Satire's brightest star - Part 3

As a most unusual and unlikely gloom settles on Private Eye's offices my memory skips back 30 years to the table at the Coach and Horses pub where the staff of the new magazine gathered each lunch-time.
"This is Peter Cook," Richard Ingrams was saying and we shook hands. The conversation was stilted, almost formal, until suddenly something quite mundane seemed to click in Peter's mind and he said something ridiculous. We all laughed. The laughter seemed to jolt him out of his reverie. His eyes sparkled, his face broke into a mighty grin and he was off, leaping from one glorious fantasy to another, while the laughter grew, sucked in the entire pub, inspired him yet again and grew again. I was working for the Sun up the road. Every morning I scuttled through my work in the hope that I might inhale another gale of that infectious laughter.

The infectious and collective nature of that laughter explains a lot about Private Eye's success. People still ask: "Who writes that stuff?" There must, it is assumed, be one author, a single genius. The answer is always the same: "They all do." "They" write collectively, sparking each other off with their laughter. We socialists are always told: "You can't write by committee"; yet from long happy years revelling to the laughter of this most productive committee, I know you can.

Just as Peter Cook was at his best when others were laughing at him, so the Eye's best satire developed out of communal laughter. Peter made his name on TV and film, but he was funniest when he was unrehearsed. At a rather sombre 1986 Eye banquet to say goodbye to Richard Ingrams in 1986, Cook rose at the end with nothing in his hand but the menu. He proceeded to read the menu out, commenting at length on the origin of the potatoes and the sprouts, before long all of us were weeping with laughter. Peter was a keen observer of what was going on in the world. He was suspicious of rulers of every description, but in particular he detested the secrecy, pomposity and hypocrisy which sustains them. His portrait of Harold MacMillan in Beyond The Fringe set the tone for the irreverence of the time, the impatience with old values and dithering, greedy Tory politicians.

When I asked him tentatively if he would open an Anti-Nazi League sports afternoon, he jumped at the chance. After a gracious - rather too gracious - opening speech, he spent the afternoon trying, without success, but with all the fanaticism which he invested in a lifetime's supporting Tottenham Hotspur, to win a five-a-side football competition. Peter was also that rare creature - indeed in my philosophy the creature does not exist, so he proved me wrong - the enlightened proprietor. He saved and sustained Private Eye more than once but never gorged himself on it, still less interfered in it.

I recall one dreadful evening where Ken Tynan and Jonathan Miller savaged us for our connections with Private Eye. Many of their angry criticisms were justified, but they didn't seem to understand, as Peter Cook did, that Private Eye is free publishing; indeed it is perhaps the only genuine example of regular free publishing in postwar Britain. Peter stuck to his guns, constantly rebuffing his friends' demands to curb the Eye's more unfair attacks.

They are meeting now downstairs to decide what to write in the Eye about the death of the real Lord Gnome. But I'm quickly comforted by the certainty that if Peter Cook had been asked to comment on his death, he would have made a joke about it.

Paul Foot