Television
Andrew Billen - Double trouble
Published 01 January 2005
Television - The cruelty behind a comedy duo is made painfully clear. By Andrew Billen
Not Only But Always (Channel 4)
The problem Peter Cook and Dudley Moore shared was one that does not usually afflict performers. They did not take themselves seriously enough. So although it initially seems tricksy of this film to seat Pete and Dud, in their trademark macs and caps, in a cinema watching their own biopic, it is appropriate. Through their flat-capped alter egos, Pete and Dud, Cook and Moore used to ridicule those who aspired to appreciate art (the puzzlingly unfunny Michelangelo cartoons in the National Gallery, for example), but in telling their lives, Terry Johnson, the writer-director of Not Only But Always (30 December, 9pm), has managed, close enough, to make a work of art himself. It is as well that Pete and Dud turn up to mock.
Everyone of a certain generation can "do" Pete and Dud - the voices at least, and probably the wistful fantasising, too. What you would expect to be harder is to find actors able to impersonate the real Cook and Moore in their progression from student promise to boozy, foreshortened middle age. Yet, within minutes, we forget we are watching actors at all. Rhys Ifans produces an extraordinary performance as Cook, reproducing not only the fake comedy voices that soon supplanted his own, but his friable prettiness, the prissy messing with eyeliner. As Moore, Aidan McArdle is his equal, turning chipmunk teeth to the camera for that extra laugh and throwing short-arsed tantrums that never fail to leave Cook quaking (with laughter).
The non-U accents they adopted in their most famous sketches can look like mere snobbery now. It was worse than that: a personal vendetta Cook waged against the Dagenham grammar school boy. That the public school boy targeted his partner's weak point was, however, also a disguised compliment. As students, Cook was the funniest guy in any room, able by extemporising on the contents of his matchbox to seduce the waitress of his choice. On being introduced to the other members of the Oxbridge revue Beyond the Fringe, he was immediately able to perceive where the real threat lay. Alan Bennett would ever be the reluctant performer, while Jonathan Miller understood humour perfectly without having a sense of humour himself. "In your false modesty, you have defined the essence of performance," he tells Bennett. Cook and Moore simultaneously smell a nasty essence in the room.
Having identified his rival, Cook sought to destroy him. The one-legged Tarzan sketch caused Moore, who had to keep a leg tied up, physical pain. It was Cook's commentary on the club foot that Moore was born with. In rehearsals, Moore asks why the sketches belittle him. Cook replies: "I don't think it's possible to belittle a club-footed dwarf whose only talent is to play 'Chopsticks' in the style of Debussy." "Do you call that satire?" asks Moore. "No," Cook replies, "that's cruelty."
In the end, there were only two things Cook's talent could not deal with: his own failure and Moore's success. His anaesthetic was booze, which only made the failures more frequent. A binge nearly causes him to miss the Broadway press night of Behind the Fridge (the critics, to Moore's despair, mistake his incapacity for genius), and on stage, the drunk Cook literally leans on the one-legged Tarzan for support. Moore emerges as a saint for putting up with so much before buggering off to Hollywood without him.
In revenge, as Moore's first hit, 10, is premiered, Cook releases tapes of their obscene, privately recorded Derek and Clive routines. To his dismay, they add to Moore's credibility in the Blake Edwards set and Moore returns to record another album. Even he, however, is silenced as Cook improvises about ejaculating over the pope's dead body and, worse, about kicking a "cunt's cunt" but managing only to "scuff her knickers". Cook's humour has mutated beyond cruelty to despair.
The structural problem of Not Only But Always is that it is so little about Moore that it could be called Not Even But Always (the title comes from their show Not Only . . . But Also . . . which was originally conceived as a vehicle for Moore). We glimpse Cook's romantic relationships, particularly his guilt at abandoning his daughters. Lin, his widow, emerges as a temporary saviour who encourages his last, triumphant TV appearance with Clive Anderson. However, there is no getting away from the fact that most of his final performances were delivered as Sven the fisherman on Clive Bull's overnight phone-in on LBC. By basing the drama on Harry Thompson's biography of Cook, Johnson at least spares us the equally tragic decline of Moore: Arthur, The Muppets, his own fruitless attempts to find domestic stability. Nor do we witness his terrible death from progressive supra- nuclear palsy. I remember him on the news responding to Cook's death in 1995. He sounded drunk. If only. Seven years later, aged only 66, he, too, was dead.
Yet Johnson's mocked time-plan allows us to end on an earlier reconciliation. "I was wondering if you would like your doorstep darkened," says Moore, turning up at Cook's home in Hampstead. Soon they are on the roof terrace, doing their funny voices, making each other laugh, unable to take their fraught relationship seriously. For a biopic about a partnership rooted in hate, there is an awful lot of love going around.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
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