Peter Cook – Archive Article
December 13, 2008

RADIO 2GB NEWS COMMENTARY BROADCAST ON FRIDAY NOVEMBER 5 1999 ON RADIO 2GB’S “BRIAN WILSHIRE PROGRAMME” AT 9 PM, AND ON NOVEMBER 7 1999 ON “SUNDAY NIGHT LIVE” AT 10.30 PM.

Peter Cook was one of the funniest people in Britain in recent decades. But he also had a terrible life as an alcoholic.

Harry Thompson, a former BBC colleague, has written an excellent book on Peter Cook, “Peter Cook: A Biography.” He recalls Cook’s slide into alcoholism and his eventual death from it.

Peter Cook was born into an English middle class family, with a tradition of civil servants working in the colonies. He was educated at a private school and then Cambridge. As the book notes, one reason that Oxford and Cambridge have produced so many political satirists is that their undergraduates come face to face with their future leaders at an early age, and realize then how many of them are socially retarded people who join the debating societies and campus political groups in order to find friends. Cook dropped his interest in politics and never revealed what, if any, political philosophy he had.

Instead, he made his name initially from political satire. While still at Cambridge he was recognized as an outstanding comedian and he was writing material for London productions while still an undergraduate. His undergraduate friends included David Frost and Trevor Nunn. The next breakthrough was the Beyond the Fringe production with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett.

The rest, as they say, is history. His partnership with Dudley Moore, albeit a very stormy one at the end, is one of the most well known acts in British theatrical and television history. He also owned the Private Eye satirical magazine, which provided an important opportunity for Barry Humphries’ talent.

But also before he graduated, there was the foundation of another theme in his life. He visited his family, now stationed in North Africa, where he contracted jaundice. His liver was badly damaged and this meant that he would never again be able to drink large amounts of alcohol without seriously endangering his health.

Despite the risk he knew he was running, Cook continued to drink. In November 1970 he was banned from driving a car for a year because of drunken driving. Throughout the 1970s, Cook had severe alcoholic occurrences, including when he was supposed to be appearing on the stage. In Melbourne in 1971, he fell fully clothed into the hotel swimming pool. Dudley Moore commented “To my mind he became an alcoholic from that moment on”.

The tragedy is that there was no shortage of people and organizations to help Peter Cook. But the first stage of recovery from alcoholism is the admission by the victim that they have a problem. Cook was never quite able to make that admission. Ironically, his Private Eye magazine was no longer put together in a London pub because “most of the rest of the staff had been forced to give up alcohol on medical advice”.

Peter Cook died in January 1995 of liver damage. He was aged only 57. As Barry Humphries said: “If Peter had managed to stop drinking he would have been a thousand times funnier, and right now he would have been absolutely at the height of his powers”.