Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (9 page)

According to Val Andrews the first professional stage job Tommy had back in England was not performing his act but working as a stooge for Harry Tate Junior, the son of the great music hall sketch comedian. Val recalls how funny he was in the wan make-up and the flat cap, playing the tall gormless caddy with a wheel on a stick in the golfing sketch: ‘Doing nothing, but doing everything’, all for two pounds ten shillings a week. There was some sporadic film extra work and three humble bottom-of-the-bill weeks in variety, at the Manchester Hippodrome, the Brighton Grand, and the Playhouse, Weston-Super-Mare during the middle of 1947, but not much else. Morale was kept up by the camaraderie of many of those in the same predicament. Once a week he would get together with a group of ex-servicemen who had committed themselves to comedy as a profession, a prospect that before the war would have seemed as unlikely as turning base metal to gold or fighting Hitler single-handed.

The number who not only made it in a relatively short space of time, but also stayed at the top is staggering. Wisdom, Edwards, Emery, Bygraves, Bentine, Milligan, Secombe, Sellers, Sykes, Howerd, Hancock, Hill, they all contributed to a seismic
effect on British comedy that has not happened since and may be comparable only with the revolution in popular music a decade or so later. They did not all achieve a similar success. The names of Joe Church, Harry Locke, Norman Caley, Len Marten, Robert Moreton – all stalwart pros – failed to register in the national consciousness in the same way. Luck as well as talent had a part to play in the longevity of a career, but at the moment they all shared the same heady dream of household name stardom. It was certainly not the most congenial time to be contemplating such a future. The variety circuit was in a shaky condition, radio in spite of
ITMA
and
Band Waggon
had yet to find its golden age in comedy terms, and television had not established itself sufficiently before the service was curtailed on the outbreak of war for anyone to know whether it held out any lasting prospects at all.

Each of these now famous names needed his own personal Mister Sandman to conjure dream into reality. The key to this was being seen, a procedure with its own built-in Catch 22: unless you already had a representative, how were you to secure a decent booking where you could be seen in the first place? One answer was the Nuffield Centre, a club for servicemen in Adelaide Street in the back of St Martin-in-the-Fields. A favourite haunt of agents and producers, it provided a free and easy showcase for many a comic emerging from the war. With or without this solitary oasis, talent would find a way and before long Norman had found a professional soul mate in an agent named Billy Marsh. Max discovered an advocate in Jock Jacobsen, Benny in Richard Stone, and ‘the lad himself’ in Phyllis Rounce. In each career one can point to one such strong individual working behind the scenes. As far as Tommy was concerned, Gwen could give him encouragement and guidance, but she did not have the professional qualifications to go the whole way. Miff Ferrie was waiting in the wings.

Miff was born George Ferrie in Edinburgh on 10 March 1911. A musician during his early life, he acquired his nickname in homage to the American trombonist ‘Miff’ Mole. The Thirties saw him recording alongside Roy Fox, Ambrose, Jack Hylton, Lew Stone and Carroll Gibbons at the height of the dance band craze, before deciding temporarily to set aside his trombone to form a permanent vocal trio. When
Band Waggon
hit the airwaves in January 1938, Miff Ferrie and the Jackdauz [
sic
] found themselves billed alongside comedy stars, Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch as one of the resident vocal attractions on the series. Encouraged by this success, he then formed his own combination featuring the vocal group as part of a seven-piece orchestra, The Ferrymen. With regular radio work, a Parlophone recording contract and tours of Great Britain and the Continent in his date book, Miff was riding high.
Airs and Disgraces
was a short-lived series based around his talents. One imagines him as a chirpy little showman in a dour sort of way. Many years later brilliant Scots comic, Chic Murray made an art form of the contradiction. Then the war intervened. Invalided out of the army, Miff acted as Musical Adviser to United States Organization, Camp Shows. His USO work involved him in auditioning hundreds of musicians and other performers as well as production administration.

After the war Miff and his band became the resident attraction at the Windermere Club at 189 Regent Street, his activities extending to those of ‘Entertainments Director’, in which capacity he was responsible for booking the cabaret. One Friday afternoon in November 1947 a nervous Tommy Cooper went along to audition for the floor show. Few places can be more dispiriting than a performing venue without its audience, the cold emptiness a cruel champion of fear. Tommy later said, ‘Unfortunately, the act I did that day was not suitable, but Miff made a few suggestions and told me to come back in a
week or two. This I did, and to my amazement I made the musicians in the band laugh. I was working from then on.’

It is hard to know what he was thinking. His first audition act majored on a series of impressions of Hollywood stars, the comedy magic playing a minor role. The idea of the hysterical Cooper presenting a convincing parade of Jimmy Cagney, Charles Laughton and Edward G. Robinson defies belief. The route to show business as an impressionist was the most hackneyed of them all. Moreover, it was a difficult genre to burlesque. Accuracy was the keynote to success, unless you were Tony Hancock, a frustrated pretender and buffoon of a different kind, who made a big feature of his own lugubrious attempts to mimic these very names in his own stage act. Indeed he persisted with them into the mid Sixties by which time the originals were passing out of fashion. That he did so was criticized by some, but seen as an accurate reflection of what the quintessential Hancock character would purvey in a comically jaded variety act by others. Whatever, one does wonder whether somewhere along the way he witnessed the Cooper act at this stage and the idea was sewn.

