John Fisher - Tommy Cooper - Always Leave Them Laughing - The Definitive Biography of a Comedy Legend

Always Leave Them Laughing

JOHN FISHER

For Gwen,

For Vicky,

And for Henry & Doris Lewis,

who also had a daughter named Victoria.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Preface:

‘I Didn’t Let You Down, Did I?’

1 All in the Branding

2 Laughing Over Spilt Milk

3 ‘Let Me See Your Dots’

4 Life Gets More Exciting . . .

5 Mad About Magic

6 Comic Ways and Means

7 The Steady Climb

8 Cooper Vision: Part One

9 Cooper Vision: Part Two

10 Method in the Madness

11 Health and Home Affairs

12 The Days Dwindle Down

13 Death and Resurrection

14 The Real Me

Index

Section One

1 Tommy’s parents, Thomas and Gertrude Cooper, circa 1920s. (Private Collection)

2 Three years old and ready for play. (Private Collection)

3 Eighteen years old and ready for the world. (Private Collection)

4 Enjoying a bottle and a glass off duty in Egypt in 1947. (Private Collection)

5 Gwen (far left), star of her wartime concert party. (Private Collection)

6 Tommy and Gwen, just prior to their wedding in Cyprus, 1947. (Private Collection)

7 The early publicity pose that defined an image. (Rimis Ltd)

8 Miff Ferrie: agent, manager, Svengali. (Rimis Ltd)

9 Later publicity pose when success was assured. (Robert Harper)

10 Baby Vicky seems unimpressed. (Chris Ware/Hulton Getty)

11 11. With baby Thomas in the garden at Chiswick. (Private Collection)

12 ‘Frankie and Bruce and Tommy’s Christmas Show’, 1966. (Fremantle Media)

13 ‘Do you like football?’ (Mirrorpix)

14 ‘Bucket, sand! Sand, bucket!’ (Hulton Getty)

15 Time to relax with the famous feet up at home. (Private Collection)

16 A sensation on the Ed Sullivan Show, New York, 1967. (Private Collection)

17 ‘When autumn leaves start to fall …’ (Fremantle Media)

18 ‘And ven zey are caught everyone vill be shot …’ (Fremantle Media)

19 Funny bones: with Anita Harris, promoting Tommy’s Palladium show, 1971. (Private Collection)

20 A rare private moment backstage. (Hulton Getty)

Section Two

1 A modern Mad Hatter. (Fremantle Media)

2 The caricature by Bill Hall. (© Bill Hall)

3 ‘Where’s Jerry Lewis when I need him?’: Dean Martin at the Variety Club Lunch held in his honour, with Tommy and Morecambe & Wise. (Mirrorpix)

4 Master of his terrain: playing the clubs in the Seventies. (John Curtis/Rex Features)

5 With Mary Kay during the latter years. (Private Collection)

6 ‘Look into my eyes’: the New London Theatre television series, 1978. (Fremantle Media)

7 A modern Punch and Judy: ‘That’s the way to do it!’ (Fremantle Media)

8 ‘On a clear day …’ (Fremantle Media)

9 ‘Look at the buffalo and speak into the tennis racquet’: with his son, Thomas Henty. (Fremantle Media)

10 ‘You’ve done some terrible, terrible things in your life!’: with Frank Thornton. (Fremantle Media)

11 T. C. – Totally Convulsed. (Fremantle Media)

12 With staunch straight man, Allan Cuthbertson. (Fremantle Media)

13 ‘And do have a piece of my homemade cake’: with Betty Cooper and Robert Dorning. (Fremantle Media)

