Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (25 page)

The former was a pastiche of
Candid Camera
, the routine which came back to haunt Cooper when Brad Ashton spotted it on American television. Set in a sport’s shop, the buffalo refers to the buffalo’s head in which the camera is hidden. Audiences also have to imagine a tennis racquet containing a secret microphone. Tommy plays the unsuspecting customer who enters wanting to exchange a pair of tennis socks, but who becomes increasingly riled as with each exchange he is told to ‘look at the buffalo’: ‘Once and for all, I didn’t come
here to look at the buffalo. I don’t like buffaloes. I don’t want anything to do with buffaloes.’ Things only become worse when he is told to talk into the tennis racquet at the same time. Tommy is dispatched to the cashier and the shop assistant eats a clove of garlic in his absence. This is not the most subtle of routines. Tommy returns and things get further out of hand. In the tradition of the programme, the salesman eventually concedes what has been happening. As the news sinks in, he cannot believe the change in his good fortune, delirious at the fact that he is on television: ‘You’ve been having me on then. This is a joke. I’m on TV?’ It had to be seen. The great Swiss clown, Grock had a catchphrase, ‘
Sans
blague!
’ which translated as ‘Get away!’ It would have been perfect here, had Cooper’s expression not said it all.

‘Hello, Joe’ teased the limits of reality even more so, as Tommy is interrupted on stage by what appears to be a distraught refugee from a shipwreck. Peering into the horizon he spots his imaginary long lost friend: ‘Hello, Joe.’ At first Cooper is puzzled, but is soon drawn into the fantasy, addressing the invisible man himself and sharing an invisible drink for old time’s sake, even brushing down his lapel when it splashes against him: ‘Careful – you spilt it all over me!’ The situation builds melodramatically with the intruder shooting Joe, the stage becoming a pool of blood and Tommy escaping to the refuge of a stool like a young girl fleeing a mouse. Tommy then spots the equally invisible Fred: ‘Put that gun down, Fred. I’ve got a knife. Take that, take that, take that.’ He ‘stabs’ him three times accompanied by three rim shots. Tommy is miraculously confused by the sound effect: ‘How come I shot him with a knife?’ Two invisible corpses now litter the floor as gingerly Tommy tiptoes his way over them. His mime was so good you could almost see the blood on the stage. The sketch took the conceptual humour that often crept
into his act – ‘My wife got this fashion book and she opened the page and she said “I want that.” I said, “What?” She said, “I want that fur coat.” So I cut it out and gave it to her’ – into another dimension.

For
Blue Magic
, which ran for thirty-eight weeks, Tommy had Shirley Bassey, scarce out of Tiger Bay, as a co-star. The second ‘Hats’ routine received its full dress West End première and his salary advanced considerably to £350.00 a week. However, during the latter part of the decade relations had become somewhat strained between the Delfont office and Ferrie. There were the trivial matters where Miff had to intervene on Tommy’s behalf, most often his obsession with who paid for the eggs and the stooges used in his additional spots. In fairness to Bernie, he almost invariably picked up the tab for the latter, but Cooper still thought he was getting a bad deal. The cost of forwarding telegrams from one venue to another on the Delfont circuit became an even more unreasonable
bête
noir
, to the point where Tommy forbade the practice rather than dip into his own pocket. In the run-up to the 1957 London Palladium pantomime, for which Delfont leased his contract to Val Parnell and Moss Empires, Miff put Bernie in an invidious position by asking him to intervene between himself and producer, Robert Nesbitt, when a clash occurred a few days before opening between a high profile cabaret booking, for which Cooper was already contracted, and a full scale dress rehearsal called for that night.

Miff pleaded he had no idea an evening dress rehearsal would be held three whole nights before opening. Then, just at the point he is asking for favours from Delfont, he sends him a letter hauling him over the coals for allowing his client to participate in a BBC sound broadcast from the Palladium to publicize the pantomime without his knowledge. In a telephone exchange Bernie deemed that Miff ‘was making a
nuisance’ of himself. In his precious manner Miff retaliated that he was in no way going to deviate ‘from the usual way in which I conduct my business,’ in which everything appertaining to his client had to be drawn to his full attention before a decision was made. The schoolmaster tendency was showing. These were hardly the circumstances in which to plead with Delfont, in the same letter, to try again to secure Tommy’s release for the cabaret. The all powerful Nesbitt won the day, as he always would, and Bernie felt bruised.

Further cracks began to appear in the relationship in the autumn of 1958, Delfont claiming – probably with some justification – that Miff did not discuss things sufficiently with his artist. The telephone log for 7 October records: ‘Blew his top!
He
(Delfont) is going to say where he will work. He either does six television shows or none at all. Would like to be released from contract. Banged phone down.’ The six shows were a series of programmes,
Cooper’s Capers
, that Delfont had decided to produce for ATV, the company run by his brother, Lew Grade, in a display of one-upmanship over rival broadcaster, Associated-Rediffusion, which had featured Cooper in a series during the previous year, and the BBC which was showing interest at this time. Whether Cooper did not wish to record a series at all at this stage of his career or whether he thought he should be entitled to twelve shows as in the previous A-RTV run is not known. Ferrie found himself dealing less and less with Bernie direct, more and more with his two lieutenants, Keith Devon and Billy Marsh. Indeed, it was Devon who called with the news that Tommy was going into
Blue Magic
, a peremptory month before the opening.

On the back of Cooper’s success at the Prince of Wales matters were smoothed over. As Max Miller once said in another context, ‘People have a remarkable way of forgetting when you make money for them.’ In August 1959 Bernie and
Miff were back on telephone terms, the impresario wanting to discuss Cooper on the basis of a £350.00 guarantee (his enhanced salary for
Blue Magic
) with the chance to make £500.00 for a guarantee of 40–45 working weeks. The offer does not appear to have been taken up.
Blue Magic
closed towards the end of 1959. After a short pantomime season in
Puss in
Boots with Edmund Hockridge, Derek Roy, and Petula Clark in Southampton, Cooper entered into an uncertain six-month period of stray cabaret bookings and the occasional television guest spot before opening for the summer as second top to Frankie Vaughan at Brighton Hippodrome.

The institution of weekly variety was fading fast and Delfont would have to concede that in the restricted theatrical environment of British show business there was no way he could monopolize the Cooper career in the Sixties as he had to a large extent in the Fifties. This did not stop discernible unrest when an offer to play the Palladium with Cliff Richard during the summer and autumn of 1960 was seen to clash with a commitment made by Miff for a Christmas season for Howard and Wyndham co-starring with Jimmy Logan and Eve Boswell at the Manchester Opera House. On 23 March Miff recorded an exchange with Billy Marsh: ‘Thought Mr Delfont had first refusal. Very upset, etc. (Delfont in the background nattering)’ Marsh threatened taking the matter to solicitors and a furious Delfont rang Stewart Cruikshank, the boss of the Howard and Wyndham circuit, who reported back to Miff: ‘Said Delfont came on rather excited, but as far as he was concerned he has no right to think he owns every act in the country.’ The upset didn’t stop Tommy playing the 1960 summer season in Brighton for Delfont, nor a seventeen week run for him in Torquay the following summer. But Miff sensed that to sustain the quality of Cooper’s bookings he had to diversify with other managements, a fact that deep down the impresario to whom
Tommy owed so much must have understood. It should be added that his salary for the Howard and Wyndham show was
£
515.00 a week, giving Miff the opening to negotiate a percentage deal over and above the Delfont standard £350.00 for the Torquay season.

Cooper would continue to work successfully for Delfont for the next decade, but only on an intermittent basis, most notably in two seasons with Frankie Vaughan, with whom he achieved a considerable rapport. Tommy idolized this most British of troubadours and his blundering burlesque of Vaughan’s song and dance act – a melange of every gag with a cane and a top hat ever conceived – became another staple of his repertoire. Not surprisingly, it became even more effective in close proximity to the elegance of the original when they shared the bill together. The 1964 London Palladium summer revue, Startime also featured Cilla Black, The Four-most, and the world’s greatest juggler, Francis Brunn. It broke all records, until Ken Dodd made his single-handed assault on the venue the following year. The success of the Frankie and Tommy combo was repeated for Bernie in a short ten-week season at the Bournemouth Winter Gardens in the summer of 1967. In the three years his salary had shot up from £400.00 to £800.00, indicative of the steep rise in his popularity on the back of his growing television success.

