{"id":10008,"date":"2020-01-09T16:37:20","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T16:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10008"},"modified":"2020-09-02T14:04:48","modified_gmt":"2020-09-02T14:04:48","slug":"recalling-peter-cook-and-his-effortless-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10008","title":{"rendered":"Recalling Peter Cook and his effortless comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 Peter Cook, who died 25 years ago today aged 57, was the funniest person I ever saw and ever met. He was naturally, effortlessly funny but he was never \u2018on\u2019 in the way some comedians seem to always be performing.<\/p>\n

He was famous for the Tony Award-winning stage shows \u2018Beyond the Fringe\u2019 (1962) and \u2018Good Evening\u2019 (1974), the much-loved British television series \u2018Not Only \u2026 but Also\u2019 (1965-70), and films such as \u2018The Wrong Box\u2019 (1966) and \u2018Bedazzled\u2019 (1967). But his legendary status in the U.K. derives from his many television appearances as a satirist in the Sixties and Seventies, the stage shows \u2018The Secret Policeman\u2019s Ball\u2019 and ownership of the groundbreaking Establishment nightclub in London and the humour publication Private Eye.<\/p>\n

I spent time with him in 1981 when he was in Los Angeles making a short-lived sitcom titled \u2018The Two of Us\u2019, an American version of Donald Sinden\u2019s British Seventies comedy series \u2018Two\u2019s Company\u2019. Relaxed and easy-going, he said he had never planned his career. \u201cCareer goals, or whatever they\u2019re called? No, a number of things have happened obviously not by chance. I\u2019ve written stuff and worked on stuff but I haven\u2019t really thought of my life in terms of a career that has some peak to which it should aspire. Or any depths to which it should sink, for that matter. Or any plateau along which I should walk. It just seems to have gone along.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said he discovered he could be funny while at Cambridge University. \u201cAt school, I used to wander around doing stuff that led to catchphrases. Why this confidence was there, I don\u2019t know but it was.\u201d He started writing comedy professionally while still at university. He wrote the famous \u2018One-legged Tarzan\u2019 sketch at age 18 and sold it and several other sketches to Kenneth Williams for a West End review called \u2018Pieces of Eight\u2019. By the time \u2018Beyond the Fringe\u2019 came along, he was established and joined Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore for the show at the Edinburgh Festival.<\/p>\n

As to his influences, he said, \u201cI\u2019ve never quite known. I would say probably Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Spike Milligan would be the ones who sort of filtered through in some way and stayed. \u2018The Goon Show\u2019 had enormous influence among many others. Evelyn Waugh is my favourite writer.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of his regrets was that his screenplay based on Evelyn Waugh\u2019s newspaper satire \u2018Scoop\u2019 was never filmed. \u201cI would have loved to have done it. I was going to play William Boot. We updated it. Africa remains in turmoil and we introduced a new character, an American CIA man, the most unsuccessful CIA man they have who is thrown out of this small African state. He was called Charles Ivor Arlington with his initials on the luggage that his mother had given him. He was constantly trying to bug things and people. It was a good script. I was pleased with it but we couldn\u2019t raise the money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Best of all, during our time together, over lunch at the Wine Bistro and in his dressing room at the CBS Radner Studios, was when he simply let his mind wander. We were talking about his sketches with Moore: \u201cWhenever I see Dudley, we can get something going anytime, upper class or lower class, it just sort of flows out without any thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said he loved vague sort of upper class people: \u201cOh, do, do, do come in the \u2026 what do we call it, dear? \u2026 room, oh, room, yes. Sit down on the, ah, we get them in, man brings them up \u2026 chair! When we first bought this house,\u00a0 <\/span>what did we have when we first bought this house? We had our whole life in front of us, that\u2019s what we had. Well, we still have, of course, but there\u2019s less of it now. I remember in the old days, I never thought about having my life in front of me or behind me. Always thought my life was just to left of me but apparently it wasn\u2019t. It was in front of me. And tomorrow\u2019s the last day of the rest of my life, is it? No, today is the first day of the month so you shouldn\u2019t eat an oyster.\u201d<\/p>\n

I told him that my old friend, another Peter Cook, and I used to telephone people at random and see if we could start a conversation. He ran with it: \u201cI thought I\u2019d give you a ring because, you know, we haven\u2019t talked for some time. In fact, we never ever have talked and I thought it was about time we established some sort of contact. Why? Well, I mean, if one starts asking why, one would never do anything. So I thought I\u2019d give you a ring, ask how you are and, indeed, ask who you are. I have your name but that could be an alias. Do you spy for anybody? I\u2019m in the pay of the Koreans at the moment. I have to go down to the fish market every Tuesday and look at the fish. I meet a little Chinese chap there. I give him a piece of paper and he gives me a piece of paper. Then I have to ring through to my, well, I wouldn\u2019t call him my superior, I\u2019ve never seen him. I only speak to him on the phone and give him some secrets about what\u2019s going on. I have to make them up because the fellow I meet down at the fish market doesn\u2019t speak a word of English. My sort of secrets are, well, they\u2019re completely secret because I forget them as soon as I\u2019ve been told them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cook said he was \u201crather annoyed\u201d at Cambridge when nobody asked him to become a spy: \u201cBit of an insult, really. I spoke French and German, fine material. The only trouble with being a spy is that you can\u2019t talk about your work to anybody. You can\u2019t come home to your wife and say, \u2018I\u2019ve toppled the leader of Ecuador.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 Peter Cook, who died 25 years ago today aged 57, was the funniest person I ever saw and ever met. He was naturally, effortlessly funny but he was never \u2018on\u2019 in the way some comedians … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,1263,2257,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-recalling","category-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10008"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10067,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10008\/revisions\/10067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}