Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

by John Fisher

  Almost as if to prove to himself and others that he was earning his money, Miff was never contented. His constant carp that ‘a good idea is not being executed properly’ seemed to place the entire onus on the writers and none on his so-called format. When he complained that material for an entire run of six or seven shows was never signed and sealed in advance of the first recording, he couldn’t grasp that an ongoing television series of this kind relies on the necessary creative give and take between star and writers, and that subsequent episodes grow organically out of the success or failure of the previous one. Specific writers came in for special condemnation, namely John Muir and Eric Geen, whose work Tommy especially prized. Miff chided his client, ‘If you wish to be seen on any television screen doing such old-fashioned material, then all the progress we have accomplished so far will be wasted.’ According to Muir, he and his partner could never reason why Ferrie was so adverse to Cooper performing stand-up on television or wallowing in the ludicrousness of his persona, all the time wanting him ‘to stop playing the idiot and become a light comedian’. When they produced a script which they considered their best ever, Miff threw a tantrum and walked out of the meeting. Muir and Geen did not stay around for the last series of Life with Cooper, taking some consolation from the fact that they were able to add some creative dignity to the final flourish of Hancock’s performing career for Philip Jones and ABC Television before his tragic end in 1968.

  There was never a time when Miff did not need convincing. Things might have been different if Cooper had enjoyed a monogamous relationship with a single writer or writing team. Since Cooper’s first excursions into television comedy in the Fifties, the bar had been raised by one man, Tony Hancock. His career was now in sad decline, but the result of his earlier achievement – and the more lasting one of his scriptwriters, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson – had been to challenge those engaged in producing comedy for the box with a greater sense of responsibility for quality. Miff and ABC Television had rightly set their sights high for Tommy Cooper, but in doing so had tended to overlook the essential nature of their own star, an innately funny man with the vigour of variety in his veins as distinct from the more contemplative actor’s approach that Hancock brought to his work. Hancock was a realist in extremis; Cooper was a fantasist caught up in the net of his own clumsiness. In the passport episode, for example, there were sketches that demanded him to be arrogant and argumentative, which suggested they might have been written with Hancock rather than Cooper in mind. Typical Tommy was neither. Moreover, put him in a sketch involving a real doctor’s surgery or a real airport and he came to earth with a thud. Even when a true life incident was dramatized, as in the falling asleep on sentry duty episode, the results were relatively flat when contrasted to Tommy’s animated telling of what happened. On the other hand portray him as a waiter in a high class restaurant threshing around in a fish tank with a mallet to catch a customer’s chosen trout –‘I’m tickling him – he’s tickling me – huh huh huh!’– or as a desperate television repair man forced to sit Punch and Judy fashion in an empty screen enacting all the programmes – news, weather, drama, cricket, volume control and picture distortion included – and the laughter reached new decibel levels. At times like these his sketch comedy was – quite as much as Milligan’s – Monty Python before its time.

  To have sustained an ongoing situation comedy he needed a permanent writer partnership capable of exploiting his absurdist take on the world and, like all successful examples of the genre, a well-defined fixed milieu in which to operate. For one brief moment there was a possibility that Ray and Alan could have come together creatively with Cooper. In 1966 they had written the book for Way Out in Piccadilly, the successful revue starring Frankie Howerd and presented by Bernard Delfont at Tommy’s old haunt, the Prince of Wales Theatre. In December 1966 Delfont approached Miff with the possibility of Tommy starring in a similar vehicle to follow on from the Howerd show in the autumn of 1967. The fact that Cooper’s friend, Eric Sykes had directed the original show could have been an added incentive. Had the stage partnership worked, one can only surmise what might have been achieved in television terms by the three – or four – of them. It was not to be. Miff chose the option of further cabaret dates and the recording schedule of the second series of Life with Cooper. ABC had always been flexible in its approach to recording dates and would surely have welcomed the prestige that would have accrued to Cooper as a result. The series would not air anyhow until the spring of the following year, 1968. Of all Miff’s misses, it was arguably the biggest lost opportunity of them all.

  Tommy expressed to journalist David Nathan, in an interview for his book The Laughtermakers, the wish that he might have found a Clouseau-like mantle as Sellers had done. Had he done so, it would have embodied his greatest gift, the apparent clumsiness which conceals perfect timing. The nearest he came to finding writers who could reliably capitalize on this was the partnership of Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke, who joined the Life with Cooper team for the second series at the suggestion of script editor for that run, Barry Took. Their sketch where he played the fiancée visiting his prospective in-laws contains at its core a prime example of what Galton and Simpson had achieved with Hancock on a much grander scale, namely taken aspects of the performer’s own personality and built upon them for comic effect. They always admitted that they never invented the character of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, merely enhanced what was already there. At one level the sketch is a monstrosity of comic misunderstanding. The parents visited by Tommy are not those of his fiancée at all. A bystander has misdirected him to 56, Ladbroke Grove, not, as he requested, 56, Ladbroke Avenue. Much of the dialogue between Cooper and the supposed father-in-law to be, played by the redoubtable Robert Dorning – a reliable character actor who in the mid-Sixties was almost interchangeable with Arthur Lowe in the roles he played – betrays a total lack of understanding with his persona. Tommy, in answer to a question about his intentions towards the daughter, would never have declared, ‘Well, between you and me, I’d like to drag her into a shop doorway and with a bit of luck …’ However, the sequence in which sitting on a settee he juggles the growing burden of hospitality offered to him by prospective mother-in-law and father-in-law betrays a brilliant observation of Cooper in real life.

  Notes made while watching the sequence do scant justice to this mounting comic tour de force: ‘Takes cup of tea in right hand; takes glass of whisky in left; balances plate of sandwiches on right forearm; receives cigar in mouth; “You’re not eating your sandwiches”; swivels cigar to left side of mouth; turns to move mouth down to sandwiches; fails to connect; holds whiskey in right hand with cup of tea; takes plate of sandwiches in left hand; crosses legs; balances plate in crook of right foot; takes glass with right hand; mother-in-law looks the other way; pours whiskey into tea; balances cup and saucer on glass in left hand; puffs on cigar with right hand; “And do have a piece of my homemade cake.”; right hand already waiting to take second plate; etcetera.’ The rhythm of the piece and Cooper’s look of consternation and embarrassment throughout contribute to a comic highlight of his television career.

  Significantly the third series of Life with Cooper, recorded during the opening months of 1969, employed the services of Eric Merriman as script editor and appears to have placed far greater emphasis on the fantastical. Miff no longer figured in the credits, having advised Philip Jones and new producer, Milo Lewis as early as 1 June 1968 that he was now forced to disassociate from any script involvement. His decision led to a more open format in which sketches shed their ties to the ‘day in the life’ motif. Tommy and the writers must have felt like caged birds restored to flight. A few days later Miff wrote to Cooper from his creative ivory tower: ‘What is now being proposed as programme material is so far removed from the original format, which was agreed and accepted by ABC and yourself as the best means of projecting your natural comedy talent on television, that I simply cannot allow my name to be connected with i
t.’ In Walter Mitty fashion he goes on about ‘making a breakthrough in the world of television comedy programmes’, completely overlooking the fact that the only way in which the term ‘breakthrough’ could ever possibly be applied to Cooper was in relation to the idiosyncratic nature of his personality and his comic technique. His persona was its own god-given innovation. As Morecambe and Wise would show, it should not matter how hackneyed the so-called format might appear if it allowed the comic sunshine to permeate through. Not that Miff’s ‘format’ had ever been anything but pedestrian. Moreover, if one were going to approach the challenge of a true British comedy breakthrough from the benchmark of Hancock’s greatest achievement, it is arguable that no such thing occurred until Ricky Gervais delivered The Office in 2001.

  Miff continued to brainwash Tommy on the issue. On 8 August 1968 he wrote to Cooper following a discussion in Blackpool the day before ‘when it was decided that you were in agreement with me regarding the unsuitability of the script material submitted so far by ABC television and that in order to have this matter dealt with properly, it will be necessary for you to write me to this effect. I enclose herewith a draft letter which you may care to sign and return to me.’ Two days later he heard from Tommy, but it was not the letter he expected: ‘Dear Miff, Regarding the six shows for Thames, after a lot more thought I cannot lie to myself – to me they are still funny! So with that in mind, I must do them. Sorry you don’t feel the same about this, but I must be true to myself. Best wishes, Tommy.’ Only Miff would argue against the instinct of a great performer. In so doing he deprived himself of credit by association with some of Cooper’s greatest comedy moments.

  It should not be forgotten that in the heyday of the music hall and the variety theatre the career of a sketch comedian like Harry Tate or Sid Field would have been founded on a repertoire of not much more than the contents of two or three television sketch half-hours. Add to the volume of Cooper’s accumulated television material the copious array of stage and stand-up stuff he had mastered down the years and it can be seen that his total comic arsenal was considerable to say the least. The Thames series of Life with Cooper that aired in the spring of 1969 does not survive in its entirety but, in addition to the priceless encounter of Tommy with his supposed in-laws, featured many memorable moments that do. Dudley Foster played an aggrieved Cooper neighbour in a preposterous ‘over the garden wall’ sequence by Mortimer and Cooke, in which a lone apple overhanging Foster’s side of the fence on a branch belonging to Cooper’s tree gives cause for dispute. Hostilities build to ludicrous extremes as sunflowers on one side with roots on the other are visibly tugged through the ground and a heavy roller is thrown in fury at Tommy’s prize-contending marrow. Whereas Hancock would have argued his way through the sequence, Cooper, with Foster, jubilantly confronts the crisis with a succession of visual gags, until a policeman comes along to settle the matter. He idly plucks off the apple in question, munches into it and settles down to listen.

  A semi-silent sequence, attributed to Eric Merriman, George Evans, and Derek Collyer, in which Tommy strolls purposefully into a gentlemen’s washroom adorned with bowler hat, brief case and umbrella quickly escalates into chaos as he negotiates a minefield of plug-less washbasins, recalcitrant taps, scalding water, eye-squirting soap dispensers and a wayward roller towel unit. The piece brilliantly exploits his intrinsically funny way of walking, each foot poised for that briefest of split seconds as it makes its own decision where next to tread before it plants itself back on the ground. As he moves from one hazard to the next, the effect is enhanced by much of the camera work that makes him appear even taller than he actually is. The location of the sketch must have made Miff squirm, but at no point is it played at a cheap lavatorial level. Possibly at his insistence, there is not a urinal in sight! In a similar slapstick vein Barry Cryer joined forces with Eric Merriman to produce the sketch in which Cooper played a toastmaster officiating at the top table of a stuffy banquet. This showed his ability to transform the most ancient slapstick ritual into something orgiastic in dimension, as gavel, food, furniture, microphone cable, fire extinguishers were orchestrated into a comic set piece from which no participant emerged unscathed and the toast to absent friends ended with Tommy saturated by the collective contents of every single glass. The whole sequence is played out by Cooper with a seriousness that belies the seeming inanity of the material and that is why it works so well.

  The two television sketches from this period that probably linger longest in the memory of those who saw them are both essentially solo pieces, although the first is adorned by a group of suffering extras sitting at tables who are subjected to the rigours of the Thames special effects department as it conjured up the conditions of a storm at sea in which Tommy, courtesy of Cryer and Merriman again, took the established device of the burlesque ventriloquist to new levels of absurdity. The set literally teeters from side to side on a rocking mechanism as Tommy staggers this way and that on the tiny cabaret stage. Watching the sequence is enough to make one queasy, if one were not already laughing out loud. The chair, the table, the performer and his dummy slither back and forth as Cooper attempts in what is essentially a burlesque of a burlesque to prove that he is as fine a technician as the best of them: much of the basic business where the head of the dummy becomes detached from the body and the head disappears derives from the comedy vent act of Sandy Powell. Cooper battles on against all the odds, coaxing the little fellow to sing for us – ‘Gye, Gye Glues!’– and engaging in a frantic wrestling match as he attempts to restore the doll to its suitcase. This becomes a losing battle and as he concedes an encore to the doll water starts to burst through the first of four portholes in the wall at the back of the stage. No sooner has he closed this than water gushes through the second, then the third, then in pairs and so on, until in defiance of his efforts to stem the flow, it is cascading through all four at once. All the while the stage is rolling to and fro, the magician and dummy drenched to desperation levels as they continue to slither in whichever direction gravity dictates. At the conclusion Tommy is literally poured into the wings. Had it been a sequence in a movie, the routine would have been talked of today with the same reverence with which cineastes discuss the scene in the stateroom where the Marx Brothers manage to compress more people in a confined space than is humanly possible. At one point a stray life belt rolls across the tiny stage as if in wistful comment of this very fact.

  The sketches in which he appeared to work the best were those that showed him fighting against the tricks played by fate, not least the caprices of inanimate objects. It is appropriate that the other unforgettable sequence from this time should make verbal acknowledgement of this, although it fits less obviously within the mould itself. Merriman, Evans, and Collyer are formally credited as scriptwriters of Cooper’s pastiche of the Hamlet soliloquy, but Val Andrews recalls working at an earlier stage on the premise for Tommy. The sight of our hero in doublet, hose and flaxen wig confirms our gravest suspicions that the boards at Stratford East and not Stratford-upon-Avon were his rightful habitat:

  To be or not to be, that is the question.

  Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune …

  Breaking off he immediately shifts into stand-up mode: ‘I had a bit of bad luck yesterday. I was pinched for parking. I said to the officer, “But I’m in a cul-de-sac.” He said, “I don’t care what kind of car it is. You can’t park here.”’

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles …

  ‘I usually travel by sea …’ And so the verse of the original is brought up against the dire reality of the comic’s lot, a double-edged comment on the two performing traditions. Other aspects of variety are brought into the mix, with Yorick’s skull the pretext for further bad ventriloquism, this time in open parody of the brilliant Arthur Worsley, who allowed his dummy, Charlie Brown to do virtually all the talking as he stood there bemused and – a technical tour de force – tight-lipped,
the almost unsmiling butt of a thousand quips, daring the audience to catch the merest lip movement. Tommy keeps his teeth clenched in defiance as with a nod to Worsley’s catchphrase he attempts to coax words from the grotesque papier-mâché head: ‘Look at me, son. Look at me. Here’s a joke. Here’s one for you now.’ But the jokes are incidental. Before long the real laugh becomes the impossibility of knowing who is supposed to be speaking to whom at any one time. The routine culminates with a song and soft shoe in obeisance to Ophelia, a re-working of an old Max Miller number: