Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (41 page)

The whole sequence was a physical powerhouse, the words in italics spelling out where his body went into overdrive in the cause of expression. The arms flung wide to denote size; the dialogue directed at the landlady on the upper floor; the ludicrous representation of Cooper the frogman; the prim half-profile turns to accommodate the catchphrases; the finger-pointing admonition on deep-sea safety; the boisterous threshing against the sea with the right hand while the left holds the instruction manual; the hands flip-flopping nineteen to the dozen to illustrate the feet – in the front and in the back; the growing sense of disorientation; the mime of the pad and pencil; not to mention a myriad of casual winks and looks to acknowledge the audience in best Max Miller fashion; all contributed to a bravura performance that, with the exception of Ken Dodd, no contemporary stand-up comedian was – or is – capable of delivering.

Equally impressive was the energy he threw into the telling of his quaint repertoire of shaggy animal stories, of which the most notable was that concerning the king of the jungle:

In his telling one feels the apprehensiveness of the chimp, the stupidity of the hyena, the sharp clawed anger of the lion. The final encounter is a visual triumph as Cooper takes upon himself the part of the pachyderm as it subjects the lion to the indignities it has been holding in reserve for the beast. This climax magnificently embraces mime, burlesque, audience acknowledgement and sheer physical effort. When added together they must come close to something called ‘acting’. According to Val Andrews, Tommy had immense respect for
members of the acting profession. Val states that he would come away from performing on television shows with the likes of Deryck Guyler complaining of his poor performance: ‘You’ve no idea how terrible I was, but Deryck couldn’t put a foot wrong.’ Within his own charted territory, neither could Cooper.

The acting profession has always doffed a cap in his direction. Sometime in the early Eighties Trevor Howard begged Michael Parkinson to arrange a meeting between himself and Cooper, so strong was his admiration for the acting ability he saw at the core of the comedian’s act. More recently Anthony Hopkins has revealed himself as the foremost Cooper fan, identifying with the apparent anarchy within the performance and using his own vibrant impersonation to break the tension on many an uptight film set. It is difficult to give any credence to his repeated chat show claim that he based aspects of Hannibal Lecter, his Oscar-winning role from
Silence of the
Lambs
, on the great clown. More relevant is his less publicized admission that in
August
, the version of Chekhov’s
Uncle
Vanya
by Julian Mitchell that Hopkins directed for Theatre Clwyd in Wales in 1994, he played the leading role with a touch of Tommy: ‘I started putting these laughs in – in the middle of this scene describing the professor’s pomposity. It just happened one night by accident and I think the audience picked up on it because I started laughing like Tommy Cooper and I thought I’d better not go too far because I’ll step outside the play and make the other actors start laughing too much. But I was tempted to. I wish I had actually.’ Another knight, Michael Gambon, capable of no mean Cooper impression himself, succumbed to a similar tendency at the National Theatre in 1995, where, according to supporting actor, Martin Freeman – later to achieve prominence in television’s
The Office
– he proved ‘an absolute joy, somehow weaving Tommy Cooper into the ad-libbing.’

When Tommy was playing a club in the Birmingham area in 1976 Trevor Nunn took a party of actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford to see the master performer at work. In return for the hospitality extended by Cooper after the show, Nunn invited Tommy and Mary Kay to a matinée of
A Winter’s Tale
the following day. When Michael Williams as Autolycus arrived on stage wearing a fez – part of his basic costume – Tommy interpreted this as a gesture to himself. To Mary’s embarrassment, the actor’s opening lines were punctuated by the comedian’s trademark laugh and the audience roared out of all proportion to the comedic weight the words carried. Nunn had arranged an informal get-together for after the performance, at which Williams’s wife, Judi Dench was likely to be present. It later transpired she did not appear, being too much in awe of meeting the comedian. Happily Williams himself, a frustrated vaudevillian whose impersonation of the much imitated music hall veteran Robb Wilton was considered the best, had not been in the least perturbed. It is significant that in the last years of his life Cooper’s own performance assumed aspects of the quiet, puzzled thoughtfulness that had once characterized the mood of Wilton’s act.

It is a pity that for all his strength as a live performer on stage and on television, Cooper never managed fully to flex his muscles in the cinema, if only to leave behind one film that would properly epitomize his talent long after the vagaries of television scheduling and the video industry have ceased to have any need for him. Nothing could do justice to his live talent, but the clues to the magic of Sid Field and Max Miller that remain captured on celluloid do more than justify the inferior quality of the films that purvey them. As his career gathered momentum in the Fifties, Cooper was not considered an obvious cinematic option. No one was rushing to make him the new Norman Wisdom. The little man was a stand-alone
phenomenon whose success would help to sustain the British film industry for the better part of fifteen years. There was no possibility that the likes of Harry Secombe, Benny Hill, Dave King, Charlie Drake – all given a fleeting moment of film fame in the hope of providing competition for Wisdom – would ever draw level with his amazing national eminence in the medium. The enquiries for Cooper that came the way of Miff Ferrie were for a ragbag of character roles rather than the long-term prospect of a movie star future, not surprisingly perhaps given the lower level of his theatrical billing in those early days.

At the end of 1954 the invitation to play a schoolmaster in support of overgrown schoolboy comic, Cardew ‘the Cad’ Robinson in his 1956 vehicle,
Fun at St. Fanny’s
was mercifully turned down. Three months later a more prestigious offer came with the opportunity to play the Danny Green role of the punch-drunk boxer, ‘One-round Lawson’ as one of the team alongside Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Cecil Parker, and Herbert Lom in Sandy Mackendrick’s
The Ladykillers
. His commitment to
Paris by Night
at the Prince of Wales Theatre stood in the way – or so Miff said – of a film role that could have made a significant impact on his career. The following year he was given a screen test at Elstree by MGM for a part in
The Little Hut
, that of the native chief who arrives on the desert island to upset the eternal triangle of its stars, Ava Gardner, Stewart Granger, and David Niven. The role would have given Cooper fourth billing to the big names, but nothing came of the test and it was eventually taken by Italian screen comedian and, coincidentally, former boxing champion, Walter Chiari.

