Satire’s brightest star: Peter Cook

Guardian, 10 January 1995²⁶⁶

Following the death of Peter Cook, Miller was invited to share memories of his Beyond the Fringe co-star.

In 1959 a meeting was convened in a Euston Road restaurant by John Bassett, who was putting the revue Beyond the Fringe together for the Edinburgh Festival. Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and I were immediately overwhelmed by the astonishing improvisational productivity of Peter Cook’s imagination, which seemed to come from some source completely alien to the person in front of us.

Peter was much more elegant, handsome, assured and good-looking than us, which was quite at odds with his disruptive surrealism. When we saw our costume – uniform grey-flannel suits – he was the only one who looked good in it. He was very puzzling to confront. I had seen him in the Footlights – an astonishing, strange, glazed, handsome creature producing weird stuff, the like of which I’d never heard before. I remember his first line when I was shot upright in my seat by him. He was playing some person in a suburban kitchen concealed behind a newspaper. He didn’t say a word, but all eyes were drawn to him. Then he rustled the newspaper and simply said, ‘Hello, hello, I see the Titanic’s sunk again.’ One knew one was in the presence of comedy at right angles to all the comedy we’d heard.

I have no idea where it came from. Peter himself, I think, was mystified by it. He ought to have been an extremely successful young diplomat. You felt you were with somebody from the Foreign Office who had suddenly gone completely bananas. He was like one of those discreet people shadowing Douglas Hurd. His father was a colonial diplomat, so that was the world Peter came from. He was a master of linguistic paradox, phrases which you can’t invent. I don’t think he ever set himself the task of being disruptive. He saw strange obsessional people, and in a strange, almost ventriloquial way, they took possession of him. He had a grasp of a character’s idioms, so that people like E. L. Wisty or these mad upper-class judges are memorable in exactly the same way as some of the great Dickens characters.

Peter was always rather distant from us. Later there were reunions, when we would sit at a table and laugh and joke. He was always interested in this strange world of showbiz, celebrity golf, football. Yet he had this phoenix-like capacity to re-emerge. There was that revival when he did those four wonderful and inspired pieces with Clive Anderson a year ago.267 He hadn’t had his time. If anyone could come up with what he did for Anderson, at a time when he was said to have not fulfilled his promise, they would be very grateful.

The fulfilment that he did give was so much greater than what has been given by most people, and at such a level that it would be rancorous discontent to complain of a lack of other things that he might have done. He gave a great gift to British theatre, and the British comic idiom. There was no one quite like him.