You are in the Special Features section - Peter Cook British comedian and satirist

Peter Cook was the King of the British satire boom in the early sixties, at least until That Was The Week That Was came along and David Frost arguably usurped that status temporarily. Tall, good-looking and intelligent, witty and with enormous mental agility and verbal dexterity, he had a wicked tongue and a Midas touch when it came to comedy.
First, as a major contributor to the critically successful box office smash Beyond The Fringe shows in the West End and New York, and then with the setting up of The Establishment comedy club in Soho and Private Eye magazine. These were followed by national fame when he teamed-up again with 'Fringe' colleague, the diminutive Dudley Moore, for Not Only But Also. Stars such as John Lennon were literally begging to appear as guests on the hit ground-breaking comedy show.

Following in the traditions of The Goons, and to be followed and paid tribute to by the Pythons, Cook lampooned and satirised remorselessly those in power and created some magical hilarious characters, such as Wisty and Spiggot. Later, he was to create two grotesques, again with Dudley, in the form of the outrageous and controversial pairing of Derek and Clive. Peter's performance on the Clive Anderson chat show in the 90's as several different characters has gone down in legend as a masterful performance.

Peter, who died in 1995, was recently awarded the most prestigious of awards, the ultimate accolade of being voted the comedian's comedian in a poll of British comedians and comedy actors.

The Peter Cook Appreciation Society ran its own fanzine, 'Publish & Bedazzled', from 1995 to 2004, the best bits of which are now compiled in a book, 'How Very Interesting' (Snowbooks 2006), by Pub & Bed's editors Peter Gordon and Paul Hamilton, along with Dan Kieran of The Idler. We caught up with Peter Gordon, now editor of 'Kettering: the magazine of elderly British Comedy', to discuss the enduring popularity of Peter Cook. 

 

Digger:  How would you describe the relationship between Peter Cook and Dudley Moore?

Peter G: Professionally, inspired. The perfect balance. I think it was Jerry Sadowitz who said that they were like a jazz band, with Cook in full free-wheeling improvisation at the front while Dudley provided the rhythm section, the grounding in reality that made sense of the whole. Cook worked with plenty of other writers and performers after the split with Dud, and the best of them like Chris Morris and Bernard McKenna brought out amazing stuff in Cook, but I don't think he ever found the same creative space with anyone other than Moore.

Personally... Well, I never met them, but one gets the impression that their behind-the-scenes partnership was a fair mixture of heaven and hell. I'm sure there were plenty of resentments, jealousies and all the rest of it, but then I suspect that's the case with any intensively creative pairing. And there were plenty of highs to go with the lows - they wouldn't have stuck at it for the best part of twenty years otherwise.

Maybe I should leave it with a quote from that appearance on Michael Parkinson's show:

DUD: It's like a marriage.
PARKY: How is it like a marriage?
COOK: We're getting divorced.

 

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore

Digger: Would you agree that Cook was a genius who realised his full potential in many ways, rather than a clever and witty man who squandered his full potential in later years?

Peter G: I've never quite understood the "squandered potential" argument. I mean, he changed the face of British comedy, starred in two Broadway hit shows, and in those 1993 Clive Anderson shows proved he was as sharp as ever. Okay, so he had a quiet eighties, but then so did a lot comedians of his generation. I don't know, maybe people feel he should have written novels or directed films or run the BBC or something. But he changed the way Britain laughed. That's a pretty mighty legacy in my books.

Digger: What do you think of Derek and Clive, particularly when compared to Pete and Dud?

Peter G: Well, I like 'em. I mean, I think it had gone off the boil a bit by the time of the third album, Ad Nauseam and the film, Derek & Clive Get The Horn, but the second album, Come Again, seems to be pretty much perfect to me. (I'm referring to the original vinyl version - they've bunged a load of "bonus" outtake tracks on the CD which I think drag down the over-all quality.)

The difference between Derek & Clive and the earlier Dagenham Dialogues is that the Pete and Dud stuff was obviously designed for a mass audience; an adult audience, and they weren't afraid to play it near the knuckle when they could, but it still had to go out on telly. Derek & Clive was for listening to in private. I think even Derek & Clive's most hardcore fans would admit that it was never going to be enjoyed by everyone; it's part of the appeal of a cult (I said 'cult') hit - the feeling that being part of the elite that gets it gives you an automatic personal link to the record.

At heart, it's experimental comedy. Like any experimental piece of work it fails as often as it shines, but it's always interesting.

