Tragically I was an Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook [Paperback]

Peter Cook may have had problems that prevented him ever fully achieving all that his comic genius was capable of, but that side of the writer and comedian is not the point of Tragically, I Was an Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook, which is a quite marvellous anthology of the man's writings.

Cook's reputation has continued to flourish since his death, and many consider him (along with Spike Milligan) one of the greatest comic writers this country has produced. Although his public face was always the quaffing, sardonic commentator, he was, in fact, a writer who simply never stopped creating new sketches and articles for both public consumption and his own satisfaction. Many of these pieces have not been published before, and many have only been broadcast once. This collection brings together many high spots of Cook's career: from his early success with Beyond the Fringe (and his initial meetings with Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore) to his time as an éminence grise behind the magazine Private Eye.

Needless to say, all the marvellous EL Whisty monologues are here, as well as classic Pete and Dud routines, and even the more scabrous collaborations between Cook and Moore as the foul-mouthed Derek and Clive. The fact that Cook's Milligan-like drawings complement the text makes this a truly cherishable volume. --Barry Forshaw --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The latest instalment in the corporate adventures of Alex, the pinstriped cartoon character who appears in the pages of the 'Daily Mail'. It's been a tough year for the investment banker: his world is rocked by financial scandals and he faces a fight to keep his job. A collection of Cook's finest and funniest writings - many of which have never been published before. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'A classic of English humour' The Independent

For his many friends and fans, Peter Cook was quite simply the funniest man they'd ever encountered. And nearly eight years since his death, his status as one of Britain's greatest comedians shows no sign of shrinking. Despite his reputation for idleness, Peter Cook was a prolific writer, who created countless outrageous sketches and articles, the very best, the most famous and some of the most unusual are collected here. Some of these pieces have never been published before, others are out of print, a few only survive in print, and many have only ever been seen or heard - never read. This collection ranges from Cook's first writing, at school and university, via Beyond The Fringe, with Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, his dualogues with Moore as Pete & Dud and Derek & Clive, and their brilliant TV series, Not Only But Also, to transcripts of his late, great TV appearances, and a selection of his journalism for the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard and Private Eye. (20021018)

William Cook is the author of Ha Bloody Ha - Comedians Talking (Fourth Estate) and The Comedy Store - The Club That Changed British Comedy (Little, Brown). He has worked for the BBC and written for the Guardian, the Mail on Sunday and the New Statesman. (20021018)

Before The Fringe
'Even at school, Peter had a greater capacity for making people laugh than anyone I have ever met,' recalls Cook's school friend, Michael Bawtree. Yet even in the springtime of his life, Peter Cook was just as happy making his friends laugh in private as he was making his fans laugh in public, and many of Cook's funniest school performances never even made it onto the relatively private platform of the Radley school stage. 'Every trivial incident was a source of mirth,' remembers Bawtree. 'Occasionally, we would chip with our own additions to the theme, and Peter would enjoy that too, building on them, improving them, turning them inside out, as he did his own.' 'He had a tremendous ear, and caught at once distinctive speech patterns and vocabulary,' confirms another school friend, Jonathan Harlow. 'He could spin a whole fantastic web of absurdity from the merest thread of an idea or phrase.' But it was a fair while before these absurdist fantasies found a forum beyond the privacy of Cook's own social circle.
Meanwhile, Cook steadily matured into a fine young comic actor. The school magazine, The Radleian, ignored his dramatic debut, as a Socialist duchess in Stuck In A Lift, but praised the 'gusto' of his Doll Common in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, and adored his 'wonderful display of virtuosity' as Don Adriano de Armado in Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost. Finally, in 1955, his penultimate year at Radley, Cook started staging his own revues, playing a dung beetle, demonstrating a fascination for insects that would last throughout his life, and audaciously lampooning the BBC bigwigs who'd been invited along to cast a critical eye over Radley's amateur dramatics.
Cook was equally busy as a writer, earning the princely fee of four guineas for a published contribution to Punch. However several of his other compositions were rather more serious affairs. 'Bric-a- Brac', which won Radley's Medrington short story trophy, was an atmospheric spine-chiller about a young woman babysitting for a sinister couple who run a junk shop. Cook also tried his hand at science fiction. 'I wrote a terrible play about Martians landing in a suburban part of England,' he recalled, a quarter of a century later. 'I can't remember what happened, except that the Martians behaved more normally than the people in suburbia.' A more po-faced effort was his distinctly fascistic tract advocating the sterilisation of the 'unintelligent working class'. 'People say I've got more reactionary in my old age,' observed Cook. 'In fact, I've moved to the left from my very solid Nazi position at the age of sixteen.'
Yet Cook's most ambitious and successful schoolboy creation wasn't remotely Nazi in its sentiments. Remarkably, Black & White Blues was a full length musical, with words by Cook and music by his fellow prefect Michael Bawtree. Written entirely in rhyming couplets, it wasn't performed by the pupils, but by puppets, all made and operated by the school's Marionette Society. The plot concerned an evangelical jazz musician called Mr Slump, who travels to darkest Africa to cure the natives of their cannibalism. Cook produced the show, provided the voice for Mr Slump, and even carved some of the marionettes. 'It really was quite appalling,' recollected Cook in 1980, but his production was such a hit that the society cut a disc of the show in a proper recording studio, and sold several hundred 78rpm records around the school. 'A great success,' proclaimed The Radleian, in a warmly complimentary review.
Cook left Radley in 1956, and would have done National Service, had he not fortuitously failed the entrance test. 'I had been allergic to feathers and I had grown out of it, but it was still on my medical record,' he explained. 'They asked me if I would sneeze if I was in a barrack room full of feather pillows - an unlikely situation, I thought - but I said, truthfully, "yes," because everybody sneezes at some time or another, and so I was unsuitable.'
While his school friends sneezed in their barrack rooms, Cook spent a year in France and Germany. The official purpose of this sabbatical was to polish his French and German, in preparation for his Modern Languages degree at Cambridge, but it also provided Cook with the inspiration for his seminal Establishment club. 'I went to these awful satirical nightclubs. I thought they were terribly bad. I spoke reasonably good French and German, and I thought the humour was very juvenile.' Yet it made him wonder why there was nothing similar in London. 'For a long time my major fear was that somebody would do the obvious and start it before me.' It can't have been that obvious, because nobody did, and five years later he opened London's first satirical nightclub. The British Army's loss was British Comedy's gain.
In 1957, Cook went up to Pembroke College. He appeared in Pembroke's own plays and smokers, but it wasn't until 1958 that he dared to approach the famous Cambridge Footlights. The Footlights president, Adrian Slade, persuaded Cook to reprise his impression of Mr Boylett, the Radley butler, at a Footlights smoker, and by 1959 Cook had become an integral member of the Footlights team. Together with John Bird, he successfully campaigned to open up Footlights to female performers, bringing in Eleanor Bron, with whom he continued to perform, off and on, throughout his career.