Nothing to laugh about

Yes, he was brilliantly funny — but he rarely paid his gag writers, cheated on his wife and breakfasted on gin with his cornflakes. Life with Tommy Cooper was . . .

TOMMY COOPER was once in Japan. He spoke no Japanese, his taxi driver spoke no English, but Tommy still made him laugh so much he crashed into a wall.

This sort of thing happened a lot. Tommy was capable of reducing a room to hysterics without saying a single word. His confused expression would set people off — that big, pale, moony face with its look of bafflement and amazed, slightly hurt innocence.

Sometimes, Tommy didn’t even need to be in the room. He’d fix up a microphone backstage and pretend to be locked in the wardrobe. The audience would be convulsed by the sounds of muttering and door-knob rattling.

As Ian Carroll announces in this generally affectionate celebration of the comic’s life, even decades after his death Tommy still manages to top polls as one of the world’s favourite comedian.

Everyone is familiar with the fez, the ‘Just like that!’ catchphrase, the fumbled magic tricks (‘Spoon, jar, jar, spoon’), and the ‘silly, harmless humour’, where the joke was how bad the jokes were.

A sample: ‘He got run over by a brewery wagon. It was the first time the drinks were on him’; ‘I went to the doctor’s the other day. I said, “Doctor, I think I’m a dog.” He said, “Take a seat.” I said, “I can’t. I’m not allowed on the furniture”.’

There were literally thousands of such groaners, carefully recorded by Cooper in files and boxes, which are now — along with the rest of his memorabilia — housed for posterity in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.

Carroll has made good use of the archive, and Cooperman! explores the comedian’s work and the practicalities of his performances. Make no mistake — for all the appearance of chaos, rummaging around on his props tables, dropping his tricks and muffing the visual gags, everything Tommy did was carefully rehearsed and timed beforehand with a stopwatch. Not for nothing was he a Gold Star member of the prestigious Magic Circle.

‘He sought perfection in his craft, if only to then spend more time undoing all his hard work to make something new and comical out of it,’ Carroll writes. Tommy was born in Caerphilly, Wales — I thought in 1921, but Carroll says 1919. Whatever the exact date, there’s a commemorative statue in the town, unveiled ten years ago by Anthony Hopkins.

He was only briefly Welsh, however, as his father, who’d been gassed in the First World War, found the dusty coal-mining district intolerable. The family moved to the West Country — Tommy retained a soft West Country burr in his voice — and later set up a haberdashery business near Southampton.

As ‘a non-starter academically’, Tommy was apprenticed to a boatyard in the city. Here he amused his mates with magic tricks. When he bungled some bits of sleight of hand and everybody laughed, Tommy began to think: ‘There could be something in this . . . ’

He served in the Royal Horse Guards during the Second World War. (‘I was in the Army. I got the military cross. I got the Navy pretty mad as well.’) Sent overseas in 1943, he was wounded in the desert and despatched to Cairo, where he performed for military concert parties. It’s in Egypt that he first donned a fez, which added a touch of the exotic. ‘He enjoyed the camaraderie,’ Carroll assures us, ‘and the fact that he had an in-house audience for his magic tricks and gags.’

As always throughout his life, though, Tommy had no actual best pals he confided in. He was essentially a solitary figure — to the extent that later colleagues, such as Barry Cryer, would recall, ‘It was like he wasn’t really there. You’d see him staring into the distance with nothing to say.’ It was as if he’d floated in from another planet.

Employment for this alien after demob looked dubious at first. Tommy auditioned for the Windmill Theatre in London’s Soho five times without success. The BBC sent him packing, complaining about his ‘poor diction, an unpleasant manner and an extremely unfortunate appearance’.

TOMMY was craggy, looming, sweaty and 6ft 4in and he wore size 13 shoes. Luckily, an agent called Miff Ferrie could perceive Tommy’s potential, ie, that what looked calamitous could paradoxically be triumphant.

A critic writing in the Magic Circle’s magazine summed it up: ‘The skill with which Tommy ruined his act was amazing.’ Before long Tommy’s choreographed lunacy was being compared favourably with Laurel and Hardy. Yet it might not have come off.

Tommy was no actor (he is very blank in Eric Sykes’s short film The Plank). Miff saw it was a mistake to allow Tommy to make all those ragged sketches in TV shows, where he is a chef or a burglar or a cod-Shakespearean thespian. He needed to stick with the fez, the dinner jacket and the broken wand.

Miff was Tommy’s absolute salvation. Having met him, ‘Tommy Cooper never really looked back’, confirms Carroll, who has examined the contracts, memos and business documents at the V&A.

From 1947, Miff had sole control, managing Tommy’s bookings and fees. He built Tommy up, positioning him in cabarets and clubs, and on the theatre circuits. There were pantomimes and summer seasons with Benny Hill and with Morecambe and Wise. Miff also sorted out all of the travel arrangements, as Tommy was quite capable of arriving at the right venue on the wrong day, or the wrong venue on the right day. ‘Tommy was oblivious, forgetful and disorganised,’ notes Carroll — he was genuinely so in real life, unlike on stage, where it was only contrived.

By the Fifties, Miff was making Tommy £10,000 a year. A decade later, staggeringly, he’d be earning this sum each week. But Tommy resented having to pay his 15% commission, and there was a lot of friction and legal threats.

Indeed, Tommy felt hard done by if ever he was asked to part with money. He never paid his gag writers if he could manage it, and never paid for tricks acquired from London’s magic emporiums.

He never once bought a round of drinks — ‘You get the teas, I’ll get the chairs’, he’d say on entering a pub, as if this made it fair. ‘Have a drink on me!’ he told a taxi driver, giving him a teabag.

He never offered people a lift, allowed them to use his phone or shared a packet of cigarettes. ‘He was a ruthless opportunist,’ said a fellow magician. Tommy’s meanness certainly does amount to larceny.

AND this is where biographers always start having a problem with the beloved comedian. Although Tommy’s daughter has said that she’d prefer her father to be remembered only as ‘a joyous, boisterous person’, the private life is pretty horrible.

Tommy married Gwen Henty in 1947, and the relationship was characterised by bad temper and sentimental reconciliations.

None of their furniture matched because they flung it at each other, breaking chairs and occasional tables. Both drank too much.

Tommy ‘drank to eradicate stage fright’, and he’d be up till five every morning on the whiskey. He poured gin on his cornflakes, as full-fat milk was unhealthy.

Chronic alcoholism led to sciatica, circulatory problems, varicose veins, bronchial and cardiac disease. He smoked 40 cigars a day. The deterioration showed — by 1978 Miff was starting to receive complaints about Tommy’s slurred delivery, lack of professionalism and obvious boozer’s sheen.

Tommy conducted a 17-yearlong affair with Mary Kay, who was his devoted dresser, personal assistant and props manager. Although the relationship was common knowledge in the business, Gwen pretended to know nothing about it.

Mary was with Tommy when he died on April 15, 1984, during a live broadcast. He donned a cloak, fell backwards and those size 13 shoes stuck out from beneath the curtains.

‘The audience found it funny and thought it was all part of the act,’ writes Carroll. The packed lunch of banana sandwiches Gwen had provided remained unopened, and was returned to her the next day.