Why £100 for Tommy Cooper’s old suitcases was the best money Craig Brown ever spent

... and how he enjoyed a drink with a posh hippo called Adrian in a hotel bar. Just two of the wickedly amusing stories told by the satirist and critic in a new collection of his best columns, MoS book reviews and waspish parodies

WITH his wickedly funny observations of people – from Les Dawson to Jacob Rees-Mogg – satirist CRAIG BROWN has entertained readers of The Mail on Sunday and Daily Mail over four decades. Here is the second part of our serialisation of his new book, a collection of his best columns, book reviews and parodies, which started in yesterday’s Daily Mail.

TITTER YE NOT, TRUMP IS A REINCARNATED FRANKIE HOWERD!

WHO does he remind me of? Watching Donald Trump on television, this question kept nagging me.

His strange hair, like an aeroplane on a launch-pad; his camp gestures; his over-expressive eyebrows, so at odds with the rest of his face; his rambling nonsequiturs; his habit of constantly interrupting himself, mid-flow; the way he uses catchphrases, like stepping-stones, to manoeuvre from one topic to the next; his oddball face, part donkey, part chipmunk.

Who does he remind me of? And then there is the content of his speeches, their defiant outrage borne along on an undertow of selfpity, and the way all his complaints of being got at are underpinned by the conviction that everything is going downhill and the world is out to get him. Woe, woe and thrice woe! Yes, of course! It suddenly struck me that Donald J. Trump is the reincarnation of the late Frankie Howerd. The two men certainly share a strong physical resemblance. Barry Cryer once memorably described Frankie Howerd’s peculiar hair: ‘He used to scratch the back of his head when he was talking to you sometimes, and the hairpiece would go up and down like a pedal bin.’

Donald Trump’s hair is, in many ways, even more remarkable. So much care and attention has been lavished upon it, and all to such unintended comical purpose. Like Frankie Howerd’s, it resembles a pedal bin, but a pedal bin that for some reason has been granted the prime spot in the kitchen.

The politician has his catchphrases, just like the comedian. Donald Trump’s include ‘I have to be honest’ and ‘Apparently’ and ‘You know what?’ and ‘By the way’ and ‘It’s frightening’. He also pronounces the word ‘huge’ in a funny way (‘Yuge’).

Similarly, Frankie Howerd says ‘Oh, please yourselves!’ and ‘Titter ye not’ and ‘Shut your face’ and ‘Not on your nelly!’ and ‘Nay, nay and thrice nay!’ He also pronounces ‘Ooh no missus’ in a funny way (‘Ooooooh! Nywo! Missussss!’).

Trump has published a number of books, as did Howerd. Oddly enough, both the politician and the comedian produced self-help volumes with the words ‘How To’ in the title. Donald Trump’s was called How To Get Rich. And – strange but true – Frankie Howerd’s just happens to have been called

Trumps: And How To Come Up.

EGGING ON MASTER MOGG AT BREAKFAST

‘GOOD morning, Nanny!’

‘Good morning, Master Jacob!’ ‘Good morning, children!’

‘Good morning, Pater!’

The breaking of one’s fast, or to employ the dreadful modern jargon, ‘breakfasting’ (!) with one’s family is surely one of the great pleasures of existence on earth.

Under the expert guidance of Nanny, the children fill up their bowls. They then sit in silence while Nanny delivers two hearty thumps with a teaspoon to my boiled eggs, and sets about unpeeling them.

‘It’s high time you learnt to do this by yourself, Master Jacob!’ she says.

‘Oh, Nanny!’ I reply, ‘Do not berate me so, for my mind is at present filled with the more pressing concerns of Queen and Country!’

‘I was but jesting!’ replies Nanny, with her abundant good cheer.

I peruse the Financial Times. It is as well to know what the ordinary people, if may one use such a term, are up to, so as better to represent them in Parliament. I also like to make sure that the international markets are behaving themselves.

I am delighted to see that my own shares, and those of my clients, are performing commendably. Our wealth has, once again, increased while we slumbered –

and yet, despite all the evidence, Messrs Corbyn and Co continue to insist that our great nation has, in some unfathomable way, failed to benefit from the firm smack of austerity! ‘A drop in our overseas markets – that’s good news for us!’ I say.

‘Ooh, you’re so sharp, you’ll cut yourself!’ chuckles Nanny. Nanny draws up a chair and takes her knife to the toast. ‘Elbows off the table, Master Jacob!’ She butters the toast, then cuts each slice up into lovely straight lines.

‘The soldiers have arrived, Master Jacob!’ she says, ‘and they’re queuing up for their dipping!’

With that, she dips my first soldier into the yolk. This is the sign for me to open my mouth as wide as I possibly can.

