My Life in Pieces (65 page)

All this Tommy Cooper embodies, baffled as he is by life in general, by the intransigence of his own body and by the magic tricks which he has so carefully rehearsed but which constantly rebel against him, even when he follows the instructions. The magic is a sort of metaphor of the unprivileged life: the doomed attempt to gain power, to be impressive, to dominate the world. No matter what you do, how much you spend on your tricks, how diligently you practise them, you will fail: they have a life of their own. And we in the audience can see that Tommy Cooper is the last man on earth who should ever have been allowed to pick up a wand; the very idea is gloriously preposterous. He knows it too. He is everyone in the audience who has ever entertained the notion of being a magician, of surprising and astonishing the family and the neighbours (as the instruction booklets so glibly promise). When one of his tricks succeeds, we rejoice for him as we would for ourselves. The magic has another function, though, within the canny mixture which constitutes Tommy Cooper’s act. It is a kind of a narrative, engaging our conscious
minds, lowering our defences as we try to work out what has just happened and why, and allowing the comedy to attack us at the subconscious level, leaving us helpless to resist. In other words – T. S. Eliot’s, to be precise – the magic is the objective correlative of Tommy’s act. It functions like the bone the burglar throws to the dog of reason, keeping it happily engaged while the artist works his darker, deeper purposes, emptying the safe of the unconscious. Verbally, Tommy may not exactly be Shakespeare, but the flights of his imagination are no less wild. The result is that his comedy unhinges us, generating a kind of delirium which is extraordinarily restorative.

There are of course other comedians who do this. Ken Dodd asks nothing more of an audience, he says, than to let him ‘muck around with their minds for an hour’. He represents another aspect of the halls when he breaks into mellifluous sentimental song; you will find no such thing with Tommy Cooper. If Tommy sings, it is to draw attention to his own lack of abilities in that department, but also, by extension, to the absurdity of singing. Mad as a snake though Dodd certainly is – Dodd the performer – and as compulsive a motor-mouthing, free-associating, stream-of-consciousness merchant as any Shakespearean clown, his personality lacks the grandeur of Tommy’s. Tommy is, as Carson McCullers might say, ‘afflicted’. He is doomed to failure at first sight. Our heart goes out to him. He is us. Dodd is a fool, a brilliant and obsessed madman, whereas Tommy plays the fool, because what else could he do? He is that person in every social group who takes it on himself to create laughter by stressing his own ineptitude. Just as his magic lets him down, so does his comedy. He offers a running commentary on the success or failure of his jokes. If necessary, he repeats them (‘I’ve got a cigarette lighter that won’t go out.’ Pause. ‘I’VE GOT A CIGARETTE LIGHTER THAT WON’T GO OUT.’). He doesn’t just give away the mechanism of his tricks; he exposes the tricks of his comedy, too. ‘More, more!’ he shouts behind his hand, fanning applause; he identifies the beginnings of a promising laugh: ‘Ripple, ripple, ripple.’ He eggs us on to greater heights with encouraging gestures. And then he roars with laughter at his own idiocy; he is his own best audience.

All of this is deeply touching, which is not a necessary component of a great comedian, but is an essential one of a clown, which is what Tommy Cooper is, at heart. The invention of a clown is a great creative act, identical in sort to the great creations of literature, to a Falstaff or a Don
Quixote, a Leopold Bloom or a Captain Grimes. Chaplin’s creation of The Tramp is a supreme example among comedians. Buster Keaton and Grock are others. And as such are they not susceptible of revival, just as you might have another go at playing Quixote or Bloom? It was the actor Patrick Ryecart, the co-producer of
Jus’ Like That
, who had the seminal thought that turned into the show: wouldn’t it be wonderful, he said, if we could sit in a theatre and be part of Tommy’s audience now. It was not a question of impersonation – one of the indices of the man’s enduring popularity is that virtually everyone in Britain who can speak can do their version of the man, if only to say ‘Jus’ like that’, with appropriate hand gestures – or even of reconstruction, but of tapping into the unique energy that Cooper generated. I suppose you could say we wanted to bring him to life again.