Throughout the new decade Cooper would play seasonal shows for all the top entertainment managements, including Harold Fielding, Tom Arnold, S. H. Newsome, George and Alfred Black, and Richard Stone. It is significant, however, that not until he worked for the latter two, at Blackpool Winter Gardens during the summer of 1968 and at Scarborough’s Floral Hall the following year respectively, did Tommy achieve sole star billing above the title of the show in which he appeared. There had been an occasional week in variety when
he had topped the bill, and a stray pantomime here or there, but they were the exceptions. At all other times he was featured as mere second top or in a co-starring role alongside names like Nina and Frederik, Jewel and Warriss, Millicent Martin, Ken Platt, Alfred Marks, Beryl Reid, Hylda Baker, even Freddie and the Dreamers, in addition to those already mentioned. Even shared co-star billing seldom led to his being featured in the all-important spot prior to the finale. By contrast, from the mid Fifties there had been no question over the sole drawing power of many of his comedy contemporaries, names like Norman Wisdom, Tony Hancock, Al Read, Harry Secombe, Max Bygraves, and a little later Dodd and Charlie Drake. Besides, of them all, only Dodd would have been strong enough to follow Cooper on an all-comedy bill. Tommy’s progress to such star status entailed a steady climb, even though he was firmly established as a national figure assured of instant recognition by this time. In the early days part of the situation may have been contingent upon his being perceived as a novelty act, but he soon outgrew that. The state of affairs throws light both on his opinion of his own talents and on the possible dexterity of his manager and agent in manipulating his career to their maximum advantage.

For all his ups and downs with Miff, billing never appears to have been an issue with Tommy. When I drew the matter to the attention of his daughter, Vicky, she was not surprised, adding that her father never had a high opinion of his talents in the first place. The fact that he always stole the show appears to have been irrelevant: ‘He never thought of himself as being good enough to be top! He always thought the others were so much better than him. And I think it comforted him to know that he did not have the responsibility of the name billed above him.’ This would have explained his resistance to forcing the issue with Ferrie when it came to top of the bill status. The
situation was epitomized by a television scenario which took place in the mid Sixties when ABC Television hit upon the bright idea of featuring Frankie Howerd, Bruce Forsyth and Tommy together in a major Christmas special. All three comics enjoyed approximately equal stature at the time. The broadcaster knew it was taking on a major feat of diplomacy by even thinking about it, not least because two of them, Cooper and Forsyth, shared the same agent. In the Thirties a similar tussle over billing had resulted in Ethel Merman and Jimmy Durante having their names crisscrossed on a Broadway poster, with the proviso that the posters were changed monthly with the names swapped around. Part of Cooper’s popularity in the business always resided in his basic humility. Barry Cryer testifies to the fact that he had no malice, no sense of competition towards other comics. When the ABC show hit the schedules the billing told the same story, ‘Frankie and Bruce’s Christmas Show, starring Bruce Forsyth and Frankie Howerd, with guest star Tommy Cooper.’ If Tommy was happy with such an arrangement, why should Miff have cause for concern? Besides when it came to his own series on television there was never any question that he was the star.

A cynical view could suggest that this was exactly the situation that most suited Ferrie at another level. Bigger theatrical billing at an earlier time in Tommy’s career may have caused it to nose-dive prematurely in a way that led to a drop in income, thus giving Cooper justifiable excuse to walk away from their sole agency agreement, according to which Miff was obliged to maintain the level of his client’s earnings from year to year. When one studies the pattern of his annual income from the beginning of the Fifties, Miff achieved his obligation with the resourcefulness of the best Chancellor of the Exchequer this country never had. The figures that follow – and similar amounts to be specified later – are based on
documents in my possession that were kept scrupulously by Miff over the years, but are not officially certified sums: