Biography Of Peter Cook

  Everything now seemed to depend on Michael Rimmer. The BBC wanted another series of Not Only . . . But Also, and American Television too came in with an offer of a 26-part series, but Peter demurred. To do further TV shows, he made clear, would be to stand still, to tread water, to become boring. According to John Cleese, ‘After his great stage and TV successes, he had nowhere to go, because basically the way up was via film’19 – which is not to say that making films is intrinsically more important than achieving success on stage or on TV, merely that artistic convention was channelling Peter’s need to face new challenges along a predetermined career path. Michael Rimmer was finally released in November 1970, five months after the Conservatives’ victory, and billed as ‘The film they wouldn’t let us show until after the election.’ Much of what it predicted had come to pass. From being an ingenious satire on what might happen, it had become a limp reflection on what had already happened. Far, far worse than that, Peter’s performance in the lead role was an unmitigated disaster. Rather than holding the whole thing together, his was a performance of glassy emptiness. You could tell that – beneath Rimmer’s nonchalance – Peter was trying desperately hard, but he was insufficiently sincere at being insincere. John Cleese felt that &lsuo;Although he was a great sketch performer, he wasn’t a very good actor. I would suspect that it was something to do with the fact that he wasn’t very comfortable with his emotions, and as an actor you have to be able to access your emotions. In the milieu where he grew up, emotions were kept very much out of the way.’20 Peter himself was his harshest critic: ‘I was suffering from Cook’s disease, which involved that terrible glassy-eyed look. I belong to the school of acting which consists of doing nothing in particular. The variety of my expressions between shock, joy and terror are very hard to define.’21

  The man from the News of the World, who called upon him at Kenwood Cottage to check on the progress of his home improvements, found Peter to be a bag of nerves, waiting for the press reaction. Unfortunately, there was to be no quick execution. The film garnered the worst possible critical reaction from Peter’s point of view – one of barely concerned ambivalence. Under the headline ‘Too many cooks spoil the Cook’ Cecil Wilson in the Daily Mail described the film as one that ‘involves with uneven results . . . the laughter never really comes to the boil.’22 The Liverpool Echo, one of the few other papers to give it a lot of space, reported that the first half of the film was good, after which ‘it tails off, unfortunately, just when it is building up’.23 Peter knew full well what it all meant. His career as a leading man of the cinema was over. For the first time in his life, he had failed. His next film, which had already been announced – he was to star in Easy Does It, directed by Jerry Epstein – was quietly cancelled. Another screenplay he was writing for himself was left on his desk, unfinished. In December 1970, unsure of where to go or what to do next, he accepted an invitation to appear as E. L. Wisty on Holiday Startime, an ITV Christmas variety programme. He was well down on the bill, below Max Jaffa, Les Dawson, Thora Hird, Kenny Ball, Reg Varney and Ted Ray. The middle-aged audience tittered in bemused fashion. It was a backward step, the first of his career, and in terms of the company he found himself in, a humiliating one. In Peter’s heart, it must have been the clearest possible admission of defeat.

  He was not poor, but then money had never really been the issue. He and Dudley were still in demand for commercials: they filmed one for Harvey’s Bristol Cream and another for a failing soft drink, with Ursula Andress. He lived a relatively restrained lifestyle, travelling everywhere by tube, keeping no credit cards. As long as he had enough to afford a copy of every newspaper every day, that side of his life was not a problem. The guiding principle behind Peter’s career at this stage was the need to progress, to meet new challenges and to stave off boredom. Unfortunately, ‘up’, as John Cleese put it, was now barred to him. Gaye Brown, who was seeing Peter more frequently on account of her friendship with Judy Huxtable, believes that professionally speaking he needed the thrill of the chase to stimulate him: ‘Only there was no chase left for him, he was already famous. That was the problem.’

  A year or two previously, when Peter had first begun to show signs of uncertainty as to the direction in which he should proceed next, Nick Garland had expressed a confident verdict to the Evening Standard: ‘Peter can now choose what he’ll do, whether he’ll be a performer, a publisher, or a producer. He said to me the other day that he admired Orson Welles and Peter Ustinov not for what they do but for what they are, that they could afford to fail on a gigantic scale and survive, that they take risks. You know there’s this view about the famous Portland Vase in the British Museum, that it’s improved since it was smashed. Well, Peter has not yet been smashed.’24 In fact, emotionally speaking at least, Peter was in no position to fail and survive. One serious fall was always likely to bring the roller-coaster ride of his career juddering to a halt – not from the public’s point of view, but from his own. The next career decision he took was to prove his most disastrous. He was about to get smashed, in more ways than one.

  In the wake of the mediocre reception accorded to Michael Rimmer, the BBC’s new Head of Comedy Michael Mills sensed that it would be a good time to entice Peter back to television. The carrot that Mills held out to the reluctant star was a substantial one: he could do anything, any programme he liked, as long it was a comedy show. Peter imposed certain conditions. He did not want to do another series of Not Only . . . But Also. He did not want to do anything with Dudley. After dipping his toe back into satirical waters with Michael Rimmer, he did not want to do anything remotely connected with politics, the news or the ‘artificial indignation’,25 as he put it, that had characterised TW3. He was keen for his new show to be live and dangerous: ‘I wanted to restore that embarrassing element that there used to be on television, when sets fell over and people forgot their lines and things went wrong.’26 Also, he wanted the programme to have a serious element, to show that he could do more than just tell jokes. He wanted to present his own chat show.

