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Tommy Cooper |
Super Cooper who left us all laughing
Funny man Tommy Cooper made us cry with laughter – but he hid a dark secret, writes William Hall
Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing
by John Fisher
Published by HarperCollins, £18.99
Someone actually complimented me on my driving the other day. They put a note on my windscreen that said: ‘Parking fine’. So that was nice.”
LAUGH, clown, laugh! He had only to walk out on to the stage with that stupid fez on his lantern-jawed head and those blankly staring features, and we started laughing before he had even opened his mouth. Tommy Cooper was a one-off.
His biographer, the TV producer John Fisher, is something of a legend himself within and without the hallowed walls of the BBC, and shared with Tommy the distinction of being a Gold Star Member of the Inner Magic Circle. Who better to write this affectionate, hilarious, revealing tribute Always Leave Them Laughing to his old friend?
He introduces his chum, likening him to a fruit and veg shop: “A potato for a head, bunches of bananas for hands, turnip nose, even an upturned flowerpot for headgear. He was born funny, he looked funny, and he had funny bones.”
“Doctor, it hurts me when I go like this…”
“Well, don’t go like that!”
He was born Thomas Frederick Cooper in 1921 in Caerphilly, capital of Welsh cheese, a coalminer’s son who arrived in the world early when his mother Gertrude, a dressmaker, was only seven months pregnant. Tommy would say later: “I was a surprise to my parents. They found me on the doorstep. They expected a bottle of milk.”
Young Tommy was attracted to magic tricks as a schoolboy, and would impress friends and family with his youthful expertise. He walked around with a pack of cards in his jacket pocket and the latest joke shop novelty up his sleeve, always ready to spring a surprise on all and sundry.
He left school at 14 to become an apprentice at the nearby British Power Boat Company, which specialised in building torpedo boats, and was rewarded with 10 shillings a week for his efforts.
Tommy also entertained his mates in the boatyard with his tricks – and it was here that he discovered his other hidden talent: to make people laugh when things went wrong.
Fisher says: “The audience loved it. The more he panicked and made a mess of everything, the more they laughed.”
“Waiter, this chicken’s got one leg shorter than the other.”
“What do you want to do – eat it or dance with it?”
When war broke out Trooper Cooper joined the Blues – the Royal Horse Guards – and kept the troops laughing throughout his army days.
He turned professional after demob. One bonus was that he had met a fellow Entertainment National Service Association (ENSA) entertainer named Gwen – he called her ‘Dove’, and their double act on stage lasted a lifetime off it following their marriage in Cyprus in 1947.
Now Tommy’s career went from strength to strength via night clubs and music halls up and down the country.
The joy of Fisher’s book is that it is also a veritable compendium of humour, with Laurel and Hardy heading a cast of virtually every comedian walking the boards in those halcyon years.
Tommy himself ventured on to the big screen, with cameo roles in And the Same to You (1960) and The Cool Mikado (1962) before actually starring as an inept builder with Eric Sykes in The Plank (1967).
“Sometimes I drink my whisky neat. Other times I take my tie off and leave my shirt hanging out.”
In their private lives, Fisher describes the Coopers as “decent, unpretentious people with their feet on the ground and no delusions of social status”.
They lived in a solid red-brick house in Chiswick from 1955, and never moved in all their years of a marriage which produced two children.
But the big problem in Tommy’s life would be his growing addiction to alcohol. His huge frame could absorb more than the average mortal, but it reached the stage where on tour in Bournemouth he once demanded a large gin and tonic with his breakfast cornflakes.
“And yet,” declares Fisher loyally, “in the world of television I have yet to meet anyone who saw him drunk.” All the same, his health would deteriorate relentlessly over the years.
Tommy Cooper left the stage in a way no-one could have envisaged, least of all himself.
The night of April 15 1984 had all the elements of a Shakespearian tragedy. On the London Weekend Television show Live from Her Majesty’s, Tommy suddenly clutched his chest, sank to the floor, rolled into the curtains, and, in front of 12 million people laughing and watching at home, breathed his last. He was still wearing his fez.
It was the way he would have wanted to go – “surfing the void of life’s emptiness with the sound of laughter in his ears,” as Fisher puts it. Or, more simply… just like that.
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