Tommy Cooper

Always Leave Them Laughing

JOHN FISHER

For Gwen,

For Vicky,

And for Henry & Doris Lewis,

who also had a daughter named Victoria.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Preface:

‘I Didn’t Let You Down, Did I?’

1 All in the Branding

2 Laughing Over Spilt Milk

3 ‘Let Me See Your Dots’

4 Life Gets More Exciting . . .

5 Mad About Magic

6 Comic Ways and Means

7 The Steady Climb

8 Cooper Vision: Part One

9 Cooper Vision: Part Two

10 Method in the Madness

11 Health and Home Affairs

12 The Days Dwindle Down

13 Death and Resurrection

14 The Real Me

Index

List of Illustrations

Section One

1 Tommy’s parents, Thomas and Gertrude Cooper, circa 1920s. (Private Collection)

2 Three years old and ready for play. (Private Collection)

3 Eighteen years old and ready for the world. (Private Collection)

4 Enjoying a bottle and a glass off duty in Egypt in 1947. (Private Collection)

5 Gwen (far left), star of her wartime concert party. (Private Collection)

6 Tommy and Gwen, just prior to their wedding in Cyprus, 1947. (Private Collection)

7 The early publicity pose that defined an image. (Rimis Ltd)

8 Miff Ferrie: agent, manager, Svengali. (Rimis Ltd)

9 Later publicity pose when success was assured. (Robert Harper)

10 Baby Vicky seems unimpressed. (Chris Ware/Hulton Getty)

11 11. With baby Thomas in the garden at Chiswick. (Private Collection)

12 ‘Frankie and Bruce and Tommy’s Christmas Show’, 1966. (Fremantle Media)

13 ‘Do you like football?’ (Mirrorpix)

14 ‘Bucket, sand! Sand, bucket!’ (Hulton Getty)

15 Time to relax with the famous feet up at home. (Private Collection)

16 A sensation on the Ed Sullivan Show, New York, 1967. (Private Collection)

17 ‘When autumn leaves start to fall …’ (Fremantle Media)

18 ‘And ven zey are caught everyone vill be shot …’ (Fremantle Media)

19 Funny bones: with Anita Harris, promoting Tommy’s Palladium show, 1971. (Private Collection)

20 A rare private moment backstage. (Hulton Getty)

Section Two

1 A modern Mad Hatter. (Fremantle Media)

2 The caricature by Bill Hall. (© Bill Hall)

3 ‘Where’s Jerry Lewis when I need him?’: Dean Martin at the Variety Club Lunch held in his honour, with Tommy and Morecambe & Wise. (Mirrorpix)

4 Master of his terrain: playing the clubs in the Seventies. (John Curtis/Rex Features)

5 With Mary Kay during the latter years. (Private Collection)

6 ‘Look into my eyes’: the New London Theatre television series, 1978. (Fremantle Media)

7 A modern Punch and Judy: ‘That’s the way to do it!’ (Fremantle Media)

8 ‘On a clear day …’ (Fremantle Media)

9 ‘Look at the buffalo and speak into the tennis racquet’: with his son, Thomas Henty. (Fremantle Media)

10 ‘You’ve done some terrible, terrible things in your life!’: with Frank Thornton. (Fremantle Media)

11 T. C. – Totally Convulsed. (Fremantle Media)

12 With staunch straight man, Allan Cuthbertson. (Fremantle Media)

13 ‘And do have a piece of my homemade cake’: with Betty Cooper and Robert Dorning. (Fremantle Media)

14 Tommy as the public seldom saw him: at rehearsals during the late Seventies. (Fremantle Media)

15 Our hero sleepwalks for his hero, Arthur Askey. (Fremantle Media)

16 With Eric Sykes, special champion and dear friend. (Fremantle Media)

17 Image taken from the final television show, 15 April 1984. (Steve Blogg/Rex Features)

18 The last photograph, Las Palmas, 1984. (Private Collection)

19 Tommy’s ‘Dove’ amongst her souvenirs. (Daily Mail)

PREFACE
‘I Didn’t Let You Down, Did I?’

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:‘

Does not know where rehearsal is!’

‘Is on his way to Brighton. Which hotel is it? He has forgotten to take the letter!’

‘What number in Garrick Street? It’s No. 20 – in my letter. He hasn’t opened my letter yet!’

‘Is sun bathing. Could he make it next week? Okay! He then said he’d be here as agreed today.’

