To the British public he has acquired a mythic status on a par with John Bull, Robin Hood, Mr Pickwick, even Mr Punch. It was with a degree of seriousness that in 1998 the Daily Mirror recommended foregoing the celebration of St George’s Day, in favour of a Tommy Cooper day. The saint had been revealed as the patron saint of syphilis sufferers and as someone who never set foot in England. It proclaimed the idea of a national day in which we all wear fezzes in tribute to ‘someone who sums up our unique attitude to ourselves and the world and someone who is eternally cool. Look no further than Tommy Cooper.’ Classless, timeless, ludicrous, his qualifications speak for themselves. Maybe Lenny Henry should think about converting Red Nose Day into Red Fez Day.
He also tapped into that rich vein of surrealism that links the comedy of the British music hall tradition back to the century of Lear and Carroll. It was another era when the diminutive clown Little Tich danced in his elongated boots, absurdist sketch comedian Harry Tate sported a moustache that he could twirl like an aeroplane propeller, and pioneer patter comedian Dan Leno claimed to have tramped the streets so often that he had to resort to turning his legs up at the ends where the feet had been worn away. But Cooper would have been perfectly at home in the company of these early superstars. Indeed, I am convinced that had fate not destined Tommy for a role in twentieth-century show business, Lewis Carroll would have had to invent him, this manic Mad Hatter with a Cheshire cat grin and a profile as forbidding as the Queen of Hearts. That the guillotine trick was one of his favourite illusions is telling, his love of outrageous wordplay even more so. And if he had not been one of the royal family’s favourite entertainers, one can imagine judgement being passed at the Palace: “‘It’s a pun” the King added in an angry tone, and everybody laughed. “Let the jury consider their verdict.”’ When donning one of those absurd half and half costumes, he might have been Tweedledum and Tweedledee in one body. His whole world was one of playing cards rising up in a rebellious swirl around him. The perpetual lateness of the White Rabbit provides its own sly grace note for those who knew him off stage.
Others have seen him in different contexts. With a meaningful twinkle in his eye, Spike Milligan once suggested to me that Cooper would have been his ideal choice for casting as Jesus Christ: ‘You can almost see him now. Fishes, loaves. Loaves, fishes. Huh huh huh! And here’s a little trick I’d like to show you now. As you can see there is nothing on my feet. I will now walk on this water over here. Not over there. Over here!’ Barry Cryer has taken up the theme: ‘I threw the money changers out of the temple the other day. Silly really, cos I wanted two fivers for a tenner. Huh huh!’ Milligan also said that when God made Cooper he got it wrong and that if he were a self-made man he made a terrible job of it. They point to the same thing. Given that the world is not a perfect place, the idea that one day one might meet one’s maker and discover he is wearing a red fez is a consoling one. Kenneth Tynan, while not subscribing to the Christian hypothesis or approving of the current state of the world, once nominated Ralph Richardson for the part of God, qualifying his choice, ‘if we imagine him as a whimsical, enigmatic magician, capable of fearful blunders, sometimes inexplicably ferocious, at other times dazzling in his innocence and benignity.’ In addition, the actor and the comedian shared that abstruse air that hints of knowledge deprived to lesser mortals, linked to an ability to make the trivial sound as if it were the secret of the Universe, as for instance in this typical Cooper pronouncement: ‘They say that 20 per cent of driving accidents are caused by drunken drivers. That must mean that the other 80 per cent are caused by drivers that are stone cold sober. In other words, if all drivers got drunk, there would be far less accidents.’
Magic of course provided him with the perfect metaphor with which to comment upon the human condition. Whereas Chaplin and Keaton needed vast expanses of Hollywood real estate, not to mention in those early movie-making days lashings of sunshine to pursue their craft, Cooper’s happiest arena was on a stage. Where else would a magician have plied his wares? His act was not a matter of merely standing at a microphone. Here was as well-defined a milieu for his personal comic vision as Galton and Simpson ever constructed for Tony Hancock or for Steptoe and Son. Of his British contemporaries only Frankie Howerd, Ken Dodd, and Max Wall succeeded in creating anything resembling a three-dimensional world out of their solo spoken monologues. Unintentionally, Tommy’s dysfunctional approach to magic – neither totally burlesque nor obviously straight – became the most consistently successful public relations device conjuring has enjoyed in its deep and distant history. He is every one of us who has ever fumbled his or her way through a conjuring trick in a social situation. His success becomes our success. He was clever enough to ensure that triumph occasionally sneaked up on him regardless.
Significantly for all his relevance to real life, he hardly ever made reference to topical issues, whether sport, celebrity, politics, or opinion of any kind. As a private individual cocooned in his private world of jokes and magic, he was not interested. Ken Dodd once said that to be a great comedian you need to know the price of cabbage. So sure is that vibrant performer’s grasp of the lives of his public, one cannot disagree. But in Cooper’s case it just didn’t matter. He succeeded in attaining the widest possible audience appeal by keeping up the barricades around his own lunatic world. Only occasionally would a product reference intrude, as when he yo-yoed a can of hair cream on a length of elastic: ‘Brylcreem bounce!’ Or picked up a loaf of ‘Nimble’ sliced bread with a balloon attached: ‘She flies like a bird through the sky – high – high!’ As he let go, it plummeted to the floor. Funny at the time, they did not last in the act for long. Many stand-up comedians of his era would have found it difficult to work without a copy of that day’s newspaper within reach. Cooper nevertheless stayed thoroughly genuine, an ordinary bloke to the last, never less than the people’s comedian. And how we need him now – a funny man who knows that success in his role is not about getting awards, playing cold, cavernous, overlarge arenas, cropping up on pretentious panel shows, or signing off from the job in hand to write novels we possibly do not need.
Some might have dismissed his comedy as mad, but as Eric Sykes put it, ‘He was about as big an idiot as Einstein and he got more laughs.’ He was a one-off. He was not necessarily the funniest comedian, the greatest clown, the most entertaining magician of all time. He may have been all three; he may have been none of these. But he was without question Tommy Cooper. Like Sinatra, Satchmo, Astaire, his very name will endure as a superlative all of its own. Let us now trace his beginnings.
He was born Thomas Frederick Cooper on 19 March 1921, although like Cole Porter and many another in the entertainment profession he cheated his death by a year when show business claimed him: ‘As I popped into the world, blinking at the light and wondering what to do for an encore, someone grabbed me by the legs, held me upside down and whacked me. Already I could see life wasn’t easy.’ Indeed the reality was even more painful. Even Cooper’s birth bore the stamp of adversity that came to characterize his stage act. In more serious moments he would ruminate on the actual conditions in which prematurely he came into this world: ‘They tell me that when I was born the midwife gave me up for a weakling. Slung me to the bottom of the bed. Gave up on me. If my mother hadn’t kept me alive on drops of brandy and condensed milk, I wouldn’t be here now.’ That midwife was Maud Shattock, although according to her son, Ivor,