I love to play an absolute bastard.
After all, I've had 55 years'research

Peter Cook on the role which tempted him into his first TV drama

Peter Cook appears to operate on a slower and more laconic time scale to the rest of working world. He has yet to reset his clocks after the end of British summertime, his wristwatch having abandoned him, presumably in disgust.

But he has managed to summon the energy to rise from his self-confessed slothful existence to play a conman in ITV's Gone To Seed, the first television comedy-drama series in his chequered career.

As Wesley Willis, a viper in a well-cut suit who steals a family's inheritance, he is convincingly evil. 'I loved playing an absolute bastard,' says Cook, adopting his trademark adenoidal rasp. 'After all, I have had 55 years of research.

It was 12 weeks of continuous labour, which is unusual for me. I Haven't done much of that in my time. It was quite funny, if not in my usual line. It arrived out of the blue and although I hadn't done anything like it before, I thought: "Why not?"

I also got to spend a couple of episodes in a wheelchair, which was very restful. I'd always fancied myself as Raymond Burr and it gave me a chance to be Ironside for a while.'

Cook relishes his indolent lifestyle, despite the obvious ravages of time - the thickened waistline, jowled jaw and whispy hair. 'I occasionally suggest a fitness regime to myself but I don't mean it. TV widens you by about four feet anyway.'

He whiles away his time improving his golf handicap, currently a creditable 16, sampling the world's sunspots and occasionally putting pen to paper. And he is used to being compared with his former partner Dudley Moore and coming off worst.

While Moore used their Sixties show, Not Only But Also, and the repartee of their Derek and Clive live act as a springboard to Hollywood fame, Peter Cook didn't. He did very little that was visible to the casual observer.

Though for more than two decades the driving force behind Private Eye, the satirical magazine in which he is a 70 percent shareholder, he has remained a shadowy influence. His screen appearances are rare, often fleeting, and more than occasionally in dreadful productions. None of which seems to bother him.

'I am the most hardworking of men,' he laughs. 'In fact, I am indolent to the point of doing absolutely nothing. In an ideal world, I would have liked to have been born enormously rich, working when I felt like it.'

'I've always been lazy and disliked anything that's too much like hard work. But 90 percent of the point of all things, particularly when it comes to television, is turning up, and I am never lazy in my work. I certainly don't fall asleep, even if work doesn't agree with my constitution.

'I've done lots of trash, but nothing I'd say I regret.' Although he conceded that Supergirl, the film in which he played a leather-clad warlock called Nigel, was pretty awful. 'But most of the things have been fun.'

His friendship with Dudley Moore is evidently as strong as ever. He says: 'I have spent a lot of time working in America, and have enjoyed it, but I wouldn't want to stay there forever. Dudley and I spent five years working on stage shows and living there and I'm sure the only reason he stayed on was because he met Tuesday Weld. He would have returned to England if he hadn't married her.

'But he's the sort of person who's happy wherever he is, as long as he's got a house to live in and a piano.

'I enjoyed New York terrifically in the early Sixties, at the time of Beyond The Fringe. They understood the humour. It would have been nice if our TV stuff had gone to America - Monty Python was probably the first English comedy series to do so and I think we would have got on as well as they did.

A lot of the television work we did was accidentally wiped out years ago, but what's left is good. Dud and I still do the occasional thing together, like Comic Relief. He's coming over next week and we'll drift happily into our usual coarse badinage, as we always do.'

As a child he travelled across the world with his mother and father, who was in the Colonial Service. 'Travelling shaped my personality. We were always visiting different places and I loved it. My ideal job is to have a film come up at some faraway location and then stay on for a while. I like to different things all the time.

'I took exams for the Diplomatic Service after university - we'd run out of colonies by then and I still fancied seeing the world. I think I would have made a quite good diplomat. Being funny is sure to be a help in those circles.'

Thanks to a degree that was not quite up to scratch, Cook abandoned his plans for a diplomatic career and dabbled in various jobs, including a spell as an advertising agency copywriter. Beyond The Fringe, which ran in the West End for three years, propelled him into showbuisness and kept him there.

Being a famous face is, he says, rather enjoyable. 'I've got nothing against it. In fact it's usually very pleasant. I've only been beaten up once and that was on the terraces of Old Trafford for wearing the wrong team's scarf.

'My wife is completely unfussed about my fame, though. After all, I was famous when she met me. These days she rather enjoys it.'

She is Malaysian-born Lin Chong, his third wife and his girlfriend for nine years before they finally married. He met his first wife, Wendy Snowden, when she was an art student in Cambridge.

Seven years later after their New York wedding, in 1971, they were divorced. They had two daughters, Lucy, now 28 and Daisy, 27, whom he prefers not to discuss. 'They are happy and healthy and have nothing to do with showbuisness.'

After marrying his second wife, actress Judy Huxtable, in 1973, they conducted a long-distance relationship, she enjoying the rural life at their country house in Porlock, Somerset and him holed up in a Hampstead coach house.
It didn't survive. But he is keen to scotch stories that he continues his arm-lengths approach with Lin.

'I most certainly don't live aloe. She just has her own flat nearby. In fact, she has just bought a new place that is even closer. Living alone - that's just mischief making.

'I met my wife at a party 12 years ago. She was in the property business - well she still is, but everyone is now loosely working in the property industry. I try out my jokes on her. Either she's a very good actress or she finds them very funny.'

Private Eye has proved the enduring love of his life, despite the traumas of frequent defeats in libel cases that have brought the magazine to the brink of bankruptcy.

'We have survived, thanks to the remarkable generosity of our readers and scraping along with what little we had left. But I have no regrets. I have enjoyed it from the word go and to give in and dilute what we print would defeat the point of it.'

Cook believes television comedy has changed little over the years. 'I enjoy Harry Enfield's show, Blackadder and Have I Got News For You because, quite simply, they are funny. We are always particularly nostalgic for comedy.

'There were a lot of comedy shows that were rubbish and have been forgotten. And just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good.'

He admits to nostalgia for the years with Dudley Moore. 'It was funny because we are so very different. I'm from public school and he's working class, I'm from the seaside of Torquay, he's from Dagenham, I'm tall and he's not.

'When it works, and there's no one better than him to have by your side, work feels effortless, no trouble at all.'

Jill Parsons