Biography Of Peter Cook

  The film contained some high-quality jokes. The Soviet leader proclaims that he has ‘the heart of an elephant’, whereupon an aide proclaims that ‘the elephant was honoured to part with it’. When the President sustains a fatal heart attack in a hospital bed the Vice-President is sent for, at which command another decrepit pensioner is wheeled in on a trolley. Gearing up to attack them, Sir Mortimer announces that ‘The time has come to be resolute. But you can’t be resolute without being strong. And you can’t be strong without blowing people up.’ For every decent joke though, there was a good minute or so of sub-Ben Elton rant. What was intended as a satire on the Falklands War was actually little more than an exaggeration of it, and elsewhere real characters and events were ‘satirised’ by nothing more inventive than a negative portrayal. Suggesting that the SAS are in fact fantastically incompetent did not actually satirise the regiment or its dealings in any way. Nor did the random idiocy of Peter’s Prime Minister bear comparison as a satirical device with the escalating paranoia of Dr Strangeled that &i>’s base commander. The authors betrayed their background in TV sitcom by omitting to provide a central character that might involve the audience, and by failing to sustain dramatic tension for any length of time.

  Whoops Apocalypse made few ripples at the box office, and most reviewers were unimpressed. ‘The audience at which this woeful entertainment seems to be aiming is one which finds the phrase “fucking dickhead” funny in itself and funnier still if reiterated at a shout several times over,’ wrote the Guardian. The Sunday Times was kinder, describing it as ‘a smart comedy, hardly satiric – satire makes you think, this doesn’t – but frequently sublimely funny.’ Peter alone emerged with credit: the Daily Telegraph reckoned that he ‘held the film up by its knicker elastic’. In fact, there seemed to be a wave of all-round affectionate relief that he had turned in a funny performance. He had succeeded in losing weight for the part, and was looking good again. Immediately after the filming, he threw himself into another round of optimistic activity.

  He began work on a screenplay, and on another TV special, which would be linked by a Teutonic psychiatrist who would scientifically attempt to work out what is and what is not funny: if 4,000 men slip on banana skins, for instance, is that 4,000 times funnier than one banana-related incident? The character would examine the role of Germans in the development of modern comedy, concentrating on the invention of the joke by two men called Fritz and Boris. On top form, Peter then pretended to be Jonathan Ross’s father on The Last Resort, where he was asked about his hours in front of the television: ‘It’s so much better than a relationship,’ he said. He appeared, too, on Clive James, where he confessed to having been in negotiation with the Kremlin about a possible defection. In April he flew out with Barry Humphries to open the inaugural Melbourne Comedy Festival, where he performed a version of his judicial summing-up in the Thorpe case. Shane Maloney, who was helping to organise the festival, recalls how Peter immediately reduced his reception committee to hysterics on arrival at the airport: ‘When informed that the hotel manager, a Swiss gentleman, had requested an autographed photo for the “celebrity guest” wall of the hotel bar, Peter immediately launched into a twenty-minute dissertation on the role of the Swiss hotelier in the development of modern comedy. It was, he explained, entirely due to the influence of the Swiss that housemaids announce their arrival with a brisk “knock knock”. And it was the hotel management schools of Zurich that first came up with the idea of leaving a small joke on the guest’s pillow at night.’34

  Peter also appeared in two films in 1987. One was Rob Reiner’s well-regarded The Princess Bride, in which he played a very small part as a camp bishop, ‘somewhere between the Archbishop of Canterbury and a female sheep’,35 as he put it. The other was a short film by the Comic Strip, Mr Jolly Lives Next Door, which was funded by Channel Four and televised by them shortly after its cinema release. In a small but excellent cameo Peter played a blood-drenched homicidal maniac in the adjoining office to that in which the main action took place; despite the sign on the door advertising fluffy toys, he had a picture of Adolf Hitler on his wall and always seemed to be chopping up innocent visitors with a meat cleaver to a deafening soundtrack of Tom Jones hits. Peter was chosen, according to e Comic Strip’s Adrian Edmonson, because ‘We were aware that there was quite a lot of Pete and Dud in what we did. We were in awe.’36

  Not just Edmonson but a whole generation of 1980s comics had grown up in awe of Pete and Dud. A cameo appearance from Peter Cook was endorsement indeed. His apparent lack of drive appealed: it created an entirely uncompetitive atmosphere around a relationship of mutual respect. Peter’s generosity towards younger comics was almost unique among his generation. According to Mel Smith, ‘Performers of my age and younger who met him were just bowled over by the fact that he was so interested in what we were doing, and that he was so relaxed about it.’ When Jay Landesman bumped into Peter for the first time since the 1960s in the newly opened Groucho Club, he found him surrounded by an adoring group of aficionados led by Robbie Coltrane. Peter made an especially attractive role model for young comedians: effortlessly and brilliantly successful in his youth, iconoclastic, self-destructive, and an avid consumer of their televised work into the bargain.

  Perhaps the first manifestation of this had been an appearance on the chat show Friday Night Saturday Morning in November 1979, a programme which had been handed over to the Cambridge Footlights to present: Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie had been among the reverential hosts. A couple of years later more Footlighters of the same generation, including Stephen Fry, had come across Peter dining alone in the La Sorpresa restaurant, at a low ebb – had they known it – following Judy’s move to Exmoor and the collapse of The Two of Us. They had been amazed when he had amiably returned with them to their modest little flat, and had then consumed everything with even the slightest alcohol content on the premises. In due course Fry became one of Peter’s greatest friends, and purchased for him a fax machine named Betty, with which a delighted Peter bombarded both his friends and various world leaders with absurd messages. Fry himself owned a fax machine called Hetty, and the two machines kept up a long and involved correspondence.

  ‘He was accessible, friendly, he had time and he was generous with it,’ says Ian Hislop, another fan-turned-friend. Hislop encountered Peter in the early eighties, when he wrote from Oxford University to ask for an interview for his humour magazine Passing Wind. Peter readily agreed to meet him for lunch; Hislop, who was not a great drinker, recalls that ‘We got completely pissed, and got thrown out of this restaurant at about 3.30. Peter said, “I think you should go home and sober up, and come back and do the interview at six.”’ Staggering down the white line in the middle of the road, it occurred to him that Hislop showed promise. He subsequently recommended him to Private Eye’s editor Richard Ingrams, which led Hislop to a career on the Eye and his eventual appointment as Ingrams’s successor.

  The retirement of Ingrams in March 1986, after a quarter of a century on the magazine, came as a shock to both proprietor and staff; still more unexpected was Ingrams’s unilateral decision to appoint Hislop to take over his job. Still only twenty-five, Hislop was regarded very much as Ingrams’s personal protégé, and the appointment enraged many of the old guard. Auberon Waugh, referring to the new editor as ‘Hinton’ and ‘Driscoll’, described the change of editorship as ‘in tune with the Eye’s misguided policy of seeking the custom of yobbo readers’. The magazine’s gossip columnist Nigel Dempster called Hislop ‘a deeply unpleasant little man who knows nothing about journalism’. Journalist Jane Ellison called him ‘a ludicrous figure’37 while her colleague Peter McKay challenged the legality of the appointment, asking how ‘a tired editor was able to choose his successor without consulting anyone’.38 McKay wrote a column in the Evening Standard demanding that Peter, as proprietor, should step in and sack both Ingrams and Hislop.

  Even though he had introduced Hislop to the magazine, Peter was put out t
hat he had not been consulted over his appointment. ‘He was very upset about it,’ confirms Richard Ingrams. ‘He thought I should have consulted him, but I just thought if I’d started consulting people it would never have happened.’ An anti-Hislop lunch was convened at the Gay Hussar restaurant, consisting of Auberon Waugh, Patrick Marnham, Richard West, Peter McKay and Peter, together with the magazine’s managing director David Cash, whom Peter had persuaded to attend. Over several bottles of wine the issue was debated, until eventually an election was held to appoint a replacement editor, and Peter McKay was voted in. Peter and David Cash then set off for the magazine’s new offices in Carlisle Street to confront Ingrams.

  Unfortunately for the conspirators, Peter – who was still in a bad way following the failure of Can We Talk? – was now blind drunk. He may have set off from the restaurant with the best intention in the world of removing Ian Hislop, but by the time he had staggered across Soho Square, into Carlisle Street and up the stairs to Ingrams’ office, he had completely forgotten why he had come. Hislop was there too, and Peter recognised him through an alcoholic blur. ‘Welcome aboard!’ Peter said, clapping him enthusiastically on the back. This left Cash on his own. There’d been a sort of vote, he explained, and Peter McKay . . . Like the Mekon, Ingrams turned his piercing blue eyes onto Cash and shrivelled him to a crisp.

  When he sobered up, Peter laughed uproariously at the failure of his abortive mission. Relations between the new editor and his proprietor remained cordial thereafter, and Peter conceded publicly that Hislop was the right choice. ‘Ian is our concession to youth,’ he said, ‘he being all of fifteen. And I believe he’s a woman as well, so that helps.’39 Hislop cemented the new alliance by inviting Peter to his wedding. Of course, even if he had been sober, Peter would not have been able to exercise any authority over Ingrams, for the simple reason that he had never once attempted to establish any. Hislop believes that Peter had never sought to make any money from Private Eye, or to exercise any control over it, partly because he viewed the magazine with nostalgic affection as the last surviving independent remnant of his satire empire. Tongue-in-cheek, Peter described the Eye as ‘a monument to my lack of financial acumen’.40

  Before the end of 1986, the magazine came under an even greater threat than it had done from James Goldsmith. The aggrieved litigant this time was Robert Maxwell, then proprietor of the Daily Mirror, who had been the victim of a photographic lookalike comparing his face to Ronnie Kray’s, and who had also been accused of funding the Labour Party in the hope of one day securing a peerage. ‘Private Eye,’ thundered Maxwell, ‘is a satirical magazine whose proprietor is in the habit of going after innocent people. I am one of those. But he knows if he steps out of line (here he thumped the table top) he’ll be swatted like a fly. Does it really make a valuable contribution to our society to destroy both in our own eyes and in those of the world at large our major national asset of incorruptibility in public life – to replace it with a belief that the instincts of the piggery motivate our successful entrepreneurs?’41

  Peter had crossed swords with Maxwell already, when the Mirror Group had put the Sporting Life up for sale a year previously; Peter had attempted to buy it, but had been rebuffed on account of his ownership of the Eye. Now he threw himself into the legal hostilities with relish, revitalised physically by the enjoyment of making Whoops Apocalypse. As Maxwell gave evidence on the witness stand, Peter waved his cheque book scornfully at him across the courtroom. As usual, he provided the downcast Eye staff with moral support. ‘Whenever I was in court and about to lose a million, he would turn up and take me out to lunch, and say that it wasn’t too serious really,’42 remembers Ian Hislop. The magazine lost, of course. A weeping Maxwell told the court that ‘Mrs Maxwell and all of our children were utterly shocked to have me, their father, compared to a convicted major gangster.’ In November 1986 the Eye was ordered to pay him approximately a third of a million pounds, which all but cleaned them out at the bank.

  Maxwell was not finished, and neither was Peter. The tycoon diverted the Mirror’s presses to produce a million copies of Not Private Eye, a bogus issue featuring large pictures of Nazi leaders conversing, doctored to include Richard Ingrams chatting with Hitler. He then bullied W. H. Smith into banning Private Eye, and selling his alternative version instead, before flying off to New York to see his mistress. Ian Hislop remembers: ‘We had this vague idea that if we could get hold of the dummy of Not Private Eye, we could persuade Smiths to reverse their decision – but how to get it? So Cookie said, ‘Let’s send a crate of whisky over to the people who are putting it together, because they won’t want to do it, they’ll have been ordered to do this.’ So we sent this crate of whisky over. About two hours later, Cookie said, ‘Let’s phone them up and see what’s happened.’ We phoned up, and the four people doing it were completely legless. So Cookie said, ‘Sounds like really good fun there, we’re coming over,’ and they were so drunk they said, ‘Yeah, fine.’

  So we all got into a taxi and went down to the Mirror building; and it was the first time I realised that if you’re very famous you can do anything, because security stopped us and said, ‘Have you got passes?’ and we had to say ‘No.’ Then Cookie appeared and said, ‘We’re just going upstairs, lads, is that all right?’ And they said, ‘Oh, it’s Peter Cook’ and let us in. So we went up to Maxwell’s suite, where they were all lying across the floor, and stole the dummy’.

  The others were keen to head for the exit, but Peter had only just begun. He sat at Maxwell’s desk, rang the Mirror’s catering department and ordered champagne. Then he telephoned the photo desk, and orderedthem to come up and take a picture of the Eye party relaxing in Maxwell’s suite. He graffiti’d the walls and windows with crayons, writing ‘Hello Captain Bob’ everywhere. Then he telephoned Maxwell’s mistress in New York, and got Maxwell himself on the line to explain what he had done. Maxwell went ballistic, and telephoned Mirror security at once. Before long a party of security men burst into the suite; such was Peter’s charisma, however, that before long they too had joined the party. In due course W. H. Smith were shown the Not Private Eye dummy and were persuaded to reverse their decision, on the grounds that Richard Ingrams was an elderly retired man who would almost certainly sue over the Hitler picture. It was a famous riposte.

  A year after Maxwell had emptied the Eye’s bank account, an even worse legal disaster befell the magazine. Sonia Sutcliffe, wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, suddenly and unexpectedly sued over a 1982 article alleging that she had taken money from a Mail journalist for information about her husband. The jury, insanely, awarded her £600,000 for her injured feelings, a sum far in excess of that awarded to any of the Ripper’s victims or their families. Mrs Sutcliffe subsequently sued the News of the World for making a similar allegation, and lost, when the paper was able to prove conclusively that the Eye’s report had been largely correct. Not without a certain glee, the legal establishment refused the Eye leave to attempt to reverse the original decision.

  Peter was filming a Wispa chocolate advertisement at Shepperton with Mel Smith when news of the record libel damages came through, in May 1989. ‘He got the phone call at lunch time,’ recalls Smith. ‘He was really flattened by it – I mean it took him an hour or so to come round.’ Peter went straight to the pub and drank himself into oblivion; but the following day, nursing a terrific hangover and tucking into burger, chips and lager for breakfast, he was laughing, joking and lifting everyone’s spirits again. He told the Sun that the magazine was ‘planning a big story on a vicar who has a nice day out in Bournemouth. Of course, we will not name the vicar.’43 He even offered to go on a sponsored slim to raise the money, in order to get rid of three unwanted stone that he had recently acquired. ‘He was great,’ recalls David Cash. ‘He made a rather sombre occasion rather jolly. He came to all the meetings we had with the lawyers, he spent a great deal of time in court and he phoned me several times a day.’ Fortunately for the magazine, the sum was eventually r
educed to a relatively manageable £60,000 by the Appeal Court.

  Peter still came into the Eye to write jokes, although not as often as he used to; in periods of depression, he could be absent for months without warning. His appearances were great events though, always unannounced except for his annual Christmas appointment to help write the ‘Gnome Xmas Mail Mart’. This was a parody of the low-budget small ads for implausibly miraculous products that litter the pages of Exchange and Mart and elsewhere. Peter was genuinely fascinated by them: ‘He got very excited once by a magic mail order mollusc which was going to hoover up all the gunge in his goldfish pond,’ remembers his sister Sarah. He and Michael Winner had a competition going as to who could purchase the most useless product. The parody versions in the Eye allowed his imagination to run riot: Ian Hislop recalls that ‘Richard’s ads were always about ingenious pencil sharpeners. Cookie’s were about screaming Hawaiian grass that yells at you to cut it when it reaches a foot long. Ants on ice was another of his, these Torvill and Dean ants on an ice cube – you could always spot Cookie’s jokes.’