Comic genius or wretched drunk? A new film about Peter Cook gets you thinking - December 29 2004
IN THE opening scene of Not Only But Always, a Channel 4 biopic about Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, an aged Cook makes a call to a late-night radio phone-in. Surrounded by empty gin bottles, he delivers a short monologue as “Sven from Swiss Cottage”, rambling and depressed.
Poor Cook — old, lonely, alcoholic. Once an astonishingly funny man, here reduced to boring the tiny audience of a local radio station. He wasn‘t funny any more, and there are few things as tragic as an unfunny comedian. But though it works very nicely in narrative terms — the film jerks back to a handsome, witty Cook at Cambridge, so that we can see his decline in perspective — it isn’t true.
What jars in this scene is the reaction of the host — bored, unamused, even embarrassed. But Cook’s Sven monologues were hilarious (“one of Peter’s finest creations”, says his biographer, Harry Thompson). He might have been drunk, and he might have been fat and lonely — but he was never boring or embarrassing.
Rhys Ifans plays Cook, in a screenplay by Terry Johnson, and it’s an extraordinary performance. He captures Cook’s tics, his rolling eyes. But Cook is more than a collection of mannerisms. Crucially, Ifans doesn’t capture his wit or charm. He doesn’t capture the weirdness of Cook — who could? But without that, the story doesn‘t make sense — why do all those women adore this cruel, unfunny drunk?
Not Only But Always reduces Cook to a caricature. But worse, it depicts his life in caricature: young and dashing at Cambridge, early success with Beyond the Fringe, mean to Dudley Moore, gets drunk, wastes his talent, annoys his wives, drinks himself to death.
This is the film’s big flaw: it tells an old, boring, simplistic story: poor, tortured Cook, unfulfilled potential. “Sententious hogwash,” as Stephen Fry said in response to Cook’s obituaries.
But in the “tragic” phase of his life, from the late Seventies on, after Moore went to Hollywood, Cook spent his time getting drunk, appearing on chat shows and making the odd movie appearance (such as in The Princess Bride, where Cook’s 30-second appearance with a silly voice steals the film). He did what he wanted to do. There was no shortage of people who loved him. He had a great time, even if his liver didn’t. It’s not a tragic life at all — it’s a thoroughly admirable life. He stayed absolutely true to himself. He wasn’t vain, he wasn’t self-important, he wasn’t greedy or ambitious.Why assume that it’s impossible to live like that without paying some terrible price?
Who squandered their talent, Moore, who made 10 and Arthur, or Cook, who spent the Eighties making up jokes for Private Eye? Which of the Beyond the Fringe group ended up the most tedious, the most tragic? Not Cook.
After his death, and talking about Cook’s heavy drinking, Moore said: “He wasn’t as good from the time that we broke up. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but that’s what it coincided with.” But how true is this? Cook’s 1979 parody of the judge’s summing up in the Jeremy Thorpe trial, “Entirely a matter for you”, is Cook at his absolute best — he wasn’t left high and dry by Moore.
A year before he died, Cook worked with Chris Morris on a series of faux interviews entitled Why Bother? with Cook as the sleazy, cynical old buffer Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, and Morris his interviewer. Morris is one of the few satirists who belongs in the same league as Cook, and Cook raises his game with him — the two spar with each other brilliantly.
The interviews cover subjects such as Sir Arthur’s “discovery of the fossilised remains of the infant Christ” and his participation in the Rodney King LA race riots: “I like to think I mowed down as many whites as I did blacks. The Koreans did very badly out of the whole deal.”
There’s nothing very radical about Why Bother?. It’s much the same as what Cook was doing in the Sixties — what Morris calls “joy in ridiculous ideas”. But it’s as good as anything he ever did. The interviews were completely improvised, the jokes arriving “fully formed”, as they always had done. It’s astonishingly clever and inventive. This is how Morris describes working with him: “He seemed a very twinkly sort of person. You know, very conspiratorially amused, and not the classic hardened cynical figure that a late-in-life alcoholic tends to bring to mind.”
The day after Cook’s death in 1995, Bernard Levin wrote that Cook was “tormented beneath the laughter”. Every genius is tormented, every comedian has hidden sadness — every good thing has a price. The only really tragic thing to happen to Cook was to have his life reduced to an idiotic cliché.
Not Only But Always is on tomorrow on Channel 4 at 9pm. Why Bother? is on the BBC Collection (£8.99)
