Biography Of Peter Cook

  While waiting for Frost to get the funds together, Peter and Dudley had been approached by Lew Grade, whose ATV company was due to take over the Midlands ITV franchise as of August 1968. He wanted to poach Not Only . . . But Also and take it to ATV. Peter and Dudley had already turned the BBC down, but the sums being offered by Grade were considerable. They gave in to his overtures, and agreed to make three one-hour specials, to be entitled Goodbye Again. At Peter’s insistence the old-fashioned torch singers of the BBC series were to be replaced by a reasonably fashionable selection of rock bands. The first show was scheduled for transmission on 18 August 1968, on a Sunday night, with the next show going out the following Saturday and the last a fortnight later. The intention was to book an American celebrity for each show, with a view to selling the programmes to the States.

  ATV have proved better than the BBC at looking after precious old programmes. The first two episodes of Goodbye Again have survived, together with an LP record. The third show, together with a fourth programme commissioned and recorded in the summer of 1969, exist in a condition that could easily be restored for transmission if any of the TV channels see fit to pay for the work. What remains, though, is ample proof of the commonly held perception during the 1960s and 1970s that successful BBC shows invariably lost something in the big money transfer to ITV. Shaun O’Riordan, the producer, was not of the comedy Premier League like Joe McGrath or Dick Clement, and clashed with Peter and Dudley, especially when he preferred to reshoot sketches that had not run entirely smoothly the first time. Much of the genuine spontaneity that had characterised the two BBC series was lost. Also, despite the increased programme budget available, studio sizes were roughly the same, so O’Riordan still had to face the perennial sketch-show problem of cramming a number of items into a relatively confined space. Unlike McGrath and Clement, who had opted for a series of intimate and suggestive sets, O’Riordan instead went for one cavernous and detailed set that would encompass every item. The design was specifically linked to that week’s Pete and Dud dialogue: thus when Pete and Dud found themselves arrested in the first week, the entire show took place in a huge prison; the second week’s show, in which they discussed medical matters, was played out in an enormous functioning hospital ward; and the third show, in which they pontificated about each other’s physical fitness, took place in a spacious and well-populated gym. It was a profound misunderstanding of the importance of physical intimacy to the Pete and Dud act. It was also extremely confusing, as the dialogues did not take place until the second part of each show, so there was absolutely no explanation as to why Ike and Tina Turner were belting out River Deep Mountain High a background of nurses, drip-feeds and elderly patients.

  The need to fill sixty minutes each week told on Peter and Dudley’s creative abilities and busy schedules. As a result sketches which they once would have pruned were allowed to run too long, giving the shows a slight air of slackness. The rock groups and the long hair that Peter and Dudley now sported did not help either: their cast of elderly upper-class twits and sad working-class bores took on a more subversive air when acted by well-spoken, clean-cut, short-haired boys performing within the then still dignified and old-fashioned surroundings of the BBC. Their comedy now seemed to be coming from outside the Establishment rather than inside, culturally as well as geographically. All of which is not to deny that Goodbye Again contained some marvellous moments: it was the overall framework that was lacking.

  The first show, as far as can be pieced together from newspaper reviews and gramophone recordings, introduced a sophisticated Chelsea version of Pete and Dud named Peter and Dudley, and featured a version of The Trial in which the original Pete and Dud found themselves under arrest without knowing why. Pete chose to defend Dud, an idea inspired by his Cambridge notion of defending David Frost against the charge of having no bicycle lights:

  Judge:

  Where were you on the afternoon of the alleged offence?

  Pete:

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  My client refuses to answer that question – on the grounds that he has forgotten.

  The judge, incidentally, was also played by Peter, a performance which very much prefigured his triumphant parody of Mr Justice Cantley’s summing up in the Jeremy Thorpe case, at an Amnesty revue some years later.

  The first show was chiefly remarkable, however, for an astoundingly confessional sketch which broke – for the first and last time – all Peter’s previous unwritten rules about directly airing his personal life in public. Peter and Dudley played themselves – retitled for the occasion as Peter Rae and David Moon – in a thinly disguised rehash of their real love lives. Facts, names and places were chopped up, mixed and doled out arbitrarily between the two men, but were clearly recognisable as facts nonetheless. The sketch opened with Dudley grappling with a Spanish-speaking operator as he tries to contact his girlfriend, who is living not in Majorca but in Acapulco. The girlfriend, named Penny Garland (an obvious reference to Harriet Garland), turns out to be taking advantage of her freedom in the Latin sunshine to sleep around, and is having an affair with a photographer named Terry (another clear reference, this time to Dud’s ex-girlfriend Celia Hammond, who had left him for the photographer Terry Donovan). What Penny does not know, however, is that Dudley has begun an affair with a lover called Judy. ‘I imagine your relationship with Judy in no way alters your very deep personal feelings for Penny,’ remarks Peter sarcastically. Dudley has enlisted his friend’s help to provide bogus alibis – late work meetings, and so on – to enable him to continue the affair with Judy, undetected at long distance.

  Peter:

  Is she very suspicious?

  Dudley:

  No, it’s just that I sound guilty when I’m on the phone to her.

  Peter:

  You sound guilty? Do you think it’s anything to do with the fact that you are guilty? Could those two be possibly linked together, do you think?

  The sketch then continues to its denouement, a long-distance telephone argument in which the two cheating lovers accuse each other ofnfidelity while protesting their own innocence.

  This was playing with fire, as Wendy had just returned from eight months in Majorca and was actually sitting in the audience. It was this risk factor, the desire to see how close to the edge he could go without falling over, that had no doubt motivated Peter. At this stage, although she knew that he had been unfaithful, Wendy had absolutely no idea about his relationship with Judy Huxtable. Peter later explained what was going on to BBC Producer Jimmy Gilbert: ‘He used to say that Wendy disapproved of the whole thing of going to ATV, and didn’t like the series. She was in the audience, and it was pretty obvious that she wasn’t enjoying herself. So he used to try and get some sort of reaction. I don’t think the ATV series was a very happy or successful one.’

  The second Goodbye Again, starring Ike and Tina Turner and Donovan, survives intact, and affords a clearer opportunity for analysis. The most innovative element is that the show contains no punchlines: every sketch, including the musical items, is linked into the next in a continuous and consequently surreal stream. This was a technique first pioneered during an extended sketch in the 1966 Not Only . . . But Also Christmas special, and later adopted by the Monty Python team (who have generally been credited with conceiving the idea) in 1969. A great chunk of the budget was blown – as it was in each programme – on a huge troupe of dancing girls who came on and performed for no more than a few seconds. This was something of a satirical response to the financially enforced minimalism that had previously characterised every show Peter and Dudley had ever done: ‘We’ve always had this fantasy of having about thirty seconds of a hundred girls dashing across the stage, just for no reason at all,’7 Peter admitted later. Each show ended, as the BBC shows had done, with a performance of Goodbyee.

  The first item in the second show was an extended sketch entitled Sherlock Homes Investigates . . . The Case of the One-Legged Dog, with Peter naturally playing Holmes and Dudley a fa
intly sarcastic Dr Watson: ‘I realised for the eight millionth time that I was in the presence of a genius.’ The whole sketch took place on film, apparently shot in double-quick time in the same patch of woodland. Thereafter, most of the second part of the show was occupied by that week’s Pete and Dud dialogue, which soon drifted away from its supposed hospital theme into a description of a Black Mass hosted by the ubiquitous Mrs Woolley:

  Pete:

  She moaned and she trembled – and suddenly out of her mouth came a strange tongue.

  Dud:

  Somebody else’s tongue, Pete?

  Pete

  No, her own tongue came out, but she spoke in a strange ethereal mystic voice that was not her own. And suddenly she said––

  Nurse:

  ( behind Dud) The doctor will see you now.

  Dud:

  That’s uncanny! I didn’t see your lips move!

