Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing Read Free

DVDs become corroded. As we shall see his comedy is more timeless than that of any of his contemporaries. There is a new generation or two or three who deserve to discover his lunacy for their own sanity.
    This is not to champion nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, the idealized memory of some blurred mythical past. Tommy had little truck for nostalgia anyhow. Whenever his cronies began to evoke the legend of some distant comic talent from the music halls, he would query if they remembered Fuzzy Knight.‘He was simply wonderful, he was,’ asserted Cooper. ‘What was that bit of business he did on the trapeze, the bit with the chimpanzee applauding with the banana?’ Before long everyone would be volunteering their recollection of this absurd imaginary act. Not that Tommy didn’t have his heroes, as we shall see. But truly great comedians like Max Miller, Bob Hope, and Tommy Cooper are like colours in the spectrum. Try to imagine a new one. It is impossible to do so. The modern entertainment media appear happier to opt for shallow celebrity in lieu of genuine talent and the life force of the great performer. For these reasons Tommy Cooper must never be toppled from his pedestal in the minds of all those who – as his contemporary, Alfred Marks once remarked – were already laughing at him as they queued to buy tickets at the box office. Sadly Gwen never got to see Jus’ Like That! having died some six months before the play opened. Nor will she get to read this book. But I hope with genuine affection that I have not let her – or Tommy – down.

ONE
All in the Branding
    Tommy Cooper off stage and on was his own best magic trick, a bumper fun package of tantalizing twists and turns, a cornucopia of paradox and surprise. He was the most loved of entertainers, but never, like so many in his profession, asked his audience openly for affection. He was the most original of funny men, with hardly an original gambit in his repertoire. He became the most imitated man on the planet, his audience appreciating his individuality all the more. He came to epitomize the world of bumbling ineptitude in both magic and comedy, but with precision and technique to die for. He exploited the comedy of failure and nervousness, but seemingly with utter confidence. He exuded good cheer on stage and off, but was happiest when absorbed in his own private world of sleight of hand and illusion. He was a child in the body of a giant, an amateur with the sparkle of the professional, a heavyweight with the light-footedness of Fred Astaire. His catchphrase could as easily have been ‘riddle-me-ree’: you never knew who was fooling whom as he plied his trade of the tricks, his penchant for practical jokes. The one certainty was his success at so doing. Paradoxically again, no one ever felt let down by the process.
    The one aspect of the man that was above question was his physical identity. No British comedian since Charlie Chaplin has displayed a surer grasp of the need for distinctive personal branding on the road to achieving personal immortality, the process that helps to keep him in the forefront of our shared comic consciousness over twenty years after his death when other funny men and women of his era have begun to recede into oblivion. Remove the fez and smooth down the tufts of jet black hair that were trained to sprout like a pair of upturned inverted commas from beneath its brim and you might as well start packaging Coca-Cola in blue cans. On one occasion the great Eric Morecambe – incidentally Tommy’s greatest fan – suggested to the author that he would be better off losing the headgear. He perceived it as a barrier between the performer and the audience. I did not have the temerity to suggest to Eric that he should replace his horn rims with contact lenses.
    What he would have done in life had he not found his niche in show business is the great unanswerable question. Mary Kay concedes that he was fully aware of his physical