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 idiosyncrasies, every detail of his gauche six feet three and a half inch, shoe-size-thirteen frame being put into the service of comedy. Of course add on the fez and the inches literally stack up. Through the years critics and fellow comics alike have been thrown into crazy competition in attempts to describe him. Clive James conjured up, ‘A mutant begot by a heavyweight boxer in a car crash in Baghdad’; Barry Cryer with one-liner panache contributed ‘like Mount Rushmore on legs’; Ron Moody added ‘he has a profile like the coast of Scandinavia; his chin is like the north face of the Eiger; Easter Island is like a Cooper family reunion.’ Alan Coren evoked fond cinematic memories of King Kong, remembering ‘the time when it roamed free, this strange, shambling creation unconfined by any human limitation, magnificent in its anarchy, going through its weird, hilarious routines. And none of its tricks worked, and all its half-heard mumbled patter meant nothing at all, and occasionally it would erupt in bizarre, private laughter.’ Nancy Banks-Smith incorrigibly pronounced that ‘he has the huge dignity and innocence of some large London statue with a pigeon sitting impudently on its head and a workman scrubbing him in impertinent places with a stiff bristled brush.’ For me he has always epitomized in spirit as much as in form the abominable snowman as fathered by Santa Claus, or maybe vice versa, with a touch of Desperate Dan – without the stubble on his chin – thrown in for good measure. Whichever you opt for, they all say he was born funny, he looked funny, and he had funny bones. Moreover, perhaps he was the Wagner of comedy. Here is Dylan Thomas on the composer: ‘Whatever I can say about him, he is a big man, an overpowering man, a man with a vast personality, a dominant, arrogant, gestureful man forever in passion and turmoil over the turbulent, passionate universe.’ The only word that confirms he was not writing about his fellow Welsh wizard is ‘arrogant’. Tommy was never that.
Once seen he would never be forgotten, but what you remember, of course, is the broad image of an ungainly hulk in a red hat. Analyse his performance and he is seen to represent a far more complex range of expression and body language than the immediate impact of his branding suggests. Facially he is as interesting as Keaton, the stone face comic of the silent screen who supposedly never smiled but in whose countenance one can read all of human emotion. The legendary guru of British comedy, Spike Milligan once described the Cooper visage to me as ‘a call for help, wasn’t it? “Please help me out of this. Please. Please.”’ His deep-set, almost mournful wide blue eyes were perfect for registering a resigned astonishment at life’s ups and downs. In time the perplexed Cooper look, characterized by a glance upwards and through forty-five degrees and as such betraying his theatrical roots, would become as much a part of his comic persona as Jack Benny’s stare. No one had a more beseeching glance of puzzlement as he scrutinized a prop that was new to him, observed a more manic look of desperation when a trick failed, a guiltier look of complicity – like that of a child with his hand stuck in the cookie jar – as he discovered you had caught him out while fumbling some secret manoeuvre, or a more radiant searchlight grin born out of a relentless optimism that the next task can’t possibly prove as calamitous as the last. Eric Sykes, who directed Tommy on several occasions, once defined comedy as a way of looking at the world askew. He knew instinctively that no performer physically played cockeyed more effectively than Cooper: all great clowns, Eric included, might be said to have been born at forty-five degrees out of kilter to the world and that is the way they see it.
One would have expected his long gangling limbs to provide a three-ring-circus of incoordination, but the mad, flapping hands – ‘See that hand there, look. Well this one’s just the same!’ – clasping his heart one moment, nervously flittering back to his props the next, and the outsize feet that when still seemed set in a permanent ten to two position were the lie to the general pattern. Interwoven throughout his whole performance was a surprising grace and delicacy of movement that might have been choreographed with sensitivity and skill. His movement at times was reminiscent of a matador swerving from one table of magical nonsense to the other as he eluded the advance of some invisible bull. At other times his lurching body seemed to defy gravity, like some inflatable figure being kept aloft as air rippled with amazing fluidity through his shoulders, arms, and fingers. He’d subscribe to this process as a regular device to follow the punch line of a joke. The theatre critic, Gordon Craig once said of the actor, Henry Irving, ‘Irving did not walk on the stage, he danced on it,’ and the same might be said of Cooper as he lifted his feet and replaced them, as if threading his way through some imaginary maze with haute école finesse. As the American poet, E. E. Cummings commented, ‘The expression of a clown is mostly in his knees.’ Cooper was certainly as capable of doing double takes with his legs and feet as with those soulful eyes. A favourite pose as he went from one piece of nonsense to another involved standing in profile beside one of his tables, hand touching, head tilted back, his right leg kicked up at right angles at the knee, his face turned to the audience in a gleeful grin, as if to say it’s all a game. Even tentative burlesque ballet movements were not beyond him. With arms outstretched, he would pirouette accordingly amid the magical chaos: ‘I taught myself, I did. I was in Swan Lake. I was. I fell in.’
His maniacal, throaty laugh was the perfect counterpoint to the whole catalogue of gestures and the reckless abandon with which his props were cast aside, leaving the stage at the end of his performance a stagehand’s nightmare. Shoulder-heaving in its intensity, the Cooper guffaw has come to be recognized as the grand sonic emblem of British comedy. Capable of warding off disapproval, excusing failure, registering delight, born – so he claimed – of nerves, it epitomized the Cooper stage persona, co-existing with that self-deprecating cough that presumably in this outrageous game of make-believe we weren’t supposed to hear as he faced the reality of the gag misfired, the trick gone wrong. Laugh and cough were the interjections that saved a thousand words. Those that remained were thrown to the mercy of the most distinctive voice in comedy since that of W. C. Fields. Once described as an impressionistic blur that made Eddie Waring sound like Julie Andrews – for today, say, read Ray Winstone and Emma Thompson – it was characterized by a slightly hoarse West Country burr bordering on a slur that at times could pass for insobriety, but only seldom was. It invested his jokes, his monologues, his shaggy dog stories with a kind of rough poetry. And then there was the matter of his catchphrase. ‘Just like that!’
He always claimed this came about by accident. ‘I may have done it and not thought anything of it at the time,’ he once mused. Anyhow, it gathered momentum through repetition and became fodder for the generation of impressionists who hitched their imitative wagon to his star. It is a fairly innocuous expression, but today cannot be said among the British public without triggering instant amusement. Once he had given in to the concept, he was only too happy to embroider upon it with those expressive hands gesturing down in counterpoint at waist level: ‘Not like that! Like that!’ followed by some incomprehensible incantation of dubious foreign extraction that might have been spelled ‘Zhhzhhzhhzhh’, but probably wasn’t. In retrospect it was the perfect verbal trademark for a comedy exponent of a demonstrative art like magic. Twenty years after his death it was voted, in one of those polls upon which unimaginative television executives seem to thrive, the second most popular catchphrase in British comedy history. Since the one that preceded it and those in close proximity soon after were all phrases of the moment, the likelihood is that his will endure, while the others will shrivel away. Reference to being the only gay in the village is hardly the stuff of everyday conversation.
The unavoidable cliché is that Cooper remains the most impersonated figure in recent British show business, the beckoning fez an instant token of fun and frivolity. The catchphrase and the hat became inseparable, as Tommy found with his wife Gwen when he returned on holiday to Egypt,