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	Eyebrow, lowbrow…or just Lowenbrau?

OBERGRUMPYFUHRER

He wants to be Goering, but being Liberace would be ‘tasteless’. PETER COOK, loveable curmudgeon and comedy doyen, is back, promoting an infamous video of Derek and Clive, the characters he created with Dudley Moore. DAVID QUANTICK undertakes the worst job he’s ever had…

‘We did this video for my company, Peter Cook Productions,’ drawls Peter Cook over a deadly-looking cigarette and a Bucks Fizz. ‘Not a company that did much. About as much as John Birt Productions, in fact…’

So here I am in a Hampstead faded-posho cafe with the great Peter Cook, one of the most important figures in British comedy, the man who went from playing in Beyond the Fringe to starting Private Eye and thence forward through the ’60s and ’70s in splendour - and he is here to promote Derek and Clive Get the Horn, a video redolent of dismalness to the max. Oh well. Let’s talk and Derek and Clive for a bit. Those two warped variants on Pete and Dud have, after all, been very popular.

‘We did them, for fun in ‘73 in New York and we got on to that tape which also included The Troggs Tape - remember that, ‘We need a fucking 12-string’?’ recalls Cook in a West Country bastard accent. ‘There was David Dimbleby and Harold Wilson losing his rag and saying ‘You wouldn’t ask Edward Heath about his yacht’, Orson Welles auditioning for the part of a frozen pea - a number of very funny tracks all on this bootleg cassette. And eventually Chris Blackwell [Island Records founder] put them out on an album.’

There were three Derek and Clive albums, and this film. Cook hadn’t seen Get the Horn until he and director Russell Mulcahy (Highlander, lots of pop vids) got together to edit the copious footage.

‘I was quite shocked, I’d forgotten some of it,’ Cook admits. ‘I don’t play those records for recreation. At my age, you don’t play Derek and Clive in the Vauxhall as a romantic background.’

Or, indeed, for laffs. No one sane can possibly enjoy the awful ‘cunt-kicking’ routine, can they?

Cook nods. ‘That’s the most horrible, but on the other hand, you can’t re-edit it to fit in with fashion. It’s like all those Bogart films where he’s smoking…I’m not making the comparison, but it would be foolish to change it because it made you cringe a bit.’

The video is preceded by trailers for equally excellent product by Bernard Manning and Chubby Brown. It is worse.

‘Filth…are we not under the sex education arm?’ laughs Cook and then acknowledges the rampantly unpleasant misogyny of the whole thing. ‘One of the bits that Dudley wrote was this awful scene where I’m with the inflatable doll. I wound up slapping her round the face. It’s an inflatable doll, I’m not slapping a woman. But I’d forgotten I’d done that. When the stripper comes back, she says I’m awful - an actual woman comes in and we’re so embarrassed. Eventually, I remember getting rid of her by doing an impression of the cunt-sucker and strangling her…I edited out the footage where I stab her and put her in a bin-liner and throw her in the canal.’

Stop, our sides have split. How drunk were you when this film was made? Cook looks aghast.

‘Not at all. Not any more than Dudley was drunk in Arthur. A bit of red wine in the control room. They’re very easy characters to portray,’ he says, demonstrating by swearing and mumbling a bit. ‘The number of people who come up to me and go ‘My mates down the pub are funnier than you’ - well, why don’t they do a fucking record instead of talking to me?’

Quite. Moving on to happier topics, it seems Cook is playing a ‘cruel Lord’ in a remake of Black Beauty and has a curious ambition.

‘I’ve always wanted to play an SS officer and I’ve always wanted to drive around in a jewelled tank,’ he drawls, louchely. ‘I’d like to be Goering, going round taking people’s art, going round with this gigantic showbiz tank. I think I’d have silver filigree mirrors and Art Deco…

‘And the uniform. I think he dressed too conservatively,’ says Peter, warming to his topic. ‘He should have veered a little bit towards the Liberace style. I loved Liberace. I saw him at the Palladium. He was wearing tiny little stars-and-stripes shorts and moving about on stage. He said, ‘I can’t dance but you have to admire my audacity’.’

Why not play Liberace then?

‘Well, Liberace…you have to be careful because he’s dead,’ says Cook in an outbreak of tastefulness. ‘And I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.’

‘Goering’s dead,’ points out photographer and accuracy man Derek Ridgers.

‘I believe he is,’ agrees Cook. ‘I wasn’t speaking ill of him, though, was I?’

We move on, a bit, to talk of Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl, who Cook doesn’t want to play, and then to ‘Allo ‘Allo.

‘I mean, talk about tasteless,’ says Cook. ‘Occupied France under the Nazis…’

Does Peter Cook have any taste boundaries?

‘I’m not sure I do. As I’ve said before, if I say down to write something to shock - which is a pointless exercise - it would be a lot more tasteless than Derek and Clive,’ he declares. ‘But why shock everybody? Absolutely no interest in doing it. Dudley wrote a sketch on Derek and Clive Come Again where he’s wanking over a picture of his mum and dad, and his mum comes in, and Dudley says, ‘Oh, sorry, mum, the doctor told me I’ve got cancer of the knob and I’ve got to get the pus out’. Shocking. That stretched my limits of shock to the full.’

And there we have it. Follow Peter Cook and his career wherever it may take you, readers, but don’t buy any Derek and Clive videos.

FIVE GREAT PETER COOK MOMENTS

BEYOND THE FRINGE
Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. Bloody hell, or what? Cambridge Footlights type in Amazingly Funny Shock.

PRIVATE EYE
There are no other magazines quite like it. ‘I still own it and I still write for it,’ says Cook, who can still be found contributing to The Secret Diary of John Major.

BEDAZZLED
Dudley Moore is Stanley Moon, lovesick short order chef. Peter Cook is the devil, and bloody sexy with it too. The scene where Cook explains Lucifer’s fall from heaven while sitting on top of a pillar box is without peer in the history of popular theology.

	Cig vicious: Pistols fan Cook

NOT ONLY BUT ALSO
Not only one of the greatest sketch shows of all time, but also the first programme to take the piss out of Gerry Anderson with the spleen-burstingly funny ‘Superthunderstingcars’ parody.

THE SEX PISTOLS
Taste, wit and anarchy presented almost weekly when Cook was the strange host of top punk rock TV show Revolver. ‘I liked the Pistols above all the other stuff. I remember accusing Johnny Rotten, who he then was, of nicking a lot of his vocal style from Buddy Holly,’ claims Cook. He also asserts that ‘John Lydon said one of their songs was based almost entirely on that song from Bedazzled where I’m singing ‘I don’t care’ an ‘I’m so plastic’. I don’t know which one, I was too pissed to remember.’