  The inspiration for this came partly from his success in livening up The Eamonn Andrews Shows in 1968, and partly from his friends, who were always telling him what a fabulous conversationalist he was; if he could capture the magic of all those impromptu conversations in the pub or around the dinner table, he would be on to a winner. There was also a subconscious motive, according to Ned Sherrin, who appeared as one of Peter’s guests: ‘I’m sure there was an element of “If Frost can do it, I can do it.”’ David Frost was by now the widely acknowledged King of the TV chat show, and Sherrin believes that ‘Because Frost had attained celebrity as a chat show host, somewhere at the back of Peter’s mind, although he was infinitely more humorously clever than David, he thought, “Obviously I must be a chat show host. It’s easy.” Being a chat show host may be pretty negligible compared with being a comic genius, but it does require certain skills.’27 Peter had indeed made a terrible wrong turning. ‘He wasn’t cut out to be a chat show host,’ explains Jonathan Miller. ‘He was cut out to be a chat show guest; a chat show guest who is bound to overwhelm and completely obliterate the host. And therefore to cast him in the role as the hospitable host of a chat show was a fatal choice on his part, because it simply misidentified what he brought to the occasion.’ All those enthralling conversations in the pub were driven by Peter, darting from subject to subject in a dazzling show of verbal agility: there were very few people so fascinating to him that he was prepared to sit back and listen to them quietly.

  Peter was breezily confident that he could emulate Frost, and this confidence communicated itself to Michael Mills. Peter asked for a pilot programme; even he was taken aback when Mills insisted that no pilot would be necessary, and commissioned a series of twelve prime-time Friday night shows for BBC2 there and then. The show was to be called Where Do I Sit?, to be produced by the young Monty Python producer Ian MacNaughton, and would combine a chat show element with various live comedy sketches. Peter had one
further request, which was granted without demur: he wanted to sing a pop song every week. It was a classic example, emulated many times since, of BBC management being happy to commission a famous comedian to do something entirely outside the scope of their proven abilities, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever that such a switch might succeed. Peter was about to deliver ‘that embarrassing element’ with knobs on.

  Advance filming began in late January 1971. With Ian MacNaughton and the crew disguised as GPO engineers and hidden in a striped workmen’s tent nearby, Peter leaped out to confront unsuspecting drivers at a Batley filling station, dressed as Cilla Black. ‘Hello! Do you know who I am?’ he asked in a camp falsetto. ‘Morning Mr Cook,’ replied one Yorkshireman flatly. ‘Go away,’ responded another. ‘What’s going on?’ the man from the Radio Times asked Peter. ‘Nobody knows,’ he admitted. A few days later, he was to be found lying across a muddy brook in Black Park, Fulmer, Buckinghamshire, while Judy, resplendent in white fur coat, miniskirt and long black boots, walked across his body. The scene was shot to illustrate Peter’s recording of Bridge Over Troubled Water, as well as being a mark of his utter devotion to his girlfriend. Ahead of the series, the journalist Ray Connolly found Peter in cautiously confident mood about his singing ability: ‘I’d love to be able to sing. I think if I get into the right state of mind I can. Some people say I can and some say I can’t. Come in here and listen to this . . .’ (At this point Peter proudly played Connolly a tape of himself singing a self-penned composition called Mother’s Knickers, and did his Elvis Presley impression.) ‘I would secretly like to have been a pop singer,’ he confessed. ‘Wouldn’t every man?’28

  For the first show in the series, transmitted on 11 February 1971, Peter decided to do an impression of Johnny Cash. The guests in the chat show element were to be the Private Eye columnist Auberon Waugh and the elderly American humorist S. J. Perelman. A few days before the recording, Claud Cockburn invited Willie Rushton to a dinner party: ‘Claud said, “You must come around, because I’ve got S. J. Perelman coming and this will be tremendous.” Now Perelman had once been very funny, let’s be fair, but I should say possibly his brain had gone. He just sat there yawning heavily and dropping off. Then I discovered, shock horror, that he was going to be the first guest on the Cookie chat show. It was dreadful. He was not a very amusing man, and Cookie was on the wrong side.’ Peter had done no advance preparation at all, by way of planning or researching questions. He wasn’t the sort to plod away at something; it either came naturally or – as in this case – it didn’t come at all. Faced with an inert Perelman on the night, for the first time in his life, Peter froze.

