Fuck Yeah! Peter Cook

The only Peter Cook that matters.

[flowerpowergoth]

Does the Dudley Moore and Peter Cook fandom still exist? I’m new here!

[fuckyeahpetercook]

I've been on Tumblr since 2009 (I'm old here!) and I'm really glad to say that in all these years, Peter Cook and/or Dudley Moore pop up in posts more than I might have guessed! Welcome to the fold! :)

[flowerpowergoth]

Bedazzled 1967 fanart

[fuckyeahpetercook]

Black and white and cool all over - Dudley Moore and Peter Cook are quite the pair! Ah, this is wonderful work!!

[tomblesabuckets]

any movie recs like bedazzled? watched it recently n was sad peter cook hasnt done a lot of other films

So glad to see another bedazzled fan! Unfortunately I can’t think of many movies that are similar, it’s one of a kind (at least as far as I know). You might like Hopscotch (1980) which I think has a similar vibe. In the British comedy world you might want to check out A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Also if you just like Peter Cook I think all his appearances on the Dick Cavett show are hilarious, there are clips on YouTube. Thanks for giving me a chance to talk about this stuff!

[fuckyeahpetercook]

Reblogging for the great question and answer!!

If I may, I gotta interject to spread the good word about an excellent "Peter Cook & Dudley Moore masterpost" by @notonlybutalso! I'm not sure how many of the links are still accessible, but it's at least a wonderful starting point if you're looking for Cook (and Moore!) media to enjoy!

[kingsnorthportfolio]

The Establishment

[fuckyeahpetercook]

It's a great Peter Cook-adjacent piece! A fantastic rendering of John Fortune, Eleanor Bron, John Bird, and Jeremy Geidt - The Establishment Club's resident "The Establishment" comedy players. (As has been previously established, Peter Cook established The Establishment!)

[davidhudson]

Dudley Moore, April 19, 1935 – March 27, 2002.

With Peter Cook. 1973 photo by Jack Mitchell.

[fuckyeahpetercook]

Solo or "but also," tickling the ivories or tickling our funnybones - Dudley Moore was a true treasure! Celebrating him today on his birthday!

[charlie-behind-the-sofa]

4 young men, the rise of satirical comedy in 1960s Britain.

[fuckyeahpetercook]

The comedy gang's all here in these awesome illustrations!!

First up - the Beyond The Fringe troupe makes an appearance, starring Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller!

Then, a doodle-y Dudley!

Finally, it's a fine pair - Dudley Moore and Peter Cook! Here, we see Moore as the Dormouse (in 1972's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) and Cook as the Mad Hatter (from Alice in Wonderland, the Jonathan Miller-directed 1966 TV play).

So cool!

[fuckyeahpetercook]

Hi, hi! Awesome blog you’ve got here!

I’m a very new Peter Cook fan and I was just wondering if you’d heard or seen anything about the pieces he wrote for the magazine “Punch” as a child (I believe a teenager) which was where his comedy career basically started…or this musical he wrote up, “Black and White Blues”.

These are more relics than anything, I was just curious about them LOL!

Hiya! Thank you, that's so kind to say!! And we're all about relics here, so all curiosity is welcome! :)

Sorry for how long this answer is, lol!

Punch stuff!

I couldn't remember coming across any actual Punch writing before, so I had a search. I was glad to see that the Internet Archive seems to have a gazillion (4,796 to be precise) results for the magazine, from 1841-1992, in its collection of the periodical; surely I could source a Cook contribution or two with a little sleuthing!

Unfortunately, from what I can tell, it looks like his writings were published in a section titled "Charivaria." A browse through some of the issues from the time period in which Cook would have been active seems to indicate that this portion of the magazine didn't include the names of the authors of the brief comedic blurbs. Darn!!

But! We do have some Cook quotes on his Punch pieces, even if determining which ones are his is pretty difficult.

Of his Punch contributions, Cook recalled in a November 1981 interview with TV Guide:

"Every week I'd send an item to Punch for a column called 'Charivaria,' and every week I'd get a check for five guineas - it came to about $30 in those days. I was very rich for a preadolescent. But then I was assailed by puberty, which sapped my penchant for writing 'Charivaria' in some mysterious way. I never sold another item to Punch after the age of 14."

Here's more Punch info, again from Cook himself! In a 1975 Studs Terkel interview with Cook and Dudley Moore during their Good Evening tour, Cook notes:

"I started writing professionally when I was about 13 for the English humorous magazine, humorous in quotes, Punch, and I used to send in little items and I got paid three guineas a time, and I thought, 'Well, if I can get in two items a week, I got a living.' I was very rich at school, and then when I was about 15, my comic invention for Punch dried up, in that none of my bits were accepted, which I later regarded as a compliment, because it's such a boring magazine."

(The full audio of that interview is available, as well as its transcript, on The WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive. A very neat thing, on a very neat archive!)

The Black and White Blues stuff!

And now we come to The Black and White Blues! Cook wrote and performed voices in this show for the Marionette Society at Radley College in 1956, with music by Michael Bawtree. While it was popular enough at the time to produce a recording of the show, it seems Cook looked back on this early piece about as fondly as Punch, as he continued in the Terkel interview:

"But I was writing from [the Punch-contributing days] on, and I was doing shows at school, marionette shows, writing musicals, and there are still people who come up to me, I wrote a terrible musical called The Black and White Blues about a missionary band that went to Africa to convert the African people through this wonderful music and all it was was doggerel and very smutty."

Cook added:

"And there are a few records in existence. I'd like to destroy them all. But occasionally people come up to me and say, 'You know that Black and White Blues thing you did at Radley […] absolutely fantastic, best thing you ever did in your life.' This […] terrible memorial to my puberty hanging around, is about 150 copies left."

The Radley College Archives actually has the audio of The Black and White Blues! (Cook's terrible puberty memorial lives on.) The website notes that "Michael Bawtree gave permission for it to be reproduced here in 2022." Nice!

For anyone who plans to give The Black and White Blues a listen, do take heed of the website's flag about the recording: "WARNING Sensitive content."

So, while Cook's Punch bits are a lot harder to source, it's really, really neat that Radley and Bawtree made one of Cook's earliest pieces available to hear!

Thanks again for the great question!! :)

[russianyoshkinaneko]

Bedazzled (1967)

here's an uncropped one bc i like this one too:

[fuckyeahpetercook]

So nice to see Peter Cook twice - from the 1967 classic Bedazzled!

[golgafrincham]

Not both Douglas Adams and Peter Cook on hignfy?

[fuckyeahpetercook]

From a 1992 episode of Have I Got News For You? - it is indeed Peter Cook and Douglas Adams!!

[darkmoongwen]

Every day they get more violent. Every day they get more nude.

[fuckyeahpetercook]

I'm blanking on the particular performance, but I do believe this is from a version of the nude ladies bit from Peter Cook's Beyond the Fringe "Sitting on the Bench" monologue! (Please correct me if I'm wrong!!)

[oldshowbiz]

Peter Cook for Cadbury

[fuckyeahpetercook]

Chocolate and comedy - what more could you ask for? Peter Cook and Mel Smith feature in an ad for Cadbury's Wispa in the early 1990s.

[kenneth-williams-diaries]

KENNETH WILLIAMS looking very similar talking to his fellow scriptwriter for BBC-2's International Cabaret, John Law, as when performing. ☆ 1967

At the age of 41, he looks thirtyish, boyishly handsome, slender, unlined - "Such a nice young man," the matrons must presume at first glance. But he is Peter Pan of infinite depravity, who beguiles his audiences by grimacing with mock chagrin as though saying, "Aren't I awful?" They love it.

In addition to being very, very popular, Kenneth Williams has become our latest cult figure, a fashionable underground culture hero. Not many actors are both. In fact, popularity, by its nature involving the interest of so many ordinary people, is usually an automatic disqualification for becoming a cult figure. When he lifts an eyebrow, the public become eagerly consenting adults. He smiles vivaciously at them, calls them "duckie", and flirtatiously urges them to "Stop messing about". Critics have praised his "outrageously rich revueacting", his "indestructible android artificiality", his "wicked camping about".

Peter Cook, himself one of this country's most imaginative comedians and writers of comedy, goes as far as to say that, in his opinion, "Kenneth Williams could be the funniest comic actor in the world". Cook told me he felt that Williams could dominate global fun if he "tries a little harder and stretches himself a little more. Perhaps that sounds too much like a school report - 'Kenneth has done very well this term but must try harder' - but you know what I mean. He could be really marvellous. If only someone would write him some really original material. He repeats himself. He needs a film or a television series written specially for him. He needs someone to create a new character for him. I can imagine him playing a new sort of detective." Cook, of course, is one of the very few writers capable of writing scripts worthy of Williams's talent. But Cook though he said he would very much like to write for Williams, is at present fully occupied writing for himself and Dudley Moore.

