Articles From A Time When Critics Were Still Allowed To Say What They Genuinely Thought
#1: David Quantick on Derek and Clive
(NME, 25 September 1993 - p26)
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 PRIVATE EYE BEDAZZLED
NOT ONLY BUT ALSO THE SEX PISTOLS
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On the same page is Quantick’s review of the Get the Horn video itself:
| PETER COOK AND DUDLEY MOORE: Derek and Clive Get the Horn (Polygram)
The Derek and Clive LPs, produced originally as private tapes by Cook and Moore, were cult faves in the 1970s, largely - oh, sod it, entirely - because they were crammed with sweating, deviant sexuality and extraordinary offensiveness. They were funny if you were pissed, and sometimes they weren’t even that.
Derek and Clive Get the Horn is a film from 1978 containing material from Derek and Clive Ad Nauseam, little seen until now for fairly clear reasons. Virtually none of it is funny; Cook and Moore veer from rambling improvisations about school buggery and sex with one’s mother to puerile monologues about giant bogies and thence into the merely unpleasant; one sketch ends in a description of ‘cunt-kicking’ and a song features a chorus about a ‘nigger’ who likes ‘white chicks’. Along the way, Richard Branson appears, a stripper strips, there is an inflatable rubber doll and a ‘drug bust’ by members of the Virgin Records accounts department dressed as policemen. This video is rubbish.
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NOTES:
Cook and Quantick appear to be talking at slightly cross-purposes regarding the editing of the film, giving the impression that the material had been edited/re-edited fairly recently. In fact, the 1993 re-issue (and indeed the later DVD incarnation) was identical to the original short-lived 1980 release.
The film had been rejected for cinema distribution by the BBFC on 21 October 1980, and was therefore released on home video instead. At that time, before ‘video nasty’ hysteria took hold, video was an unregulated industry where material did not require the same certification. (By way of enticement rather than revenge, BBFC director James Ferman’s letter of explanation for the film’s rejection was cheekily printed as the blurb on the original VHS box. As a final gag, parts of the letter were scribbled out in thick felt-tip.) Therefore, when Cook talks about how he’d ‘forgotten some it’, it’s possible he was talking about either (a) a recent re-acquaintance with the video itself, or (b) the experience of editing the footage circa 1980. The material, even at that stage, had been in the can for a while: the exact dates of the two Ad Nauseam sessions, only the second of which was filmed for Get the Horn, have never been confirmed, but some biographers claim that Cook’s reference to his friend Keith Moon’s death was a tastelessly topical one. If so, this narrows the recording down to September 1978.
Cook refers to Moore ‘writing’ sketches - since the items in question are clearly improvised, it’s likely he’s referring to Moore coming up with embryonic ideas. The premise of the ‘Mother’ sketch, which opens Get the Horn, has obviously been devised and agreed upon beforehand: ‘Let’s do ‘Mother’…’ the pair are heard to mutter. This not only calls into question the whole ‘Cook was the genius, Moore just sat there corpsing’ canard, it also suggests that Moore’s discomfort with the Derek and Clive project has been over-played. Moore does, after all, seem to be having more fun on Get the Horn than Cook.
Cook also shoots down another popular piece of Derek and Clive mythology - the assertion that the pair were drunk during the sessions. This is something that will probably remain forever ambiguous: Cook was an alcoholic but seldom looked/sounded drunk; Moore, meanwhile, was very good at acting drunk.
Naturally, we disagree with Quantick’s assessment of Derek and Clive, but his refusal to jump on the ‘Peter Cook was a fackin geenyus’ bandwagon (not to mention his reluctance to let crypto-misogyny/racism go unchallenged, no matter how colossal the comedy god) is ultimately quite refreshing. Wouldn’t happen, nowadays, etc. Truly, he was a Martin Cropper for the Slowdive generation.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:23 am
A little bit of information, then, about Derek And Clive Get The Horn, taken from an assortment of press clippings.
The first mention of it is in an article by Paul Callan printed in the 29th June 1979 issue of the Daily Mirror - the article has the catchy headline, “Peter Cook’s wife lives upstairs and he has only Wiggins the cat for company. He’s irritable and lethargic. But sometimes he thinks he’s brilliant“. Less than a column into this interview with Peter Cook is the following:
Less than a month later, some more information on the film - including how much footage was shot for it - was revealed in an article by Kit Miller in the 19th July 1979 issue of The Sun. Here in full is “Why Cuddly Dud likes to play it nice and naughty“:
The next mention in the press of Derek And Clive Get The Horn was– what, you want to know what The Ferret was, and what happened to it? Well, okay. The Ferret was to be Blake Edwards’ next franchise following the unexpected death of Peter Sellers, star of Edwards’ current franchise The Pink Panther. The concept made it into Waldo Lydecker’s gossip column Dish Night in the January 1979 edition of Take One:
(You can read the rest of the gossip page here: http://smarterthantheaverage.tumblr.com/post/33909652 )
The Sunday Express, in an article by Roderick Mann, commented on The Ferret’s abortion in its 30th September 1979 edition. Here follows the entirety of the depressingly-titled “Hope Dashed“:
Also around this time Dudley Moore was hotly tipped to replace Sellers as The Pink Panther’s Inspector Clouseau, but he had his reservations. Peter Cook, too, was tipped for the role, but shared Dudley’s worries, telling Ian Woodward for an article printed in the 12th September 1980 edition of the Evening News called “Coming soon - Peter Cook’s church of knobbly knees“, that “I’m impressed by all this tipping, but I’m afraid I haven’t been approached yet. I agree with Dudley that Clouseau’s an impossible assignment, compared to which James Bond is a doddle. What I am tipped to take over is Jacques Cousteau’s underwater television programmes if ever he perishes which he should do, being under water. I’m definitely a snorkel-and-flippers man“. Cook had just taken over Sellers’ role in a series of four Barclay’s Bank commercials. “It’s one of the quickest film-to-air commercials I’ve ever done,” Cook said in the above quoted article. “Filmed on Monday and Tuesday, edited on Wednesday and Thursday, dubbed on Friday and shown on Monday“. An article on this advert can be read here: http://chilled.cream.org/boards/index.php?topic=17466.msg845682#msg845682
What were we talking about? Oh yes, Derek And Clive Get The Horn. Our next stop is in the 2nd August 1980 issue of The Sun, where Peter Cook is again interviewed by Kit Miller for an article titled “Marriage, Drink And Me By Peter Cook“. Miller ends the article with the following, an amalgam of earlier information:
Note that the 93-minute running time as printed in Kit Miller’s previous article has now been abbreviated to 88 - those missing minutes being the material mentioned as being removed in David Quantick’s article, perhaps. The film obviously caused trouble in the editing room - five long months after the autumn release date cited by Kit Miller, an article on Cook printed in the 2nd December 1979 issue of the News Of The World (”If only life was more of a laugh says Peter Cook” by Ivan Waterman), “he is currently putting the finishing touches to a Derek and Clive film which he made with Dudley Moore. It promises to be just as much of a shocker as the records“.
Ah, but what of Dud? So far all the quotes on the film have been from Pete’s mouth. Dudley Moore finally commented on the still unreleased film in an interview with James Cameron-Wilson printed in his On Film section of the 1st February 1980 edition of What’s On In London - the article was titled “No Dud“. The relevant extract follows, having originally followed a piece comparing Wholly Moses to Monty Python’s Life Of Brian:
As already explained in the BLOGCAA post, the film never did receive a theatrical release due to being refused a censor certificate, and went straight to unrated video. But was it ever really seized by the police as legend maintains? Here Peter Cook talks about the controversy over Derek And Clive Get The Horn in an article by John Hind printed in the 30th January to 5th February 1991 issue of Time Out, titled simply “Cook Tease” - note that some of the production information divulged by Cook here directly contradicts what he tells David Quantick, notably about “getting blasted” and Moore’s unhappiness with the session:
Peter Cook may not know if Dudley Moore wished the film to go unshown in America, but we do. Peter McKay wrote an article for the 7th October 1981 issue of the Daily Mirror - titled “Brooke makes Dudley more wealthy” - which spreads believably the rumour of Dud’s worries. This article also tells us the month in which the video was first planned to be put out - two years after its proposed autumn 1979 theatrical release:
A worthless promise, as Derek And Clive Get The Horn had been shown six months earlier at the Filmex film festival in Hollywood. (Love In The Afternoon, incidentally, never got made.) Shown at the Aquarius Theater on the 12th April 1981, this 16mm, 88-minute print - naturally unrated by the MPAA - was reviewed by “Cart” on page 30 of the 22nd April 1981 edition of Variety:
August 20th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Excellent findings, Squidy.
So, hang on…the 1981 cinema screening ran at 88 minutes, even though that’s the duration of the video (88′48″ to be exact)? Given that you lose a few minutes on VHS, that must mean they screened a shorter edit. Although they still issued the full-length cut on tape. Is that right?
Was the ‘2-D specs’ edition the one Cook was plugging on Clive Anderson Talks Back circa 1992? I remember he held aloft a copy of the poster - same plain blue design as the original video. I remember looking out for it in shops to no avail. A year later, the orange-cover edition appeared.
Not sure I buy the ‘12 hours of rushes’ thing…they’re probably talking about the audio rushes for Ad Nauseam rather than the film footage. Get the Horn looks like it was all shot on the same night.
I’ll have to chase up my source for the ‘They only filmed the second session’ claim - not sure if it was Harry Thompson’s biography or Publish and Bedazzled. Wasn’t there a third session planned, but Moore didn’t turn up because he was pissed off at Cook? Or is that another urban legend a BFI micro-jacket will squash flat?