Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (54 page)

Tommy’s strengths outweighed any character defects. The simplistic approach is to say he was tolerated as a child or a fool, in the Shakespearean sense. Those who are more honest would concede that he was tolerated as a human being, one
whose inner psychic drama was not much more, not much less complicated than that of the next man. Possibly comedians are weighted in the former direction, but when it comes to basics we all reflect one another. Without wishing to delve into the inner reaches of Kleinian philosophy, Tommy Cooper – to paraphrase the moral philosopher, Alexander McCall Smith – was not a nice person,
because nobody’s nice
. Allowing for that view, he might in the scale of things have rated closer to Mother Theresa then to Margaret Thatcher than one might imagine.

For most of the time to be in his company was to bask in the sun. To walk through the street with him on the cloudiest day was to experience the glow manifested towards him by passers-by, as if a hurdy gurdy were playing and a fun fair lurked around the corner. It should be stressed that charity was not alien to him. His son recalled how they would be walking along together and he’d disappear: ‘I’d look round and he’d be tucking a fiver into some tramp’s hand.’ Every Christmas a large sackful of toys was delivered to Variety Club headquarters from the Cooper household: it is not difficult to imagine the fun he had going round Hamley’s and selecting them himself, under the pretence, of course, that he was ‘just looking for something for the act’. He was a major contributor to the Club’s funds as well as to the Grand Order of Water Rats and only time, health and modesty prevented him from aspiring to high office in both organizations. But his greatest generosity was reserved for the stage where he gave everything, his capacity for comedy welling from deep within him in an unstoppable flood. After a show he would be drained, empty, a spent force. In that sense he proved a colossus with a heart and spirit to match. To public and friends alike he was irresistible. He was also incorrigible. Once he arrived late for a cabaret date to be greeted by the distraught organizer, Michael
Black. ‘You were on half an hour ago,’ said Michael. Without batting an eyelid he replied, ‘Was I? How did I do?’ Who could resist a man like that?

His friends still debate how high his IQ was. As Michael Parkinson has said, ‘I could never work out whether he was the dimmest man I ever met – or the brightest.’ David Hemingway once overheard him in a hotel foyer: ‘My wife is coming later today. You will look after her until I get back, won’t you? Her name is Mrs Cooper.’ According to David, he was totally serious. Veteran comic, Jimmy Jewel recounted the occasion he gave Tommy a lift home from Blackpool one weekend during the summer season. Jewel was in considerable pain at the time, forced to wear a neck brace for a week after an accident on stage: ‘Tommy was the type of man who had to try everything – if you had a sandwich, he’d want a bite – and he said, “Can I try your neck brace?” I said, “Don’t be daft. I need it.”’ Nevertheless Jimmy gave in and for the entire journey Cooper sat there smiling happily while Jewel drove on in agony. He never decided whether the behaviour was that of an innocent kid or an inconsiderate adult.

When Tommy returned from his first trip to America he brought a miniature tape recorder that he soon discovered wouldn’t work in this country. He moaned to Val Andrews about the shop that sold it to him, quizzing him on how he might dispose of it here. Three days later Val was back in the dressing room, being plied with sales talk for a wonderful recording machine he’d picked up in the States and spinning the line that what he really needed was a movie camera. Val thought, ‘You lying bastard!’ He had voiced the original complaint to so many he’d forgotten the conversation with the writer three days before. The naivety outweighed the deceit. On the other hand, magician John Derris remembers accompanying Tommy and a plane load of journalists to Gibraltar
for a British Airways function. Cooper played ‘Spoof’ all the way with members of the British press and deductive reasoning became the order of the day. He never lost. He was an unlikely chess player, but picked up the game quickly with quite some success after Peter Hudson educated him to it during the lulls of a lethargic summer season.

In over thirty documentary programmes produced on the lives and reputations of great comedians I have scrupulously avoided the ‘g’ word. The jury will remain out on whether Cooper was a ‘genius’ or not. Loftier minds have applied themselves to the precise definition of the word, the coinage of which has become debased by celebrity culture and the attempts of unthinking people to slap the label on anyone who achieves an above-average degree of success in virtually any activity from bee-keeping to napkin-folding. If the word implies a prodigiously skilled intellectual machinery linked to a thoroughgoing alertness and understanding of one’s ability, he was not. Tommy’s was an intuitive talent. If the similar gift of a painter or an inventor can command the tag, he almost certainly was. But, to say so categorically would be to subscribe, to what Alistair Cooke once described as that ‘method of bullying the reader into sharing a prejudice’. Genius, simpleton, or just plain lucky, no one could dispute that he was among the most original comedians of the last one hundred years, the century in which funny men and women were promoted out of the crowd and accorded a prestige and a platform that had not existed before. More importantly he maintained an innocence in an increasingly cynical age. At the risk of sounding propagandist, he emanated the most expansive comic aura of any comedian of his generation. He was also a magician without subterfuge, a clown without ego. It is no surprise that his memory touches depths in those to whom laughter and wonder are sacrosanct.

Today his legacy is kept alive less in the reconstituted British comedy scene, where the performer and writer must come together as one, than in the heightened awareness on a global scale of comedy magic as purveyed by great clowns and skilled magicians both, like The Great Tomsoni and Teller, of Penn and Teller, in America, and Norbert Ferré and Gaëtan Bloom in France. Meanwhile it would be comforting to think that in the fertile comic realm that exists between lofty aspiration and pratfall reality, he might today be surveying his subjects. Stan and Ollie, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Hancock, Frasier, Captain Mainwaring, Basil Fawlty, and David Brent must all be there, different icons for different times, but timeless in attitude if not in cultural reference. As reputations in comedy are eclipsed with even greater rapidity, the fez will remain a constant emblem of a remarkable man who drew upon an endless capacity for fun and captivated all who came within his orbit. At a combined level of skill and technique, innocence and cunning, wisdom and wonder, eccentricity and human fallibility there has been nobody in British show business quite like him. He was his own invention and as vulnerable as the next man. At one point in his act he used to tell the audience, ‘When I do this trick, I don’t want you to clap. I want you all to sing, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”.’ More often than not they did.

He used to take pride in being impersonated away from the theatrical arena: ‘Women come up to me dragging little kids who can’t be a day over three. They nudge the kid and say, “Do it. Do it,” and then the kiddie says, “Just like that!” in exactly my tone of voice. It’s incredible and it kills me – I think people are marvellous. I’m a great observer of the human race and if I could, I’d sit on a bench and watch the world go by. We’ve never cottoned on to the fact that we’re so hilarious.’ He certainly never fully realized just how funny
he
was. I wish
I could be back in his dressing room now to provide one last word of reassurance. Whatever his flaws and venialities, as his guardian angel, Max Miller would have said, ‘There’ll never be another!’