"Of course it would be very nice to be in a brilliant new West End revue or play or a different kind of film," Williams agreed, "but there's a dearth of material. duckie. A dearth. And anyway, in the meantime, I'm happy doing what I'm doing. There's really quite a lot of variety in it."

... I couldn't agree more with Peter Cook. Unfortunately, Kenneth never managed to tap the full of his immense potential and artistic range. Nevertheless, he certainly was one of a kind! ✨️

Source: Excerpt and photos taken from Patrick Skene Catling's article "The End of the Beginning, Duckie" published in The Daily Telegraph Magazine, 15 December 1967. The complete edition is part of my KCW collection.

[fuckyeahpetercook]

This is a wonderful post!! A delight for Kenneth Williams fans - and how cool to see Peter Cook (whose early days saw him writing for Williams) quoted! Fascinating observations from Cook here, in this very kindly shared excerpt from The Daily Telegraph Magazine in December 1967. What a neat insight into the comedy scene of the late 1960s!

[crystallineuniverseguerilla]

[fuckyeahpetercook]

Peter Cook, an umbrella, and The Establishment Club before it became The Establishment Club! A great photo by Lewis Morley, taken in the early 1960s.

[inkflourishes]

mike nesmith in his autobiography, discussing his exposure to english culture before meeting john lennon. he mentions peter cook and dudley moore.

when worlds collide!! :D

[fuckyeahpetercook]

A Monkee, a Beatle, and the Beyond the Fringe guys walk into a bar…! What a neat find!

Monkees man Mike Nesmith recalls his intro to British comedy - listening to the stylings of Beyond the Fringe (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett) by way of the LP of their stage show. Then it seems that John Lennon's humor blew his mind a bit too, thus making this clipping from Nesmith's autobiography a very cool mash-up of '60s pop culture luminaries!

[fuckyeahpetercook]

Happy New Year!!

Time to celebrate… at least a little bit! :)

[fuckyeahpetercook]

The countdown begins!! 🎉 Here comes 2026. Another year, another chance for Peter Cook's E.L. Wisty to achieve that total world domination by 1958! Happy New Year, Tumblr! 🥳

[fuckyeahpetercook]

Peter Cook appeared among a star-studded cast as the Impressive Clergyman ("Mawage") in The Princess Bride in 1987.

Thank you for the movies and the memories, Rob Reiner. ❤️

[fuckyeahpetercook]

Hello

'Long Distance' sketch　【Goodbye Again】

Cook interrupts Dudley's phone call. Cook replies "Hello" (in a high-pitched voice) to Dudley's "Hello". 🤣 Funny

Upon listening to the audio, I noticed the difference. Why different?

I wish the audio had the video too... 😢

I like both. 🥰

―――

video: After Dudley makes the call, Cook dances while singing, cute

https://vimeo.com/7177629?fl=pl&fe=sh

https://youtu.be/j8q2AOadPr4?si=qKFNmb0RMUZ9qAG0

―――

audio: After Dudley makes the call, music (and song?) plays as Cook makes a call (he occasionally laughs while talking), cute

http://stabbers.truth.posiweb.net/stabbers/html/discography.htm

―――

Hi!

Thank you for this great question and info! "Long Distance" is such a fun sketch!

The Goodbye Again LP, featuring a selection of audio recordings of the sketches from the 1968 series of the same name, includes "Long Distance." As you mention, its audio recording is a little longer than the sketch as aired on TV.

In the Goodbye Again LP audio, we're treated to an additional bit with Peter Cook's character getting on the phone with Dudley Moore's girlfriend Penny to try to cover for the cheatin' Moore. Cook's a smooth-talking guy with lounge-y background music to match, but the boys are still caught in a lie!

I'm not sure why the LP audio includes that part but the TV series didn't, but my very amateur guess is the sketch was edited for time for the TV airing. It's kind of fun to have the sketch in two formats - so nice, you can enjoy it twice! :)

Thanks again for this question! :)