Biography Of Peter Cook

  He also devised imaginary characters, like Blind Willie Lemon, who was so blind he was invisible, whom he blamed for every mishap; he would draw Blind Willie as a solitary lit cigarette in the middle of a blank page. He tried to interest the two girls in televised football, by getting them to root for one particular player. And always, when it was time for them to go, he would be in floods of tears. ‘He was very soppy,’ recalls Daisy. ‘He would get quite emotional. It was a real wrench when it was time to leave. I felt it very much, just hating to leave really.’

  Even when his daughters weren’t there, Peter in a good mood behaved as ebulliently as if they were. Once he taunted four large Manchester Unitd fans in the High Street, then hared off on his skateboard when they tried to attack him. He and Spike Milligan improvised the game of indoor candle-lit ping pong in his garage, played with two six-foot builders’ planks and a tennis ball; Peter’s World Championship-winning smash actually destroyed the table tennis table. One evening, looking out across the garden at the back of the houses in Church Row, he and Judy spied an opulent dinner in progress. Peter went down into the garden, vaulted the wall, knocked on the back door of the house and joined the party. Judy watched him all evening through the window, having the time of his life entertaining a roomful of strangers.

  Peter needed his constant fixes of adulation. His self-confidence was like a drain, impossible to fill to the brim however many compliments were poured into it. Sid Gottlieb worked hard at the job of pouring: ‘Peter needed affection and admiration in spades. You can’t give someone in his predicament enough reassurance. In fact the general content of my conversation was boring, repetitiously but deliberately so, just reinforcing my conviction of his genius.’ As far as Gottlieb is concerned, Peter’s need for reassurance regulated his womanising; as professional disaster set in over the summer, this increased sharply. For a start, there were always the au pair girls. ‘I insisted on choosing them,’ says Judy, ‘and I found someone very serious and plain, a student, thinking I’d be safer with her than the long-legged Swedish variety who would drop by for a spot of light dusting. But before I knew it, she told me she was in love with him. It happened all the time.’14 When famous women came to call, such as Germaine Greer, Peter could flirt so furiously that he barely spoke to his wife. ‘I remember going upstairs and putting different clothes on and thinking, I wonder if he’ll notice me now. He didn’t.’15 On another occasion he took Raquel Welch out for the evening, leaving a surprised Judy at home on her own; Peter and his date were photographed by paparazzi, entering the Savoy Hotel. A few months later he repeated the trick with Ursula Andress.

  At the end of August Peter took his daughters on holiday to Cornwall with the Gottliebs and their seven children. Judy decided not to come, which was the first public sign of a rift in their relationship; but Peter was happy enough wallowing in the company of his kids, whom he introduced to the sport of ‘grassboarding’ down a hill at midnight on a silver tray. ‘Peter was an absolute wizard with all those children,’ remembers Sid Gottlieb. ‘He’d get up a squad of footballers or cricket players, and he’d be in the middle getting as worked up and partisan as they were – there was absolutely no question of the sports master in charge or any of that stuff. He’d take sides, and cheat, and argue that somebody hadn’t put their bat down in the crease. Then sometimes he’d invent a character, and this character would take over for the day; for example there was Mr Sharkey, who operated the electric chair. And so he would set up an imaginary electric chair in the garden, and the kids would be in fits of laughter. Then in the evening Peter and my wife and I would go to a restaurant, and he’d hold court non-stop. The other diners all used to be quiet and lapped it up, killing themselves with laughter.’ The holiday, which Peter made into a regular fixture, provided a welcome escape in the shape of an affectionate, uncritical audience, whom he could entertain without having to accommodate the whims of colleagues or the conforming pressures of a career path.

  Back in London things were not going so well. By the autumn of 1977 Peter and Judy had begun to quarrel ‘endlessly and magnificently’.16 Judy would point out in no uncertain terms that she had once had to get rid of a baby for him. On one occasion she refused to talk to him for three days. She became ill with bronchitis and went to sleep in the spare bed: ‘He came and shouted into my ear that if I was set on this course, I had better pack all my things and be gone.’17 On his fortieth birthday Peter telephoned the Daily Mail in a fit of gloom and told them he wouldn’t be writing his column any more. When someone from the Mail came to call, Judy had just thrown a cup of scalding tea over Peter. Dudley Moore is in no doubt that ‘Judy worshipped Peter,’ and that he had driven her to it deliberately. He was sabotaging a perfectly good relationship as a perverse means of self-protection, getting his rejection in first before it inevitably happened to him. His self-respect was so low that, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, he didn’t want to join any club prepared to have him as a member. Even his children began to feel the rough edge of his tongue, a sure sign that something was very wrong. Lucy remembers that ‘It would be something really silly, like he’d be fixing a plug – he wasn’t the most practical of men – and he’d be getting terribly impatient with it. You’d go to help him and he’d say something very sharp and make you feel just awful. It wouldn’t be a joke, it would be sarcastic and cutting; sometimes not even that, it would be just his tone and his look, making you feel not so much scared, but certainly intimidated.’

