Biography Of Peter Cook

  Peter and Lin’s relationship remained stormy; often the arguments concerned his drinking. Roger Law walked into the middle of one, as Peter brought a period of self-enforced abstinence to an end. ‘It was a rather upsetting evening. He hadn’t drunk for ages, but he chose that evening to drink in the restaurantessed othen he really went at it with a fucking bucket. The wife left. Smacked the keys down on the table. I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. When we got back to his place, she’d gone. I said, “Well I ought to go,” and he said, “No, no, don’t go.” And I said to him, “Well, why the fuck did you choose tonight to get back on the piss?” And he said, “I lost this job.” I said, “What, a really important one?” He said, “No, just some commercials.” So I asked, “Well, what are you pissed off about then?” And he said, “Because it would have meant I wouldn’t have had to work for a year.” And I couldn’t get my head round that.’

  Like Judy before her, Lin took Peter to see Sid Gottlieb: ‘I was forever talking to him and Lin about his liver. They came to see me professionally, for a serious new beginning. I said, ‘Right, what you’ve got to have, urgently, is a baseline. You’ve got to establish the current state of your liver. There’s nothing sentimental about this problem of alcoholism; it has to do with encroachment on the liver, and I will tell you precisely, after the tests are done, what the degree of encroachment on your liver is.’ And the encroachment was substantial, and I told him. I said, ‘You have enough liver to survive on, but you’ve got to stop drinking completely.’ And in the same breath I went on, ‘Look, I say this sort of thing so many times to so many people, and I realise it’s not the point. The point is not telling you what you already know. The point is trying to find a way of your absorbing this piece of information, that you’re killing yourself with these massive doses of alcohol.’ Of course he knew that, absolutely. I don’t believe that people sit there dousing themselves with alcohol because they want to die, because Peter always showed the appropriate terror when confronted with an alcoholic crisis. There was no question of joking about that.’

  Terrified or not, Sid’s strictures were powerless in the face of the inexorable pull of alcohol. Peter insisted in a magazine interview that tests had shown his liver to be ‘undamaged’, and he continued to drink heavily. He made frequent attempts to give up, of course, but in the long run he always found his way back to the bottle. The year following his divorce and remarriage was one of the worst; despite having gained Lin, the prospect of losing Judy had plunged him into a pit of depression from which he took years to emerge. ‘Happiness is one of the great delusions of living,’ he claimed. ‘You think back on the times when you think you were happy – but you probably didn’t notice it then. You remember the unhappiness, though.’4 John Cleese believes that ‘Peter almost took the choice that he would rather live a shorter time and drink. That was the great sadness, because his close friends – and latterly, I counted myself as being very, very close with him – made some feeble attempts to say something. He responded not in an unfriendly way but with slightly humorous defiance.’5 Reminded by another journalist that he had assured her he was on the point of giving up drink, he replied: ‘Giving up drink? I never said that. If I did, I must have been drunk.’6 So out of condition had he become by 1991, that when the author of this book interviewed him one lunchtime for a radio documentary about Private Eye, he was barely able to stand unaided. ‘I really thought he was going to die,’ reflects Jonathan Ross.

  The divorce settlement had hit Peter not just emotionally but financially. He had chosen at the last minute to desert Wright Webb Syrett, his solicitors of many years’ standing, and to employ Lin’s solicitors instead; Judy, represented by Anthony Rubinstein, had rejected the terms on offer and had chosen to contest the matter in court. The case was not completed until November 1991, when the High Court awarded her a settlement of over £200,000, with costs going against Peter. After the hearing was over, he shook her hand, and said, ‘Well done.’ An anonymous caller subsequently telephoned the Daily Mail to inform them that Judy was ‘nothing more than a gold digger’. It was not the only financial blow to hit Peter and his wife: Lin, in her capacity as a Lloyd’s ‘name’, lost £32,000 after a bad year on the insurance markets, and her brother Yin even more.

