Biography Of Peter Cook by Thompson Harry

Author:Thompson, Harry [Thompson, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781444717839
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2011-11-24T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Learning to Fly Underwater

Pete and Dud, 1968–71

In the wake of Bedazzled, Peter rather enjoyed hoisting the devil’s banner sympathetically around town. He appeared in a lunchtime debate at St Mary-le-Bow Cheapside against the Rector, Joseph McCulloch, and put up a spirited defence of Lucifer and his forbearance in the face of the raw deal handed down to him by God. A packed congregation heard the Reverend McCulloch counter with the argument that ‘Jesus was, in a way, the greatest satirist of all time,’ thereby proving that Alan Bennett’s contribution to Beyond the Fringe had changed nothing. The Rector, who had expected to face a wild, angry, irreligious subversive, was so surprised by Peter’s gentility, humility and excellent manners that he actually wrote to Margaret Cook to compliment her on the way she had brought up her son. ‘I’d rather go to hell with Peter Cook than to heaven with the Archbishop of Canterbury,’ he confessed.

On 28 January 1968, the day after losing his front teeth at Old Trafford, Peter bravely fulfilled a commitment to defend Satan’s point of view on a BBC religious programme: ‘I don’t believe those fellows were the instruments of God’s revenge,’ he remarked cheerfully. It began to dawn on TV producers and the organisers of public events, rather belatedly, that he was an absolute natural at the chat show game – witty, articulate, combative and bursting with amusing anecdotes. The organiser of a symposium entitled This Is England managed to lure Peter, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller up to Manchester later in the year, an event that caused Bennett to reflect in his diary: ‘Seven years since Beyond the Fringe have hardly altered the relationship between us. We still retain much the same characteristics we had when we first worked together, only in an intensified form. Jonathan is voluble and lucid, Peter seizes opportunities for laughs and delivers good cracking insults, while I make occasional heartfelt but dull remarks. The difference between 1961 and 1968 is that all feeling of competition between us has gone.’

From the beginning of 1968, Peter became a regular and much-requested guest on The Eamonn Andrews Show, the principal TV chat show of the time. One of his earliest appearances, recorded at the Royal Lancaster Hotel on 8 January, set the tone for the rest of the series: Andrews spoke to each of the guests in turn, soliciting bogus showbiz compliments for the Hollywood star Zsa Zsa Gabor, who sat alongside him blushing, batting her eyelashes and stroking the small dog that sat sweating in her lap. ‘Who do you think is the real Zsa Zsa?’ gushed the Irishman. The other guests obliged with suitably fulsome remarks before Peter, reclining languidly, fag in hand, replied that the real Zsa Zsa was almost certainly a vain, untalented non-event. He was not in the best of moods: his family was due to emigrate to Spain without him the following day. The fur flew, literally in the dog’s case, Zsa Zsa pointing out that Peter was the rudest young man she had ever met, who would do well to get his hair cut.

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