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20 years on: The satirist's satirist Peter Cook remembered
What's the worst job you've ever had?
Bloody Greta Garbo
A minor tragedy in all this is that many of Cook and Moore’s best performances were on the Not Only ... tele-recordings – half inch black and white tapes, later followed by one inch colour tapes – and after the series ended in late 1970, it was widely rumoured that the tapes were to be re-used by BBC bean counters, a move partly prompted by the space needed for a new format of bigger tapes.
When Cook heard that such cultural vandalism was in the offing he offered to buy the tapes and/or replace them with new ones, a generous gesture stupidly rejected by some BBC high-up who insisted that most of the reels be wiped (the few that remain were issued as a BBC Worldwide DVD The Best of ... What’s Left of ... Not Only But Also in September 2008).
But Not Only ... had good ratings and won awards, giving Cook enough of a profile to star in feature films like The Wrong Box, Alice In Wonderland, A Dandy in Aspic, Monte Carlo or Bust and his very own Bedazzled, a slick, sick but hilarious parody of the Faust legend starring both Cook and Moore – a film which was also an obvious influence on both Life of Brian and Johnny Rotten – the stage persona of John Lydon.
Incidentally, if you've not seen the original, it's in a different league to the dreary remake of Bedazzled (2000) starring Liz Hurley. In March 2012, the BFI celebrated Cook's comedic talent with a season of films under the banner Peter Cook: Genius at Work. Bedazzled played to a packed audience with an introduction from actor and comedian Peter Serafinowicz in conversation with Eleanor Bron, one of the film's stars.
Cook ended the 1960s with two more "serious" comedy movies – the scathing anti-bomb film The Bed-sitting Room and The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (a political satire in which a pollster slowly takes over the country with an overdose of democracy).
In the 1970s Cook became more of a hard-drinker – when he wasn’t helping Private Eye magazine stay in business – which may be why he issued the obscene but funny Derek & Clive album (a sort of gross Pete and Dud session that had been secretly recorded). There were Derek & Clive follow-ups, and even a video, but each one was less amusing than its predecessor (while the video is mostly just embarrassing).
In 1978 he retained his music connection by presenting the late night Revolver, one of the few programmes that gave the latest punk, post-punk and New Wave bands a showcase (around the same time he made various contributions to albums by Sparks and Godley & Creme – working with the latter on the concept album Consequences, providing a play and acting the parts that form a part of this ambitious triple album).
In the 1980s and early 1990s, as Dudley Moore became a Hollywood star, Cook starred in a short-lived US sitcom, The Two Of Us, while still throwing cameos into various TV shows and feature films – most notably Whoops Apocalypse (1988) as well as being the star turn at the annual Amnesty International fund-raiser The Secret Policeman’s Ball.
He died exactly 20 years ago today on 9 January 1995, killed by a haemorrhage that was caused by chronic liver damage. He was only 57 years old. Lurid press stories about Cook’s life and funeral upset many of his friends and admirers, including Stephen Fry who publicly criticised the sneering tone of much of the coverage.
A decade later the Channel 4 film Not Only But Always dramatised the Cook-Moore relationship while unfairly casting Cook, played by Rhys Ifans, as an all-out bully, but his real legacy remains all around us; in the stand-up genre he helped start, in the comedy clubs he pioneered and in the thousands of shows, sitcoms and film comedies that he has undoubtedly influenced. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