That may be why they approached me to direct the piece. I have spent quite a large part of my working life being what Dickens in
A Tale of
Two Cities
calls a ‘resurrection man’. As a biographer, but also as an actor, I have often been involved in trying to revive the dead (usually the great dead). In my time I have played Mozart, Handel, Schumann, Oscar Wilde, Verlaine, Rousseau, Juvenal, Dr Johnson, Napoleon, Galileo, Dickens. It has generally proved to be a rather emotional business. I am not of a mystical turn, but whenever I start to play one of these geniuses, I am aware of a curious sense of responsibility towards them, as if they expected me to give the best account of them I could, to plead their cause. They take hold of you, put a pistol to your head, and force you to tell their story the way they want it told.

Working on
Jus’ Like That
has touched on some of these same emotions. Tommy was one of those few performers, a tiny handful, who go beyond being simply entertainers, helping to pass the time, but become part of our mental landscape, as known to us as family. Their very presence – their very existence, you might say – warms us and their gorgeously familiar routines never fail to unlock the accumulated tensions of our lives. They are as cheering and as crucial to our well-being as wine and food; they put us firmly back into the present moment, that split second at which the laughter breaks, and we surrender our rational defences, giving in to the riot of mental mayhem where nothing makes sense any more, nor does it have to. Everything one has been holding together collapses. This intellectual liberation – this temporary insanity – produces physical joy, and a sudden breakdown of barriers between individuals.
Nothing melds people more swiftly. In the grip of this sort of laughter, it is nearly impossible to avoid catching one’s neighbour’s eye; sometimes it is essential to grasp him or her by the arm.

Working on the show has been a curiously moving experience. Given a performer as deeply connected to Tommy Cooper as Jerome Flynn is, as skilled and as funny, it has been no surprise that the comedy and the magic work triumphantly. What has been extraordinary, and surprising to all of us, as we’ve toured around the country, is – beyond all the glorious gags and the tricks – the sheer affection in which Tommy was held, the delight in his grandeur of spirit and his great cosmic laugh. There is a feeling that someone has returned who should never have gone away; that his spirit is abroad again, that something very personal, something that belongs to them, has been restored to people. He is a genuine Folk Hero, and his return is as welcome as that of Robin Hood or John Bull. (But they never got a laugh in their lives, as Tommy would say.)

Tony Hancock, too, was somewhere between comic and clown – with more
than a little of the actor about him in the bargain. I wrote about John
Fisher’s biography of him in 2009, in the
Guardian.

John Fisher is the roving commissar of comedy, the peripatetic Professor of Pandemonium, the Ancient Mariner of the Music Hall. He knows where all the bodies are buried and where the connective tissue is; nothing escapes his eagle eye, nothing slips away from his all-retentive memory. For years, he has been writing comprehensive studies of comedians he has seen, as well as affectionate evocations of those of whom he has merely heard. Though most of his professional life has been spent producing television programmes, including such milestones as
The
Tommy Cooper Show
, and although he has a keen sense of the practical aspects of comedy, it is essentially as a fan, a gurgling, joyously chortling fan, that he comes to his task. In
Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biogra
phy
, he gives a touching picture of himself as a seven-year-old boy in the Gaumont Southampton, glimpsing Tony Hancock – then an up-and-coming radio star – hurling himself about the stage with hilarious precision; thereafter, he followed him through his brief but momentous career, and was numbed by his lonely, early death. But when the first
book about Hancock appeared – a lurid account by his second wife, the publicist Freddie Ross – Fisher was utterly shocked by the unlovely details of his hero’s decline, and tried to protect his very respectable and loving mother and father from learning them.

Something of this innocence betrayed haunts the present book. Fisher charts the comedian’s rapid rise with jaunty brio, vividly recounting plots, analysing gestures, turns of phrase. But you sense that he is dreading the inevitable hints of trouble, tragedy’s unrelenting finger beckoning, beckoning. When it all starts to go wrong for Hancock, he gallantly finds a redeeming moment here, a nicely timed gag there, but he gazes on helpless as the man he refers to again and again as ‘the lad himself’ slips deeper into the morass of alcohol and self-laceration. The final days as described by Fisher are almost unbearable to read because the author is so upset himself, as if Hancock were a close personal friend bent on a course of doom.

He gives us a lively account of the early life in Bournemouth, where Hancock’s parents, who were intermittently in show business, bought an hotel where, like one of his heroes, Charles Laughton, he helped out. His father died; he was sent to public school and walked out at the age of fourteen. He tried to follow in his father’s footsteps as a comedian and failed at the first hurdle; there was a succession of hopeless jobs; then his first faltering successful steps on stage. The breaks and the disasters are duly recorded against the background of a vivid and deeply affectionate account of the variety theatre of the day.

Eventually, after a dreary war as a clerk in the RAF, Hancock was discovered, like so many others, by Ralph Reader of the Gang Show, and equally inevitably, found his way to the Windmill Theatre, six shows a day, six days a week, where he learned ‘to die gracefully, like a swan’. His confidence was growing; people began to sense that he had something special. He got into radio as a running character in Peter Brough’s
Educating Archie
. His catchphrase ‘Isn’t it sickening?’ was on everyone’s lips, soon followed by ‘Flippin’ kids!’; an innocent age indeed. The crucial event in his life as a star was when he met the writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who uncannily channelled the essence of the man Hancock into the character Hancock, boastful, aspirational, intolerant, out of place almost everywhere he finds himself, but nonetheless possessed of a certain grandeur. This character is surely one of the great inventions of twentieth-century comedy, the love child of these two
writers and the actor they served. Just as surely as Archie Rice or Jimmy Porter, Hancock (as created by Galton and Simpson) expressed the age – the post-war accidie, the sense of vanished dreams, of alienation and angst, the rage against conformist greyness – but through the rumpled and familiar form of the man the writers in an inspired moment christened Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock. (In one of a million astonishing details in the book, Fisher reveals that Hancock was seriously courted to play Jimmy Porter in the film of
Look Back in Anger
.)

As a boy I was besotted with Hancock, especially after his transition to television, for which medium his infinitely expressive, melted-down features were made. Indeed, I identified with him, recognising in him a middle-aged child not so very unlike the middle-aged child I felt myself to be. There is so often a child at the heart of any great comic creation, and Hancock was gorgeously, outrageously infantile. The part was bespoke: the scripts follow the contours of Hancock’s natural melody so perfectly that to read them on the page is to hear them. Fisher is exceptionally good on the odd interpenetration of character and man, and shrewdly observes that it was this that began to gnaw at him. As Fisher puts it, there were times ‘when he felt cheated of his real identity’. He began to feel that the character was merely him, and that therefore he wasn’t proving himself; he started to become increasingly introspective about his work. Like someone picking a scab, he felt compelled to worry at it till he bled, pulling a thread in a cardigan till the whole thing came apart. Like the lad himself, he had
des
idées au-dessus de sa gare
: he started to think of himself as an Artist, which, of course, he was, but a deeply instinctive one – to the extent that he never used to read the radio scripts until the morning of the transmission, and then gave flawlessly timed and inhabited performances. The blitheness of radio – where scripts don’t have to be learned, props don’t have to be mastered and the actors have an easy camaraderie across the microphones – left him blissfully unselfconscious. Television, where everything had to happen for real, started the process of endless self-analysis which, his brother noted, killed him.

He was invited to appear on the notorious
Face to Face
series in which a quietly unrelenting John Freeman, shrouded in shadow, interrogated him as the camera dwelt on his face. It was a form of public confession – without absolution – which did him irreparable damage, tipping him over into a sort of anguished contemplation of his own limitations and an insatiable determination to innovate. He was determined to become a
Chaplin or a Keaton, a universal and international figure. This meant the immediate dismantlement of Hancock as we knew him, the departure from East Cheam, the abandonment of his co-stars (Sid James the first to go), and, catastrophically, the dismissal of his writers. From then on – despite occasional successes like his film
The Rebel
– it was a slow and increasingly excruciating professional suicide. His consumption of alcohol while on the job, which had begun when he was playing in variety theatres, began to destroy his talent: he could no longer remember lines, and, most poignantly, as his physical condition got worse, that uniquely expressive mug became as rigid as Mount Rushmore. In life, he and his wives and mistresses plunged headlong into a sea of booze; at one point he chained himself to the railings of Primrose Hill. Often things turned violent. One wife happened to be a judo expert, so he rarely inflicted any damage on her; the other protected herself by frequently (and with diminishing impact) attempting to kill herself.