  Pete:

  Well, as in most of these cases, Dud, there is a rational explanation for that fact. The reason my lips didn’t move was, I wasn’t speaking.

  There followed a parody news report based on the Aden crisis, featuring Rodney Bewes, John Wells and Brian Murphy as various soldiers and journalists. Dudley, as Sergeant McPepper, is trying to launch a surprise night attack on the Arabs, but finds himself under intense media pressure to wait until daylight when filming conditions will be better.

  The final sketch, occupying the bulk of the third part, was the one intended to ‘get some reaction out of Wendy’ that week. A man, played by Dudley, goes to see his Teutonic psychiatrist because he is bored sick with his wife of seven years, who is mother to his two children. He has fallen in love with a girl called Jane and has begun an affair, and officially cannot decide between the two, although every time he is shown a picture of his wife he screams. The psychiatrist suggests Aversion Therapy: he will be given a tub of strawberry yoghurt every time a picture of his wife flashes up on the surgery’s slide projector, whereas every time his girlfriend Jane’s picture appears he will be smacked around the head with a cricket bat.

  Psychiatrist:

  You will sensate – or rather feel – I use the word ‘sensate’ advisedly, and wrongly indeed . . .

  At this point both Peter and Dudley began to get the giggles.

  Psychiatrist:

  It seems to amuse you . . .?

  Dudley was lost from this moment on, and soon collapsed into hysterics when a picture of his wife appeared and Peter tried to cram Turkish Delight into his mouth. Shaun O’Riordan had the good sense not to try to re-shoot this scene.

  The third show began with another filmed sketch, this time a Sherwood Forest parody with Dudley as Friar Tuck and Peter as Robin Hood, the leader of a merry band of in-laws (‘Outlaws, Tuck’, corrects Peter). The language was cod Shakespearean and the attack on the abilities and values of ‘straight’ actors implicit. The action then moved indoors to the ‘Sherwood Forest Health Club’, a transparently flimsy device to excuse the as yet unexplained gym setting, where Peter, Dudley, Rodney Bewes, John Wells and John Cleese performed the Alan A’Dale number from Not Only . . . But Also. This demonstrated in microcosm what was wrong with Goodbye Again: not just the fact that there was insufficient new material to fill a whole programme, but also the fact that the direction was failing to reflect the intimacy of the comedy. Whereas Joe McGrath had filmed ‘Alan A’Dale’ head on, concentrating closely on the earnestly optimistic faces of the performers as they sung their hilariously directionless twaddle, Goodbye Again saw the piece filmed largely in wide shot from the side, with a background of parallel bars.

  The second full-length sketch in the show, another parody news report on the subject of violence, showed yet more pre-Pythonesque touches. Dudley appeared as a Mrs Pepperpot-style old lady with headscarf and screeching falsetto, and the sketch investigated the problem of senile delinquency via the case of Fred and Deirdre Nimble, an elderly couple who are machine-gunned to death in slow motion after stealing a number of milk bottles. Dudley also appeared as football hooligan Ted Stagger, in a section based on Peter’s encounters at Old Trafford, while Peter appeared as Inspector Knacker of the Yard, a Richard Ingrams character borrowed from Private Eye. Again the direction let the joke down: Knacker was pictured expressing absolute confidence in the police’s ability to tackle crime, while a smash-and-grab raid on a jeweller’s took place in the background beyond his right shoulder. The basic rules of comedy direction dictate that the shot should have stayed fixed and the burglary kept as a background detail to undercut what the speaker was saying. O’Riordan cut away to big close-ups of the jewel raid instead, thereby utterly destroying any humour present in the scene.

  Sandwiched between a number by Traffic and a three-second performance by the all-girl dance troupe, Pete and Dud discussed physical fitness. As with all their Goodbye Again dialogues, the conversation soon rambled away on to a completely different topic, albeit a highly amusing one. Pete expressed the opinion that throughout the anals of history (sic), all the truly great men, like Mahatma Gandhi, have been extremely skinny. By the same token, he reasoned, Twiggy must therefore possess one of the most brilliant minds of our age. From Twiggy it was but a short leap to eastern religions, and the steps required to go into a mystic trance:

  Pete:

  Let your mind go blank. Have you done it?