  For the first time in his life, Peter approached Private Eye for money. He was reluctant and embarrassed to ask, but there was absolutely no reason to feel so. The Editor and Managing Director, after all, paid themselves handsomely. Andrew Osmond explains that ‘For many years, we always said, “Peter, take some money.” We were drowning in the stuff. But he’d always say, “No no, I don’t need it. You guys pay yourselves.” So the tradition that the loot was distributed among the doers rather than the owners was at his urging.’ Now, Peter requested a salary of £30,000 a year for his contribution. ‘They would never have thought of resisting, even if he’d asked for twice as much,’ insists Osmond. Some felt, probably correctly, that £30,000 per annum undervalued his input over the previous three decades.

  In the year before his divorce, Peter had been making good money with a series of undemanding film cameos. He appeared in three films released in 1989, playing a slimy bit-part character in each. Without a Clue was a Sherlock Holmes comedy almost as dire as The Hound of the Baskervilles, with Ben Kingsley portraying Dr Watson as the secret mastermind behind the dazzling successes of Michael Caine’s dim-witted Holmes; Peter played the editor of the Strand magazine who forces Watson to go through with the deception. Great Balls of Fire was a Jerry Lee Lewis biopic, with Peter as the cynical leader of the Fleet Street ratpack, who exposes the true age of the rock singer’s child bride. Getting It Right was a rather pointless British romantic comedy that actually began with a shot of a red London bus; Peter played the smarmy, unpleasant owner of the hairdressing salon where the romantically undecided hero of the film earns a living. All three were extremely passable comic turns. There was also a TV appearance that year, playing Craig Ferguson’s vaudeville-obsessed father in Channel Four’s The Craig Ferguson Story, a live stand-up concert packaged with a series of framing biographical sketches. The results were so hopeless that transmission was delayed until 1991, in the forlorn hope that the impact of reputations falling on to concrete from a great height might be dulled by a suitably obscure placing. Like the films, it was just another routine piece of work for Peter, in the persona of the jobbing actor he had become. Only his witty and self-deprecating appearances on chat shows served to remind the world of his true abilities – on Aspel & Company he claimed to have secured a job as Raymond Burr’s stunt double and forecast a bright future for Dettol as a social drink.

  McArthur Park over and over again until we cleared the entire lounge.’

  Back down in Sydney, the organisers of the fund-raising event were getting nervous; but not as nervous as Peter was himself. Michael Parkinson, who had the task of going onstage to introduce him, remembers his arrival on the night: ‘I thought, there’s no way he’s going to perform, because he looked absolutely awful, he was very pissed. His tie was dishevelled and he wasn’t quite together – he looked like three different men had been assembled. But he had got with him – which I thought heartening – a big pile of notes which he’d written in longhand.’ Peter walked out in front of a thousand people and placed his notes carefully on the lectern in front of him. ‘Good Evening,’ he said. At this point the notes slithered off the lectern on to the floor in a disordered heap. Laboriously, he bent down and collected them all up, trying desperately to get them back into some sort of order. As he gathered the last sheets he straightened, and cracked the back of his head underneath the lectern, which toppled off the stage into the front row of the audience, causing him to drop his notes again. ‘Oh, fuck it,’ he announced, before walking off. ‘Now I worked out that that was the highest-paid speech in the history of speech-making,’ laughs Parkinson. ‘Typically, there was no scandal about it – it was just “poor old Peter”. If I’d done it, it would have been in all the
bloody newspapers, I’d have been called this and that, they’d have withheld payment and probably sued me. But Peter got away with it.’

  As so often when he was drinking heavily and finding it difficult to work, Peter turned to the repackaging of old material as a source of income. For seven years, since the trough of 1983, he had been sporadically negotiating with the BBC for the release of a sell-through video of classic Not Only . . . But Also sketches, supported by TV repeats. It was his mother who suggested a way out of the bureaucratic impasse that was bogging him down. ‘Why don’t you write to the Chairman of the BBC,’ she said, ‘and tell him that your mother is now very old and that she would very much like to see the shows again before she dies?’ Peter did as suggested, and two days later Marmaduke Hussey wrote back sanctioning the project. In the summer of 1990 Peter flew out to America to persuade Dudley to led a helping hand.

