by John Fisher
The Plank in its revised form was transmitted in the run-up to Christmas 1979, marking the first of a short run of occasional specials by Sykes within the semi-silent genre. The following year Rhubarb was submitted for a makeover. In spite of the risk of incurring the wrath of Miff, Sykes had exerted pressure on his chum to take part. Again Tommy appeared compliant. In February 1980 Thames offered £5,000.00 for the new project. Miff said ‘No’ and Tommy concurred with the words he usually used when he agreed the deal was not up to scratch: ‘You do the business!’ Not until 1982 did the pair work together again, first in a Sykes television special, and then in the fourth of the semi-silent shows, It’s Your Move, for which he was paid £5,000.00 and £6,000.00 respectively. The Eric Sykes 1990 Show, in which Tommy appeared in a guest line-up alongside Chic Murray, Dandy Nichols, guitarist John Williams and veteran announcer, Leslie Mitchell, was an uneasy attempt to guy the television of the future, where programmes are the items squeezed in between the commercials and those same programmes have to be paid for by the people who star in them. It did not do Cooper justice.
It’s Your Move was more rewarding, with Tommy and Eric reprising their workmen roles, now recast as removal men, with Richard Briers and Sylvia Syms as a newly married couple moving into their first home. Although only half the length of The Plank, it achieved something like the same rate of visual gags as the intrepid pair and their colleagues brought chaos to the entire street. The soundtrack is sadly plastered with unsubtle and raucous audience laughter, the curse of its television origins. Nevertheless, the pleasure of watching Cooper advance towards camera holding a giant Oriental urn in front of himself, suggestive of some bizarre fugitive from the Arabian Nights, is matched by the joy of seeing him use a bed as a trampoline. To the strains of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ he becomes for a fleeting moment a child again, jumping up and down until he is spotted by Eric, at which point he steps off the bed and walks into the house a much older man. Throughout the film the walk that Sykes strained so hard to capture in The Plank is more tentative, more spasmodic, and – at the cost of greater pain – even funnier. It is also rewarding to see Sykes exploring the reaches of white magic, Stan Laurel style, on Tommy’s behalf. As Bob Todd amuses himself playing a grand piano, Cooper comes along and takes the strut supporting the lid to use as a snooker cue: the lid of the piano stays suspended in the air. In another sequence a scantily clad Sylvia Syms pushes a wardrobe in front of the bedroom door in her desperation to get some privacy to change. No sooner has she done so than the film cuts to Cooper opening the same door from the landing. He steps through the door and emerges from the wardrobe on the other side with a pile of blankets. He puts the blankets down, acknowledges his embarrassment by doffing his bowler to Syms, and then walks back through the wardrobe, the doors of which close behind him. Syms wastes no time in inspecting the cupboard, but there is no one inside and no sign of any exit by which he could have left. It is seldom that a camera trick offers genuine mystery, so skilfully is the gag executed.
Today, Sykes looks back on the working partnership with his friend with great frustration, blaming Miff for coming between himself and Cooper by asking for amounts that Thames couldn’t afford. However, in fairness, Tommy was, in Eric’s own words, ‘the biggest thing in the country’, capable of commanding vast sums for his appearances. It would have been totally remiss of Ferrie to have debased the coinage of his client’s value and it may sadden Sykes to learn that this was the line often endorsed by his client. He also overlooks how the harsh working hours of filming cut against the grain of Cooper’s lifestyle. Tommy never relished getting up at six o’clock in the morning to be at location and then, in his own words, ‘having to be funny in cold blood’. Appealing as The Plank and It’s Your Move are, they in no way represent the best archival evidence of Cooper’s true talent. Nevertheless, as bonus diversions within a major career they are to be cherished. Sykes has the great gift of inspiring trust within his profession and it is to his credit that a colleague of Cooper’s stature and individuality was prepared to place himself so unequivocally in his hands. No sooner had the saga of the removal men been completed than both men were talking of another film in which they played two plumbers tackling a big freeze. It would not be the only project with Sykes’s name attached to it to be thwarted by Tommy’s death.
Few careers progress without opportunities falling by the wayside, whether by luck or judgement. Fortunately for Cooper those that were missed would not have made too much difference in the final reckoning of his achievement. However, if it were possible to wind back the clock and magic one into reality, I personally would have no hesitation in bypassing the prospect of Educating Archie, the important interest shown by Galton and Simpson, or a further minor masterpiece by Eric Sykes in favour of the film opportunity that presented itself in July 1966. The request came from Hollywood producer, Arthur Jacobs, for Tommy to play the part of ‘a seedy circus proprietor’ in the film version of Doctor Dolittle starring Rex Harrison in the title role. It would have entailed four weeks shooting in California from the end of September in lieu of a week in Dunstable and a few scattered cabaret bookings prior to recording the first of the Cooperama shows for ABC Television at the end of October. It is impossible to imagine the situation was not flexible. Maybe Miff would have looked more favourably on the vehicle if the character had not been described as ‘seedy’. The extended cameo of Albert Blossom, the boisterous circus showman went instead to Richard Attenborough, who turned in a convincing enough interpretation of the vaudeville spirit to win a best supporting actor Golden Globe award. And so Cooper lost out on immortalizing himself as a latter day Stanley Holloway or even Harry Champion, bouncing along with the song Attenborough made famous: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life!’ Tommy could have brought the song back home to England as an alternative signature tune. Had screenwriter and lyricist, Leslie Bricusse agreed, the circus attraction to end them all – the two-headed llama known as the pushmi-pullyu – might well have attracted a demonstrative ‘Not like that, like that’ from the master. In retrospect it is all supposition, but it feels so right. One can even see the magnificent Rex for once in his career conceding his picture to a lowlier cast member.
Outside of the Dolittle context, Rex Harrison may seem an unlikely performer to call to the witness stand in evidence of Cooper’s potential acting prowess. In his book, The Incomparable Rex, his brilliant evocation of the star whom he describes as ‘the last of the high comedians,’ writer and director Patrick Garland allowed his subject to reminisce on the great matinée idols of the first half of the twentieth century. While Cooper could never pretend to the suavity and elegance of Hawtrey, du Maurier, and Hicks, he did share what Harrison described as ‘their extraordinary concealment of art’. In other words, they didn’t look as if they were acting: ‘They played their comedy on the balls of their feet. I remember to this day, their alert posture, well-balanced, but pitched slightly forward, attentive and yet relaxed. Producing gold cigarette cases out of inside pockets, with a kind of magician’s sleight of hand, removing, opening, closing, concealing the case again, and then flicking up the cigarette from finger into mouth with the same effortless dexterity.’ The magician analogy is an amazing red herring of a coincidence, but the description of these great light comedians corresponds eerily with the sloping grace, the unexpected poise and delicacy, not to mention the dexterity of Cooper in action. According to Harrison they shared a special inner energy that allowed them to stand on a stage and do nothing: ‘By definition, an actor can’t get up on the stage and do nothing. That isn’t acting. But equally he shouldn’t be seen to be acting … The true comedian, like the true bullfighter, should affect to do nothing.’ The italics in affect are mine.
Comparing videotapes of Cooper from the beginning and the end of his career, it occurs that he was almost alone among comedians of his generation in being allowed to grow old by his public. Others achieve longevity and stay in the public favour purely bec
ause they retain the illusion, whether physical or mental, of youth. Ken Dodd’s energy as he approaches his eightieth year would defeat many a young pretender on the alternative comedy circuit. Max Bygraves looks amazing for his age and may yet prove to be the British George Burns in this regard. Norman Wisdom still has an impish quality and he has passed ninety. Their popularity was and is dependent in no small part on the age-defeating process. Milligan, although physically frail, remained as bright as a button to the end of his days. Cooper, however, was not so blessed. As ill health took its toll, the timbre of the manic laugh became gruffer and more resonant. His features became fuller, his shoulders slumped, his pace decelerated, his outward energy waned, the mood of his act became even melancholic at times, but the public continued to give of their laughter and affection. It was as if something remarkable was happening to the comedy process. While the individual personas of those mentioned have remained constant throughout their careers, Cooper’s noticeably changed with age and the wear and tear that went with it. With maturity he developed an attitude – or, more accurately, a shift in attitude – and audiences, aware of the ravages health had played on him, were more than happy to subscribe to the revised version of their favourite buffoon.
