Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing by John Fisher

Author:John Fisher
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Cooper, Comedians, Tommy, Comedians - Great Britain, Entertainment & Performing Arts, General, Great Britain, Sports & Recreation, Biography & Autobiography, Soccer, Individual Director, Biography
ISBN: 9780007215119
Publisher: Harpercollins Uk
Published: 2007-09-28T19:57:09.146796+00:00

EIGHT

Cooper Vision: Part One

When Tommy was given his first series, television comedy was still at a tentative stage. Arthur Askey’s success was not wrongly perceived as little more than televised concert party. Richard Hearne, with his Mr Pastry characterization, was primarily a children’s performer accorded bonus adult appeal by nature of the grown-up fascination with the medium that purveyed him. By 1952 it was generally perceived that the only show to have achieved any sort of breakthrough in presentation terms was Terry-Thomas’s How Do You View? with its intimate approach and sketch comedy that scored visually. The star’s bizarre appearance with his gap-toothed smile, elaborate waistcoats and exaggerated cigarette holder, once wittily purveyed as a television aerial, were made for the medium. The challenge that faced Cooper as he contemplated his first television series, It’s Magic, was daunting, but the fact that magic was a visual performance form had to be in his favour.

A habitué of live performance, Tommy would have to adapt to the more exacting approach of a medium, where, as he admitted in later life, amid a welter of technical distractions the performer has to create his own atmosphere with the studio audience situated on the other side of an enforced barrier of cameras, cables and the people operating them. That mood then had to filter into the homes of millions more. The number of people who have volunteered to me that Cooper is the only comic they have watched from their favourite armchair with tears streaming down their cheeks indicates that he was more than passably successful. However, when he looked back on his first series experience, he did so with a modesty that borders on the defensive. He always recognized it for the big break it was, but in interviews never referred to it as his own show, always as McDonald Hobley’s: ‘He had a show called It’s Magic. I went in as a guest artist, but they kept me for the series.’ Hobley, one of the defining faces of pioneer television in this country, was the debonair continuity announcer who acted as master of ceremonies throughout the programme and proved a perfect foil to Cooper. But the Radio Times billing (as well as Cooper’s contract) left one in no doubt: ‘Tommy Cooper in It’s Magic’. Only then in humbler print do we encounter ‘A miscellany of mischief, music, and mystery, introduced by McDonald Hobley.’ The listings magazine also carried a credit, ‘Material for Tommy Cooper supervised by Miff Ferrie.’ There is no indication of who wrote what and one assumes that Tommy and Miff collated it from the usual ragbag of sources.

Miscellany is the spice of variety, but in this instance it almost certainly undermined the public’s expectation of the programme. It was not a magic show per se, as its title suggests, but clung to the word ‘magic’ in its figurative sense as the key that locked all the ingredients into place. Tommy’s burlesque interludes were interwoven with items that epitomized the ‘magic’ of music, of dance, of song, and so on.

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