Tommy v Ted? Cooper wins, just like that!

Afew months after Tommy Cooper’s death from a heart attack in 1984, Christie’s staged an auction of his comic effects. Rarely can an auction have been punctuated by so much laughter. Brown- coated assistants held up giant springing snakes, strings of sausages and, at one point, ‘a genuine milking stool’, which could be made to squirt milk from one of its legs.

The catalogue itself was a masterpiece of deadpan comedy, my favourite item being: ‘One wooden duck (blindfolded).’ It was for a routine in which the duck picked a single playing card from a full pack with its beak. Before starting the trick, Tommy Cooper would blindfold the duck, ‘just to make it harder’.

The auction included a number of fezes, among them one with a stuffed budgerigar stuck on top of it. This was for a gag in which Cooper arrived on stage wearing the fez with the budgerigar and carrying an empty cage, wailing ‘I’ve lost my budgie!’ and bursting into tears.

Another item was a bath tap attached to a piece of elastic rope. It was only decades later, when I read his biography, that I discovered what on earth this tap was for. Bob Monkhouse once saw Cooper in his dressing room before a show with the tap on the rope. He asked him what he was doing.

Cooper said that he planned to come onstage, dangle it up and down, and then exclaim to the audience: ‘Tap dance!’

Monkhouse thought it the worst joke he had ever heard and begged him not to do it, as it was bound to fall flat. But Cooper went ahead with it regardless and it brought the house down.

One of the things that made Tommy Cooper so indestructible was that the worse a joke was, the more his audience would enjoy it.

‘My dog took a lump out of my knee the other day. A friend of mine said: “Did you put anything on it?” I said: “No. He liked it as it was.” ’

I came away from the auction with two battered old suitcases packed full of brightly coloured artificial flowers, some of which could wilt or blossom on demand — an unbelievable bargain for £100.

Thirty years on, the flowers still decorate our house. It was only later that I discovered the then director of the theatre collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum had been sitting at the back, bidding against me. But the V&A still managed to secure many more expensive lots, and this week they enhanced their collection with the acquisition of a file packed full of thousands of Cooper’s jokes, all meticulously ordered.

Under ‘B’, for instance, you will find Babies, Ballet, Banquets, Barbers, Baseball, Bathing, Beatles, Beatniks, Birthdays, Books, Bowling, Boxing and Bullfights.

I imagine that under ‘f’ for ‘football’ is the gag he tried out on the Queen in the after-show line-up at the Royal Variety Show in 1964.

‘I say, Your Majesty,’ he said to her, just as she was moving on. ‘May I ask you a personal question?’

‘As personal as I’ll allow,’ replied the Queen, a little disconcerted. ‘Do you like football?’ ‘Not particularly.’ ‘well, could I have your ticket for the Cup final?’

whenever he went on tour, he would take 17 large bags of props along with him.

The V&A has also acquired a handwritten list of props he used for a single performance: ‘1 black hanky, 1 white hanky, can, red bucket, 1 red hanky with bell, 1 black spotted hanky, 1 large flowerpot’ and so on.

Tommy Cooper was an unstoppable joke machine, with no button marked ‘Off’. The jokes would always flow, the sillier the better, regardless of whether he was onstage or off.

In a public library, he would ask for a pair of scissors and snip the bottom off one of his trouser legs. He would then present it to the librarian with the words: ‘There’s a turn-up for the books!’

You can rest assured that the V&A will be a happier place for its new treasure trove of Tommy’s jokes.

Contrast the Cooper Collection, if you will, with the stuff left to the nation by his sobersided contemporary, the late Sir edward Heath.

The two men had little in common other than a certain bulk and the way their shoulders would shake up and down when they laughed.

Visitors to Heath’s old house in Salisbury — recently reopened — can peruse scale models of all his yachts, photographs of the great man with grandees such as Kissinger, Nixon and Castro, his writing desk, his grand piano and a pair of Qianlong dynasty vases, presented to him by Chairman Mao.

But, alas, no string of sausages, no novelty flowers, no tap on a rope, no wooden duck ( blindfolded). It all goes to show that prime ministers come and go, but great comedians will last for ever.