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!
