves and the project had been instantly invalidated. At that moment a little bit of the heart went out of it. I know it did for me. In fact it was such an incredible failure that it forged a sort of bond between the people that were involved.’ Peter remained fiercely loyal to the two musicians: at the LP’s launch in Amsterdam, where the pair were greeted cynically by Dutch journalists, he interrupted one hostile questioner by asking him what he did with his time. ‘I do nothing,’ replied the Dutchman. ‘Well fuck off home and do it,’ said Peter angrily.

  The year that had begun so brightly, promising so much, had tailed off into disaster. His home life, which had seemed so jolly and full of optimism, had slipped back into despondency and depression. Peter’s daughters, who spent a lot of time at Perrin’s Walk, were now old enough – they had been twelve and eleven at the beginning of 1977 – to appreciate their father’s mood swings. Before the calamities of the summer, Daisy observed that ‘Dad and Judy were lovely together. She was very funny, they had the same sort of wonderfully idiotic sense of humour. They just seemed to laugh at the same things and to make each other laugh – they had a real rapport, they would make each other shriek. She was a really lovely gentle soul, and she looked after us very well, spoilt us completely rotten.’ Judy would take the two girls shopping, while Peter specialised in home-made entertainments. He produced three skateboards, including a giant surfboard-on-wheels for himself, and took his children whizzing through the gravestones in St John’s churchyard at the bottom of Church Row, or speeding down Hampstead High Street, himself in the lead wearing a policeman’s helmet.