Presenter of Rainbow who also wrote the television film Walter
DAVID COOK, who has died aged 74, was an aspiring actor – he presented Rainbow on children’s television – and a writer who explored the lives of outsiders; his 1978 novel, Walter, was turned into an acclaimed drama starring Ian McKellen.
The book’s subject matter was almost unrelentingly grim. Cook’s hero, Walter, a kind-hearted man with severe learning difficulties, is treated with indifference by his father. His mother tries unsuccessfully to kill him. After leaving a “special school” he begins a path towards institutionalisation, and gradually finds himself subsumed in the world of the “subnormal” – a place that he eventually accepts as his “real world”, realising that “he would never get out of it.”
For all its painfulness, the book’s sharply detailed prose and unsentimental social commentary drew broad acclaim. In creating the harsh world of the title character, Cook drew on his earlier employment as a hospital nurse. His own hobby – looking after pigeons – became Walter’s main respite from the difficulties of everyday life; when the film adaptation needed a tame bird to sit on McKellen’s shoulder, Cook set about rearing one himself.
Directed by Stephen Frears (later known for such films as The Queen and Philomena), Walter was broadcast on Channel Four’s opening night, November 2 1982. A sequel, Walter and June (1983) was adapted from Cook’s novel Winter Doves and featured Sarah Miles as a suicidal young mother.
At McKellen’s own request, Cook ended the story on a more upbeat note in a play for Radio Four, Walter Now (2009). The script found the character destitute yet optimistic in old age, sharing a house with three other learningdisabled people. Though some critics thought it too sentimental in the light of all that had gone before, a positive write-up from The Times singled out Cook for a script that “wasted no words and never slipped over into melodrama”.
David Cook was born in Preston, Lancashire, on September 21 1940, and attended Rishton Secondary Modern School. He joined Rada in 1959 and began acting three years later, with bit parts in Coronation Street and Z Cars. In 1972 Cook was hired by Thames Television as the first presenter of Rainbow, conceived as a rival to the American puppet series Sesame Street. Joining him onscreen initially were Sunshine (optimistic yellow with a red hat) and Moony ( glum and mauve), but Zippy, an overbearing creature with a zip for a mouth, would later come to dominate proceedings.
“It was very odd if you ever delved into it too deeply,” Cook recalled – especially since at the age of 32, he felt himself a little too old to be dancing around to The Grand Old Duke of York. In the event he lasted two series on the show, retiring to focus on his nascent career as an author.
His first published book was Albert’s Memorial (1972), inspired by a bag lady whom he used to observe sitting in doorways at South Kensington station. “I did not write a story,” he said later. “I wrote little pieces of what the details of her life might be, and after a while they began to form themselves into a story.”
Happy Endings (1974), about the relationship between a 12-year-old boy and a schoolteacher, won the EM Forster Memorial Prize in 1977; while Walter won the 1978 Hawthornden Prize for “imaginative literature”.
In addition to his later books, Cook wrote the screenplays for a 1994 film adaptation of his novel Second Best (1991), about a single man’s attempt to adopt a troubled 10-year-old boy, and for the gentle comedy-drama Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, starring Patricia Routledge.
David Cook is survived by his partner, the playwright and novelist John Bowen.