  Dud:

  Oh, yeah.

  Pete:

  Not a very difficult step for you, I imagine.

  The final item was another father and son sketch, which drew heavily and rather desperately on the films that Peter and Dudley had recently been making. Peter appeared as a rich upper-class businessman, John Cleese as his butler Gattis (a character from A Dandy in Aspic), and Dudley as his son Edward, who is planning to leave home in order to get married:

  Peter:

  Is there any particular reason for your going so suddenly? I mean, you’ve been with us for a long time, haven’t you?

  In a development redolent of The Bedsitting Room, Dudley’s fiancée is then ushered in by Gattis, and turns out to be a large box (or she is contained in a large box – it is purposely not made entirely clear which). Peter’s wife is then brought in, and proves to be an identical box. The boxes proved difficult to hide on the night, and the audience was able to register their presence long before O’Riordan was able to get his cameras on to them.

  Peter freely admitted later that the scripts for Goodbye Again were not up to his usual standard. The party atmosphere of the Not Only . . . But Also studios had given way to a more subdued ambience: when Tina Turner shouted ‘Everybody help me one time!’ not one member of the audience joined in with the chorus. Press reaction was ambivalent: the Daily Mail spoke of ‘a show that glittered at every moment with the old originality, literacy and wit’;8 but the Daily Sketch, under the headline ‘ITV puts a damper on Pete and Dud’, complained that ‘Cook and Moore seemed slightly subdued . . . they performed timidly, as if they were bashful maidens not quie sure whether their slips were showing, and frightened if they were.’9 The set design came in for general criticism and the whole attracted unfavourable comparisons with Not Only . . . But Also. Peter and Dudley resolved not to make another series with ATV, although they consented to do a further one-off special the following year, when Anne Bancroft was offered to them as a special guest. That show, produced by Garry Smith and Dwight Hemion, was closer in concept to the BBC series: Mel Tormé provided the music, Anne Bancroft appeared in a parody of The Graduate, and also as Dudley’s mother, taking him to see a child psychologist played by Peter.

  By the autumn of 1968, following Goodbye Again’s lukewarm reception, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer had begun to take on even greater significance to Peter’s career. In early December, David Frost announced that he had raised sufficient backing to make the film, with his customary mixture of smooth persistence and blithe self-confidence. Columbia-Warner had been persuaded to fund the project: they had Peter under contract anyway, making this t
he third (after The Wrong Box and A Dandy in Aspic) of his three-picture deal. John Cleese and Graham Chapman had originally written the script in a three-month sojourn on Ibiza in 1967, paid for by Frost; it was now in need of updating, so Peter himself set to work rewriting it with the two authors and the director Kevin Billington. As with Bedazzled, Peter was determined to put in far more time and effort than was normally the case, in order to be sure that the script was absolutely right; and as with Bedazzled, there was no room for Dudley on the writing side. He went off to star in a disastrous adaptation of Play It Again Sam at the Globe Theatre, produced by David Merrick of all people, Peter’s arch enemy from the Establishment days. Woody Allen’s script was anglicised at Merrick’s instigation, the action was transplanted from Manhattan to Swiss Cottage, and all traces of Jewishness were removed from the play, which was missing the point to say the least.

  The satirical thrust of The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer was to demonise opinion pollsters with the same wary distrust often lavished on spin doctors and PR executives today. The science, if one can call it that, of opinion polling was a relatively new one, and was held in some quarters to have influenced Labour’s victory at the Kingston-upon-Hull by-election of January 1966, in which large numbers of undecided voters had supposedly reacted to the pollsters’ findings, rather than the other way round. David Frost had devised the story of a smooth opinion pollster who becomes a politician, and takes over Britain by asking the public’s opinion on everything from devolution to road-widening in the Scilly Isles, until they are so sick of giving it that they are happy to abdicate all democratic decision-making powers to his dictatorship.