  Auberon Waugh watched the disaster unfold with a fascinated horror. ‘It was terrible, terrible. Oh, it was awful. It was totally disorgaised and pathetic and didn’t work at all. Peter had insisted on being live, but he’d had no experience at all in anything like that, so he was just dithering around and interviewing you badly, then standing up and wandering around the studio. There was no shape or form. It was just a disaster.’29 Willie Rushton, who had switched on in eager anticipation, remembered later that ‘It was the worst thing he ever did, worse than the stuff he did when people said he was the new Cary Grant. He thought he could sing like Johnny Cash – this was a major error – and he sang this Johnny Cash number which was terrible, it was really awful. Nobody knew whether he was joking or not. It just wasn’t working and he knew it. What you could see was a man not entirely happy about this particular period of his life, who’d embarked on a dreadful idea.’ After the show Peter recovered his composure sufficiently to entertain a crowd of admirers in the BBC bar, laughing and joking nonchalantly about how dismal the recording had been, and thereby proving that in his private life at least he could act when he needed to.

  The following day he was utterly crucified by the press. Chris Dunkley in The Times labelled the show ‘dismally embarrassing’ and the Perelman interview ‘truly pathetic’.30 Peter’s inability to disguise the mechanics of the chat show host’s job, such as knowing where to stand or when to bring an interview to a close, came in for particular criticism. ‘I mean, we’ve got past the days of saying, “I’m sorry, I’m getting the wind-up signal from the producer,”’ complained the Daily Telegraph.31 The BBC admitted officially that there had been ‘teething troubles’. The round of parties and meals that had characterised the Not Only . . . But Also recordings continued – Gaye Brown attended dinners at the Ark restaurant off Notting Hill Gate where Peter and Judy performed impromptu routines just as Peter and Dudley had once done – but beneath the jollity Peter was gripped with nerves. He took to drinking heavily before recordings.

  The second show lurched from bad to worse. When the star guest Kirk Douglas walked on, a tipsy Peter rose to his feet to ask the question ‘How are you?’ Unfortunately, it came out as ‘Who are you?’ Unfazed and smoothly professional, Douglas replied, ‘Well, Peter, I’m extremely well.’ ‘Hello Kirk,’ said Peter nervously. ‘Hello Peter,’ replied Kirk. There followed a long, awful silence. Later in the show Peter asked his second guest Johnny Speight a question, only to cut Speight off abruptly just as he began his answer, as the interview had run out of time. The comedy content of the programme consisted principally of a sketch performed with Spike Milligan, which led Mary Whitehouse to telephone the Chief Constable of Worcestershire and ask him to prosecute Peter for blasphemy. The two men had walked on stage dressed as tramps:

  Peter:

  I’m God.

  Spike:

  Oh, Christ! Oh dear . . . I’m sorry, he’s your son, isn’t he.

  Peter’s character went on to claim that the Universe had fallen off the back of a lorry. Only the most narrow-minded person could have found the piece offensive; but what bothered most viewers was that after the sketch, Peter had actually asked the audience whether or not they had been offended. One young man had tentatively admitted that yes, he had found it a bit strong. Peter had then proceeded to humiliate and ridicule him live on air. The television critic of the Daily Mail reported that the answer to the programme’s title Where Do I Sit? was ‘As far from the television set as possible . . . I have the feeling that fame has gone to Cook’s head, and he feels that his mighty presence is enough to rivet millions to the screen. He sits scriptless, jabbering mindlessly to baffled guests.’32 Philip Purser in the Telegraph pointed out that when interviewing Johnny Speight, Peter’s voice had gradually and unconsciously assumed Speight’s cockney tones: ‘He is always playing some part. We’re not sure he’s capable of being himself.’33 Michael Mills’s boss, the Head of Light Entertainment Billy Cotton, warned that unless there was a considerable improvement the show’s days were numbered.

  Like a rabbit caught in the headlights, Peter seemed transfixed, completely unable to sidestep inevitable disaster. ‘There was a gathering sense of panic, and futility, and the knowledge that I couldn’t do it,’34 he admitted later. Judy recalls that ‘He had thought that a chat show would be a piece of cake, and didn’t realise until after he got involved that it wouldn’t suit him; but by then it was too late and he had to go through with it. Peter was a very proud man and he couldn’t handle the stress of realising that he couldn’t do the show. The emotional odds started to bank up against him. He was drinking too much, and abusing prescriptive drugs. In fact he was using a whole cocktail of drugs to cope, mixed with alcohol.’ Ned Sherrin, who was the chief guest on the third show along with starlet Julie Ege, remembers that Peter was doped to the eyeballs on drink and drugs that night: ‘He was in a terrible state. He was frightened. It was chaos.’ The previous week, one viewer had written in to complain that Peter was clearly a drug addict, so Peter had conceived the idea of telephoning him live on air. The phone was answered by the complainant’s wife:

  Peter:

  Could I speak to Mr Wentworth please?

  Mrs Wentworth:

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  Ooh, I’m very sorry, but Mr Wentworth’s in the bath.

  Peter:


  Well this is Peter Cook speaking. He just wrote in to the show and said I was a drug addict and I’d like to talk to him.

  Mrs Wentworth:

  Ooh, fancy that! Well, I’ll just see if I can get him out. Are you on at the moment?

  Peter:

  Yes.

  Mrs Wentworth:

  I’ll just switch on the telly to see if we are on, you know. It takes a little time to warm up. (shouts) George!

  Mr Wentworth: