A Cook's tour of London

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in the 1960's

10 April 2012

Ten years after his death, Peter Cook's reputation as Britain's greatest comedian shows no sign of fading. From Stephen Fry to Ricky Gervais, modern comics queue up to sing his post-humorous praises, and tonight another layer will be added to the legend in a new film about his life and work on Channel 4.

Not Only But Always charts Cook's career from his precocious performances at Cambridge University in the 1950s to his early death, aged 57, from a gastrointestinal haemorrhage. Though he was an acerbic, self-destructive drinker, he is played with immense charm by Rhys Ifans. Written by Terry Johnson, Not Only But Always is an affectionate yet unflinching portrait of a man who more or less invented modern comedy.

From Beyond the Fringe to Bedazzled, Cook's impact was immense. Without his influence, Monty Python and The Comic Strip would have been inconceivable. With Dudley Moore, he conjured up in Pete & Dud and Derek & Clive an archetypal double act. Moore eventually moved to Hollywood, but Cook was a Londoner at heart, and he spent most of his life in the capital, right up to his sudden death at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead on 9 January, 1995.

Hampstead, more than anywhere else, is where Cook came to call home. Born on the English Riviera at Torquay, the son of a diplomat, he was public-school educated at Radley and read Modern Languages at Cambridge. But his sights were already set on the bright lights.

Beyond the Fringe, the groundbreaking revue he wrote and performed with Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, transferred from the 1961 Edinburgh Festival to the West End, and from there to Broadway

On his return from America, in 1964, Cook bought 17 Church Row, NW3, a Georgian house formerly occupied by HG Wells. With his first wife, Wendy, whom he met at Cambridge, he had two daughters (Lucy, born in 1964, and Daisy, born in 1965), but still found time to throw sparkling dinner parties.

Guests who gathered in the Cook basement dining room included John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Peter Ustinov and Peter Sellers. In the attic, Cook would sit writing, often with Moore, who lived nearby. The Flask, at 14 Flask Walk, was Cook's local. Other regulars included Robert Powell and John Hurt.

With his fondness for flair over efficiency, Cook supported Tottenham Hotspur rather than neighbouring Arsenal. This was back in the days when Arsenal were reliably boring. "Since their foundation in 1886," claimed Cook, 'this insidious force has been indirectly responsible for two world wars, famine, pestilence, countless acts of mindless violence, and if anyone believes the holes in the ozone layer are caused by aerosols, they should watch the Arsenal side as they hoof the ball into the air."

White Hart Lane was Cook's habitat on a Saturday afternoon, as a season-ticket holder. "Soccer has got everything," he declared in 1968, shortly after being beaten up by teenaged Manchester United fans. "It is beautiful to watch and even at its worst it is still exciting. That's why I'm a soccer addict. What about Dudley Moore? He's not a fan. He doesn't know what he's missing."

Later, he took to golf. "He played far more than many people realised," recalled the TV commentator Peter Alliss. "With a little more effort he could have become a low-handicap player."

But with his innate sense of the ridiculous, Cook was incapable of taking any sport altogether seriously. So he launched an audacious campaign for Hampstead to host the Ryder Cup, devising a bizarre course that encompassed the North Circular, Karl Marx's tomb in Highgate Cemetery ("the green will be protected by bunkers and headstones") and the concert venue Kenwood House. "The green will be within range of the big-hitters off the tee," explained Cook, "but they will have to carry the lake, the orchestra and Edward Heath MP, who will be conducting."

Hampstead was where Cook unwound, but the West End was where he dazzled. The Fortune Theatre, on Russell Street, is where he first appeared in Beyond the Fringe. At the Cambridge Theatre, on Earlham Street, he appeared in 1972 with Dudley Moore in Behind the Fridge. At Her Majesty's Theatre, on Haymarket, Cook was the linchpin of the historic Amnesty International fundraiser, The Secret Policeman's Ball, in 1979. The cast included Rowan Atkinson, Billy Connolly and most of the Monty Python team, but Cook stole the show with his wicked send-up of Mr Justice Cantley's summing up in the Jeremy Thorpe trial ("you are now to retire - as indeed should I - carefully to consider your verdict of Not Guilty").

You'd be hard pushed to find a Soho street where Peter Cook never set foot. At 18 Greek Street in 1961 he founded the Establishment Club as "London's first satirical nightclub". A few doors away, at number 22, was Private Eye, in which Cook bought a controlling interest in 1962. At 29 Greek Street is the Coach & Horses, a resolutely unpretentious pub renowned for its Private Eye lunches.

The Establishment closed within a few years (it's now a bar and restaurant called Boardwalk) and Private Eye has since moved to Carlisle Street, but the Coach & Horses is still serving.

It was on television that Cook achieved his biggest audience. The Not Only But Also sketches were filmed at the BBC's Television Centre in Wood Lane, near Shepherd's Bush, but they were rehearsed at Sulgrave Boys' Club on Goldhawk Road, now a daycare nursery for under-fives.

Here Cook and Moore first donned their flat caps and flashers' macs to play those two philosophising idiots, Pete & Dud. With his vast appetite for the surreal, Cook would have relished the incongruity of toddlers frolicking in his playground.

Across the road is the Town House Studios, where Cook and Moore recorded Ad Nauseam, the last (and nastiest) of their Derek & Clive LPs, in 1978. A video of these sessions, entitled Derek & Clive Get the Horn, shows their last day's work together.

Cook has often been portrayed as a lost soul without his comic partner, whose career ended prematurely once Moore left for Hollywood. Yet Cook didn't stop looking for new directions.

I regret that one of his strangest projects, a TV documentary called Peter Cook's London, never got made. It would have been devoted in its entirety to the 40 yards between his Hampstead home and his local newsagent. There will surely never be another comic who could almost talk a network into giving an hour of prime time to 40 paces of paving stones.

Not Only But Always is on Channel 4 tonight, at 9pm.William Cook (no relation of Peter) is editor of Tragically I Was An Only Twin - The Complete Peter Cook, and Goodbye Again - The Definitive Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, both published by Century.

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A Cook's tour of London

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