  He found his old partner rueful, down in the dumps and glad to see a friendly face. Dudley’s marriage to Brogan Lane had collapsed and his career was in free-fall. ‘Most actors, if they are lucky, last five years,’ Dudley said bitterly. ‘I was tops for around two years, then one morning I woke up and found I was on the B-list and falling. I tell you, Hollywood is a great place in which to get cynical about human behaviour.’7 Dudley produced some Ecstasy and the two men sat in Peter’s hotel room avoiding reality. ‘I was very surprised at Dudley coming out with these little tablets,’ Peter later told Rory McGrath, swiftly adapting an old joke, ‘because I always thought Junior Disprol was the limit of his drug-taking activity. The trouble with E though, is that you do want to fuck everything – I started looking at the Corby trouser press in a different light.’ Peter’s life seemed to Dudley to be happier than his own, and Dudley admitted to a certain jealousy. He had even followed Peter’s example by suggesting that his new girlfriend Nicole Rothschild live in a separate house.

  Putting together the video – The Best of What’s Left of Not Only . . . But Also – was to prove an illuminating and nostalgic experience for the two men. Peter knew the material well; he confessed that he often sat alone and watched his tapes of the old sketches, especially The Glidd of Glood. It was only from viewing the material again, he admitted, that he had realised ‘just how much I bossed Dudley about.’8 They chose fourteen sketches and two title sequences for the video, having to leave out only the John Lennon material, as they could not come to a financial settlement with Yoko Ono. They also recorded a new Pete and Dud sketch to introduce the tape, which simply did not match up to the material that followed:

  Pete:

  We have not spoken for twenty years and now we have broken the silence – or rather, I have broken the silence whereas you are sat there and not talking.

  Dud:

  It’s because I can’t get a word in edgeways.

  Pete:

  Which word would you like to put in?

  Dud:

  Maybe I would like to put in the word ‘edgeways’.

  Pete:

  Feel free. Where has it got you?

  Dud:

  Nowhere. I think I will put ‘nowhere’ and ‘edgeways’ in.

  The problem was, manifestly, that the dynamic had changed. Dud was no longer the subservient acolyte, hanging on Pete’s every word. He was an equal partner, questioning, disagreeing, almost churlishly so at times.

  Off screen, though, relations between the two men were at their best for twenty years. They underwent the usual round of promotional interviews together, including an appearance on the Wogan programme on a replica pub set, where Dudley and Terry Wogan sat with their pints untouched while Peter ripped through his. There was a big party to celebrate the video’s release on Bonfire Night, at which the Rolling Stones were honoured guests. Peter was disappointed, though, that unlike the Stones’ royalties, the financial rewards due to him from re-releasing 1960s hits were proving rather limited. ‘He was rueful about that particular comparison at the time,’ says TalkBack television’s Peter Fincham. ‘I didn’t get the impression that he was earning an awful lot of money from the video. In fact he gave the impression that he was getting rather short of cash.’

  Peter’s income was a subject of increasing concern to him. Mel Smith remembers that ‘he’d had a lean year, and I’d had a good couple of years, so when Cadbury’s wanted to reshow our Wispa commercial, my office was saying, “No no, forget it, you’ll have to come back with something better than that.” And Peter used to keep ringing me, saying, “What are we doing? I mean, what’s happening? We’d better take this money.” And I was saying, “Peter, Peter, relax, don’t worry about it, it’ll be fine,” which it was in the end. But he was beginning to panic slightly.’ The journalist John Lahr remembers visiting him at Perrin’s Walk, ‘when the sound of the doorbell sent him lurching to the window to peek out in case it was the tax collector, to whom he owed, he said, seventy thousand pounds.’9 The continuing costs of the divorce case were beginning to worry him too, so at the end of 1990 he began to look actively for work. He secured TV ads for Nat West Bank (with Harry Enfield and Jennifer Saunders) and Panama cigars (with Ronnie Corbett, Frank Carson, Frankie Howerd and Bruce Forsyth). He also did a deal with Mel Smith’s TV company, TalkBack, to write and star in a series of short programmes for the BBC.

