Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (39 page)

For the star, the exercise was valuable at a psychological level, part of what Mayoh described as helping to create the atmosphere in which he excelled, something in which he had the full support of the technical crew. As for sketches, Mayoh again held the key: ‘The best you could do is arrange the supporting cast around him so that if he wandered off on some track of his own they could catch up. There was no point in telling him he was three inches off his mark. You just moved the mark and let him get on with what he did best.’ As actress Sheila Steafel commented, ‘You didn’t really work with him. You were there. You worked around him.’ When it came to the scripts themselves there is a half-myth among writers that he was bad at remembering their lines, but Mary Kay insists that he applied a schoolboy diligence to learning his words by rote. Audio tapes exist of the process. I think she can be believed that for the most part he would often be word perfect while others in the cast would arrive unprepared. Apparently he was fond of quoting Spencer Tracy on this point: ‘All you have to do is know your lines.’

Writers, actors, producers, all come together in their memory of the moment when rehearsals had to stop for him to perform his latest magic trick. It had nothing to do with the show, unless he could find a way at a later date of giving it a comic twist, but obviously represented his own subconscious
attempt at a bonding exercise with fellow team members. As actor Gordon Peters observed, ‘You never got close to him any other way. He was totally obsessed in his own world.’ Perhaps that obsession makes his success in such an essentially collaborative medium as television all the more remarkable. With a fully lit stage and a responsive orchestra, stage work came second nature to him. Television was always bound to be a bigger challenge.

I have left to last what may have been his funniest moment in a television studio. Sadly it was not recorded. It happened at a time when fellow comic, Dick Emery was hitting the headlines with the break-up of yet another marriage. Tommy was enjoying an after-rehearsals drink with Barry Cryer in the bar at Teddington Studios. He looked at his watch and saw it was fast approaching eight o’clock. He then remembered that Morecambe and Wise were taping their own show that night. ‘Let’s go down to see the boys,’ said Cooper. Tommy had no difficulty getting past the flashing red studio transmission light. He sidled along the edge of the audience seating rostrum as Eric and Ernie forged ahead with their warm-up, which was in full flow. Barry held back as Tommy barged into the act. The place was in uproar as he grabbed Eric by the arm and went down on his knees, shedding tears by the bucketful. It took several moments for the laughter to subside. Eventually Ernie managed to say something: ‘Tommy, what’s the matter?’ After a sob or two more, Cooper composed himself and said, ‘Dick Emery has gone and left me.’ At which point he stood up and left as suddenly as he appeared. As Eric would have said, had he not been rendered speechless by the incident, ‘Well, there’s no answer to that!’ Perhaps Cooper did not need so many scriptwriters after all. For a man who did not like surprises, he never lost his knack for giving them.

All great performance is based on a finely tuned individual balance of skill, ego, and personality. In Cooper’s case there can be no question that he possessed the latter trait in profusion, while, as we have seen, his ego – unless the word is qualified as the need for an audience’s affection – was, for such a giant of comedy, a relatively low-key affair. However, in using incompetence as the peg upon which to hang his public image, he could not help but raise the question of the extent of the first attribute. The anatomy of a physical comedian of Cooper’s accomplishment, like that of a soccer superhero, can be seen to comprise a framework of poise, agility, heart and mind. There were actually times on stage when he resembled a football star with his ability to change direction with amazing cunning, the feints and swerves of his body adding a balletic quality to the equation. The risks he took in the cause of laughter showed no lack of courage at a level worthy of a Victoria Cross in the front line of comedy. How rational he was is another issue.

I doubt if Cooper ever really stopped thinking about his work. His absorption in the preparations for a performance
was legendary, never leaving a single thing to chance – ensuring that he had two, sometimes three of every prop he needed – and constantly preoccupied with the secret workings of a mechanical flower pot or an exploding cigar rather than a matter of deeper introspection. A stage hand once commented on his habit of treble-checking every prop before a show: ‘Tommy’s no fool. He knows where every single bit of gear is. It’s like a space-launch countdown.’ For a standard cabaret appearance, this amounted to over one hundred props distributed over three tables, not to mention free standing items like the gate, the table that disintegrated and the pedal bin with the shock-horror head that popped up from inside. Anyone who observed the process would have to admit that there was something Zen-like in his application to the task. Photographs and sketches made to help the process reveal the bird’s eye view of his stage to be as fascinating as the most surreal version of Kim’s Game. Hidden among the props were prompt cards – anything from postcards, shirt stiffeners and the dividers from packets of Shredded Wheat – containing new jokes to be tried and mistakes (plotted) to be made. His son Thomas, who in later years helped his father with this chore, once said that Tommy knew where everything was blindfolded.

