Petering Out

The world seems to be full of Peter Cook at the moment: his biography stares out from the shelves, his face stares out from the screen in retrospectives of his life and reminiscences about Secret Policemen's Balls and, last night, his black and white doppelganger, in the form of Rhys Ifans, stared out from beneath a cloth cap in Ray Bennett's "Not Only ... But Always". This last was supposedly a teleplay about the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore partnership but turned out to be simply another piece focusing on the life of Cook.

Cook, for many, is the great genius of British comedy, the man who - with a single wave of an elegant hand - shook up the establishment (and set up The Establishment) with his excoriating satire and opened the way for the 60's to occur. All around him, we are constantly reminded, were mere pygmies: Alan Bennett a campily wistful Northerner; David Frost an irritating little git on the make; Jonathan Miller a pompously overintellectual ass; Dudley Moore a Dagenham oik who could play the piano a bit and liked shagging, and so forth.

Yet there is surely a worm in the bud of this rosy view of Cook; not his treatment of Moore, nor his treatment of women, nor even the booze and porn. The clue to the problem lies in the constant asseverations by those who bend the knee before the Cook altar that "he certainly didn't waste his talent". They protest too much. For those of us who didn't grow up in the sixties, Cook was a pale and puffy figure who stalked such heights as "Supergirl: The Movie", "Joan Rivers: Can We Talk?" and reruns of dross such as "Bedazzled". By all accounts he would regularly drop in on the offices of Private Eye to sprinkle a little magic dust over the contents, but the difficulty with using this to defend his genius is that the Eye has never been half as brilliant as those behind it think it is. Let's face it, apart from a moment of brilliance at the Secret Policeman's Ball with his parody of the Jeremy Thorpe summing up, an amusing turn on a Clive Anderson talkshow(1) and a few rambling calls as "Sven from Swiss Cottage" to a late-night phone-in, Peter Cook spent his last few years in an alcoholic haze, shuffling from his house to the Europa late-night store on Hampstead's Heath Street to grab more booze.

None of this is to deny Cook's early brilliance: he's still the man who created some of the finest sketches and monologues of all the early 60's Oxbridge set. It is to ask why we in Britain are so keen to tell and retell his story. Particularly when the British seem so keen to praise Cook while ignoring the story of Moore. Surely in any other country it's the diminutive Dud's story that would be being told and retold. Where else would they ignore the tale of a short, working class boy with a club foot who manages to overcome all these difficulties, going on to become an organ scholar at Oxbridge, an accomplished jazz pianist, half of one of the greatest British double acts and then manages, while his partner trudges the weary path into alcoholism, to turn himself into a Hollywood sex symbol? Where else would they prefer the story of a well-heeled public schoolboy who began his life on the public stage in triumph and ended it in something less interesting than failure?

(1) generally hailed by his supporters as the second coming of the comic Messiah.