Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (19 page)

Perennial Cooper props like the flower that wilts every time it is watered and the sword that recoils on itself when he pretends to swallow it, as well as many of his cod juggling bits – like timing the third (soft) cannon ball to reach his forehead at the precise moment he brings together with a resounding crack the two other hard balls in his hands – were all part of the same clown legacy. A more short-lived bit of business with a similar pedigree from the late Fifties was what Tommy called his ‘Goofus’ routine, one of the few musical sequences in his repertoire, again almost certainly spotted on a trip to America.
A thousand clowns before Cooper had donned a long overcoat stuffed with motor horns. Only Tommy could announce ‘Please notice I have absolutely
nothing
concealed about my person’ before revealing the horns for all to see: ‘This is note F, this is note G. This next one – I don’t know what that one is… Huh huh huh!’ The title of the routine relates to an early hillbilly number by Gus Kahn. The item might have been more effective with a tune better known to English audiences, not least Kahn’s more memorable and more appropriate, ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie!’

When it came to acquiring strong original material Tommy never realized how lucky he was on his own doorstep. Aside from the massed ranks of the television writers, many of them familiar names, commissioned by the television companies to provide him principally with sketch material – names that we shall encounter again in the chapters on his television career – there were three writers who should forever be guaranteed their place in the roll call of honour attached to classic Cooper comedy gems. Their names are Val Andrews, Freddie Sadler, and Eddie Bayliss. According to Vicky Cooper, Eddie was probably her father’s favourite writer. He had no links with show business or the literary world, was a lorry driver by trade and came to Tommy’s attention when out of the blue in the late Sixties he submitted some material to Miff Ferrie. His reluctance to give up his day job kept him outside the cabal of the top television comedy writers of the day, in whose company he could well have held his own. To his credit Ferrie spotted that he had a sure grasp of the conciseness that hallmarked a great Cooper gag and Tommy’s fondness for a literalism that could go to surreal extremes, as in these: 

 Eddie was also responsible for the memorable visit Cooper made to the doctor the time he lost his voice:

Bayliss gave Tommy the basics of his fly routine, the miniature newspaper – ‘a fly paper’– upon which the fly would alight for Cooper to sneak up behind and annihilate it with an almighty mallet and – once he had convinced us he was only kidding – the best method of getting flies out of the room: ‘I use this. Instant starch. It doesn’t kill them, but they glide out the window like that.’ At this point Tommy, arms outstretched, would perform an effortless glide around the stage himself. Eddie had as sure a grasp of the visual as of the verbal, as also shown on the occasion of the 1977 Royal Variety Performance, upgraded by Lew Grade to Royal Variety Gala in recognition of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, when Tommy with one eye on the royal box took a sword from his table, carefully laid it on the ground and knelt expectantly in the direction of
Her Majesty. After a few seconds he stood, replaced the weapon and shrugged, ‘Well, you never know!’ By then, however, the Palladium was in uproar. According to one reviewer, ‘the Queen, who doesn’t always laugh too easily, literally shouted’ at the joke.

If Eddie was his favourite writer, Cooper still owed Val and Freddie a considerable debt of gratitude for devising his most memorable routine, for which neither of them has ever been given proper credit. I refer to the ‘Hats’ sequence. Both Sadler and Andrews had been around Tommy from virtually the start of his career. Freddie was by night, as his letterhead proclaimed, a ‘Comedy Impressionist and Compère’ on the concert party circuit, trying to eke out an existence by doubling as a scriptwriter by day. Val, the only survivor of the trio, was and remains in his eightieth year respected throughout the magic community for his achievements as an author, dealer and light comedy performer in his own right. In those early days both were paid what might be deemed less than modest amounts to pen material for their friend. Freddie had some success with a burlesque of the ‘catching a bullet in the teeth’ routine that would crop up in the Cooper repertoire until the end of his days. Perhaps more memorably, he gave him the gag with the skipping rope: ‘Here we have a skipping rope – so we’ll skip that!’ Anything that gave Tommy an excuse to sling something to one side without fear of breakages had an additional cachet.

In the early Fifties Val advertised himself as ‘The Magicians’ Scriptwriter – at your service for a complete act, routine, or patter for a single effect, written to your own style.’ One night he had been performing himself and was aware of his friend grabbing him as he came off stage: ‘Who writes your patter, boy?’ Val replied that he did. ‘Well, I want you to write something for me.’ In time Tommy professed his interest in a
standby of the magician’s repertoire from an earlier time. Chapeaugraphy was virtually an act in itself, in which a large circle of felt with a hole in the centre was twisted into a variety of different hats. The French magician and entertainer, Félicien Trewey had scored heavily with the device during the latter part of the nineteenth century, his presentation being one of the very first performances captured – by the Lumière Brothers – on film. At its fullest extent his routine presented a parade of as many as thirty-two characters ‘under one hat’, including toreador, miser, drunkard, costermonger, priest, schoolmaster, a whole sequence of nationals, including a Turk in a fez, and a Salvation Army ‘lassie’. The idea can be traced back to the early part of the seventeenth century when in more limited form it featured in the act of Tabarin, a popular charlatan and farceur who performed on the streets of Paris. Since Trewey’s heyday it had become relegated to a large extent to the amateur stage and lecture platform. Tommy had recently seen a performance in which the different hat shapes were linked to an accompanying story line for the characters represented.

For a man who never wore hats in real life, the comic potential of the actual article had long intrigued him. In 1970 Tommy confided to the journalist, John Dodd that he first discovered he was funny when he was wearing a hat. He was seventeen and standing at a bus stop with a hat on his head when people began to laugh and snigger. At first the circumstances must have been daunting for the developing teenager, but with a pith helmet and a fez behind him he would in adulthood turn the discovery and embarrassment of his teenage years into comic gold, as first shown by the early routine in which he went back and forth between the theatre tabs in a series of daft impressions – each signified by the hat he was wearing – of ‘famous people of the past, the present, and the future’. He featured this as a second spot in the show,
Paris
by Night
at the Prince of Wales theatre in 1955. In the original sequence he paraded, in quick succession, Uncle Sam; John Bull; Napoleon; English sailor; American sailor; ‘Two sailors at once’; Napoleon again; ‘We should not have lost the war! (Nazi helmet); ‘Why?’ (British Tommy); the King of Norway; ‘the other way’ (turns hat through ninety degrees); Nelson (with a hand over his right eye); Half Nelson (same as before, but down on bended knee); and so on. Sometimes he would become hopelessly entangled with the tabs, sometimes completely out of sync with the invisible assistant backstage readying each hat for him. With this in the back of his mind Val devised the concept of using a box of different hats instead of the disc of felt to tell a continuous story. Tommy brought in Freddie to add some ideas of his own and the routine that stopped the show for Cooper on more occasions than any other was born during the run of
Paris by Night
.

His effortless ability to switch with lightning speed from one to another of a whole procession of characters that included tramp, sailor, banker, cowboy, soldier, little old lady, fireman, pilot, policeman, and a few more along the way – while keeping order for himself in the box that belied the confusion experienced by the audience – would alone qualify many a lesser performer for a place in comedy’s hall of fame. The words of the doggerel that began

were largely inconsequential – and sometime incomprehensible – but provided a springboard for his gift for comic looks like
no other routine in his repertoire. It is hard for Val to be specific about who was responsible for what detail other than, ‘I can safely say 50 per cent of it was Sadler, 50 per cent Andrews.’ He is also gracious enough to concede that what enabled the routine to grow in stature and remain fresh over so many years were the occasional
faux pas
on Cooper’s part that proved so funny he kept them in. It is great testimony to his acting skills that night after night they continued to come over as entirely spontaneous. Tommy would be hardly a dozen lines into the script when in a moment of excitement – ‘Them’s shooting words,’ a cowboy said. ‘Are you aimin’ to be shot?’ – he forgot the words and had to backtrack to the beginning, muttering the whole sequence again
sotto voce
and switching hats around at a great pace while he caught up, all the while insinuating to the audience that it will be business as usual soon, as if nothing had happened. Val recalls that when this first happened – during a dressing room rehearsal – he had to spend half an hour convincing him how funny it could be on a regular basis: ‘His reaction was, “Yes, but they’ll think I really have forgotten!” There were times when Tommy was not exactly a mental giant!’

Such lapses proved the making of the routine. Inevitably at one stage he can’t find the hat he needs: ‘I’ve got to get a bigger box! Where was I up to?’ Then it is time for the fireman to have his say, but Tommy brings the helmet up so sharply, he hits himself accidentally with considerable force on the forehead. Registering pain as only he can, he appeals to the wings: ‘Now that’s dangerous, that is. You should have padded that a bit. I could have cut my head open on that.’ The poem concludes with the bar-room brawl getting so out of hand – ‘in rushed an Indian; a little schoolboy; I don’t know who that is!’– that the law has to intervene:
 

It doesn’t come. 

No luck this time either. 

At last we hear the sound effect from the wings. Tommy peers out at the disgraced stagehand with disdain and utters the line that sums up amateur theatrics everywhere:

 In a more expansive moment Val confided to me a more detailed account of the circumstances surrounding the birth of the sequence, acknowledging in addition the burlesque monologue style of the comedian Billy Bennett, the low comedy laureate of the music halls, as a further source of inspiration. The verbal structure of ‘New Year’s Eve in Joe’s Bar’ started out as a conscious Bennett-style parody of ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ by the Edwardian balladeer, Robert William Service. In addition, working away in Val’s mind was the memory of an extinct double act, Tom Payne and Vera Hilliard, in which the comedian played a door to door salesman
with a number of hats in a suitcase. The many strands became plaited together to produce a classic. Over the years other writers with Cooper’s consent took the basic premise to rewrite other words and characters around it. It was always a futile exercise. Audiences would never tire of the original. Why should they, let alone the performer, settle for second best?

Tommy never relinquished his interest in the piece of felt itself. In later years the writers John Muir and Eric Geen came up with the approach that suited him best and, more importantly, did not clash with the now established pattern of ‘Hats’. For all his skill in switching hats back and forth at breakneck speed in and out of a cardboard box, he had proved less adroit at twisting the ring of felt into a series of specific complex patterns while following a set patter line. The new angle was an incidental one, taking away any such worries as he reminisced about the lady who had approached him before the show to enquire how serious a person he was in his private life. Tommy is anxious to stress that at home he is nothing like the buffoon she sees larking about on the stage, that he reads a lot of serious books, attends a lot of serious plays. All the while he is twiddling the cloth into an inconsequential series of bizarre headpieces that hilariously disprove the assertions of the moment.

It is doubtful if Sadler received the remuneration that was his due for his part in the ‘Hats’ routine. Val, who wrote for Tommy on a fairly regular basis from 1947 until the mid Sixties, certainly never received what his contribution was truly worth. Only economic necessity kept him in the loop for so long. There were times when he might have been forgiven for walking away. Around the time when ‘Hats’ came into being he submitted to Tommy a sketch based on the idea of Cooper as a penniless restaurant owner forced by circumstances to play all the staff himself, doubling as commissionaire