Not only a genius. . . but also a gentleman

Later generations who knew him only from the television screen, when he was greying and battered by the years, can never know just what an extraordinary star Peter Cook was as a young man in the late Fifties and early Sixties - the most compulsively funny man I have ever known, a real original, touched with genius.

Although in worldly terms many of those associated with him in those early years such as David Frost, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, went on to become more securely successful, Peter had a gift which was rarer than any of their more earthbound talents.

From the way his influence lay at the start of that explosion of comic skills which, from the satire of the early Sixties and through and through John Cleese and Monty Python, dominated English humour for more than 30 years, one could argue that he was the key figure behind it all - certainly more than has been properly recognised.

He remained to the end a gentle, inimitable figure whose comparatively early death - even though not wholly surprising - has left a wide circle of friends feeling that a special light has gone out.

I first met Peter at Cambridge in the late Fifties. Our post-Suez student generation bubbled with talent and energy, but for sheer star quality Peter stood above everyone. With his funny voices, his fantastic monologues woven around characters with names such as Pules and Rune, humour poured out of him in an irrepressible stream.

Whenever Peter entered a roomful of people and began talking, within 30 seconds everyone was rolling around helpless with laughter.

The style of his monologues, seen in cabaret acts or on the stage at the Footlights, was so infectious that everyone tried to copy them - his most slavish admirer being a young Freshman from Beccles, David Frost. I remember joking at the time that the recipe for a bad joke was 'D.Frost and leave to Cook for five minutes'.

In his first year at Cambridge, Peter had written many of the sketches for a hit West End revue, Pieces Of Eight. In his last year at university, his most successful cabaret act was a hilarious, half-improvised parody of a party political broadcast, sending up the world-weary Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.

This was included when he and three other recent Oxbridge graduates, Moore, Miller and Bennett, teamed up to stage the revue which was the hit of the 1960 Edinburgh Festival, Beyond The Fringe.

During that summer as Macmillan's Supermac image of the 'never had it so good' days became that of a clapped-out Edwardian poseur, Peter's sketch was elevated to the centrepiece of the show when it transferred to London.

That autumn, the word on every lip was 'satire', focused not just on Beyond The Fringe but on The Establishment, 'London's first satirical nightclub', which Peter opened in Greek Street, Soho, with an ex-Guard officer, Nick Luard.

Night after night, our Cambridge contemporaries, John Bird, John Fortune and Eleanor Bron, recreated the Berlin of the Twenties with their satirical sketches in front of crammed tables of diners. Peter would call in to improvise after the final curtain of Beyond The Fringe. Dudley Moore would pound a funky piano with his jazz trio in the basement.

In those same weeks, with Richard Ingrams and Willy Rushton, I was putting together a new satirical magazine, Private Eye. When I showed our first efforts to Peter in the bar of the Establishment, he was generously enthusiastic and, typically, he at once came up with an idea which has characterised Private Eye more than anything else.

Peter had seen an American magazine cover of the newly-elected U.S. President Kennedy with the photo bubble 'I got my job through the New York Times' and suggested the same device for the front of Private Eye.

Six months later, Peter's association with Private Eye became complete when, after its sales had reached 10,000 and the first proprietor resigned to take a proper job, he and Luard came to the magazine's rescue by buying it for £1,500. For a few crazy weeks we even produced the paper from the waiters' changing room in The Establishment, before we moved just a few doors down Greek Street.

The most publicised event at The Establishment that season was the arrival of Lenny Bruce, a tortured, heroin-addicted, 'sick' comedian from New York, whose act, strewn with four-letter words, teetered between brilliance and nervous breakdown.

One night, Bruce's aggressive crudity was building up a nasty atmosphere, threatening an explosion of violence in the packed audience. Peter seized the microphone, improvising a stream of sheer comic genius which defused the crisis by reducing everyone to hysterical laughter.

