Like spending an hour with your funniest friend
‘Ilike his programmes but not him. He’s hopeless. This is the biggest load of organised c--p I’ve ever seen.” This is not my view of The Undiscovered
Peter Cook (BBC Four), a new documentary about Britain’s greatest satirist, but one of many letters to the BBC’s duty officer, complaining about Cook’s ill-fated 1971 chat show, Where Do I Sit?, and quoted with glee by the man himself in longlost footage.
Following Cook’s death in 1995, his grief-stricken widow Lin locked up his Hampstead house and refused all access to the media. Two decades later, she invited writer Victor LewisSmith inside, granting full access to Cook’s private recordings and personal clutter.
For a comedy obsessive like LewisSmith, it was a gold mine and the result was this charmingly ramshackle, joyous film – a fascinating insight into the mind of Cook: influential performer, Private Eye publisher and, it turns out, dodgy Elvis impersonator.
Treats included a lost sketch with Peter Sellers and Cook teasing David Attenborough, then the controller of BBC Two. However, the industrial language wasn’t for the faint-hearted. The Derek & Clive out-takes alone would have given Mary Whitehouse a coronary. Even when casually improvising, Cook could make partner Dudley Moore dissolve into helpless cackles. It was infectious.
We saw Cook the sport nut: playing golf on the cobbles outside his house and inventing a ball game called “Los Bollockos”. We saw Cook the soppy romantic: leaving tender notes around the house for Lin and writing “PC loves LC” in the sand. We saw Cook the well-connected celebrity, who was friends with the Rolling Stones and once a lover of Jackie Kennedy.
Much material, by its nature, wasn’t terribly televisual. The odd archive clip aside, it consisted mostly of photographs, crude Terry Gilliam-esque animations or still-life shots of vintage cassettes. Yet, because the audio was so wonderful, it didn’t matter. You could concentrate on Cook’s voice, velveteen and sardonically surreal, basking in his genius.
Finally, we heard Moore’s irreverent eulogy at Cook’s memorial service. As Barry Humphries added: “It’s quite impossible to think of Peter as dead because he’s a perpetual spirit.” Indeed, this intimate film was like spending a relaxed hour in the company of your funniest friend. What could be more laughter-filled and life-enhancing?
In Kids on the Edge: the Gender
Clinic (Channel 4), young Ash expressed her anguish. “Sometimes I feel like if I stay a child forever, nothing bad will happen.” This was not simply a refusal to grow up, but the profound distress of a child with gender dysphoria. The documentary look at the work of the Tavistock & Portman Trust in north London, the country’s only NHS clinic for children who feel they’ve been born into the wrong body. It treats children as young as three.
The documentary plunged us into the cases of two: eight-year-old Ash and Matt, 11. Ashley was born a boy but now lives as a girl. As she put it: “I say he’s my brother who fell over a cliff and died.” Last year, Ash was bullied, had a breakdown and even sent suicidal text messages to her mother.
The family moved to Brighton, and Ash started a new school where nobody knew she was born a boy. Understandably, she didn’t want to tell her new friends. We watched her doing things that all girls do: singing along to Beyoncé, experimenting with make-up, stroppily slamming doors.
For Matt, born Matilda, the issue was complicated by autism, which meant he had extreme difficulty discussing his feelings. He just wanted people to accept him, repeating the heartbreaking refrain: “I’m me.” With puberty looming, Matt’s mother and the Tavistock team had to decide if controversial hormone blockers should be prescribed.
A problem with the film was that it focused so much on Ash and Matt at home and school, that it sometimes forgot to show precisely what the Tavistock was doing for them. Directed by Bafta-winning Peter Beard, it was by turns affecting and exasperating.
Dr Polly Carmichael, the clinical psychologist in charge, explained the difficulty of seeking certainty in such an uncertain area. There were no answers in this film either, which, for all its good intentions, was frustratingly inconclusive.