I had just finished university and had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. By day, I was working at what was known, not particularly endearingly, as a ‘gopher’ for an architects’ firm in Camden, spending a lot of my spare time (and a lot of my supposed ‘gopher’ time) naively sending off letters and scripts to addresses grabbed out of the various ‘how to get on in acting/producing/writing’ guides. They were almost certainly written by people who hadn’t got on in acting or producing, and this was the only writing they had ever done.
The only thing that kept me sane during this time was a tape a friend at the firm had given me: Derek And Clive, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s booze-fuelled mixture of classical education and pure filth. I was in the mood for some unremitting swearing, and I loved it. When recorded in the 1970s, the police had wanted the duo prosecuted for obscenity but it was dismissed by the Director Of Public Prosecutions as ‘fourth-form lavatory humour’.
Peter Cook grew up in Torbay (where I also grew up) and was a supporter of Torquay United, regularly turning up at Plainmoor in the Gulls’ League Two glory days. The first paid writing job I eventually got was BBC Radio 4’s Week Ending. Producers were still talking then about That Was The Week That Was which had been a TV show 30 years earlier, for which Peter Cook had made a TV pilot based on his comedy club, The Establishment.
Monologues criticising authority were how Cook made his name. If we hadn’t had Cook, we wouldn’t have had Monty Python or Brass Eye or Frost/Nixon. He was a major shareholder in Private Eye, loved long lunches, supposedly had a fling with John F Kennedy’s missus, and hung out with The Beatles. Comedy is not the new rock’n’roll. But Peter Cook was.
Theatre Royal, Dumfries, Wednesday 12 July; Glasgow Glee, Thursday 13 July; Andy Parsons: Bafflingly Optimistic, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, Monday 14–Sunday 27 August.