‘In he pops!’ says Nanny, placing him in my mouth. ‘What a good boy!’

‘Mmmm!’ I exclaim. I notice that shares in Consolidated are down a couple of points, though no cause for immediate concern.

I am a firm believer in traditional meals, partaken in a traditional way. I sometimes worry that the British have lost the ability to fend for themselves. Where is our backbone? Our Empire was built neither on casual eating nor on sloppy manners.

DAYS WHEN MACMILLAN HAD NEVER HAD IT SO BAD

EVEN in his own day, Harold Macmillan seemed like a throwback to

an earlier age. He was Prime Minister when The Beatles were topping the charts, yet he was born in 1894, and severely wounded in the Battle of the Somme.

Like every Conservative Prime Minister since, he gave the impression of embracing change, but his heart lay elsewhere. The modern world was alien to him, and, when times got tough, he would retreat into the literature of an earlier age. ‘Sometimes the strain is so awful, you have to resort to Jane Austen,’ he once confessed to his colleague Rab Butler.

The beginning of 1962 – the year of the spy scandals and the Cuban Missile Crisis – finds him ‘in bed all day, writing, reading, dozing’. The book he is reading is an ‘old favourite’ by George Meredith. Its appeal lies in its nostalgia for a time before the First World War, ‘for it reminded me all the time of… the old dead world, in which I had just begun to live and move before it crashed’.

He avoided anything as modern as television. ‘I have not looked at any TV,’ he confides to his diary. ‘Happily, we have not got the instrument… (except in the Servants’ Hall).’

Staying at the White House in 1959, he was obliged to sit through the latest blockbuster movie, The Big Country, starring Gregory Peck. He could barely contain his boredom: ‘We had a film called “The Great Country”, or some such name. It was a “Western”. It lasted three hours! It was inconceivably banal.’

Reading this diary entry now, I particularly like those stand-offish inverted commas around the word ‘Western’. Much of the rest of the language he employs is wonderfully cobwebby. He talks of ‘motoring’ and ‘luncheon’, and, on a visit to Africa, finds a couple of leaders ‘unprepossessing’.

It’s interesting to compare all this with Tony Blair’s autobiography of 2010. ‘Wow, I was really freaked out,’ Blair writes at one point. This would have read like a foreign language to Macmillan. How strange to think that for three years (198386), these two men were both sitting in the Houses of Parliament.

JUST LIKE THAT, TOMMY’S TAXI TEABAG TRICK

BACK in 1984, I went to the funniest auction – in fact, the only funny auction – I have ever attended. ‘One string of sausages,’ the auctioneer would announce, in his solemn tones, followed by: ‘One wooden duck (blindfolded)’.

It was the sale of Tommy Cooper’s magical and stage properties at Christie’s in South Kensington, and so, in a sense, the very last show of that wonderful comedian.

For myself, I came away with two ropey old suitcases packed full of brightly coloured feather flowers, a real bargain for £100, especially considering some of them can, with the flick of a wrist, be made to bloom, and others made to wilt. I don’t think I’ve ever spent £100 quite so wisely: the moment I produce the flowers and mention the name of Tommy Cooper, everyone starts to smile.

He was, in a sense, in thrall to laughter, both its master and its slave. When he left the stage, his jokes followed him and wouldn’t leave him alone.

A friend went with him into a tailor’s shop on Shaftesbury Avenue. Cooper tried on the suit he had ordered, then turned to the tailor and said: ‘Do you mind if I take it for a walk round the block?’

Permission granted, he removed a small block of wood from his pocket, placed it on the floor, and walked round it.

In a public library, he asked for a pair of scissors and snipped the bottom off one of his trouser legs. He then went up to the librarian and gave it to her, saying: ‘There’s a turn-up for the books!’

Cooper was a perpetual child, his many friends and admirers seem to agree, and with the ruthlessness and attention-seeking of a child. As others pursue fame or wealth, so he pursued laughter.

Right up to the end, he was always putting plastic beetles in his wife’s bath, or severed hands in her laundry basket. After she discovered a wind-up spider in her make-up bag, ‘he laughed and laughed and laughed, lying on the bed with his feet in the air’.

He regarded everyone as a potential stooge, even the Queen. In the line-up after the Royal Variety Show in 1964, he was disconcerted that she hadn’t paid him enough attention, so, just as she was moving on, he called her back. ‘I say,

Your Majesty – may I ask you a personal question?’

‘As personal as I’ll allow,’ replied the Queen.

‘Do you like football?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Well, could I have your tickets for the Cup Final?’