  Peter Fincham, who produced A Life in Pieces, explains that the series was originally Griff Rhys Jones’s idea. ‘He said we should do a programme calledThe Twelve Days of Christmas, but he didn’t explain what he meant by the idea, so in characteristic style he left us sitting round saying “What should we do?” And somebody said, “Let’s get Peter Cook in.”’ Peter and John Lloyd, who was hired as director, suggested twelve five-minute programmes in which Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling would be interviewed by Sir Edward Heath about each of the twelve gifts in the song. Heath turned the proposal down point blank, and was replaced by Ludovic Kennedy; BBC 2 bought the idea, which didn’t cost much, for late-night transmission at Christmas. Conscious of the fact that Peter would probably be insufficiently self-disciplined to sit down and write an hour’s worth of material, TalkBack took on Rory McGrath as scriptwriter/transcriber, to knock Peter’s taped improvisations into shape.

  Even though it was only a late-night fringe programme, A Life in Pieces was Peter’s first solo TV vehicle for a decade, and he found himself in a state of nervous indecision. He expressed his worries to McGrath: ‘Peter insisted that it should be just him talking; he said, “I don’t want it to be an interview.” So I said, “Great, I’ll tell them that it’ll be just you talking to camera then.” Whereupon he said, “No, I think it should be an interview.”’ Similar problems bedevilled the writing process. ‘We had these fantastic lunches together. He said, ‘Come round first thing in the morning.’ And I said, ‘What time is that – nine?’ And he said, ‘No, one o’clock.’ ‘One o’clock in the morning?’ No, one o’clock in the afternoon.’ So I’d turn up at lunchtime, he’d sit there with a can of cider, improvising, and it was hilarious, I was just pissing myself laughing. When I got home and sobered up it was still magic to listen to, but I couldn’t make it into a series. I was supposed to be doing twelve episodes, each with a self-contained story, and this was just the ramblings of a crazed comic genius. I tried to hone it into shape, but whenever Peter saw something written down he tended not to like it. He said, ‘This isn’t very funny,’ and I’d say, ‘Well this is what you said,’ and he’d say, ‘No, it’s not good enough.’ So I rewrote it completely and junked all that stuff. And he said, ‘This is funny, it made me laugh a lot, but I don’t want to do it because it isn’t me.’11 The week of recording loomed nearer, and still there was no script.

  Peter, John Lloyd and Peter Fincham improvised further material in the more ordered surroundings of Lin’s house, and Lloyd turned his hand to cramming the autobiographical wanderings of Sir Arthur into the ‘Twelve Days’ format. Eventually the scripts were prepared and transferred to autocue, and a manor house was booked for three days’ filming in early Nov
ember 1990. Peter Fincham recalls that ‘We were in the hotel one night, looking at the scripts for the following day, and Peter said, “One of these isn’t good enough” – it was for the third day of Christmas. So we went to his room and turned on the tape recorder; and he started going into this extraordinary tale about being in Brussels, and falling in love with a girl called Rochelle or something, whom he took back to his flat, and it’s the most touching and funny thing.’ In fact the programmes were a mine of semi-autobiographical material – reminiscences about Sir Arthur’s childhood, family history and student days that bore uncanny similarities to Peter’s own.

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  In so far as the programmes were noticed in their late-night eyrie, they attracted kind notices: ‘Supremely diverting,’ said the Daily Telegraph, for instance. Even those involved, however, admitted that they had not really succeeded. The improvisatory feel of the material was smoothed away by the single-camera mode of filming: Peter and Ludovic Kennedy never appeared in shot together, their questions and answers were recorded separately, and no relationship between the two was ever built up. The material only dimly fitted the format: Ten Pipers Piping, for instance, was connected to The Twelve Days of Christmas only in that the subject of Peter’s monologue was a man named Piper. A faint atmosphere of nostalgic regret hung about Peter’s performance, that sat ill with Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling’s traditionally obtuse confidence. ‘It had a slightly pointless feeling about it,’ admits Rory McGrath. ‘I think if it wasn’t Peter Cook you probably wouldn’t have forgiven it.’ John Lloyd reflects accurately that ‘It’s got some wonderful things in it, but it was done for its own sake.’ Justin Sbresni, a student handing out flyers for his fringe show in Hampstead High Street, gave one to Peter, who stopped to chat for fifteen minutes about Sbresni’s material and about his own; A Life in Pieces, he said with regret, was really not very good.