by John Fisher
A television sketch from 1975 in which he played all the parts in a one-man identity parade in an old-fashioned police station was built around this very premise. Cooper not surprisingly has the time of his life amid a flurry of false moustaches, giant sunglasses, and assorted headgear. Of course, the concept of confused identity underpinned his cod impressions, the Hamlet sketch, the famous ‘Hats’ routine, and not least the World War Two duologue where his costume is split between the German Kommandant on the one side and the British officer on the other. As the two soldiers wrestled with the uncertainties of monocle and clip-on half-moustache and the constant turning from one profile to the other, the two parts became hilariously out of sync until it slowly dawned upon the brigadier that he was speaking the part of the Nazi. They had been discussing escaped prisoners:
Kommandant: When zey are caught zey vill be shot.
Brigadier: Oh, no, they won’t.
Kommandant: Oh, yes zey vill.
Brigadier: Oh, no, they won’t
Kommandant: Oh, yes, zey vill.
Brigadier: And ven zey are caught everyone vill be shot because …
(Cooper thinks quickly and turns again)
Kommandant: Vy are you imitating me?
The real joke, of course, was that he could play neither, remaining unmistakably Tommy Cooper whatever the costume, the accent, or the facial appendage. And yet at another level, in order to make this very point, he was resorting to comic acting of considerable skill.
In real life Cooper was obsessed with identity. Bob Monk-house claimed that at the height of the poll tax demonstrations when West End streets were at a standstill he was cajoled by Cooper into travelling with him on the underground and no one appeared to take a bit of notice. But such occasions were the exception. He envied his friend and hero Arthur Askey who could whip off his spectacles, put on his hat and coat, and walk out of the theatre with the audience, disappearing into the crowd. For Tommy anonymity was usually a challenge of Sisyphean proportions. While there were times when he liked to be the centre of attention – he once expressed concern to magician, Ian Adair that he had been ignored at the hotel where he was staying in Blackpool because a wedding had taken centre stage that day – he also valued his privacy. Mary Kay recalls the summer season in Skegness where in order to walk around unnoticed he went to a wig-maker. Tommy imagined he was leaving the consultation a new man, complete with spectacles, a false moustache and his new hair. He had scarcely walked a few steps when a woman came up to him and asked, ‘Excuse me, Mr Cooper, may I have your autograph?’ The wig was never worn again. Dennis Kirkland would tell of bumping into him once on the concourse at Kings Cross Station. Tommy was wearing a psychedelic Hawaiian shirt, shorts, white socks, pumps, sunglasses, and clutching a brown paper carrier bag. ‘What are you dressed like that for?’ asked the producer. He took off the glasses and said, ‘Oh, I didn’t want anyone to recognize me.’ Dennis swore he was being serious. As if the spectacles made a difference!
As an actor there was no way Cooper was born to be the next Alec Guinness, but, as Anthony Sher has pointed out, acting is less about disguise, more about revealing your soul. In this chapter alone we have observed his ability to portray pain, fear and guilt in the cause of laughter. The way in which he projected these emotions was no cardboard pretence. Drama teachers could have done worse than point their pupils in the direction of Cooper nursing the pain of his rapped knuckles in the cabinet routine. It was the simple detail rather than the obvious burlesque – like trapping a finger or thumb in a wayward prop, even clapping his hands too hard in a gesture of showmanship – that revealed the act as the minefield of disaster it was and neither Peter Sellers nor Alastair Sim, let alone Guinness, could have registered the emotion more tellingly. The reaction was often delayed – as when he smashed the jug stuck on his hand with a rolling pin – only to make the grimace all the more authentic. His wide-eyed stare with hand on heart acknowledged fear even when – as with his roar as Frankenstein – it was of his own making. ‘Frightened the life out of me!’ he’d say, stepping out of character, and he meant it. After he had finished pretending to strangle himself with one hand round the side of a flat or the edge of a curtain – an impressive optical illusion of its own – he didn’t have to say a word as giddy-eyed he regained his balance: it could have been the hand of the Boston Strangler. When his magical prowess let him down, the subtle insinuation of self-reproach as he ignored the world and took refuge in the nearest table top said it all, as if the President of The Magic Circle was about to tap him on the shoulder and ask for his medal back.
Equally impressive was his ability to summon up real tears. Although he abjured sentiment and self-pity in his performance, he traded on the genuine emotion to send up pathos. Barry Cryer remembers there was no need for a make-up girl’s glycerine: ‘He could genuinely cry to order.’ A television sketch designed to make capital of the trait had Cooper bemoaning the fate of his lost budgerigar. It happens to be perched on his fez in full view of the audience throughout, but their laughter does not deter him from weeping buckets: ‘He was in that little cage – (sob) – and now he’s gone – (sob) – I bought him a little ladder so that he could go up and down like that – (sob) – and now he’s gone.’ It all gets too much and he pulls out a handkerchief to mop up the tears: ‘I’ll be alright. I’ll get over it.’ But still they come, until Cooper absentmindedly takes off the fez and discovers the object of his affection, which in an instant switch of feeling he proceeds to hit repeatedly. In another sketch he emerged tight-lipped and resolute from a casino having lost a million francs: no sooner was he outside than the water gates opened and he was bawling like a baby. Had they been anything less than realistic, none of these reactions would have been half as funny, bearing out the old adage about truth in comedy. Because none of it was happening to us, it was funny, but only because we believed implicitly that the pain, the fear, the guilt, the sadness was happening to him.
His television sketches are full of brilliant moments when he brings such skills into play: the registering of pain as he brings his hand down on the pile of bricks in the karate sketch; the conviction with which, in the restaurant sketch, he handles the wet rubber fish as if it were alive; the agony with which in another casino scene he eats the chips from the newspaper, too hot to hold and to eat. But if there were any doubt of his skill in this area of expression one has only to look at the way in which he would physically embellish an otherwise straightforward monologue. Consider one of his favourite routines, the one centred upon the seaside town of Margate:
I was in Margate last summer for the summer season. A friend of mine said, ‘You wanna go to Margate. It’s good for rheumatism.’ So I went and I got it. And I tried to get into a hotel. It was packed. So I went to this big boarding house and I knocked at the door and the landlady put herhead out of the window and said, ‘What d’you want?’ Isaid, ‘I wanna stay here.’ She said, ‘Well stay there’ and shutthe window. And while I was there I bought one of these suit. I bought the whole thing. Goggles –flippers – tank onthe ack. And I had a photograph taken like that – and likethat. You never know, do you? You never know. And I went cos you’re not supposed todive in – it’s dangerous. And I jumped in like that and I think I turned a little bit on the way down and I went down about a hundred and fifty-five feet. It was lovely. Very quiet. And I’m going along like that. I’ve got the instructions here.And I get rid of them and start doing out like that. And thefeet are going like that. Not in the front – in the back –d’you know what I mean? And I don’t care now – d’youknow what I mean? I’m all over the place – the gogglesgetting all misty – and I’m humming to myself – hmmmhmmm, hmmm hmmm – not loud – just hmmm hmmm – and all of a sudden I saw a man walking towards me in a sports jacket and grey flannels. I thought, ‘That’s unusual for a Thursday.’ So I went towards him, moving like this, and I got right up to himand I took this pad out and wrote on it, ‘What are you doing down here walking about i
n a
sports jacket and grey flannels?’ and he took this pad fromme and wrote on it ‘I’m drowning!’
The whole sequence was a physical powerhouse, the words in italics spelling out where his body went into overdrive in the cause of expression. The arms flung wide to denote size; the dialogue directed at the landlady on the upper floor; the ludicrous representation of Cooper the frogman; the prim half-profile turns to accommodate the catchphrases; the finger-pointing admonition on deep-sea safety; the boisterous threshing against the sea with the right hand while the left holds the instruction manual; the hands flip-flopping nineteen to the dozen to illustrate the feet – in the front and in the back; the growing sense of disorientation; the mime of the pad and pencil; not to mention a myriad of casual winks and looks to acknowledge the audience in best Max Miller fashion; all contributed to a bravura performance that, with the exception of Ken Dodd, no contemporary stand-up comedian was – or is – capable of delivering.
Equally impressive was the energy he threw into the telling of his quaint repertoire of shaggy animal stories, of which the most notable was that concerning the king of the jungle:
You know – the king of the jungle – the lion. And one day he woke up – he had a very bad temper – and he said tohimself, ‘I’m just going outside now and teach them allwho’s king of the jungle: Just to teach them. So he gets up and he goes, ‘Grrrrrr’. He was really mad, you know what I mean? ‘Grrrrrr’. And he saw a little chimp and he said, You’re the king of the jungle.’ ‘Well that’s alright then. across a laughing hyena and he said, ‘Hey you, laughing boy.’ And he went, ‘Hah hah, hah hah hah. Hah hah, hah hah hah!’ He said, ‘Who’s the king of the jungle?’ (He mimes ooh ooh aah, you are, you are.’ So he walked on a little bit further and right at the very end was an elephant and a gorilla talking. And this gorilla looked at the elephant and of the jungle” bit again. He always does it.’ He said, ‘I’m went up a tree. He said, ‘I’ll give you a trunk call later.’ Hah hah hah! So he went up to this elephant and he said, ‘Hey you. I’m talking to you, Big Ears.’ He said, ‘Who’s theking of the jungle?’ And this elephant got his trunk andwrapped it right round him and threw him up in the air and the king of the jungle? Who’s the king of the jungle?’ And he hit the ground hard. And he picked him up again and he threw him against the tree and he threw him against theother tree. Then the other one. Then the other one. Then the other one. And he sank to the ground like that. It may have been like that. No. It was like that. And the lion saidto the elephant, ‘Look, there’s no good getting mad just
In his telling one feels the apprehensiveness of the chimp, the stupidity of the hyena, the sharp clawed anger of the lion. The final encounter is a visual triumph as Cooper takes upon himself the part of the pachyderm as it subjects the lion to the indignities it has been holding in reserve for the beast. This climax magnificently embraces mime, burlesque, audience acknowledgement and sheer physical effort. When added together they must come close to something called ‘acting’. According to Val Andrews, Tommy had immense respect for members of the acting profession. Val states that he would come away from performing on television shows with the likes of Deryck Guyler complaining of his poor performance: ‘You’ve no idea how terrible I was, but Deryck couldn’t put a foot wrong.’ Within his own charted territory, neither could Cooper.
The acting profession has always doffed a cap in his direction. Sometime in the early Eighties Trevor Howard begged Michael Parkinson to arrange a meeting between himself and Cooper, so strong was his admiration for the acting ability he saw at the core of the comedian’s act. More recently Anthony Hopkins has revealed himself as the foremost Cooper fan, identifying with the apparent anarchy within the performance and using his own vibrant impersonation to break the tension on many an uptight film set. It is difficult to give any credence to his repeated chat show claim that he based aspects of Hannibal Lecter, his Oscar-winning role from Silence of the Lambs, on the great clown. More relevant is his less publicized admission that in August, the version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya by Julian Mitchell that Hopkins directed for Theatre Clwyd in Wales in 1994, he played the leading role with a touch of Tommy: ‘I started putting these laughs in – in the middle of this scene describing the professor’s pomposity. It just happened one night by accident and I think the audience picked up on it because I started laughing like Tommy Cooper and I thought I’d better not go too far because I’ll step outside the play and make the other actors start laughing too much. But I was tempted to. I wish I had actually.’ Another knight, Michael Gambon, capable of no mean Cooper impression himself, succumbed to a similar tendency at the National Theatre in 1995, where, according to supporting actor, Martin Freeman – later to achieve prominence in television’s The Office – he proved ‘an absolute joy, somehow weaving Tommy Cooper into the ad-libbing.’