The impressions aside, little did Miff know that the trick or two Tommy also managed to fumble that Friday afternoon were the tip of an iceberg of material already waiting in the wings. The return audition was not necessarily the challenge it might have seemed to the man requesting it. In later years Miff would himself take credit for suggesting to Cooper the idea of the burlesque approach to magic, to the extent of having Tommy apparently voice the claim himself in much early publicity, interviews that Miff in fact gave or provided copy for on his client’s behalf. There may have been a genuine misunderstanding – Tommy was now too busy and too increasingly successful to be bothered – but the claim was not based on fact, as we know from the approach Tommy had
already adopted in the services and at his BBC audition. More importantly, at that second audition for Ferrie the frenzied fellow in the fez achieved one of the most difficult feats in show business. He reduced the band to hysterics. Surveying the debris of imploded conjuring tricks, Miff had no option but to offer him a week’s work at a salary of fifteen pounds, while thinking to himself, ‘My God, if we could recapture that and channel it, we’ve got something that no one else is doing.’ On and off Tommy played the Windermere for fifteen weeks over the coming year, initially as a supporting attraction to the exotic Marqueez – once described as the Pavlova of the music halls and now billed as the ‘Glamorous Star of the East, featuring her famous Dance of the Seven Veils.’ From that first booking, Miff continued to mastermind his career – through countless trials and tribulations between them – to the end of his life. At this early stage a surviving script suggests that he even muscled in on the act:

It took Miff a while to adjust to the spotlight favouring Tommy and his few other clients at the expense of his own
ego. In the early years of their partnership, he could never completely ignore an opportunity for his own self-promotion, as shown by this gratuitous attempt at humour from a standard Cooper press biography:

 As the years progressed and Cooper’s good fortune headed for the stratosphere, Miff was able to come to terms with his own feelings of inadequacy, although, with his background as a minor star, self-effacement would never come easily to him. In fairness, there was not a moment around the clock when this short, bespectacled Scot with the shrewd eyes behind their tinted lenses was not prepared to fight Tommy’s corner, but the relationship between them was never without its difficulties. Praise did not come as easily as reproach, while his comedy judgement proved little short of appalling, as epitomized by the time Miff sat stony-faced while Tommy demonstrated to him for the first time his classic routine with the cardboard box of ‘Hats’. After that it became a byword of the Cooper household – as well as the production crew of many a Tommy television series – that, in Gwen’s words, ‘If Miff thought it wasn’t funny, you can bet it was.’ She used to smile,
conceding that when Tommy wanted to upset Miff, he’d call him George. As we shall see, there were times when things became far more serious, Tommy conducting what amounted to a war of psychological attrition against him, but Miff – ‘that little Scottish fellow sprouting red horns’, as Tommy would refer to him – stood steadfastly firm with typical native fortitude. For the magician it remained a case of ‘better the devil you know’. For all Ferrie assumed the notoriety of a
monstre sacré
as the power behind Cooper, and a short while later Bruce Forsyth too, he remained among his fellow agents one of the most respected players in the game.

This is the place to lay to rest once and for all the myth of the contract that existed between performer and agent. No arrangement in show business history has been more misrepresented. Tommy always claimed that Miff signed him unwillingly to a lifetime contract that guaranteed him a wage of twenty pounds a week for the first seven years, however many shows he performed. Gwen claimed she was livid when she heard he’d signed, guaranteeing Miff fifteen per cent – as distinct from the then standard ten – into the bargain. It became the most notorious agreement of its kind since the one that kept Sid Field out of the West End, a prisoner of the provinces, until he was nudging forty. However, even had the hearsay been true, it should be stressed that twenty pounds was a fair recompense at a time when the average supporting magic or comedy act was earning little more than ten pounds a week.

The original document as signed by T. F. Cooper over its pink and magenta sixpenny stamp on 28 November 1948, which is now in the possession of the author, is a totally honourable Sole Agency Agreement, as endorsed by the Council of the Agents’ Association Limited. There is nothing to stipulate that Tommy should not receive the total earnings he has achieved in any one week, minus the commission that is set
at the agreed fifteen per cent. The arrangement covers an initial period of five, not seven years during which Miff is expected ‘to use all reasonable efforts to procure employment for me … and to guide and advise me with respect to my theatrical career and to act for me as Manager and Personal Representative in all matters concerning my professional interests whenever you are called upon to do so.’ It granted Miff exclusivity in the area of ‘Manager, Agent, and Personal Representative’.

Clause Six is a key one and certainly caused the greatest aggravation to Tommy over the years:

As for Clause Five, there was no reason for Tommy to quibble. It was there to protect the performer as much as the agent, giving him the opportunity to walk away had Miff failed in his obligation to provide work in any four month period that failed in less technical language to reflect his average earnings in the previous twelve months. Here it is for the record: