For those old enough to remember Peter Cook and Dudley Moore do their comic routine on British TV and films.
Not only a comic genius ...
... but also the founder of a Soho venue where subversive humour flourished in the 1960s. And yesterday a plaque was finally unveiled in honour of Peter Cook and the Establishment Club. Andy McSmith reports
Monday, 16 February 2009
Peter Cook performs on stage at The Establishment
Club in London's Soho in the early 1960s
Aheritage plaque unveiled in honour of Peter Cook would not be complete without a joke. "Peter Cook 1937-1995, comedian and 'only twin', co-founded and ran the Establishment Club here 1961-1964", reads the green disk mounted on the wall of the building in Soho where he opened London's first satirical nightclub. Now the bar Zebrano's, the Establishment Club, which Cook opened with his business partner Nick Luard almost 50 years ago, was the realisation of the comedian's dream ever since his university days. This was the venue where a young Australian comic, Barry Humphries, first took to the stage as his alter-ego, Dame Edna Everage. Dudley Moore danced The Twist in the basement. It also revived the career of Frankie Howard.
Yesterday, a motley crew of family and friends, including fellow comedian Barry Cryer and a female Lord Mayor in turquoise tights gathered to honour Cook with his own plaque from the Heritage Foundation. One of the Bee Gees, Robin Gibb, was due to unveil the memorial but withdrew after newspaper revelations that he fathered a child with his housekeeper. The DJ Mike Read did the honours instead.
"Peter Cook recreated British humour as we know it. He can never be imitated or replaced," said Read. "We don't appreciate people until we lose them and that's a very British trait," added David Graham, of the Heritage Foundation. "I remember when Peter died. The next day the papers were full of what a great genius he was but why weren't they saying that when he was alive?"
Cook was the first and possibly the greatest of a long line of Oxford or Cambridge-educated comics that has included John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson and Stephen Fry. He formed a duo with an Oxbridge contemporary, Dudley Moore, who was his polar opposite. Cook was descended from colonial civil servants, was brought up by nannies, educated at public school and was over 6ft tall. Moore was 5ft with a club foot, brought up in Dagenham and educated at state school but secured a music scholarship to Oxford. He and Moore starred with Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett in the revue Beyond The Fringe, which Cook wrote in the year he graduated from Cambridge, and which kicked off the satire boom of the early 1960s. Its longest surviving feature is Private Eye magazine, which Cook part owned.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/news/not-only-a-comic-genius-1622997.htmlGreat video of Cook and Moore:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzazJqOV_Eg
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