14 Tommy as the public seldom saw him: at rehearsals during the late Seventies. (Fremantle Media)

15 Our hero sleepwalks for his hero, Arthur Askey. (Fremantle Media)

16 With Eric Sykes, special champion and dear friend. (Fremantle Media)

17 Image taken from the final television show, 15 April 1984. (Steve Blogg/Rex Features)

18 The last photograph, Las Palmas, 1984. (Private Collection)

19 Tommy’s ‘Dove’ amongst her souvenirs. (Daily Mail)

Tommy Cooper has been a part of my comic consciousness for almost as long as I can recall. Back in the Fifties I remember waiting despondently with my mother for her to be served in a greengrocer’s shop in the Southampton suburb of Shirley and being briefly distracted by a giant cardboard cut-out of the fez-capped zany producing a large citrus specimen of South African origin from the folds of his mysterious cloak. The caption said it all with the conciseness that characterized a Cooper one-liner: ‘Cape Fruit! Grapefruit!’ It might have been the other way around. It does not matter. Even without the trademark chortle that the man himself would have added in performance, my impatience gave way to laughter. I was scarcely out of short trousers at the time.

In later years I have often thought how appropriate it was to be familiarized with this great clown in a store for fruit and vegetables. For a child of the time his outsize noddle resembled the prototype of Mr Potato Head, the craze that encouraged kids to rummage in the vegetable bin and then to create an identity from the plastic accessories provided for his ears, eyes, and other facial features. A more academic allusion might align the whole Cooper appearance with the work of the sixteenth-century Italian artist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, skilled at creating faces out of the constituent parts of the aforesaid bin. He would surely have applauded the appearance of Cooper that we all call to mind, one with not only a spud for a head, but runner beans for legs, bunches of bananas for hands, turnip nose, dark olive eyes, crinkly endive hair, even an upturned flowerpot for headwear. Today, when gardeners and chefs appear to command more air time and celebrity than clowns and gagsters, Tommy might have appreciated the irony.

It was not always so. There was a time when a mere two- channel television service lost no opportunity to put mainstream performing talent on screen. One opening was provided by the summer season shows that were an essential part of the British seaside holiday. Every Friday during high summer the BBC Outside Broadcast vans would decamp to the coast to provide the viewer with a grainy black and white sample of what they were missing at one resort or another. This was how I first came to see Cooper in performance, televised to the nation from the end of a pier in Great Yarmouth on a bill with the singer Eve Boswell and the now forgotten stand-up comic Derek Roy sometime in the late Fifties. The fact that I can pinpoint the first time I saw this remarkable comedian, whereas the personalized debuts of others have long since become indistinct, is significant. Whereas other comedians of my then limited experience made the act of comedy a challenge with the audience, he made it a game. The hilarious abandon as he zigzagged his way from one crazy prop to another, the sheer delight he managed to communicate through the veil of his own frustration and bewilderment were things to savour. Television had never been so entertaining and I could hardly wait to see him live on stage. Another summer, another resort, and nearby Bournemouth claimed the comedy wizard. I was not disappointed, my initial response enhanced a hundred times. Like all the true Variety greats, he was always at his most effective in the welcoming environment of a real theatre, even if he worked in an era when visibility on television was essential to fill seats in the first place.

The years moved on and in my late teens I found myself attending a magicians’ convention in Eastbourne. It was the morning of the ‘Dealers’ Dem’, the event at which those who devise and sell tricks to the rabbit in the hat brigade are given the opportunity to perform their new miracles for their prospective clientele. The event was already under way. I was sitting about six rows from the back. There was an empty seat to my left. Then I became aware of a minor disturbance caused by somebody clambering past the knees of those already seated to take up the empty position. It was the gentle giant of comedy magic. Nobody clambered to funnier effect than Cooper. All eyes around him were now averted from the stage. Finding his place, he briefly acknowledged myself and his neighbour on the other side, before settling down into his chair. What then happened was a scene of unintentional comic chaos caused by the fact that throughout this Tommy was holding a cup and saucer in one hand, a glass of something stronger in the other, juggling a convention programme and a newspaper under one arm, and smoking a cigar, all at the same time. At no point did he ask the help of either of us sitting alongside him. At no point was a drop of liquid spilt. He was not consciously putting on an act. It just happened that way.