In this way he forestalled the potential disappointment of audiences as it became impossible for him to keep up with the frenetic nature of his earlier style. The look that had once been a darting glance of comic acknowledgement as a trick misfired now took on a more searching, more contemplative aspect. His habit of dispensing with one prop and then meandering apparently aimlessly, even illogically to the other table to find the next became funny in itself. Peter Hudson recalls the occasion he genuinely lost a prop on stage and spent a minute searching from table to table, in his quest shifting things from one place to another amid the debris that had piled up through the act. By now, audiences assumed it was part of the act. As with W. C. Fields, they were able to read into his behaviour a comic statement about life in all its frustration and futility, straight man, in Tynan’s phrase, ‘to a malevolent universe which had singled him out for siege and destruction’. Like Jack Benny and Tony Hancock at the height of his powers Cooper had caught up with Rex Harrison’s criterion of affecting to do nothing. It is a quality that, had his health allowed, may – with the blessing of the same audience – have given him the ability to have progressed to the type of dramatic role that writers like Beckett and Pinter spun out of the cadences of banal commonplace speech and the hidden meanings implied between their lines.
Significantly Max Wall, Cooper’s near-contemporary, who became the prime exponent of such parts within the so-called ‘theatre of the absurd’, is the only other top British comedian I can call to mind who sustained a similar shift in audience tolerance, the much publicized problems within his private life providing the catalyst in this instance. His transition from tap-dancing novelty act and grotesque piano-master to bearer of seemingly all the woes inflicted upon man in the cause of laughter underlined the skill with which he, like Cooper, brilliantly subverted the art of comedy in his later years. His reaction to tripping over some invisible obstacle –‘A little hole sticking up! (Pause) How desperate can a comedian be?’– is the visual equivalent of every ‘bad’ joke Cooper ever told, making comic capital out of the sheer desperation that so often accompanies their profession. Tommy’s typical look – the one that said, ‘What am I doing here in the first place?’– corresponded so aptly with Wall’s general demeanour and with Beckett’s most famous opening line: ‘Nothing to be done’. It may not be so difficult to imagine him as Estragon in Waiting for Godot. Interestingly, among all his papers – the gag sheets and American joke bulletins, the magic trick instructions and dog-eared television scripts – was a stray sheet from a more serious source. How it arrived there, no one knows. One would like to think that in Tommy’s closing years an enterprising Peter Hall or Trevor Nunn sent the fuller version to him. I refer to a single page of dialogue from Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, the part where the two gunmen, Ben and Gus, discourse on road accidents and the crockery at their disposal as they play their own waiting game. It doesn’t take too much imagination to hear Cooper saying: ‘Listen to this! A man of eighty-seven wanted to cross the road. But there was a lot of traffic, see? He couldn’t see how he was going to squeeze through. So he crawled under a lorry.’ It is a temptation not to resist adding, ‘Just like that!’
ELEVEN
Health and Home Affairs
The Coopers were never ostentatious in displaying the fruits of their success. The solid red-brick suburban house in Chiswick, to which they moved towards the end of 1955, remained the principal family home until Gwen’s own death in 2002. It was the residence of a successful professional couple, but not the lavish abode of a major star on a locked estate with exclusive private access to the golf course at the bottom of the garden. At the end of the Sixties they acquired a second home in the old quarter of Eastbourne. A pair of modest labourer’s cottages converted into one, this was little more than a bolt hole where no one paid them attention, Gwen could feel close to her roots and Tommy could learn his lines, rather than an elaborate coastal mansion in stunning grounds. Its garden, in perpetual shade, was hardly larger than the Chiswick kitchen.
The Coopers were decent, unpretentious people with their feet on the ground and no delusions of social status, never appearing to need the reassurance that materialism brings. Those who enjoyed their hospitality will testify to the complete lack of side displayed by the couple. As Gwen admitted to Janet and Jimmy Farrow, who became two of their closest friends after Jimmy, a delivery driver, knocked apprehensively on the door asking for an autograph, ‘If it wasn’t for the likes of you, we wouldn’t be where we are now.’ Tommy’s philosophy of success was quite simple. As he said in one newspaper interview, ‘I live quite well now, but not expensively. The idea of making money is only to make your life a bit easier, isn’t it?’ Fortunately Gwen, nothing if not down-to-earth where her husband was fanciful, took care of all financial matters. It never occurred to Tommy to open bills, let alone to pay them. As his wife said, ‘He had no idea about money. If I’d let him have his way, he’d have spent every penny he earned.’ The live-in presence of their dedicated maid, Sheila was the only tell-tale clue to the fact that they could have afforded a more lavish life style once Tommy’s career consolidated itself in the Sixties.
The mock-baronial interior of the converted hall and dining area was a shrine to domesticity with few clues to the show business connections of its inhabitants. A motley collection of antique prints and paintings and a dresser groaning with antique blue Staffordshire china were more dominant than the few pictures of show business colleagues scattered among the predominantly family portraits displayed on the baby grand piano. Unless you include the period coaching scene entitled Laying the Dust on the wall in the tiny next room – depicting, as it does, an array of ladies peeing under their fulsome skirts during a comfort break on their arduous journey from one side of the country to the other – a mirror with the smiling faces of Laurel and Hardy silhouetted into the glazing and framed signed photographs of Max Miller and Bob Hope were the only indication that comedy might be of more than passing interest to the people who lived there. However, there were times, of course, when the space became transformed into a laboratory of comic research, scattered with the tricks of the magician’s trade like a cartoon version of an alchemist’s eyrie. Once the curtains were drawn, the large oak dining table would become transformed into a vast experimental bench as Gwen with stop watch at the ready timed her husband’s rehearsals to the last second. Each gag, each trick was subjected to her own shrewd appraisal. The length of time she suggested they allow for laughs and applause was uncannily accurate. Tommy always set store by her opinion: ‘I don’t know how I’d manage without her. She says, “Do that gag there. Move that trick somewhere else. And then finish your act with such and such.” And she’s never wrong. She’s always right.’
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p; The address at Chiswick also provided the background to another kind of comedy, an unintentional domestic sitcom that might have been scripted by the legendary cartoonist, Giles, had he been persuaded to swap drawing board for typewriter and the camera’s lens. Giles was, in fact, a friend of the family and Tommy did one year provide the foreword to his cartoon annual, joining a distinguished roll call that included Sir John Betjeman, Denis Norden, Dave Allen, and Frank Sinatra, no less. His knack for depicting the most intricate comic detail within the wider domestic scene would have brilliantly captured the surreal obstacle course Tommy set around the house for Gwen and their children, Vicky and Thomas. If he brought his wife breakfast in bed it was to take advantage of the trick rubber spiders he had concealed on the tray. His penchant for practical jokes extended to imitation beetles left in the bath, snakes that sprung out of cocoa tins, books that burst into flames or gave out an electric shock when opened. On one occasion he installed a full-size ventriloquist’s dummy in the downstairs cloakroom and gave his daughter the fright of her life. One journalist recalls interviewing Tommy at home when a chilling scream reverberated down the stairs: Sheila had just discovered a ‘severed hand’ in the laundry basket. Tommy would quite lose control of himself when the jokes worked. Gwen described the aftermath of the occasion he placed a wind-up jumping spider under her make-up bag: ‘The damn thing leapt across the room when I moved the bag and I nearly died of a heart attack. He just fell about. He laughed and laughed and laughed, lying on the bed with his feet in the air. You have to laugh at him.’ Towards the end of his life Tommy had a simple explanation of just what he was up to when he involved her in his shenanigans: ‘She hates it. But it’s the way she knows I love her, because I’m still thinking about her – searching the world for any trick to frighten her – after all these years.’ Gwen reciprocated: ‘I wouldn’t swap him for anything. Not even for a few hours’ peace, although I’d be sorely tempted.’