‘Where is he working and when? Told him tomorrow at the Dorchester. All in his letter. He can’t find it!!’

‘Re cabaret at Southend tonight. Has he signed contract for it? YES!!!’

‘Band call? Band gone!!’

‘Re contract – where does he sign? I did not pencil it!!! Told him where it says ARTIST.’

‘I said I’d told him yesterday the show was off through strike action! He went along today and found no one there!!!’

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.

My own volume never loses sight of its initial objective to chart the progress and impact of his immense comedy talent. Within these pages his fans will hopefully find happy reminders of their favourite one-liners and bits of business. I make no apology for chronicling the obvious. The box of hats, the bottle and the glass, the Nazi Kommandant and the British officer together in one costume may be played back in the minds of his devotees on an almost daily basis, and of course are available in various formats for viewing afresh today. However, it is still hard to come to terms with the fact that going on a generation and a half will not have seen him performing in full flow, whether live or on television. Working on the assumption that the printed page will have the last laugh over the mechanized media, I hope this volume succeeds in evoking the magic of an extraordinary entertainer whose skills and vitality might otherwise be lost to some distant future when the video tapes have all disintegrated, the DVDs become corroded. As we shall see his comedy is more timeless than that of any of his contemporaries. There is a new generation or two or three who deserve to discover his lunacy for their own sanity.

This is not to champion nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, the idealized memory of some blurred mythical past. Tommy had little truck for nostalgia anyhow. Whenever his cronies began to evoke the legend of some distant comic talent from the music halls, he would query if they remembered Fuzzy Knight. ‘He was simply wonderful, he was,’ asserted Cooper. ‘What was that bit of business he did on the trapeze, the bit with the chimpanzee applauding with the banana?’ Before long everyone would be volunteering their recollection of this absurd imaginary act. Not that Tommy didn’t have his heroes, as we shall see. But truly great comedians like Max Miller, Bob Hope, and Tommy Cooper are like colours in the spectrum. Try to imagine a new one. It is impossible to do so. The modern entertainment media appear happier to opt for shallow celebrity in lieu of genuine talent and the life force of the great performer. For these reasons Tommy Cooper must never be toppled from his pedestal in the minds of all those who – as his contemporary, Alfred Marks once remarked – were already laughing at him as they queued to buy tickets at the box office. Sadly Gwen never got to see Jus’ Like That! having died some six months before the play opened. Nor will she get to read this book. But I hope with genuine affection that I have not let her – or Tommy – down.

ONE

All in the Branding

Tommy Cooper off stage and on was his own best magic trick, a bumper fun package of tantalizing twists and turns, a cornucopia of paradox and surprise. He was the most loved of entertainers, but never, like so many in his profession, asked his audience openly for affection. He was the most original of funny men, with hardly an original gambit in his repertoire. He became the most imitated man on the planet, his audience appreciating his individuality all the more. He came to epitomize the world of bumbling ineptitude in both magic and comedy, but with precision and technique to die for. He exploited the comedy of failure and nervousness, but seemingly with utter confidence. He exuded good cheer on stage and off, but was happiest when absorbed in his own private world of sleight of hand and illusion. He was a child in the body of a giant, an amateur with the sparkle of the professional, a heavyweight with the light-footedness of Fred Astaire. His catchphrase could as easily have been ‘riddle-me-ree’: you never knew who was fooling whom as he plied his trade of the tricks, his penchant for practical jokes. The one certainty was his success at so doing. Paradoxically again, no one ever felt let down by the process.

The one aspect of the man that was above question was his physical identity. No British comedian since Charlie Chaplin has displayed a surer grasp of the need for distinctive personal branding on the road to achieving personal immortality, the process that helps to keep him in the forefront of our shared comic consciousness over twenty years after his death when other funny men and women of his era have begun to recede into oblivion. Remove the fez and smooth down the tufts of jet black hair that were trained to sprout like a pair of upturned inverted commas from beneath its brim and you might as well start packaging Coca-Cola in blue cans. On one occasion the great Eric Morecambe – incidentally Tommy’s greatest fan – suggested to the author that he would be better off losing the headgear. He perceived it as a barrier between the performer and the audience. I did not have the temerity to suggest to Eric that he should replace his horn rims with contact lenses.

