Kevin Billington, His quickwitted comic style was ill-served by the stop-start nature of the filmmaking process. By the s, his increasingly heavy drinking and his apparent antipathy to work gave the impression that his youthful promise was beginning to fade into indolence, as he drifted apparently aimlessly between projects mostly unworthy of his gifts.
Particular low points were his hosting of both the short-lived chat show Where Do I Sit? He was never to have a major television series of his own, largely maintaining a public presence over the ensuing years through chat show appearances, guest spots on variety shows, and sporadic work with Moore. The latter included an on-off world tour between and of their stage show Behind the Fridge renamed Good Evening in America , sketches from which were televised as Excerpts from Behind the Fridge BBC, tx.
More controversial were the three notorious, obscenity-saturated 'Derek and Clive' recordings issued between and ITV, tx. Despite expressing a disinterest with both television and performing in his later years, he made a celebrated appearance in the 17 December episode of Clive Anderson Talks Back C4, , where, as sole guest, he was interviewed in the guise of four different characters.
This appearance provided ample evidence that Cook 's improvisatory comic skills were, despite his professed disinterest, as sharp as ever. He died from a gastrointestinal haemorrhage on 9 January Sign in.
All Football. Showbiz Celebrity Yoko Kono. Famed for his sketches with Dudley Moore he died in January 9, The liberating possibilities for comedy which the new generation had seized on, not just the surreal but the scatological and the obscene, had been discovered — or more properly rediscovered — in the first place for them by Peter Cook, whether they acknowledged it or not; of all the people I have known or seen toiling in that particular vineyard he is the one indisputable genius.
The direction his work took had nothing whatever to do with marketing a talent, finding a niche, developing a career. It had everything to do with a compulsive articulation of his view of life — beady, remorseless, hilarious. Still, a satirist is what he was, but only if you use the term for its richest and most complex connotations. He would be seized by an idea in his case the image is almost literally true and pursue it through vertiginous spirals of logic, allusion, and spectacular connections until it, and his audience, was exhausted.
Just to quote examples does Cook a disservice, because it never stopped, anyway as long as I knew him, the fountain of original, freshly minted stuff, unmediated by political correctness, or any other form of correctness. His performing partnership with Dudley Moore was unique. Although it contained a certain amount of creative tension, it was a spontaneous combustion of comic invention, which took no prisoners, in film such as Bedazzled , , The Bed Sitting Room , , The Hound of the Baskervilles , , on television Not Only But Also , or on stage Behind the Fridge , The obscenity in their Derek and Clive records was very liberating.
The desire was not to shock for its own sake but, Cook said, to get the speech rhythms right and knock out barriers to invention. Cook had a remarkable feeling for language.
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