That autumn of 1962, Peter was in New York with Beyond The Fringe when satire exploded onto Britain's television screens with That Was The Week That Was, turning David Frost overnight into the most famous satirist of them all.

In his genial fashion, Peter bore no obvious resentment. Indeed, when Frost came to America a few months later, there was the famous incident when, staying at a house Peter had rented outside New York, David was on the verge of drowning in the pool when Peter jumped in to save him.

But to become overshadowed by lesser, or certainly less original, talents was now to become the keynote of Peter's career.

In 1965, he began his television collaboration with Dudley Moore in Not Only . . . But Also, which for the first time brought him to a mass audience - not least for their wonderfully surreal Dud and Pete duologues, the two middle-aged working men in their caps and mufflers, endlessly fantasising around anything from Old Masters to the breasts of Greta Garbo.

But from the late Sixties on, Peter was to watch as one after another of his erstwhile collaborators soared into fame: Moore as a Hollywood film star; Miller as a stage director; Bennett as a playwright; and Frost as the greatest celebrity of them all as a television interviewer.

And although he was to enjoy other relative successes, Peter was the one who was to lose his way, earning his living from chat shows, smaller film parts, advertisement voice-overs and all the spin-offs of the life of a contemporary celebrity, without that essential golden thread of the career his talent might have justified.

What he had helped to start, through the Cambridge Footlights and the satire movement, was continuing to have the most enormous influence on British humour. And it is arguable that without the tradition and the surreal style he had pioneered - building on the inspiration of the Goon Show, which he had listened to in his public school days at Radley - all this might have been very different.

Although his comic gist remained inimitable, it was without a focus. The one place where over the past 25 years he continued to make a happy contribution was at Private Eye, of which he remained the majority shareholder until his death.

He was the only 'outsider' who could stroll in at any time to participate in the strange ritual whereby the small group of regular jokesmiths - Ingrams, Barry Fantoni, myself and eventually Ian Hislop - have for 30 years sat round a desk putting together the joke pages which are the kernel of the magazine.

As proprietor, Peter never made money out of the magazine. His dividends were a free supply of newspapers and the occasional case of wine. Originally he had been the comparatively rich benefactor who had kept it going by buying it in its infancy, and his informal, unpaid relationship remained the same right up to his last visit a week or two back. He would walk in after lunch, sit down to puff away at endless cigarettes and out would come the familiar stream of surreal comments, sometimes irrelevant, often shrewd, sometimes outrageous, but always irresistibly funny.

Born with this compulsion to be funny, which overrode everything else that it sometimes seemed like a Frankenstein's monster, Peter's was not an easy life. In those first post-Cambridge years, with his talented first wife Wendy (by which he had two much-loved daughters), he used to play host to hilarious evenings round the supper table in Battersea.

Later, through his years in Hampstead with his second wife Judy, a beautiful actress, and his delightful Chinese third wife Lin, he retired from the world, watching television and perhaps consuming rather more alcohol than was good for him.

Even if one had not seen him for months, he was a great one for ringing up out of the blue, usually because some news item had inspired him with a mad idea for Private Eye. Always he was charming and funny. But his problem, as with many funny people, was knowing quite where his serious personality lay beneath the humour. And from that uncertainty came perhaps not just the drinking and gambling, but that lack of a master thread to his career which left such a sense of unfulfilled promise.

Again, as with most funny people, it is impossible to recreate just how Pete managed so unfailingly to inspire laughter. That is why those who did not know him in those early days will never know just why he seemed to tower over everyone else. Even the clips of Beyond The Fringe are only a shadow of his magic.

Inevitably in retrospect, his career looks like a rocket, soaring quickly upwards into a wondrous explosion of multi-coloured fire, with its sparks gradually fading through the decades which followed.

The firework may have fallen, sadly, to the ground, but we remember that unique sunburst of talent at its height, and the gentle, inwardly rather lost but always lovable man who never really came to terms with why to so many of us he was simply the funniest man we have ever known.

Christopher Booker