Dad was no wife-beater, I’m putting the record straight... just like that
THE daughter of Tommy Cooper has finally spoken of her horror after an ITV drama about the comedian’s life portrayed him as an alcoholic wife beater.
Four years after the drama was shown, Vicky Cooper, 64, said the time has come to set the record straight about her muchloved dad.
Vicky, who grew up with her parents and brother, Thomas, in Chiswick, west London, said she has only happy memories of her father, who was 63 when he suffered his fatal heart attack in 1984.
The 2014 drama Not Like That, Like This, starring David Threlfall, and Amanda Redman, focused heavily on his long affair with assistant Mary Fieldhouse.
Vicky has acknowledged the affair, saying she and her brother shielded her mother, Gwen, who did not want to know about it.
But she says she never saw her father behaving violently. After it aired on ITV, Vicky said: “Having watched it, I feel as if I’ve been assaulted myself.
“It was a character assassination. It was like seeing my family history rewritten, seeing something unfold that was treacherous and untrue.
Perfection
“He’s been misrepresented to make what someone else considers to be good TV — and never mind accuracy.”
Writer Simon Nye insisted Vicky had approved the scripts, but she claims to have only seen a version which bore little resemblance to the finished product.
Vicky said: “He was a wonderful family man, he really was. He always came home on a Sunday, no matter what. We’d all lie in bed watching The Saint, and eating
Eastbourne sausages. That was part of our Sunday ritual.”
In her first TV interview about her father since his sudden death during a live performance, she said she and her brother helped the comedian by rating jokes he tested on his family.
As children she and Thomas, who died four years after his father from complications linked with haemophilia, would “score” Tommy’s jokes for him.
She said: “Dad had a list of jokes, so he would sit at the dining table. He used to get me to go through the jokes and mark them, red, amber or green.”
In the two-hour show, Tommy Cooper: In His Own Words, she says her late mother also helped out.
“My mother used to time everything for him. And her timing was brilliant… so the pair together, they got it to perfection.”
She added: “I have never done a television interview before because I couldn’t talk about my father, because of the grief.
Respect
“It came to me – I owe it to his public. For them to know about the real man. And to show my love and respect for him.”
The programme charts Cooper’s rise from a weakling born in a Welsh mining town, through a military career in the Horse Guards, to being Britain’s highest-paid comedian with a toprating TV series throughout the 1970s. At the height of his fame he earned over £1,000 a week.
The new programme includes memories from Cooper’s showbusiness friends Sir Michael Parkinson, Jimmy Tarbuck and Chris Tarrant.
His writer Barry Cryer, choreographer Lionel Blair and “straight woman” Sheila Steafel also contribute.
The show airs on Channel 5, tomorrow, 9.15pm.