What he would have done in life had he not found his niche in show business is the great unanswerable question. Mary Kay concedes that he was fully aware of his physical idiosyncrasies, every detail of his gauche six feet three and a half inch, shoe-size-thirteen frame being put into the service of comedy. Of course add on the fez and the inches literally stack up. Through the years critics and fellow comics alike have been thrown into crazy competition in attempts to describe him. Clive James conjured up, ‘A mutant begot by a heavyweight boxer in a car crash in Baghdad’; Barry Cryer with one-liner panache contributed ‘like Mount Rushmore on legs’; Ron Moody added ‘he has a profile like the coast of Scandinavia; his chin is like the north face of the Eiger; Easter Island is like a Cooper family reunion.’ Alan Coren evoked fond cinematic memories of King Kong, remembering ‘the time when it roamed free, this strange, shambling creation unconfined by any human limitation, magnificent in its anarchy, going through its weird, hilarious routines. And none of its tricks worked, and all its half-heard mumbled patter meant nothing at all, and occasionally it would erupt in bizarre, private laughter.’ Nancy Banks-Smith incorrigibly pronounced that ‘he has the huge dignity and innocence of some large London statue with a pigeon sitting impudently on its head and a workman scrubbing him in impertinent places with a stiff bristled brush.’ For me he has always epitomized in spirit as much as in form the abominable snowman as fathered by Santa Claus, or maybe vice versa, with a touch of Desperate Dan – without the stubble on his chin – thrown in for good measure. Whichever you opt for, they all say he was born funny, he looked funny, and he had funny bones. Moreover, perhaps he was the Wagner of comedy. Here is Dylan Thomas on the composer: ‘Whatever I can say about him, he is a big man, an overpowering man, a man with a vast personality, a dominant, arrogant, gestureful man forever in passion and turmoil over the turbulent, passionate universe.’ The only word that confirms he was not writing about his fellow Welsh wizard is ‘arrogant’. Tommy was never that.

Once seen he would never be forgotten, but what you remember, of course, is the broad image of an ungainly hulk in a red hat. Analyse his performance and he is seen to represent a far more complex range of expression and body language than the immediate impact of his branding suggests. Facially he is as interesting as Keaton, the stone face comic of the silent screen who supposedly never smiled but in whose countenance one can read all of human emotion. The legendary guru of British comedy, Spike Milligan once described the Cooper visage to me as ‘a call for help, wasn’t it? “Please help me out of this. Please. Please.”’ His deep-set, almost mournful wide blue eyes were perfect for registering a resigned astonishment at life’s ups and downs. In time the perplexed Cooper look, characterized by a glance upwards and through forty-five degrees and as such betraying his theatrical roots, would become as much a part of his comic persona as Jack Benny’s stare. No one had a more beseeching glance of puzzlement as he scrutinized a prop that was new to him, observed a more manic look of desperation when a trick failed, a guiltier look of complicity – like that of a child with his hand stuck in the cookie jar – as he discovered you had caught him out while fumbling some secret manoeuvre, or a more radiant searchlight grin born out of a relentless optimism that the next task can’t possibly prove as calamitous as the last. Eric Sykes, who directed Tommy on several occasions, once defined comedy as a way of looking at the world askew. He knew instinctively that no performer physically played cockeyed more effectively than Cooper: all great clowns, Eric included, might be said to have been born at forty-five degrees out of kilter to the world and that is the way they see it.

One would have expected his long gangling limbs to provide a three-ring-circus of incoordination, but the mad, flapping hands – ‘See that hand there, look. Well this one’s just the same!’ – clasping his heart one moment, nervously flittering back to his props the next, and the outsize feet that when still seemed set in a permanent ten to two position were the lie to the general pattern. Interwoven throughout his whole performance was a surprising grace and delicacy of movement that might have been choreographed with sensitivity and skill. His movement at times was reminiscent of a matador swerving from one table of magical nonsense to the other as he eluded the advance of some invisible bull. At other times his lurching body seemed to defy gravity, like some inflatable figure being kept aloft as air rippled with amazing fluidity through his shoulders, arms, and fingers. He’d subscribe to this process as a regular device to follow the punch line of a joke. The theatre critic, Gordon Craig once said of the actor, Henry Irving, ‘Irving did not walk on the stage, he danced on it,’ and the same might be said of Cooper as he lifted his feet and replaced them, as if threading his way through some imaginary maze with haute école finesse. As the American poet, E. E. Cummings commented, ‘The expression of a clown is mostly in his knees.’ Cooper was certainly as capable of doing double takes with his legs and feet as with those soulful eyes. A favourite pose as he went from one piece of nonsense to another involved standing in profile beside one of his tables, hand touching, head tilted back, his right leg kicked up at right angles at the knee, his face turned to the audience in a gleeful grin, as if to say it’s all a game. Even tentative burlesque ballet movements were not beyond him. With arms outstretched, he would pirouette accordingly amid the magical chaos: ‘I taught myself, I did. I was in Swan Lake. I was. I fell in.’

