My Uncommemorated Hero

Earlier this year, in February, the London Society held an event where members talked about people they thought should be commemorated by a statue or monument. It was a fairly serious event, even though it was held in a pub. They needed one more speaker to propose their hero/heroine: so I volunteered. I didn't say in advance who I was to talk about and I was the last to speak. This is what I said: 

"My hero wasn’t a great general - he didn’t crush the French at Waterloo or die bravely upholding the values of Empire. He wasn’t a great poet or literary figure winning the Nobel Prize for Literature or entombed fittingly in some large mausoleum. He didn’t uncover the secrets of the Universe, or enumerated philosophical insights we’re still untangling. He wasn’t a great philanthropist, financier or captain of industry. 

He didn’t stir the nation with a rousing speech  

“ we shall fight on the beaches,

we shall fight on the landing grounds,

we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,

we shall fight in the hills;

we shall never surrender, “

Instead he said this:

“Yes, the leg division, Mr Spiggott. You are deficient in it to the tune of one. Your right leg, I like. I like your right leg. A lovely leg for the role. That's what I said when I saw you come in. I said, "A lovely leg for the role". I've got nothing against your right leg. The trouble is – neither have you”.

He might have written but didn’t:

“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

  The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

 And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”

Instead he wrote:

“… being a miner, as soon as you are too old and tired and sick and stupid to do the job properly, you have to go… well, the very opposite applies with judges.”

He, unlike Plato, wouldn’t have said:

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

Instead you hear him opining on late nights and film stars:

“I had the same bloody trouble about two nights ago. I come in, about half past eleven at night. I come in, I get into bed, you see, feeling quite sleepy. I could feel the lids of me eyes beginning to droop, you see — a bit of droop in the eyes. I was about to drop off when suddenly — tap, tap, tap at the bloody window pane. I looked out. You know who it was?

Dudley Moore: Who?

Cook: Bloody Greta Garbo. Bloody Greta Garbo, stark naked save for a shortie nightie, hanging on to the window sill, and I could see her knuckles all white, saying "Peter, Peter". You know how those bloody Swedes go on.”

Whereas Brian Sewell would say this about Hockney:

“Hockney is not another Turner expressing, in high seriousness, his debt to the old master; Hockney is not another Picasso teasing Velázquez and Delacroix with not quite enough wit; here Hockney is a vulgar prankster, trivialising not only a painting that he is incapable of understanding and could never execute, but in involving him in the various parodies, demeaning Picasso too.”

My hero’s profound art critique was:

“The thing that makes you know that Vernon Ward is a good painter is if you look at his ducks, you can see the eyes follow you around the room.”

My uncommemorated hero is of course Sir Peter Cook, architect, lecturer, writer and an all round good egg…

Sorry, slight hiccup here. I must pay my researcher more.

I mean of course Peter Cook the comic genius. He died young, married and drank a lot and was gifted beyond count. He thought so himself. Not one for false modesty.

“As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realize how insignificant they are.” 

Some say he burnt out early on, that his genius for comedy was short lived. He could have done so much more. He died in 1995 aged 58, and in truth, gone were his good looks, his sharp intellect and brilliant funniness. I think he spread himself far too thinly. There was so much he could do such was his talent. “Beyond the Fringe”, “The Establishment Club”, Not Only but Also” which started out as a vehicle for Dudley Moore but with Cookie on board was to be the highlight of mid 60’s TV, “Derek and Clive”, “ The Secret Policeman’s Ball” and his often blistering chat show appearances.

Let me end with what others have said about him.

“He got used early to the adulation of a wide public and eventually decided that he could do without it; long before the end, fame had to chase him far harder than he chased it. But among his fellow practitioners his lustre was undimmed, unequalled. and unchallenged…” 

Clive James

“Obviously, he was the first — he was the Governor. Right from the start with those very precocious sketches for the Cambridge Footlights and through Beyond the Fringe, he was an exceptional talent. Every 10 years or so you always get a new generation of comedians but they all acknowledge their debt to Peter.”

Ned Sherrin

And my own favourite homage from Alan Bennett:

“Peter never had any regrets in his life. I never heard him voice any regrets. He didn't regret the fact that he lost his early facility, he didn't regret the fact that he lost his looks, which he did quite spectacularly, he didn't regret the fact that Dudley had gone on to fame and fortune in Hollywood. The only regret he regularly voiced was that, at the house we all shared in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1963, he'd saved David Frost from drowning.”   

If anyone deserves a monument it’s Peter Edward Cook born Torquay, 17 November 1937 : died Hampstead  9 January 1995."