 

 

Derek and Clive

Digger: Did David Frost take advantage of Cook's absence in America to front what became the satire boom?

Well, I'm not sure how much you can really blame Frost himself for it. Cook tried to sell the BBC a TV version of his Soho satirical nightclub, The Establishment which they passed on. Then when Cook was in the US with Beyond The Fringe, Auntie (the BBC) got Ned Sherrin to put together That Was The Week That Was, which was pretty much the same idea. Obviously, Cook was fairly fuming about it at the time, phoning the UK each week to check which jokes of his Frost had nicked. But someone was bound to make a TV show out of the Satire Boom that Fringe had started sooner or later, and presumably someone at the Beeb (the BBC) worked out it would be cheaper to do and more controllable if they fronted it was a relative unknown like Frost rather than Cook, who was already a star.

A lot of people are very keen to knock Frost on Cook's behalf - I think it was Jonathan Miller who called him "The Bubonic Plagiarist', and Cook was fond of saying the only thing he regretted in life was the time he saved Frost from drowning. And it's certainly true that while at Cambridge Frost modelled himself very carefully on Cook. But I always think there's an unpleasant whiff of snobbery about some of the flak Frost gets - public school boys looking down on the grammar school upstart.

Plus, when the whole satire boom went down the plug in 1964, I don't think it did Cook any harm at all that the public associated it with Frost rather than him.

Digger: Why was Beyond The Fringe so successful?

Peter G: Would I sound facetious if I said "Because it was so good"? It still is. A film of the show was found in New York a couple of years ago and has been released on DVD over there but, for some reason, not in the UK. It's a huge pity, because seeing it now makes you realise what an incredible set of performers they were. The audio recordings are available, but they're really only half the story.

And of course the whole satire thing was something wholly fresh. Not that there's much in it that we'd really call satire now, only Cook's impersonation of Harold Macmillan, which was ground-breaking - imitations of living people were still technically illegal at the time - but seems rather tame to modern ears. It had the "being there first" factor.

 

 

Pete and Dud in Not Only But Also

Digger: Are the stories about Peter and his application to join (British Actor's Union) Equity true?

Peter G: Yeah. When Cook applied to join there was already a Peter Coke on the books - he used to play Paul Temple on the radio – and there was also a singer called Peter Cook. They had strict rules on people having names that were too similar. When they asked him to come up with alternatives he came up with a list, including Xavier Blancmange and Sting Thundercock. They didn't bother him after that.

Digger: What do you think it is about comics like Spike, Kenneth Williams,  Hancock and Peter that makes them so self-destructive in many ways?

Peter G: It's the legend, isn't it, that comedians make some kind of Faustian pact, that the talent comes at a price. It goes right back to the days of Dan Leno and Little Titch and, before them, Grimaldi. Maybe it's the nature of the job. You're working with something so intangible. As Hancock found out, you can make the world laugh one day and then be greeted with stony silence the next. A lot of comedians, like Tommy Cooper, refused to analyse what they did at all, almost out of a superstitious belief that looking at it too closely would make it go away. Although Hancock certainly wasn't afraid to analyse and used to draw diagrams and flowcharts of funniness - trying to quantify the laws of comedy physics.

As for Cook's own brand of self-destructiveness, his first divorce certainly hit him hard. I'm not sure he ever really recovered from it. But it's from that well of darkness that he produced some of what I think was his most original work, like the best of Derek & Clive and more mainstream pieces like Minidrama, a sketch about a psychotic cab driver from the early '70s. They may have been self-destructive - Milligan with his manic depression, Hancock's restless perfectionism and Cook's cosmic boredom and so on - but that's also what fuelled their comedy, what made them original and interesting. Can you separate the one from the other?

Digger: What are your favourite lines and sketches of Peter's?

Peter G: Oh, it changes every week or so. The one that really got me into his stuff, that made a full on fan, is the sketch about Sir Arthur Streeb Greebling and his failed attempts to teach ravens to fly underwater. It's an incredibly audacious sketch, completely abandoning its own premise halfway through, and has some killer lines in it.

'I've often thought of taking something else up, you know... a bit more sort of commercial. But it's very difficult when you go round to a firm and they say "What were you doing before this?" and you say "Well, I was hovering about, ten foot under water, attempting unsuccessfully to get ravens to fly". They tend to look down their noses at you.'   

 

    

Peter Cook - comic genius and legend

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Many thanks to Peter Gordon for the interview

 

 

For further information:

The Peter Cook Appreciation Society

Kettering Magazine- the magazine of Elderly British Comedy