For all this attention to detail, he had no wish to analyse his appeal: ‘I honestly don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to know, because if I became self-conscious, I would lose the gift.’ But neither, unlike Dodd or Morecambe, did he analyse his humour. Barry Cryer claims he never heard him utter a single analytical remark. His response to a gag would always be a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’: ‘It was as if something went “Ping! I can do that.” He would never explain a rejection, although he would always be very nice in turning something down.’ Peter Reeves recalls the lunchtime spent in conversation with an intense lady journalist from the Swedish equivalent of
Radio Times
. She went on and on about her theories of his humour, relating it to the bigger issues affecting society at the time and at last concluding, ‘Is this the way you approach your work?’ ‘Well, I put something in and if it works, I keep it in. If it doesn’t, I leave it out.’ ‘Very interesting,’ was her reply. One longs to have seen the expression on his face.

His natural speech rhythms were such that he often repeated key phrases. The writers at LWT picked up on this. Dick Vosburgh recalled the read-through where one of the team launched into the material he was submitting for the opening stand-up, written as Cooper would say it: ‘Good evening. Good evening.’ Tommy looked at the words and was aghast: ‘What’s this? I can’t say that. I don’t say everything twice.’ Everyone fell about laughing. The story manifests itself in another form with the young Alan Ayckbourn, no less, as the writer faithfully reproducing Cooper’s speech patterns on the page. When Tommy read the four words aloud, he found himself delivering the greeting four times: ‘Good evening. Good evening. Good evening. Good evening.’ ‘There are too many good evenings here,’ he complained. On another occasion at Thames, Dick Hills included in his script the lines, ‘And he came in like that –it could have been like that –but no, it was like that.’ Royston Mayoh explains that Tommy genuinely didn’t understand: ‘Dick just didn’t think. He had done the unforgivable. By holding a mirror up to his foibles, he ran the risk of exposing the myth.’ All magicians are inquisitive by nature, but the ultimate secret Cooper did not wish to have explained was his own.

Unless he was taking his straight-faced penchant for teasing people to unheard of lengths, there are some remarkable instances of how dim he could sometimes appear. Val Andrews remembers the early time when the last five words of the line that went ‘this trick was given to me by a very famous Chinese
magician, Hung One –
his brother was Hung Too
,’ emerged one night as ‘and his brother was executed as well.’ Tommy couldn’t see what was wrong. Val said, ‘He would argue, “But he still died.” He could never grasp it.’ Cryer cites the wrong emphasis he would place on the word in a line. Another joke went something like, ‘A man walked into a bar and went “Ouch!” It was an iron bar.’ Barry explained how important it was to put the emphasis on the adjective, not the noun. An argument ensued: ‘Isn’t the joke, ‘It’s an iron
bar
?’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Did they laugh?’ ‘Yes.’ As Barry says, ‘He wasn’t interested. But then
he
laughed.’ Maybe it was funnier Cooper’s way as long as Cooper was doing it, but as Andrews says, ‘It was a pity his intellect didn’t match his talent.’

But it could never be that simple. Inevitably, much of his success has been accounted to timing, that cliché of comedy appreciation. Spike Milligan once compared Cooper’s verbal dexterity to a finely honed razor or a piece by Chopin: ‘It was so magically correct. There’s only one split second in a moment of time when the joke is right. Go left or right of that and it doesn’t happen and he hit a bull’s-eye every time.’ On the other hand his magical colleague, Patrick Page dismisses forcibly the whole idea that he was born with some special gift: ‘Bollocks. Tommy didn’t understand the meaning of the word “timing”.’ He may not have had the intellectual grasp the term implies, but at an instinctive level there was something locked into his very being that with experience achieved the sharpness and exactitude Milligan held in such high esteem. Tucked away in a single sketch – the one set in the fish restaurant – is an exchange between Cooper and the difficult diner that encapsulates this verbal skill. Tommy continues to show remorse for ‘his little fishy friend’, the trout that the character played by actor, Anthony Sharp insists he must have:

On the page the joke is as flat as a flounder, but somehow Cooper’s delivery lifts it out of the mire of limp Seventies sitcom. There is no pause to telegraph what he is going to say. Once the line is uttered – with the merest flicker of a smile – he moves speedily on. It is not a major laugh, but within the Milligan terminology the proportionate reaction it triggered in the studio unquestionably qualified it as ‘a bull’s-eye’.

If he skilfully downplayed this line, what arguably remained the most obvious tag in his repertoire was pushed fearlessly to the limit as he returned on stage in defiance of the audience pre-empting him. I refer once more to that moment when having attempted to shoot himself for failing to land the third card in the hat he declares for a third time, ‘Missed!’ The joke is obvious, but however many times one saw it performed, however transparent it appears in retrospect, one never heard the word without feeling a twitch of surprise. Like the master magician he was at heart, Cooper never let go the gift of surprise, even if, as his daughter says, he hated being surprised himself. Whatever the definition of timing in the comic’s handbook, it is difficult to imagine him as anything but a blue riband exponent of it at times like these.

Comedy has its own unfathomable secret workings, professing rules that are incapable of rational explanation. As Walter Matthau’s character, Willy Clark explained in Neil Simon’s
The Sunshine Boys
, ‘Words with a
k
are funny.
Chicken
is funny.
Pickle
is funny.
Kleenex
is funny.
Tomato
is not funny.’ A great deal of what made Cooper so enduringly funny is inexplicable too. If it is true that the brains of a Beckham are in his boots, it may be equally true that Cooper’s
were locked away somewhere within the innermost, imponderable reaches of his physiology. It would help to explain the most astonishing aspect of his technique whereby physical business cultivated in the earliest years of his career remained constant until the end. His pace slowed down through the years, as did that of Pelé and of Best, but something stayed amazingly constant in his combined physical and mental makeup that many a soccer player would have killed for.

Study the earliest and latest recordings of a set piece from his act and very little discrepancy will be found between them. A film or video editor could cut back and forth haphazardly from one to the other and still arrive at a continuous whole. Whatever Tommy’s physical condition, albeit compromised by age, health or merely the weather, the performance remained sharp and precise. As Bob Monkhouse said, ‘Once he’d got the piece of business correct, it remained perfectly that way always. He never altered it. The precision gave the lie to the apparent clumsiness that he produced. The only time I ever saw him in any way being clumsy with his clumsiness was when he was doing something for the first time in rehearsal. And he wouldn’t do it on stage until he got it right.’ In this approach he was as painstaking as the greatest practitioners of serious stage conjuring. There is no better example than his cabinet routine.

In its pacing and dramatic structure the sequence is a short one-act play of its own. At Tommy’s silent beckoning two stagehands wheel on the wardrobe-size piece of furniture with red curtain in lieu of door. It comes on faster than expected. At the split second it reaches centre-stage, Cooper, clearing the decks for its arrival, just so happens to be standing in its path. The abrupt force of the collision leaves him dazed and disoriented until, pulling himself together for the miracle ahead, he draws our attention to the pitch black interior. As he
adjusts the prop first to right and then to left before returning it to central position, no one in the audience can have a single doubt about its innocence: ‘Empty! Empty! Empty!’ Reaching over the threshold he knocks against the three interior walls with his clenched right fist to prove the point further. Genuine hurt steals over the Cooper countenance as he hits too hard, but the show must go on. With all the bravura of Dante or Jasper Maskelyne he steps inside, draws the curtain across and almost instantly whips it back again. There has been no time for anything to have happened, but he looks as if he has seen the ghost of Rasputin, or maybe – in this retro sentry box – that of his old commanding officer: ‘Ooh! It’s dark in there!’ Back on
terra firma
he pulls the curtain across once more and almost fussily proceeds to make a series of mystical passes towards it, each pointedly from a different direction and loudly accompanied by a tymp roll. Then with anticipation and precision he jerks the curtain back sharply. There is no one there. Nothing has happened.

Nothing will happen. For a nanosecond expectancy hangs in the air, before Cooper succumbs to disdain and dismissal. For one incredible moment the audience ceases to exist. He shrugs, almost subliminally, to the stagehands to take the cabinet back whence it came, slapping the side nearest him as he does so: ‘Right!’ The bathos of his delivery tells us all we need to know. In that one word is wrapped up more than the secret admission of his own failure, but the guilt and frustration of every one of us who sets out high-handedly to achieve a personal goal we know we can never attain. The underplaying of the end says a thousand words, while the routine is studded with detail that could take up many more. The sound of the metallic swish of the curtain on its rail is as correct as a musical note needs to be. The danger that he will be carried away with those mystical passes shows a mind spiralling out of control.
The basic emotions of pain, fear and, come the end, guilt are enacted with his whole body at a level with which the audience for all its laughter truly empathizes.

His interaction with long established props testified to the same exactness throughout his career. The supposed muddle with the box of hats, the catalogue of errors with top hat and cane in the Frankie Vaughan send-up, the confusion with the bottle and the glass, the demonstration of the ‘very famous’ vanishing wand, all provide evidence of the process. If one wanted proof that it is more difficult to burlesque straight magic well than to accomplish what one purportedly sets out to do, the latter serves as a prime example. Picking up the wand he went into traditional screech mode: ‘Look. A solid wand …’ The words are timed to coincide with the moment he brings the wand down against the plate in his other hand. The plate shatters. He is not deterred: ‘… will vanish in front of your very eyes.’ He grabs a sheet of newspaper from a small table to his left, wraps the wand inside and as if he were tussling with some unknown force attempts to make the rod disintegrate within. He fails and tries again. On the third and final attempt the wand makes contact with the table, which collapses into a heap. The fancy footwork he shows as he attempts to sweep away the evidence under a magic carpet of his own imagining takes us back to football pitch and ballet stage. His legs are their own expression of embarrassment as, above the waist, he attempts to retain dignity and composure. Tommy said it himself: ‘Straight magic and funny magic are almost equally difficult. If it’s straight, it’s hard and takes a lot of practice, you see. But to send it up is still hard, so it’s more or less on the same level, although the magic has to go wrong at precisely the right time, so I suppose it’s harder.’ The paradox was that within his own twisted parameters he set himself higher standards of personal perfection than anybody.
In my opinion, he could have added that his own choreography was more impressive than that ever accorded the occasional dancers on his television shows.