Satire's brightest star - part 4

I first met Peter Cook in autumn, 1963, when Private Eye's circulation seemed to have drifted into an irreversible decline from 95,000 to around 15,000. Against this background, Peter Cook re-emerged as a central figure, and one who was, in some senses, to single-handedly alter the Eye's history. He had just been in America with his hugely successful review, Beyond The Fringe, and was bristling with self assurance and full of what seemed to me, as I was then a very junior satirist, an endless stream of extraordinary original ideas. I confess I was in awe of Peter at the time and remained in awe of him to the day he died. No other satirist I know had the ability to take an idea, no matter how mundane, and develop in into quite wonderful fantasy, while at the same time never losing the point. Peter's contribution to the Eye's revival is specific, and there is a precise moment when this change came about.

Pieces at the Eye are always written in concert, with two, three and even more contributors throwing in jokes, while someone writes them down in longhand.

On this occasion, Peter sat at a typewriter - the only machine in the office, as I recall - and off the top off his head, typed with one finger the opening chapter of a feature called Tales Of The Seductive Brethren. Over the months that the Eye ran the feature, Peter invented a range of characters (my favourite was a figure called the Clintisorit of Wintistoring) which gripped the readers' imagination, and the Tales became compulsive.

At the same time, Peter introduced the team of Barry Humphries and Nick Garland to the Eye. Barry wrote, and Garland drew the Adventures Of Barry McKenzie, which traced the adventures of an innocent Australian in Swinging London. This strip was an enormous hit and perhaps more than the tales, became the instrument in Private Eye's resurrection.

I became a close friend. Peter himself said that I was the only member of the editorial staff beside himself, who knew what a football looked like and had any interest in the world of popular culture. During a big fight or cup match on TV, he would ring me, or I him and we'd watch the contest in our own homes, while at the same time amusing each other with personal observations. This would have a particular poignancy, and more jokes if Spurs were playing - Peter was an avid Spurs fan.

It was during such TV phone-ins that more general jokes would come about. The only time I drew a cartoon with a caption by Peter, arose from such a bout of casual banter. Two men are talking in a pub. One says: "I'm writing a book." The other says: "Neither am I."

I last saw Peter just before Christmas. We had lunch and he spoke with tears in his eyes about his mother, who died last summer. He was in many ways more human than I had seen him at any time. Naturally we laughed a great deal and there was plenty of Cookish humour. But against that, he seemed to be harbouring something very deep and personal - perhaps it was a portent, perhaps he knew then more about the condition that was to kill him a month later.

I can't remember his last words to me, but he did say something I did not expect. In public, he was a vital and witty man, with a brain as sharp as a surgeon's, but what he said did not fit this image. He told me he had no bad friends. He hated no one and to his best knowledge, no one hated him. On the day he died, I think he would be astonished to know the deep love so many continue to feel for him as a man and for his towering genius as a satirist.

Barry Fantoni