Cook's Broth
Britain says farewell to the man who scourged its follies

Peter Cook was a connoisseur of the way in which the press treats a tragic death. He recognised the silly episode that becomes a man's defining characteristic. He could doubtless have predicted that almost every obituarist this morning would find a way to use the most famous line of his great character E.J.Thribb. And he would not have wished any of us to pass the opportunity by.

So then, for the last time, farewell then, Peter Cook, the man who brought together Macmillan, old macs and Dudley Moore in a way that created a new comedy for a generation. Millions around the world - not just the magazine Private Eye and its poet obituarist - owe a lasting debt to the man who kept tadpoles on his bed at school, was excused National Service because of an allergy to feathers, considered a career in the Foreign Office and then, as E.L.Wisty, the cloth-cap philosopher, or the ruder half of Derek and Clive, brought to humour a spontaneity, improvisation and mimicry that outraged, lacerated and inspired.

As inevitable as his "farewell then" yesterday were the comparisons between Cook and the fellow Cambridge Footlights graduates, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, who opened in the Fortune Theatre in 1961 and whose review, Beyond the Fringe, heralded a new golden age of satire. All three went on to greater heights in the theatre, the cinema or cultural politics. Peter Cook, the languid eccentric whose brilliant ad-libbing gave birth to sketches that fell ready-formed from his mouth, seemed left behind. Whereas in the late Sixties his influence was everywhere, more recently it has been hard to say what he did. He enjoyed an unhealthy lifestyle. He revived a few of his more manic characters in television guest appearances. He phoned up radio talk-ins as Scandinavian fishermen with complicated sex lives. He readily admitted to idleness. And he fended off, again and again, the suggestion that he envied Dudley Moore his Hollywood success - though he probably did.

Recognised by most as the most as the most inventive of the Fringe four, he achieved his comic apotheosis as the the other half of Pete and Dud in the television series Not Only But Also. But his persona as the prematurely aged bore masked a formidable comic energy. It was Peter Cook who gave satire a permanent foothold in Britain - through Private Eye, which he bought when its fortunes were precarious, and the inimitable London club which fostered the talents of John Bird, Eleanor Bron and John Fortune. He took British humour overseas - to Australia and New Zealand, where he offended more sensitive Antipodean souls and managed, usefully, to get himself banned from the radio, and to America, where he bought an off-Broadway theatre that soon folded.

A clowning friend of John Cleese and men who brought us Monty Python, it is from Cook that all post-Pythonesque humour traces direct descent - a genre, incredibly, so saleable that British humour has proved as big an export as it was in Chaplin's day. Peter Cook had something of the Hancock in his manic mood-swings, drinking and never fully realised talent. The tragi-comic is always the most comic. For the very last time, farewell, then.