  By the end of 1977 Peter and Dudley found themselves right back where they’d been twelve months previously, with only Derek and Clive for company. The follow-up album was the only arrow left in their quiver, and they convened, depressed and ill-prepared, at the CBS studios in London’s Whitfield Street, to record the whole thing in one day for Christmas release. It was entitled Derek and Clive Come Again, and contained precisely two jokes, both of which were to be found on the sleeve notes: one described a vicious assault on Clive by an octogenarian who had previously been keen on the pair – ‘That’s when the fan really hit the shit’ – and the other referred to their huge cult following in North Korea – ‘Unfortunately one of the huge cults followed them back to their hotel and beat the shit out of them.’ The content of the album was a vicious, bleak outpouring of genuinely inarticulate, pent-up rage and frustration. There was nothing funny whatsoever about it, and it bore little relation to the subversively good-natured original.

  The bulk of the rage was Peter’s, and much of it was directed at Dudley; his partner tried to match him obscenity for obscenity, like a small boy trying to impress a gang leader with his loyalty, but Peter was always going to be the victor on that score. In My Mum Song, for instance, Dudley improvised a rhyme about his mother sucking his penis, to the tune of My Old Man’s a Dustman. Peter countered with:

  My old man’s a dustman

  And he’s got cancer too

  He’s got it up his flue.

  Peter knew perfectly well that Dudley’s father had died of cancer of the colon, and that it had been the single most devastating event of Dudley’s life to date. The reference was not intended to be therapeutic. Peter was, of course, extremely drunk indeed. Dudley, however, was stone cold sober, and co-operating out of a sort of horror-struck, fascinated loyalty. The pair ploughed on with Back of the Cab, an analysis of Picasso: ‘You take shit out of other people’s arseholes, shove it on the canvas and send it to other cunts.’ In the Cubicles, a routine about gay sex carried out through holes drilled in lavatory walls, degenerated into a slanging match where the pair merely shouted ‘You fucking cunt’ at each other. Having a Wank concerned Dudley’s mother catching him masturbating over his father’s photograph, his explanation being that he had ‘cancer of the knob’ and ‘had to get the pus out’; Peter replied that he was suffering from ‘cancer of the wife’.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, Derek and Clive Come Again was rubbish, and nasty rubbish at that. It is of purely historical interest only, a laborato
ry slide showing that day’s cross-section of a life in despair. Of course a number of wide-eyed students became excited by the daring and splenetic nature of the content, but that hardly represents a thoughtful endorsement. According to Dudley, ‘Peter wanted to shock people with it and did. There’s no doubt he shocked me, and it seemed that was his main source of pleasure – shocking me. He was pushing me to go further too – I don’t know what his plan was with that. I didn’t enjoy it as much as doing Pete and Dud. Also I think we were running out of material.’ Peter claimed defensively to the press that the record ‘broke new ground by tackling subjects that we all dread.’ But he knew that his nihilism functioned as a kind of defence mechanism, by furnishing an inbuilt excuse for any bad reviews. He insisted that ‘I’ve played it to people I love and respect and they’ve found it very releasing.’18 In fact Peter had held a party at his house and had played the record to the assembled guests, but after putting it on the turntable he had retired to the bathroom, to stare at his forty-year-old face in the mirror.

  Island records were not responsible for Derek and Clive Come Again; no doubt in anticipation of further substantial profits, Peter had set up his own Lichtenstein-based company to publish it, named Aspera, with the release being handled by Richard Branson’s Virgin Records and the distribution by CBS. Such financial planning was to prove largely unnecessary. There were problems with the content from the start, when staff employed to test the quality of the pressings refused to listen to the LP. 40,000 advance orders were shipped to record stores, but after that CBS refused to go on with the distribution, when they discovered that they would be jointly liable for any prosecution under the obscenity laws. In a mix-up far more amusing than anything on the actual record, a saboteur with a sense of humour at Kay’s, a Worcester-based mail order firm, put 700 copies of Derek and Clive Come Again into Black Beauty cassette boxes, and vice versa. Peter wondered who would be more upset, the 700 bewiered children or the disappointed Derek and Clive fans. The shambles continued when Ron Matthews, a twenty-year-old petrol pump attendant from Oxfordshire who had managed to get hold of a copy, was dismissed from his job for possessing it, and took his case to an industrial tribunal with Peter’s help. Licking their wounds, Peter and Dudley absented themselves from press attention by accepting a private cabaret booking in Bermuda on the album’s official release date. Of course, because the sales had been frozen there was no telling what the actual demand for the album would have been; Virgin gave the pair the benefit of the doubt, and commissioned a third Derek and Clive album for the following Christmas.

  The Hound of the Baskervilles, meanwhile, was finally due out in April 1978, but it was so awful that the distributors kept postponing its release in the hope of finding an extremely uncompetitive month in which to slide it quietly into the cinemas. There was no straight-to-video option in those days. A summer release was postponed, officially, because it would ‘coincide with the World Cup’; eventually a date was chosen in November. Dudley, who was utterly fed up, flew back to Hollywood in the interim to continue his hitherto fruitless search for film work there. His marriage, which had been tempestuous at the best of times, had not been helped by his long absences in England, and in the spring of 1978 he and Tuesday Weld split up. She subsequently gained custody of their son Patrick in the divorce courts.

  By the summer, Peter – who had done very little but drink himself insensible and argue with Judy for six months – contacted the BBC to offer them a new series of Not Only . . . But Also. He even announced it to the press, while bemoaning the show’s title as ‘lousy – the worst ever. It was, of course, one of Dudley’s plodding ideas.’19 Dudley, however, was having absolutely nothing to do with it. He was committed to the third Derek and Clive album, and that was it. Over and over again during the next few years Peter was to arrange a new series with the BBC and announce it to the papers: in November 1978, April 1979 and again a year later, but always without Dudley’s agreement, and therefore without any realistic chance of success. After Dudley’s first refusal to take part, in June 1978, Peter defiantly announced instead that he was writing a new solo TV series to be called The Wonderful World of Wisty: but a year later, he had managed to accumulate just fifteen minutes of material.

  That spring though, the rebellious image of Derek and Clive had actually yielded a job offer, when Peter had been asked to appear as a weekly guest on Revolver, a brand new ATV show highlighting punk and new wave music. Revolver was presented by Chris Hill and Les Ross, and produced by Mickie Most. When they had met to discuss his involvement, Most had been extremely impressed by Peter’s knowledge of the punk scene: ‘He knows more about it than I do. I hadn’t even heard of some of the bands he mentioned to me,’ he said. ‘That was probably because I made some of them up,’ Peter later confessed. ‘They didn’t exist.’20 The conceit of the show was that the ill-tempered manager of a dilapidated dance hall, played by Peter, had been forced to let out his premises to the TV company; this allowed him to make regular abusive interjections about the standard of the music on offer. Given Peter’s current nihilistic state, it was the perfect job for him. He genuinely thought that some of the punk bands were ‘direof Dudley&nd said so. ‘That was rubbish,’ he would pronounce emphatically as Eater or the Lurkers finished their set. The Only Ones, he announced, were ‘direct proof that there is unintelligent life in outer space.’ Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks remembers Peter distributing porn mags among the audience, and encouraging the recipients to hold them up when the cameras rolled, in order to put the band off.

  It was, of course, a performance entirely in the spirit of punk. The audience would shout ‘Off, off!’ whenever Peter appeared on screen, seated behind a desk with a big-breasted stripper perched on it. ‘Learn a language,’ he would retort, then – to the stripper as she removed a stocking – ‘Thank you Jill Tweedie.’ His jokes went down well, including the one about the man at a Sex Pistols concert who attacked Sid Vicious (a rare instance of the fan hitting the shit) and the one about his huge cult following (everywhere I go I have a huge cult following me). Peter became the favourite comedian of another generation of rock bands, most notably the Sex Pistols; Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McLaren consulted him at various stages of the group’s development, and Rotten assured him that one of their songs had been based on his Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations number from Bedazzled. ‘I don’t know which one,’ Peter told the NME. ‘I was too pissed to remember.’ Revolver was charmingly disorganised and rather enjoyable to watch, the first decent new material that Peter had been involved in creating since the early seventies.

  The critics naturally detested the show, not because of any humorous failings but because they both feared and failed to understand the musical concept. Philip Purser in The Sunday Telegraph called it ‘a deplorable entertainment’, while The Sunday Times suggested that encouraging the Sex Pistols in this way might lead young people into a life of crime. Peter wrote to the letters page in mock appreciation, claiming that ‘I myself turned to crime on learning that my idol, Robert Mitchum, had been convicted on a drugs charge.’21 The barrage of criticism had its effect, though. After a successful pilot in a prime Saturday evening placing in March, the series proper was moved by frightened TV executives to a late night ghetto slot in July which varied from region to region; the resulting paucity of viewers in relation to the size of the programme budget inevitably condemned it to be viewed officially as a failure. Peter, who had only signed up for Revolver on the basis that it would be a Saturday evening primetime show, was furious and depressed. Just as luck seemed to have been on his side throughout the early part of his career, it seemed now to be deserting him utterly.

  Martin Tomkinson observed his drinking companion’s mood and behaviour becoming increasingly black and vicious throughout the year. The famous absence of malice, which as far as Peter’s old friends were concerned had always solidly underpinned his humour, was showing clear signs of weathering under the pressures of a difficult twelve months. Af
ter a spell in the wake of the first Derek and Clive release when Peter had bounded into the pub and ordered triple tomato juices in the brightest of moods, he had returned to his former practice of deliberately looking for trouble. In September 1978, Dudley returned to Britain to record the third Derek and Clive LP, and Peter invited him along to one of his drinking sessions with Tomkinson, at a small club in Gerrard Street: ‘Peter ordered trebles for himself – he only drank spirits now – and singles for Dudley nd me. The atmosphere was very uneasy and the two bosom companions seemed to me to have nothing in common. They just growled at one another. Conversation was stilted, if not non-existent, and it felt like being between a warring married couple. When Dudley was out of the room Peter called him ‘a horrible little shit’. Never a hail-fellow-well-met drinker, his influence that day was positively malign. He seemed to relish the froideur in proceedings. People say that Peter was incapable of malice, but I’m afraid that’s bollocks.’