When Tommy was playing a club in the Birmingham area in 1976 Trevor Nunn took a party of actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford to see the master performer at work. In return for the hospitality extended by Cooper after the show, Nunn invited Tommy and Mary Kay to a matinée of A Winter’s Tale the following day. When Michael Williams as Autolycus arrived on stage wearing a fez – part of his basic costume – Tommy interpreted this as a gesture to himself. To Mary’s embarrassment, the actor’s opening lines were punctuated by the comedian’s trademark laugh and the audience roared out of all proportion to the comedic weight the words carried. Nunn had arranged an informal get-together for after the performance, at which Williams’s wife, Judi Dench was likely to be present. It later transpired she did not appear, being too much in awe of meeting the comedian. Happily Williams himself, a frustrated vaudevillian whose impersonation of the much imitated music hall veteran Robb Wilton was considered the best, had not been in the least perturbed. It is significant that in the last years of his life Cooper’s own performance assumed aspects of the quiet, puzzled thoughtfulness that had once characterized the mood of Wilton’s act.
It is a pity that for all his strength as a live performer on stage and on television, Cooper never managed fully to flex his muscles in the cinema, if only to leave behind one film that would properly epitomize his talent long after the vagaries of television scheduling and the video industry have ceased to have any need for him. Nothing could do justice to his live talent, but the clues to the magic of Sid Field and Max Miller that remain captured on celluloid do more than justify the inferior quality of the films that purvey them. As his career gathered momentum in the Fifties, Cooper was not considered an obvious cinematic option. No one was rushing to make him the new Norman Wisdom. The little man was a stand-alone phenomenon whose success would help to sustain the British film industry for the better part of fifteen years. There was no possibility that the likes of Harry Secombe, Benny Hill, Dave King, Charlie Drake – all given a fleeting moment of film fame in the hope of providing competition for Wisdom – would ever draw level with his amazing national eminence in the medium. The enquiries for Cooper that came the way of Miff Ferrie were for a ragbag of character roles rather than the long-term prospect of a movie star future, not surprisingly perhaps given the lower level of his theatrical billing in those early days.
At the end of 1954 the invitation to play a schoolmaster in support of overgrown schoolboy comic, Cardew ‘the Cad’ Robinson in his 1956 vehicle, Fun at St. Fanny’s was mercifully turned down. Three months later a more prestigious offer came with the opportunity to play the Danny Green role of the punch-drunk boxer, ‘One-round Lawson’ as one of the team alongside Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Cecil Parker, and Herbert Lom in Sandy Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers. His commitment to Paris by Night at the Prince of Wales Theatre stood in the way – or so Miff said – of a film role that could have made a significant impact on his career. The following year he was given a screen test at Elstree by MGM for a part in The Little Hut, that of the native chief who arrives on the desert island to upset the eternal triangle of its stars, Ava Gardn
er, Stewart Granger, and David Niven. The role would have given Cooper fourth billing to the big names, but nothing came of the test and it was eventually taken by Italian screen comedian and, coincidentally, former boxing champion, Walter Chiari.
There were the inevitable queries for movies that never got made or were dangled in front of him with illustrious stars attached and materialized later with lesser names as standard B-movie fodder. It is ironic that when he did accept an invitation to go before the cameras it was as another punch-drunk boxer in a desultory affair called And the Same To You. The film, best described genre-wise as sub-Ealing comedy, was released in January 1960 and featured Brian Rix and William Hartnell billed above Cooper in the cast. So insignificant was he to the plot that its précis in the Monthly Film Bulletin makes no mention of his character. Tommy played Horace Hawkins, a dim-witted pugilist of the kind that Bernard Bresslaw would soon make his own in the short-lived BBC sitcom, Meet the Champ. Cooper passed in and out of the action – some nonsense about a vicar hiring out a church hall for illegal fights to raise money for the roof of the hall – wearing an air of bewildered innocence that veered between fear and geniality. He later admitted he was awful in the role, laying back in his chair and rolling his eyes around like blue glass marbles to prove the point. The movie epitomized the poor record of the British cinema in transposing vibrant variety talent to the screen. It was slow, unsubtle and old-fashioned and made no attempt to capitalize on his presence, in spite of the promise of his first shot on camera, registering pain – as only he could – as he punches his own left fist in the excitement of cheering on a colleague in the ring.