His maniacal, throaty laugh was the perfect counterpoint to the whole catalogue of gestures and the reckless abandon with which his props were cast aside, leaving the stage at the end of his performance a stagehand’s nightmare. Shoulder-heaving in its intensity, the Cooper guffaw has come to be recognized as the grand sonic emblem of British comedy. Capable of warding off disapproval, excusing failure, registering delight, born – so he claimed – of nerves, it epitomized the Cooper stage persona, co-existing with that self-deprecating cough that presumably in this outrageous game of make-believe we weren’t supposed to hear as he faced the reality of the gag misfired, the trick gone wrong. Laugh and cough were the interjections that saved a thousand words. Those that remained were thrown to the mercy of the most distinctive voice in comedy since that of W. C. Fields. Once described as an impressionistic blur that made Eddie Waring sound like Julie Andrews – for today, say, read Ray Winstone and Emma Thompson – it was characterized by a slightly hoarse West Country burr bordering on a slur that at times could pass for insobriety, but only seldom was. It invested his jokes, his monologues, his shaggy dog stories with a kind of rough poetry. And then there was the matter of his catchphrase. ‘Just like that!’

He always claimed this came about by accident. ‘I may have done it and not thought anything of it at the time,’ he once mused. Anyhow, it gathered momentum through repetition and became fodder for the generation of impressionists who hitched their imitative wagon to his star. It is a fairly innocuous expression, but today cannot be said among the British public without triggering instant amusement. Once he had given in to the concept, he was only too happy to embroider upon it with those expressive hands gesturing down in counterpoint at waist level: ‘Not like that! Like that!’ followed by some incomprehensible incantation of dubious foreign extraction that might have been spelled ‘Zhhzhhzhhzhh’, but probably wasn’t. In retrospect it was the perfect verbal trademark for a comedy exponent of a demonstrative art like magic. Twenty years after his death it was voted, in one of those polls upon which unimaginative television executives seem to thrive, the second most popular catchphrase in British comedy history. Since the one that preceded it and those in close proximity soon after were all phrases of the moment, the likelihood is that his will endure, while the others will shrivel away. Reference to being the only gay in the village is hardly the stuff of everyday conversation.

The unavoidable cliché is that Cooper remains the most impersonated figure in recent British show business, the beckoning fez an instant token of fun and frivolity. The catchphrase and the hat became inseparable, as Tommy found with his wife Gwen when he returned on holiday to Egypt, where he had served in the war: ‘We were in Cairo and we came across a guy selling fezzes in the market. I went up to try one on and the guy turned to me and said, “Just like that!” I said, “How do you know that? That’s my catchphrase!” He said, “What’s a catchphrase? I know nothing about any catchphrase. But I do know that every time an English person comes up here and tries on one of these fezzes, they turn to their friends and say ‘Just like that!’ And you’re the first one not to say it.” Marvellous, isn’t it!’

The fez acted as a beacon of merriment the moment he stepped on stage. That first entrance was irresistible as he strode to the centre like a barrel of bonhomie come crashing towards the footlights. He was possessed of a crazy comic spirit from the end of the tassel to the tips of his toes. In this regard I have always considered that he was to magic and comedy what Louis Armstrong was to music, their performance modes extensions of their natural being, underpinned by an essential playfulness and a keenness to share this quality with their audience. In his early days his attack was irrepressible. Never had such a surge of idiocy been unleashed into an auditorium with such vigour. So contagious was the atmosphere he created that from that moment everything he did would be funny, however seemingly unfunny any one constituent part of his routine might have appeared in the cold light of a lesser performer’s act. By the time his fame was established, it was only necessary for those expectant for his entry to hear the opening strains of his signature tune, the ever present ‘Sheik of Araby’, for the laughter bottled up inside them to gush forth in waves. For the next twenty, thirty, forty minutes he would grant us entry into his weird world, a crazy magical paradise where reality was turned on its head as he panicked his way to a closing ovation.

His stage tables always resembled some surreal Argos catalogue made real. There were props for playing with, like the rose in the bottle with the secret thread attached: ‘Rose, Rose, Arisen!’; props for dropping for the sole purpose of picking them up: ‘See that. I’m not afraid of work!’; props for questioning: ‘I don’t know what that’s for!’; props for his own comfort, as when he would blow up a balloon for no other purpose than to deflate it into his face: ‘It’s the heat that does it!’; props with which to impress, as when he threw an egg into the air only for it to shatter the plate upon which it was supposed to land intact; props he had presumably brought from home to sneak in some vestige of domestic routine, like the flower in the pot which wilts the moment he turns away from watering it, not once, not twice, but ad infinitum; and occasionally props for genuinely succeeding with, moments when the magic came right and his look of triumph was a wonder to behold. Ostensibly no object on stage served a more useful purpose than the rubbish bin slightly to the right of centre, but when he went to activate it an absurd jack-in-the box head from some distant Hammer horror movie emerged to send him into instant shock and the stage became more littered still. Working in tandem with the chaos was a stream of anarchy that was nothing if not liberating, ahead of its time in reflecting the message of modern stress therapists to rid us of the clutter of our own lives, the Christmas presents never used, the gadgets that never worked, even the jokes we wish we had never started to tell.

In mocking the conventions of magic and comedy he made fun of the performer that we might like to think exists in us all. James Thurber had a special insight into the formula. It is unlikely that the great American humorist ever saw Tommy Cooper. Even if his failing eyesight allowed him the privilege on a visit to London in the Fifties, he showed amazing prescience in the Thirties when he entitled a New Yorker article ‘The Funniest Man You Ever Saw’. To read it today is to play an instant game in which Cooper has to be cast into the main part, not merely because he possibly was the funniest man you ever saw, but because here was a type, that of the compulsive gagster, that Thurber and Cooper clearly intuitively understood. ‘He’s funnier’n hell,’ explains one character. ‘He’d go out into the kitchen and come in with a biscuit and he’d say: “Look, I’ve either lost a biscuit box or found a cracker,”’ says another. As for card tricks, there was no stopping him:

‘And then he draws out the wrong card, or maybe he looks at your card first and then goes through the whole deck till he finds it and shows it to you or –’

‘Sometimes he just lays the pack down and acts as if he’d never started any trick,’ said Griswold.

‘Does he do imitations?’ I asked.

‘Does he do imitations?’ bellowed Potter. ‘Wait’ll I tell you –’

As the title character passes off the use of a pencil eraser as some magnificent vanishing trick, claims the invention of the hole in the peppermint wondering whether it will prove a commercial proposition, or emerges from the bathroom with a tap in his hand, ‘I’ve either lost a bathtub or found a faucet!’, one can imagine Cooper bringing the whole piece to life. But the telling line is yet to come:

‘Laugh? I thought I’d pass away. Of course, you really ought to see him do it; the way he does it is a big part of it – solemn and all; he’s always solemn, always acts solemn about it.’

For all the outward mayhem, Tommy never performed without solemnity. Seriousness and sincerity never failed to hallmark anything he did in the cause of laughter. And as for imitations? Well, wait till I tell you! There was the one of the swallow (‘Gulp!’), the one of his milkman that no one seemed to get, not to mention Robert Mitchum’s father and Frank Sinatra, where he donned a trilby for effect. After the laugh, he’d drop the hat and the ground shook. It happened to be made of cast iron. Even Louis Armstrong was conjured up with a scrunched up handkerchief and a single toot on a child’s plastic trumpet. ‘Right!’ he would sheepishly admit to himself as he faced up to the fact that it was not quite what the audience expected.

He corresponded to the Lord of Misrule in ancient times, licensed to make play of our expectations of life, right down to the bare bones of language itself: ‘Now before I begin my act proper, I’d like to say this. This. Funny word that, isn’t it? That. Now that’s funnier than this!’ That he had far greater effect than any distant forebear may be attributed to the fact that the world in which he operated has become more complicated, more ambitious, more self-satisfied than it ever was when the original Tom Fool would have been expected to wear cap and bells in lieu of red felt and tassel. The mass media of our own time have also helped to raise Cooper to the status of an enduring national figure. Since his death his caricature by Gerald Scarfe has been the subject of a postage stamp in 1998; he has featured as the lead figure in the poster campaign for the celebrations staged nationwide by the National Film Theatre to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Independent Television in 2005; even the 2001 discovery in a garden shed of the earliest known television footage of our hero dating back to 1950 occasioned headlines that might have been fitting, had the technology allowed, for a Christmas Day broadcast by Queen Victoria. In the Nineties, National Power went as far as using the image of a pylon with fez, bow tie and outstretched metallic arms to tell the world that it was now generating more power from less fuel – ‘Just like that!’