There were the inevitable queries for movies that never got made or were dangled in front of him with illustrious stars attached and materialized later with lesser names as standard
B-movie fodder. It is ironic that when he did accept an invitation to go before the cameras it was as another punch-drunk boxer in a desultory affair called
And the Same To You
. The film, best described genre-wise as sub-Ealing comedy, was released in January 1960 and featured Brian Rix and William Hartnell billed above Cooper in the cast. So insignificant was he to the plot that its précis in the
Monthly Film Bulletin
makes no mention of his character. Tommy played Horace Hawkins, a dim-witted pugilist of the kind that Bernard Bresslaw would soon make his own in the short-lived BBC sitcom,
Meet the Champ
. Cooper passed in and out of the action – some nonsense about a vicar hiring out a church hall for illegal fights to raise money for the roof of the hall – wearing an air of bewildered innocence that veered between fear and geniality. He later admitted he was awful in the role, laying back in his chair and rolling his eyes around like blue glass marbles to prove the point. The movie epitomized the poor record of the British cinema in transposing vibrant variety talent to the screen. It was slow, unsubtle and old-fashioned and made no attempt to capitalize on his presence, in spite of the promise of his first shot on camera, registering pain – as only he could – as he punches his own left fist in the excitement of cheering on a colleague in the ring.

His next excursion into a film studio was prompted by Michael Winner’s decision in 1962 to direct a ‘modern musical’ version of
The Mikado
. It was only the second feature to be made by the colourful director and was rushed into production by producer, Harold Baim in an attempt to be the first to put Gilbert and Sullivan on the big screen once the pair came out of copyright. Tommy was appearing in Blackpool at the time and fitted in his entire scene on a Monday morning before being flown back to the seaside for his evening shows by fellow comic, Stan Stennett in his private plane. Winner
remains in awe of Cooper’s professionalism under such pressure. Whereas he found Frankie Howerd, who played the gangster Ko-Ko, surly and uncooperative, Cooper breezed in, did not – as was feared – turn the whole enterprise into an excuse to keep the crew in stitches, and got on with his role as the Detective in a pleasant and efficient manner. He was script-perfect, having added, with the blessing of Winner and co-writer Lew Schwartz, one or two pieces of business to make the part his own. Tommy shared the four minute scene with Hank Mikado, an ex-GI played by Kevin Scott, who consults the detective on how to get rid of Ko-Ko in his attempt to win the unfettered attention of his girl friend, Yum-Yum. It was not the intention that Cooper should be of any great help in this matter.

The Cool Mikado
resembles one of those Hollywood ensemble movies where too many entertainers are pulled together in one studio at one time for their own good. Howerd had top billing over Cooper. Other television names of the day like Stubby Kaye, Mike and Bernie Winters, Lionel Blair, and Pete Murray give the movie the air of an overblown television special rather than that of a feature film. It was not a success, one critic making the surprising judgement that ‘this shoddy film contains some enjoyable dancing by Lionel Blair, but little else,’ but today its curiosity value as quintessential Sixties kitsch outweighs any worth, or lack of it, that it might have shown at the time. To Gilbert and Sullivan purists the whole enterprise inevitably showed a severe lapse in creative judgement, but it was never Winner’s intention to cling to the original story. Any pretence at production values was compromised when the budget ran out and the director found himself unable by using chroma-key to overlay shots he had envisaged shooting in Japan against the blue walls of the Shepperton sound stage. The lack of time Cooper had in studio gives itself away.
He gallops through his lines, like a poor man’s Groucho on speed, and is at times difficult to comprehend. Tommy interpolates some classic Cooper moments, as when he picks up a briefcase and strikes it with a mallet: ‘I’ve been working very hard on a new case,’ but there is no space left within the dialogue for the audience to laugh.

The next decade would see enquiries by Ken Annakin for a cameo in the Stanley Baxter/Leslie Phillips/James Robertson Justice vehicle,
The Fast Lady
; by Stanley Baker for a part in his film on the life of the highwayman Jack Sheppard,
Where’s
Jack?
; by Richard Lester for the film of
The Bed Sitting Room
, the nuclear war fantasy by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus; and again by Lester to play the part of a Gothic villain in
Royal Flash
based on the
Flashman
books of George MacDonald Fraser. The requests always seemed to come through relatively late in the day and Cooper’s television and cabaret commitments always seemed to stand in the way. Another possibility of becoming associated with Ray Galton and Alan Simpson presented itself with the starring role in a proposed film version of
The Wind in the Sassafras Trees
, the play they had written for Frankie Howerd. For no apparent reason the project appears to have gone away almost as soon as it was mooted and was never made. One heaves a genuine sigh of disappointment that several requests for him to feature in an episode of the comic adventure series,
The Avengers
were all frustrated. Happily a move by Peter Rogers to recruit him to the
Carry On
team with a cameo in
Carry On … Up the
Khyber
went no further than a lunch between Cooper, Ferrie, the producer and his associates. Miff wrote to Tommy after the meal: ‘I have now been advised that they do not think it would be practical to continue this matter, so, with all the goodwill in the world, they suggest that we disengage from this project and trust that we may be able to get together in
the future.’ One heaves another genuine sigh – this time of relief – that they never did.