Television - Andrew Billen on why the genius of Peter Cook should be viewed in context

The old familiar story of Peter Cook's fall was told with all the old familiar faces in Peter Cook: at a slight angle to the universe (28 December 9pm, BBC2). At the start of the hour were his peers Ned Sherrin and David Frost, Jonathan Miller and John Fortune. As his star fell, there came forth lesser beings such as Mel Smith, Clive Anderson and even Paul Jackson, who had booked him in the Eighties for Saturday Night Live. Even the programme's title, cribbed from Claud Cockburn's description of an Irish town, was overfamiliar and, like most of the contributors, seemed to get Cook slightly wrong: there was, surely, nothing slight about him.

Only one talking head gave us something original: a blowsy actress named Brenda Vaccaro, who had slept with him. I couldn't think how she had made the final cut until, towards the end, she showed us a photomontage he had sent her, a selection of Polaroids of naked women on to which (the photos, not the women) he had extinguished the butts of cigarettes. The result was a disturbing sequence of disfigurement worthy of Francis Bacon.

If this was a clue that the thrice-married Cook was a secret misogynist or sadist, Lucy Kenwright, the producer of the documentary, did not pursue it. The montage just sat there amid the tributes, a turd on the shag pile of a luxury-feel documentary, proving only, perhaps, that Cook retained until the end the urge to shock.

It was one of several programmes about Cook over the holidays. On Christmas Day, Channel 4 charted the break-up of the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore double act through their witless Derek and Clive albums. Radio 2 presented a two-hour tribute on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. And after the documentary, BBC2 broadcast Peter Cook: a posthumorous tribute, in which Harry Enfield, Angus Deayton and many others recreated Cook sketches. The same night, BBC4 complemented the schedule with a compilation of the best of Not Only. . . But Also from 1975 and the recent extraordinary Omnibus documentary about Moore's musicianship.

Such a coincidence of scheduling usually indicates that there is an anniversary in the offing, which I vaguely thought was of 1963, the zenith of British satire as well as the year of Profumo, Kennedy RIP and the Beatles' first LP. In fact, by 1963 Cook was already in decline. On Broadway with Beyond the Fringe, he had missed the launch of That Was The Week That Was - and Britain had accepted as the king of satire his pale imitator David Frost. By autumn, his club The Establishment had been sold and his show business magazine, Scene, had folded. The documentary pointed out that the pilot of Not Only . . . But Also the next year was actually a vehicle for Dudley Moore and billed as "Not only Dudley Moore . . . but also Diahann Carroll, Peter Cook and John Lennon".

By then Cook's greatness was established, although the clips from his sketches - "I could have been a judge but I didn't have the Latin", a one-legged Tarzan and so on - did little to confirm it, probably because we have seen them so many times. Sherrin got closest to defining the Cook gang's achievement when he said that they had been funny about more demanding subjects than comedians had hitherto chosen.

Cook's ambitions remained obscure, however, and we were never sure how seriously he took them. Some contributors claimed he had an eye on Shaftesbury Avenue and was less keen on the truly satirical aspects of Beyond the Fringe, such as the "Aftermyth of War" sketch, than his collaborators Miller, Moore and Alan Bennett. Others praised his bravery for attacking Macmillan's "fatuous grin" to his face when he came to see the revue.

As for his later years, no one could agree on whether he begrudged Moore's Hollywood success. One theory had it that Cook had all along used the double act to torture Moore, which later continued through Cook deliberately getting drunk before performances. In Australia, in Behind the Fridge in the Seventies, Moore could be heard ranting "the cunt is drunk" and swearing never to work with him again. In return, Cook referred to Moore as "that cripple" or "that dwarf".

Miller claimed that our "promiscuous" interpretations of Cook stem from there being so little of the real man in his comic personae. Yet the documentary showed there was quite a bit of Cook up there, first in E L Wisty, which he himself said aired his manic-depressive side, and later in his failed football manager on Clive Anderson Talks Back. A call to the Clive Bull phone-in show on LBC as the Norwegian fisherman Sven concluded: "Look, it is up to me to say I am alive. I am a man. I have a mackintosh. I feel a lot more upbeat."

When he was once asked about failing to fulfil his potential, Cook replied so forcefully that his interviewer started backwards, as if expecting to be hit. But his potential clearly was fulfilled, just very early. There was no puzzle to unravel if you looked at the programme's chorus line. John Cleese was funny in the Seventies. Clive Anderson fitted the Eighties. Harry Enfield was big in the Nineties. They are all hard to watch now. Comedians have their time and Cook's was the early Sixties. As for why he pissed away his remaining talent - well, he was a pisshead, wasn't he? It's what they do.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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