A Peter Cook Poll

There will be three things with votes.

Bedazzled the film
Not Only but Also, the first TV series
and the Derek and Clive album, Live.

That's quite interesting, actually.

Revolver deserves a mention, though.

Actually, on "Come Again" he tells how he went up to a bloke who said "hello" and kicked him in the stomach, at which point he "had the temerity" to go "urgh!" and so on. It's not until you read the biography that you find out he was actually on the receiving end of the incident back in 1962.

OK, I shuttup now.

But that was on "Derek & Clive Live"

You missed out Yellowbeard and Peter Cook Talks Balls.

No one's going to vote for Where Do I Sit? except me, since only three episodes were made before the BBC (a) canned the show/replaced Cook with Michael Parkinson and (b) wiped the tapes.

But I watched them at the time and they were compelling in a heroically-and-repeatedly-crashing-his-car way. My dad taped them (ditto all the NOBA...s) but sound only.

The LBC 'phone-ins were great, too (I think there's a CD available?). Sven the fisherman from Norway - the original Geir.

respect 2 yr dad!

Were they the source tapes that Ned Sherrin? or someone similar, discussed in one of the biographies?

xpost ha!

Sven the fisherman from Norway - the original Geir.

roffles

you can clearly hear the influence of sven on Down The Line

Most of this stuff is sadly unknown to us Yanks; I haven't even heard Derek & Clive.

"The Frog & Peach" is from Good Evening, yes?

I haven't even heard Derek & Clive

Wow!

Possibly advisable to start with the Bo Duddley sketch and work your way backwards from there...

apart from derek and clive i only really know his stuff as text having read that recent anthology of his work. thou cos so much has been deleted and lost that's the only way it can be experienced i guess. i was suprised to learn there is a dvd of beyone the fringe on release. has anyone seen it? is it a good package?

I did see the Fringe DVD, I think mostly bare-bones package, which is OK w/ me.

i was more asking cos i was thinking it might be a bit of risk if it turns out to be a dodgy print, badly shot (ie on cine film from the back the row), have bad sound or something.

It's hardly state-of-the art visually, but as it's sketch comedy and audible, who cares.

WTF NO "PETE AND DUD" CATCHALL?!?!? I guess I'll just go for NO...BA, less specific but satisfactory

the fact that the BBC recycled so much NOBA tape still depresses me no end

Particularly when you imagine what rubbish must have been taped over it ("Teach Your Dog To Pee" and similar, probably).

ALAN A-DALE
ALAN A-DALE

every time I watch that one I keep getting freaked out by the resemblance of one of the merry men to our Ed

No "Playing the straight man to Joan Rivers on her talk show"?

I think most Americans under 40 know him from the one scene in Princess Bride.

You shoulda seen the US butler sitcom he did in the '80s, oy... I don't know recall the Joan Rivers connec, mercifully.

"Can We Talk", BBC2 1986. Most known from clip shows where Bernard Manning pwnz Cook repeatedly, in comedy's very own version of Berbick/Ali.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299327/

Was that the "you were great once, now yr very sad" or something similar?

I was gonna put VERBAL SMACK DOWN FROM B MANNING in as an option for you dp. but i didn't. cos that would be stupid.

Hey let's have yr fave Peter Cook annecdote again:

I'm actually glad that the docu-drama featured (however briefly) one of the weirdest sights in TV history, which is Bernard Manning laying some verbal smack down on Peter Cook, and Cook just sitting there and realising everything that he's saying is right (this is when Cook's career had gone so tits upwards he was reduced to playing Joan Rivers' sidekick).
-- Dom Passantino (Dom Passantino), Monday, 3 January 2005 23:19 (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

Yeah. "You're a bit quiet tonight Peter", followed by "What happened to you, you used to be funny"

xp

I voted for Revolver, for what it's worth. There's a really really REALLY awful Revolver "tribute" on MTV these days hosted by him what was Dennis Pennis.

Bernard Manning is truly the Peter Cook of the North.

You mean he used to be funny?

Bernard Manning had a "strained" relationship with other members of The Comedians, as did Cook with Moore.

Have you guys read that bio of Cook, maybe 10 years old? I leafed thru once, saw some really vicious quotes about Moore: "If Dud hadn't been a clubfooted dwarf he wouldn't be a success," etc.

The pop psychology take on that is that Cook was really depressed by his sidekick making it as a Hollywood "star", while he was stuck making prank phonecalls at 3 in the morning.

My take: He did what he wanted to do. That's it.

I saw him on the Clive James show, not that long before he died. That was one "fire in his eyes" dude!

the prank phone calls came much later. the dud hate was during his drunk years.

Clive Anderson thing was great too. Ye Gods!!!

Prank phonecalls were the mid 80s, weren't they?

xp

All four Clive Anderson videos: http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=mrbunglevids

i think the phone calls were early '90s. were they ever recorded? cos the transcripts alone are piss funny, albeit in a weird melancholy way.

http://stabbers.truth.posiweb.net/stabbers/html/sven.htm

1988. MP3s here.

i had the clive james thing as mp3s on an old computer, i think i need to hunt them down again. huge chunks of it are stuck in my brane.

What about that Sparks single he's on? 12" of something from "Beat the Clock" era?

and let's not forget "Consequences"

closing tonite. that dvd of beyond the fringe is ntsc. been watching cook on youtube. those clive anderson bits are great and full of *jokes* you don't get such well constructed lolz anywhere these days.

I'll go with Bedazzled cos it's beautiful as well as funny, but I wouldn't be without any of them, really.

So, longest options list to number of votes cast ratio = ?

I rewatched The Wrong Box over the weekend, which is reasonably amusing given that Bryan Forbes is no idea of a comedy director. He doesn't prevent Ralph Richardson, Sellers, otr Cook from being funny, though. I wonder how Dudley Moore felt about Cook having much the bigger role?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJbwtyHSu6E

Never seen it but I think Cook was seen as the potential star - good looking, clever, funny - until people realized he couldn't act. And Dud was just the sidekick.

The saddest thing about The Wrong Box is that it also has Tony Hancock's last film performance, as the policeman - he's not in it very much, and looks old and tired, but he's still p funny.

I also like the psychedelic whimsy of the intertitles, v. Sgt. Pepper.

We don't really know Hancock over here -- an Anglophile friend played me one of the radio shows -- but I thought it was virtually his first film too.

The guy who plays the decrepit butler is very funny, Wilfred Lawson.

Cook acts as much as he has to in this role, he's really Sellers' straight man in the two Dr Pratt scenes.

Hancock's first, and best, film was "The Rebel", which I thoroughly recommend watching.

... not a great film per se but lots of great lines.

Nanette Newman is in The Rebel - she's great as this existenialist beat girl

https://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/130/590x/secondary/GOING-INTERNATIONAL-Hancock-with-Nanette-Newman-in-the-1961-film-The-Rebel-and-scriptwriters-Ray-Galton-and-Alan-Simpson-in-20-217017.jpg

Some years ago I went to an exhibition in Shoreditch where the Anthony Aloysius Hancock artworks from the film had been meticulously recreated. One of the best days out I've ever had in London.

afaik the only ever exhibition of an artist from the Infantile School in the capital.

well, i see The Rebel is on YouTube. I didn't know about TH's alcoholism and that he killed himself at 44. He looks 60ish in The Wrong Box.

Hancock’s half hour is on constant rotation on BBC 4 extra. It’s often touted as the first ‘modern’ British sitcom, i.e. it’s not got two musical interludes in it. Some of them stand up very well and Tony Hancock is a brilliant comic.

Take a Listen to ‘Fred’s Pie Stall’ It’s still stands up very well today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009h7l4

Hancock's Half Hour finished in 1961, and it was downhill thereafter, washed up 1965/66 and dead by 1968. I don't remember seeing anything of Tony Hancock when I was growing up, he was a comic from a different generation, the TV series wasn't repeated and you just had to take as read his reputation as One Of The Greats.

i was reading hugh burnett's wikipedia entry a couple weeks ago and it hypothesized that hancock's "face to face" interview might have played a role in what happened to tony

not fond of this sort of armchair psychologizing myself, but what do i know, i haven't seen the interview

I listened to shitloads of Hancock’s Half Hour a few years ago when there was a 3rd party downloader for the iPlayer, still bangs

The Hancock Face to Face is on YT (in three parts)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnkovGeASzE

When I lived in Hampstead in the early ‘90s, I had the saddest completely-in-character celeb spot ever: Peter Cook ahead of me in the queue at the now-gone Foodhall, buying a bottle of vodka. This was early 1991, I think?

opening improv is pretty good here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svxuq1Fzk7w

That's so good. Been rereading the compilation of Cook's work lately but so much is in his performance, it doesn't do him any justice

yeah that's great.