Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

For Gwen,

For Vicky,

And for Henry & Doris Lewis,
who also had a daughter named Victoria.

Tommy Cooper has been a part of my comic consciousness for almost as long as I can recall. Back in the Fifties I remember waiting despondently with my mother for her to be served in a greengrocer’s shop in the Southampton suburb of Shirley and being briefly distracted by a giant cardboard cut-out of the fez-capped zany producing a large citrus specimen of South African origin from the folds of his mysterious cloak. The caption said it all with the conciseness that characterized a Cooper one-liner: ‘Cape Fruit! Grapefruit!’ It might have been the other way around. It does not matter. Even without the trademark chortle that the man himself would have added in performance, my impatience gave way to laughter. I was scarcely out of short trousers at the time.

In later years I have often thought how appropriate it was to be familiarized with this great clown in a store for fruit and vegetables. For a child of the time his outsize noddle resembled the prototype of Mr Potato Head, the craze that encouraged kids to rummage in the vegetable bin and then to create an identity from the plastic accessories provided for his ears, eyes, and other facial features. A more academic allusion might
align the whole Cooper appearance with the work of the sixteenth-century Italian artist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, skilled at creating faces out of the constituent parts of the aforesaid bin. He would surely have applauded the appearance of Cooper that we all call to mind, one with not only a spud for a head, but runner beans for legs, bunches of bananas for hands, turnip nose, dark olive eyes, crinkly endive hair, even an upturned flowerpot for headwear. Today, when gardeners and chefs appear to command more air time and celebrity than clowns and gagsters, Tommy might have appreciated the irony.

It was not always so. There was a time when a mere two- channel television service lost no opportunity to put mainstream performing talent on screen. One opening was provided by the summer season shows that were an essential part of the British seaside holiday. Every Friday during high summer the BBC Outside Broadcast vans would decamp to the coast to provide the viewer with a grainy black and white sample of what they were missing at one resort or another. This was how I first came to see Cooper in performance, televised to the nation from the end of a pier in Great Yarmouth on a bill with the singer Eve Boswell and the now forgotten stand-up comic Derek Roy sometime in the late Fifties. The fact that I can pinpoint the first time I saw this remarkable comedian, whereas the personalized debuts of others have long since become indistinct, is significant. Whereas other comedians of my then limited experience made the act of comedy a challenge with the audience, he made it a game. The hilarious abandon as he zigzagged his way from one crazy prop to another, the sheer delight he managed to communicate through the veil of his own frustration and bewilderment were things to savour. Television had never been so entertaining and I could hardly wait to see him live on stage. Another summer, another resort,
and nearby Bournemouth claimed the comedy wizard. I was not disappointed, my initial response enhanced a hundred times. Like all the true Variety greats, he was always at his most effective in the welcoming environment of a real theatre, even if he worked in an era when visibility on television was essential to fill seats in the first place.

The years moved on and in my late teens I found myself attending a magicians’ convention in Eastbourne. It was the morning of the ‘Dealers’ Dem’, the event at which those who devise and sell tricks to the rabbit in the hat brigade are given the opportunity to perform their new miracles for their prospective clientele. The event was already under way. I was sitting about six rows from the back. There was an empty seat to my left. Then I became aware of a minor disturbance caused by somebody clambering past the knees of those already seated to take up the empty position. It was the gentle giant of comedy magic. Nobody clambered to funnier effect than Cooper. All eyes around him were now averted from the stage. Finding his place, he briefly acknowledged myself and his neighbour on the other side, before settling down into his chair. What then happened was a scene of unintentional comic chaos caused by the fact that throughout this Tommy was holding a cup and saucer in one hand, a glass of something stronger in the other, juggling a convention programme and a newspaper under one arm, and smoking a cigar, all at the same time. At no point did he ask the help of either of us sitting alongside him. At no point was a drop of liquid spilt. He was not consciously putting on an act. It just happened that way.

This memory achieved piquancy a few years later when, playing the fiancé in a sketch on his television show, he sits on a sofa between his prospective in-laws and attempts to juggle cup of tea, glass of whisky, plate of cake, and cigar. His handling of the situation is one of applause-worthy brilliance, not least
because it came so naturally to him. More importantly, in that Eastbourne auditorium, the atmosphere seemed to brighten the moment he appeared on the scene. To meet him in such a situation was to realize that his stage persona was indistinguishable from his offstage presence. To be in his company was a pick-me-up, a tonic, a carnival with no need for fairground music or fancy dress. The sense of fun was endemic in the man. If those struggling to ply their wares on that Eastbourne stage that morning had been able to package this quality, they would have become millionaires overnight.

It was a privilege to enjoy Tommy’s company on many occasions provided by the social side of the magic scene in the years to come. At the time of Eastbourne, however, in the early Sixties, I had no idea that I would one day come to work with my hero, producing several of his last television appearances. One of those turned out to be his penultimate performance in the medium prior to his death on live television in 1984. Tommy was far from a well man. He speech was slightly slurred, his stance slightly stooped, but his comedic playfulness and unerring sense of audience control were undiminished. That night he slew them. As the credits rolled the crowd cheered him as never before. Within minutes I went to his dressing room to congratulate him. Tommy was standing there in his under vest and long johns, drenched in sweat and drained, a semi-deflated Michelin Man. I instinctively flung my arms around him in gratitude and exclaimed how well he had done. I can feel the clamminess to this day and often reflect on the ludicrous image of such an incongruous hug. He didn’t say a word. There was a pause. He sat down, took a sip from a glass of brandy that he should not have been drinking, took a puff from a cigar that he should not have been smoking, and only then did he speak: ‘I didn’t let you down, did I?’

When he died the most visible of deaths on live television
on the stage of London’s Her Majesty’s Theatre on 15 April 1984, I had no idea that I had not worked with Tommy for the last time. By the end of the decade an executive role with Thames Television enabled me to promote the Cooper legend through several series of programmes that repackaged his best material. Along the way he became an inevitable subject of my Channel 4 series,
Heroes of Comedy
. Indirectly this led to the idea of a stage show based on his life and repertoire.
Jus’ Like That!
brought Cooper back to the West End when it was staged at the Garrick Theatre in 2003. Throughout these activities I was supported by Tommy’s widow, Gwen.

My visits to the Cooper household to discuss these projects were over laden with generosity, not to mention the bountiful supply of the strongest gins and tonics in Chiswick. I never came away without a personal memento of the man I was getting to know even better in death than in life: one day the police whistle travelled by Tommy for use at the end of his ‘Hats’ routine, another the prototype – found on holiday in a French antique shop – of the cone and ball connected by a string with which he brilliantly managed to knock himself into a semi-dazed condition at virtually every show he performed. There were his thumb tip – the secret flesh-toned magician’s gimmick that makes many a miracle possible – and false noses attached to elastic and trick billiard cues, even a tea cup with one straight side, to all intents and purposes sliced in half – with its handle still attached – for those occasions when he’d joke in company that he wanted ‘just half a cup’ of tea. On one occasion this magnificent lady even went to the trouble of baking for me to take away one of her husband’s favourite raspberry sponges, distinguished by its triple layering to maximize the jam content. In life as in performance Tommy had little appetite for half measures.

More relevant, however, to a project like this was the gift
of scripts and papers galore. An extended literary treatment of the man whom I am convinced will remain the pre-eminent single icon of late twentieth-century British comedy was always on the cards. This gave Gwen the impetus to consult Beatrice Ferrie, the widow of Tommy’s long serving manager and agent, Miff, thus granting me access to the surviving documentation on her husband’s career. Miff Ferrie had died ten years after his protégé in 1994. When Beatrice died in 2000, through Gwen’s prompting and the kindness of her estate, this material came into my possession. Miff had been the most punctilious of men, keeping not only records, contracts and correspondence relating to Tommy’s career from the moment the two men met in 1947, but also date books and journals that recorded the bulk of the telephone calls made to his office from the early Fifties. The resultant archive is beyond the imagining of any biographer, often providing what amounts to a ‘fly on the wall’ look at aspects of both the personal and professional life of one’s subject.

Much of the material plays like a trivia buff’s dream. At random, the date of 16 February 1968 reveals a routine round of telephone enquiries: Shirley Bassey wanting Cooper jokes for a wedding speech, the
TV Times
needing to know the colour of Tommy’s eyes, Anthony Newley’s film company wanting to know whether Tommy can walk on stilts for a film cameo. On 22 September 1970 it befell Miff to extricate Tommy from jury service, pointing out to the authorities that the presence on any jury of the most naturally funny man in the land could prove to be an embarrassment for all concerned. Relations with the law had been put on a fairly solid grounding in January 1958 when two parking offences in Argyll Street were commuted to a couple of cautions traded in against a charity cabaret for Bow Street Police at the Savoy the following month!

A random selection of messages reported by his manager from Tommy himself gives a flavour of the man away from the public gaze, as well as providing justification for the exclamation mark as the symbol of mounting frustration:‘

This could be the material for a comedy sketch. Other parts of the material, however, show Cooper in a more rounded, less favourable way than any previous appraisal of him. It was never the intention of my approach to take a sensationalistic path. But, ‘Use what you like,’ had been Gwen’s pragmatic response to what I found. It is the stuff of fact and not conjecture and some of what it reveals will upset some. The opportunity to
take full advantage of unique material has influenced parts of the book immeasurably since I first contemplated an appraisal of his performing skills bolstered by biographical detail and an exploration into the roots of his magic and comedy. However, the writer’s intrinsic need for truth, backed by Gwen’s reaction, has hopefully led to a fuller picture. Unlike several of his contemporaries, including Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan, and Peter Sellers, Tommy was not a complicated man – or not consciously so. But all were exceptional talents whose greatness came as part of a complete package alongside their faults and frailties. To those who complain of the approach, the question should be asked, ‘Who are we to accept the one and to criticize the other?’ With that lumpish physique it should come as no surprise that he possessed feet of clay. At a personal level I may be disappointed that at times he resorted to the behaviour he did, but never without forgiveness, never at any time without knowing that were the chance to occur again I would not hug that sweat-drenched body more affectionately than before. One’s love and admiration for the man remain unconditional.

Throughout the archival documentation the voices of agents and producers, friends and journalists all have their moment on stage. But essentially it is a record of a professional
ménage
à trois
inhabited by Tommy, Gwen and Miff. The other key person to figure in my own pages is his partner outside of marriage. She is almost entirely absent from Miff’s records – such was his discretion – and her role in Tommy’s life as stage manager, mistress, and handmaiden only fully came to light after his death. Within a short time, Mary Fieldhouse, professionally known in Tommy’s television circles as Mary Kay (the name by which I have always known her), had sadly cashed in on her relationship with a quick tabloid memoir of their affair. Unnecessary hurt was caused to his widow, who
lost no time in dismissing the association as little more than the distraction of a one night stand. However, anyone who worked with Cooper from the time of his meeting Mary in 1967 until the end of his life would have to testify to the genuineness of the feelings between them. In this context her memoir in book form assumed a passing dignity and provides an additional insight into the life of the man she loved.