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Happily the editor keeps his attempts at analysing his namesake’s humour to a minimum. He points out that, like Joe Orton’s, Cook’s writing was ‘often far more literary than theatrical’. Cook was essentially a miniaturist. ‘Most of my ideas are only worth about five minutes,’ he admitted.
Although celebrated as the Sultan of the Satire Industry in the Sixties (Beyond the Fringe, the Establishment Club, Private Eye), Cook was not primarily a satirist. ‘He wasn’t interested in satire at all,’ says Alan Bennett. ‘He was interested in being funny.’ To Jonathan Miller, ‘the idea that he had an anarchic, subversive view of society is complete nonsense. He was the most upstanding, traditional upholder of everything English and everything establishment.’ Miller thought that Cook found Harold Macmillan, whom he memorably lampooned in Beyond the Fringe, as ‘rather adorable, really’.
As Richard Ingrams explained, ‘Cook’s talent has always been for outrageous nonsense fantasies. He would impersonate a zoo-keeper attempting to rescue ‘a very rare type of bee which had become lodged in a lady’s knickers’. At Private Eye, Auberon Waugh recalled, ‘Peter’s visits stand out as moments when everybody suddenly became possessed with a new energy.’
To his credit, William Cook refuses to go along with the traditional formula of ‘Decline and Fall of a Genius’ and laments Peter Cook’s ‘lost promise’ (‘A shame you did it all at 26’, to quote Tim Rice’s lyric for ‘High-Flying, Adored’). In praising the ‘perceptive and prescient cartoon’ of ‘Jonathan Crake’, the doomed satirist in Private Eye’s ‘Aesop Revisited’, though, he should also have mentioned the principal author of that strip, Christopher Booker, as well as the artist, William Rushton. A quarter of a century after Beyond the Fringe, Cook himself reflected, ‘I haven’t matured, progressed, become deeper, wiser or funnier. But then, I never thought I would.’
Yet to anyone privileged to hear him at the end of his life he remained the funniest man in the world. Indeed, as John Bird observed of Cook’s ‘interviews’ with Clive Anderson on television and Chris Morris on radio, they were
far from being the dregs of some washed-up has-been scratching around to recreate lost glories. Rather it looks like the last work of a considerable creative artist.
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