There was, inevitably, a dark side to this sun. He was unbelievably tight-fisted, never buying anyone a drink, and sneakily intent on short-changing his scriptwriters. Tipping taxi-drivers, he would always shove something into their top pocket, saying: ‘Have a drink on me’. Only after he had gone would they find it was a teabag.

DOWN THE WATERING HOLE WITH GEOFFREY THE LION

THE plan had been to visit the set of the latest David Attenborough series, but my flight to Africa had been delayed.

When I arrived, they were all packing up for the night. Thankfully, I was allowed into the VIP enclosure.

‘You might find one or two of the stars hanging around,’ said the programme’s publicity officer. ‘They like to unwind in the lounge after a hard day’s filming.’

In a corner of the bar, with their feet up, were two young hippos, swapping tales over a couple of pints. ‘Mind if I join you?’ I said.

‘Not at all, old boy,’ said the first hippo, who had an unexpectedly posh English accent. His name was Adrian. It turned

out he’d spent much of his youth on secondment to Chessington Zoo in Surrey. ‘One didn’t set out to upgrade one’s accent,’ he said. ‘It just sort of rubbed off on one, as these things do.’

He told me he was ‘literally exhausted’, after some pretty gruelling filming. ‘David was desperately keen to film us having a scrap with a lion or a crocodile.

‘I put him in touch with an old lion pal of mine called Geoffrey, who’s got a CV as long as your arm, and, I might add, won an Emmy for his work on Daktari.

‘Geoffrey’s always popping up on wildlife documentaries, chasing this, that and the other. Producers simply LOVE him.

‘He’ll always go that extra mile, is relatively inexpensive and, of course, still devilishly handsome. Oh, look – there he is!’

Adrian the Hippo waved in the direction of a lion sitting at the bar, nursing a pina colada. In return, the lion blew him a kiss.

‘I never imagined you’d be such good pals,’ I commented. I had seen YouTube footage of a hippo and a lion fighting by the water’s edge, and it had all looked very real to me.

‘Don’t be daft!’ said Adrian. ‘Once the cameras are turned off, we’re all the best of friends! I mean, take a look at that little gang!’

He pointed towards the far corner

of the lounge. A group of hyenas were sharing a laugh with an antelope.

‘Just an hour ago, they were out on location, coming to blows for the cameras,’ said Adrian the Hippo. ‘But the moment David shouted “Cut!” they stopped, and were congratulating each other on their performances. Believe me, you can’t survive in this business without a real sense of teamwork.’

At this point, I spotted Sir David himself near the entrance, congratulating a crocodile and a wildebeest on the day’s shoot. ‘You really looked as if you were going for him!’ he told the crocodile, who laughed selfdeprecatingly.

‘In fact, we’re old mates,’ the wildebeest chipped in. ‘We first met on the set of Out Of Africa with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, lovely guy. Do you know Bobby?’

In make-up, I came upon a young elephant, Ellie, sitting in front of the mirror. ‘For today’s shoot I’m playing an elderly elephant, so they need me to look suitably lined,’ she told me.

As we spoke, Sally – a make-up artiste who has worked with the likes of TV legends Joan Collins and Cap’n Birdseye – was applying extra wrinkles all over Ellie’s body, a job she expected to take three hours or more.

Alongside Ellie was Leo the Lion, veteran of more than 30 wildlife documentaries. ‘To be brutally honest, I’m basically playing myself, so I don’t require much make-up, other than a light dusting of powder and perhaps the merest touch of eyeliner,’ he explained. ‘But I do insist that my mane is at its best, and that involves endless blow-drying and back-combing. One owes it to one’s fans.’

PETER COOK’S LATE NIGHT TARTAN TEASE

EVERYONE who knew Peter Cook likes to boast about it. It was, I suppose, a bit like knowing God.

So here goes my boast. Like a lot of people, I used to receive telephone calls from Peter Cook at unlikely times of the day and night.

One of his running jokes was to keep me up to date with the ever more successful career of the other Craig Brown, the then Scottish football manager who shares my name. Peter Cook had suffered a similar fate. Over lunch in an Australian restaurant, he once told me that at some time in the early 1980s, when his career was at its lowest ebb, his press agency had sent him the largest packet of newspaper cuttings he had ever received.

Imagining there must have been a sudden explosion in his popularity, he eagerly opened the package, only to find that all the cuttings referred to the Cambridge Rapist Peter Samuel Cook, who had brought terror to the university city in the mid-1970s.

Other celebrities would have been mortified to find their careers overtaken by a serial rapist; but Peter was thrilled to bits. He was a man who started haemorrhaging ambition in his 20s and never stopped.

Extracted from Haywire: The Best Of Craig Brown, published by Fourth Estate at £25. To order a copy for £22.50, go to mailshop. co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937 by December 23; p&p is free on orders over £20.