Stephen Fry says Peter Cook was the funniest man ever to draw breath. Recommendation enough to want to know all I can about the extraordinary Peter Cook. Unfortunately, Harry Thompson’s celebrity-style biography delivers at least that much and far more. His biography runs to nearly 500 pages and seems to include mention of everyone Peter Cook ever met (as well as many he didn’t), repeats criticisms and failings again and again, and saves its analyses for the wrong things – especially the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore years.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were a team. As such they needed to fit together like two puzzle pieces, complementing and filling in where the other was lacking, or different. This has been the model forever. You can see it Laurel and Hardy, the Smothers Brothers, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Rowan and Martin – but for Cook and Moore, that’s not enough. We are treated to endless pages of criticism of Peter Cook for being the dominant character, while Dudley Moore was the submissive. But that’s the essence of comic teams. If it weren’t so, it would never have worked so well. The problem, if there was one, was that the characters they played onstage were who they really were in life, unlike most other teams, who were just playing roles. But Thompson doesn’t see that. In fact, when Dudley began to assert himself, the quality of their work plummeted. He stepped out of his caricature, and the public yawned, which Thompson finally acknowledges on page 273, after dragging us around for a good hundred pages for nothing. (But he’s in good company. The post mortems were all over the place.)
What I see in this biography that does not get stated as such is that Peter Cook was a shark. He had to keep moving. He had to keep conquering new media all the time – or wither and die. So he went from class clown to student actor, to sketch writer to playwright to Fringe professional to West End star, to Broadway star, to television star, to film star and even nightclub owner. Not to mention recording artist and Top 40 hit maker. And magazine publisher. And talkshow guest. And he succeeded immediately and easily each time, which made him into an entertainment monster. Peter Cook WAS Carnaby Street/Swinging London in the 60s. His invitation was the most sought after. He surrounded himself with the who’s who of western culture, from sports celebrities to the Beatles. His (twice weekly!) parties were legendary. (Frequent guest John Lennon said he wrote Lucy in the Sky for the Cooks’ daughter Lucy.) He was the Oscar Wilde of the 20th century, a celebrity wit if ever there was one. He was always ON, and people hung by his words – and his delivery of them.
Simple hubris took over, and Cook failed as host in a tv talk show format he refused to do any prep for. He was after all, a natural. He could do anything, anywhere, any time, and be successful for a while. But it all came crashing down around him, and by his early thirties, he was no longer the center of the attention that made him. The rest – 200 more pages – is a pitiful descent into obscurity. The simple truth is alcohol and drugs and chemicals occupied critical parts of his brain which in earlier years were used for lightning quick tangents and flights of fancy. That he used these compounds to kickstart the mechanism is not so much ironic as typical. They dulled his responses just as they do with everyone else, and the energy quickly faded. His creative output became shorter, more superficial, and less significant. He simply could not compete with his former self, having handicapped himself with drugs.
Instead, he turned down offers left and right, year after year, and complained continuously of being terminally bored. Nothing interested him, starting with life. The shark needed to move up, but was unwilling to actually work for it.
Another problem I had is not so much a fault of the author so much as the age. I decided to watch some of the sketches he described on Youtube. They weren’t quite as stated. Thompson loves to dwell on how the comedy team used to crack up at each other’s lines, giving the impression of anarchy and chaos onstage. Nothing could be further from the truth. They did think each other immensely funny; you could see it. But it was more like being in on an inside joke than witnessing a calamity. If you want to see a sketch collapse in fits of uncontrollable laughter, watch Carol Burnett’s shows that were taped before a live audience. Cook and Moore are models of self control by comparison. Not a huge crime by biographical standards, but it made me wonder how accurate the rest of it was.
Peter Cook could have had it all. What was missing was guidance. He never actually trained for anything. He never actually learned to do anything. Everything he succeeded at came without sweating a drop. And no one was in his corner to point him in the right direction or hold him back when he was making a mistake. That’s the tragedy of Peter Cook, and the feeling comes through loud and clear in Thompson’s biography. Peter Cook was a loner, and it cost him everything. ( )

This book convinced me that Peter Cook was the most original post- Milligan comic geniuses in Britain: Monty Python owed so much to his anarchic sense of the ridiculousness. He was especially brilliant at exposing those who think they have power over others, and he really was the spirit behing Private Eye. Thompson's is a very detailed and thorough-going biography. Its hilarious and tragic by turns: Peter Cook's need to escape boredom blessed us with some astonishingly witty sketches many of which are detailed in the book. Highly recommended.