The catchphrase was quoted by Margaret Thatcher in one of her last party conference speeches, although it is said in such circles that her speech writer, the dramatist Ronald Millar was required to give her lessons in the correct intonation ahead of the delivery, the PM being possibly the one person in the land ignorant of the most famous three words in popular culture. Politicians of all parties still find themselves caricatured fez on head when disaster crosses their path, an error of judgement is made. It only seems yesterday that The Times, courtesy of cartoonist John Kent, ran an image of a be-fezzed Home Secretary waving a magic wand with the caption, ‘It’s Magic! “Tommy” Blunkett turns an asylum-seeker into a taxpayer.’ It was almost unnecessary to add the catchphrase. It was a change in the summer of 2005 to discover by chance an article on of all things glass collecting in the investment pages of The Business headlined, ‘Glass, bottle – Bottle, glass.’ It is one thing to have one’s catchphrase remembered way beyond the time it was meant to serve, quite another to have one’s very speech patterns enter the subconsciousness of the nation.

The most bizarre manifestation of his fame came in 2000 when he was featured in the Body Zone at the ill-fated Millennium Dome built on the Meridian Line in Greenwich. Visitors were literally able to get inside the mind of Tommy Cooper, which found itself vying for attention with a giant model of an eyeball and an enormous, throbbing heart which beat faster whenever anyone let out a blood-curdling scream. Footsore tourists and day-trippers queued to stand behind massive teeth in sight of fez, microphone and glass of water as the distinctive voice was heard once again telling not only its familiar one-liners, but responding to the heckling of other so-called comic brains. The public complained that nothing was explained properly, which seems in keeping with the Cooper way of doing things. Tommy had become the most effective byword for incompetence and confusion since his own heroes, Laurel and Hardy. It was appropriate that he should prove to be the most popular aspect of an exhibition and building that in their own way quickly came to symbolize those qualities. All that is left is for Cooper to be granted the posthumous knighthood he deserves and for his iconic image to be discovered by some enterprising animation film company ready to transmute his sense of the ridiculous into further comic gold.

To the British public he has acquired a mythic status on a par with John Bull, Robin Hood, Mr Pickwick, even Mr Punch. It was with a degree of seriousness that in 1998 the Daily Mirror recommended foregoing the celebration of St George’s Day, in favour of a Tommy Cooper day. The saint had been revealed as the patron saint of syphilis sufferers and as someone who never set foot in England. It proclaimed the idea of a national day in which we all wear fezzes in tribute to ‘someone who sums up our unique attitude to ourselves and the world and someone who is eternally cool. Look no further than Tommy Cooper.’ Classless, timeless, ludicrous, his qualifications speak for themselves. Maybe Lenny Henry should think about converting Red Nose Day into Red Fez Day.

He also tapped into that rich vein of surrealism that links the comedy of the British music hall tradition back to the century of Lear and Carroll. It was another era when the diminutive clown Little Tich danced in his elongated boots, absurdist sketch comedian Harry Tate sported a moustache that he could twirl like an aeroplane propeller, and pioneer patter comedian Dan Leno claimed to have tramped the streets so often that he had to resort to turning his legs up at the ends where the feet had been worn away. But Cooper would have been perfectly at home in the company of these early superstars. Indeed, I am convinced that had fate not destined Tommy for a role in twentieth-century show business, Lewis Carroll would have had to invent him, this manic Mad Hatter with a Cheshire cat grin and a profile as forbidding as the Queen of Hearts. That the guillotine trick was one of his favourite illusions is telling, his love of outrageous wordplay even more so. And if he had not been one of the royal family’s favourite entertainers, one can imagine judgement being passed at the Palace: “‘It’s a pun” the King added in an angry tone, and everybody laughed. “Let the jury consider their verdict.”’ When donning one of those absurd half and half costumes, he might have been Tweedledum and Tweedledee in one body. His whole world was one of playing cards rising up in a rebellious swirl around him. The perpetual lateness of the White Rabbit provides its own sly grace note for those who knew him off stage.

Others have seen him in different contexts. With a meaningful twinkle in his eye, Spike Milligan once suggested to me that Cooper would have been his ideal choice for casting as Jesus Christ: ‘You can almost see him now. Fishes, loaves. Loaves, fishes. Huh huh huh! And here’s a little trick I’d like to show you now. As you can see there is nothing on my feet. I will now walk on this water over here. Not over there. Over here!’ Barry Cryer has taken up the theme: ‘I threw the money changers out of the temple the other day. Silly really, cos I wanted two fivers for a tenner. Huh huh!’ Milligan also said that when God made Cooper he got it wrong and that if he were a self-made man he made a terrible job of it. They point to the same thing. Given that the world is not a perfect place, the idea that one day one might meet one’s maker and discover he is wearing a red fez is a consoling one. Kenneth Tynan, while not subscribing to the Christian hypothesis or approving of the current state of the world, once nominated Ralph Richardson for the part of God, qualifying his choice, ‘if we imagine him as a whimsical, enigmatic magician, capable of fearful blunders, sometimes inexplicably ferocious, at other times dazzling in his innocence and benignity.’ In addition, the actor and the comedian shared that abstruse air that hints of knowledge deprived to lesser mortals, linked to an ability to make the trivial sound as if it were the secret of the Universe, as for instance in this typical Cooper pronouncement: ‘They say that 20 per cent of driving accidents are caused by drunken drivers. That must mean that the other 80 per cent are caused by drivers that are stone cold sober. In other words, if all drivers got drunk, there would be far less accidents.’

Magic of course provided him with the perfect metaphor with which to comment upon the human condition. Whereas Chaplin and Keaton needed vast expanses of Hollywood real estate, not to mention in those early movie-making days lashings of sunshine to pursue their craft, Cooper’s happiest arena was on a stage. Where else would a magician have plied his wares? His act was not a matter of merely standing at a microphone. Here was as well-defined a milieu for his personal comic vision as Galton and Simpson ever constructed for Tony Hancock or for Steptoe and Son. Of his British contemporaries only Frankie Howerd, Ken Dodd, and Max Wall succeeded in creating anything resembling a three-dimensional world out of their solo spoken monologues. Unintentionally, Tommy’s dysfunctional approach to magic – neither totally burlesque nor obviously straight – became the most consistently successful public relations device conjuring has enjoyed in its deep and distant history. He is every one of us who has ever fumbled his or her way through a conjuring trick in a social situation. His success becomes our success. He was clever enough to ensure that triumph occasionally sneaked up on him regardless.

Significantly for all his relevance to real life, he hardly ever made reference to topical issues, whether sport, celebrity, politics, or opinion of any kind. As a private individual cocooned in his private world of jokes and magic, he was not interested. Ken Dodd once said that to be a great comedian you need to know the price of cabbage. So sure is that vibrant performer’s grasp of the lives of his public, one cannot disagree. But in Cooper’s case it just didn’t matter. He succeeded in attaining the widest possible audience appeal by keeping up the barricades around his own lunatic world. Only occasionally would a product reference intrude, as when he yo-yoed a can of hair cream on a length of elastic: ‘Brylcreem bounce!’ Or picked up a loaf of ‘Nimble’ sliced bread with a balloon attached: ‘She flies like a bird through the sky – high – high!’ As he let go, it plummeted to the floor. Funny at the time, they did not last in the act for long. Many stand-up comedians of his era would have found it difficult to work without a copy of that day’s newspaper within reach. Cooper nevertheless stayed thoroughly genuine, an ordinary bloke to the last, never less than the people’s comedian. And how we need him now – a funny man who knows that success in his role is not about getting awards, playing cold, cavernous, overlarge arenas, cropping up on pretentious panel shows, or signing off from the job in hand to write novels we possibly do not need.

Some might have dismissed his comedy as mad, but as Eric Sykes put it, ‘He was about as big an idiot as Einstein and he got more laughs.’ He was a one-off. He was not necessarily the funniest comedian, the greatest clown, the most entertaining magician of all time. He may have been all three; he may have been none of these. But he was without question Tommy Cooper. Like Sinatra, Satchmo, Astaire, his very name will endure as a superlative all of its own. Let us now trace his beginnings.

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