Scrunched

[poliphilo]

A life takes four score years and ten but a biography scrunches it down into something that can be consumed in a matter of hours.

Peter Cook's friends complained that the TV film about his life made him out to be a lot less jolly than he really was.

It was a good film, but it was very, very scrunched. The life was reduced to a couple of intertwined narratives, both familiar, bordering on archetypal. They were "the tragic clown" and "the fatal marriage".

Are clowns any more tragic than any other group? Is Michael Palin tragic? Is Mel Brooks tragic? The greatest clown of all- Charlie Chaplin- had a few problems along the way but wound up immensely rich, living on a Swiss mountain top with a loving wife, an adoring family and a library full of Benny Hill videos. Tragic clown, my foot!

And Cook? Well, he drank, he wasted a couple of marriages, his career wasn't as starry as it might have been, but tragic? He had a lot of friends, he was very funny (funnier in private than on stage by all accounts) and his last wife stuck by him.

Cook's fatal marriage was with Dudley Moore. Cook despised Dudley, but he couldn't do without him. Dud fired up his creativity. Without Dud, he was left staring at a typewriter with a blank sheet in it and a whisky bottle within easy reach....

Bollocks, piffle, poppycock!

Cook's greatest creative partnership was with the dudes at Private Eye. That mag is his monument. Take another look at Not Only but Also. It's OK, but it's not as good as either Spike Milligan's stuff or Monty Python. I've always found the flat-capped Dud and Pete characters a bit patronizing, a bit predictable. This is a public school oik sending up the working-class. Cheap, easy, not very clever at all. NOBA wasn't dangerous the way Cook's best work was dangerous. It was a watering down, for TV, of the ground-breaking satirical comedy that Cook had pioneered with Beyond the Fringe and the Establishment Club.

You could have made a film about Cook that reduced Dud to a foot-note, the way the Eye was reduced to a foot-note in this, and it would have been equally true.

Comments

[cybersofa.livejournal.com]

Spot on. There was so much more to his life and work than was showed in the film, and his work with the Eye was a prime example. I would have thought that, in a film that went on and on at length as they all do these days, they could have found time for more of the positive. Striding round the Eye office declaiming about the Seductive Brethren - his Amnesty performance as the Thorpe trial judge - the Clive Anderson appearances, just to name a few. The concentration on Cook's problems probably made it better television though, and the performance of Rhys Ifans spookily lifelike. Indeed all of them, and the Jonathan Miller character was hilarious.

Here I am criticising away, but I must say it's good to see something deserving such thought, and worthy of two hours of one's life, on TV for once.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ifans was wonderful.

I hope Miller took the caricature in good part. My perception is that the real Miller has a gleeful and mischievous sense of humour.