'Indecently funny in every way' – Peter Cook's legacy by Eddie Izzard, Lucy Porter and more

The reports of Peter Cook’s death on 9 January 1995 had no difficulty arriving at a consensus about him, but then there had been plenty of time to consider his legacy. Although Cook was only 57, his triumphs and innovations were generally agreed to lie in the distant past. There was Beyond the Fringe, the groundbreaking revue he wrote and performed with Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore, and which brought new bite to British satire. There was Not Only … But Also, the TV sketch comedy in which he and Moore played Pete and Dud, a pair of flat-capped, mackintosh-wearing amateur philosophers. And there were the improvised Derek and Clive albums that pushed comedy into the realms of scabrous obscenity.

Even toward the end of his life, Cook was still an inspired improviser. This could be in an official capacity (in Why Bother?, upper-class braggart Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, one of his longest-running characters, was quizzed by the young satirist Chris Morris) or in an impromptu one (he would call late-night radio phone-ins under assorted guises including Sven the Norwegian fisherman). But such activity did nothing to subdue the image of Cook as a man with a bright future behind him.

At the time of his death, Stephen Fry observed that “being British in this part of the century meant living in the country that had Peter Cook in it” while Morris remarked that the worst thing that could happen would be “the sanctification of Peter Cook as the Princess Diana of Hampstead”. The reality has been more regrettable than that. Twenty-five years after his death, mentions of Cook are scarce even as his influence proliferates in satirical news shows (The Daily Show, The Mash Report), standup (the cultivated, fine-grained monotony of James Acaster) and such character comedies as Dear Joan and Jericha, the improvised podcast with Julia Davis and Vicki Pepperdine as filth-obsessed agony aunts – the true spiritual heirs to Derek and Clive.

Cook’s personality is all over Private Eye magazine, which he bankrolled for decades, and his standing has always been high among his fellow comics: in 2005, he was voted the greatest comedian of all time in a poll of 300 UK and US comedy performers, writers and directors. By 2012, he was at sixth place in a similar poll by the TV channel Dave. If that’s what wasted talent looks like, we should all be lucky enough to fall short.

Adrian Edmondson, star of The Young Ones and Bottom, was a fan from the days of Not Only … But Also. “There were quite a lot of jokes about sex, or the lack of it, which resonated with who I was then,” he says. “I adored Morecambe and Wise but they never went there. And, of course, the double act I had with Rik Mayall owed a lot to the Pete and Dud characters from the pub and the art gallery. Not exclusively – we also stole from Steptoe and Son, Hancock and Sid James. But it was a seemingly newish tradition of these sorts of characters being absurd in domestic situations, quite removed from the more heightened comedy of the Goons or Monty Python.”

Eddie Izzard – who attended the same preparatory school as Cook, St Bede’s in East Sussex, albeit several decades later – was also strongly influenced by his steeply escalating absurdity. “The surreal diversions that I do – ‘He was nine-foot tall and his name was Steve and he was made out of jam’ or whatever – come from Pete and Dud because they were just pushing all the time, much more than Python.

“There was a sense that these guys were winging it, and that came in useful for me when I was a solo street performer: people would come, people would go, but you had to be able to improvise in and out of this rough set you were doing. With Pete and Dud, it’s the rules of improv: whatever the other person says, you go, ‘Yes and …’ Whereas by the time they got to Derek and Clive, it sometimes felt as if Peter was saying, ‘No but …’”

Edmondson remains an admirer of Derek and Clive, though. “They were the rudest thing I’d ever heard, so why wouldn’t I be? Above all, I think I enjoyed listening to two people trying to make each other laugh. It’s something I enjoyed with Rik when we were writing. As a partnership, we spent longer together in the writing room than anywhere else, and it was the best part of the process. I can hear that in Derek and Clive. I think Dudley’s corpsing became a bit forced occasionally, like a trick he’d learned, but Pete’s instinct was always to surprise him. Which is delicious.”

For the Anglo-Lebanese standup Esther Manito, Cook is there in her earliest memories of comedy. “When I was growing up in Essex, Peter Cook was part of the soundtrack of my childhood. What I loved was the straight-faced, straitlaced silliness. The posh voice was so much a part of it: there’s this kind of Withnail-like eccentricity that you don’t feel a geezer type could have got away with. It’s because he’s so intelligent and well-placed in the world. I don’t know if someone who hadn’t had his advantages could have pulled off the combination of silliness, charisma and charm. His comedy wasn’t self-deprecating: he was a cool cat.”

Not many of Manito’s peers feel the same way. “I don’t hear him talked about among younger comedians,” she says. “They tend to focus more on US comics, or people like Stewart Lee. But I think you can see him in everyone from Tim Vine to Bridget Christie. And I remember feeling his tone in Green Wing and in Smack the Pony – that appreciation of pure eccentricity.”

Izzard believes a lack of hunger did for Cook in the end. “He had genius levels of ability to create and perform but what he never had to do was fight for it. If he phoned something in, it was still a really good phone call, you know? But what he needed was to become a Peter Sellers kind of actor.” By way of defence, I put in a word for Bedazzled, the barbed 1967 comedy, scripted by Cook, in which he plays the Devil trying to tempt Moore into relinquishing his soul, but Izzard is not convinced.

“I don’t feel Bedazzled works so well as an acting performance,” he says. “Cook as the Devil is impregnable, so you never worry for him. Even at the end, when he wants to get back into heaven, he’s still very self-contained. If you look at Peter’s eyes, he’s not connecting with everything he’s saying – he’s not living it – whereas Dudley is. Dudley is developing gears and Peter doesn’t have that range.”

It’s true that the shape of Cook’s career conforms to a rise-and-fall template: he began his career writing West End revues while still an undergraduate and ended up in the 1980s parked on a chat-show sofa as Joan Rivers’ stooge. But perhaps that narrative is less relevant now in an age when Cook’s work can be consumed by younger viewers in bite-sized YouTube segments. Who cares about his trajectory if the work is still funny?

And it is – as long as it’s performed by Cook. Edmondson was among the actors who in 2010 revived old skits that had been wiped by the BBC. Did he learn anything from his participation in Pete and Dud: The Lost Sketches? “Yes,” he says. “Don’t do it. What a turgid exercise that was. I thought we managed to rob their writing of all its spunk. They must have been spinning in their graves.”

At least he got to pay a more fitting homage while Cook was still alive: in 1988, he and Mayall wrote the role of the hit-man in Mr Jolly Lives Next Door, one of the best and nastiest works by the Comic Strip group, expressly for him. For the comic Lucy Porter, that film was the gateway drug to Cook’s comedy. “His performance was the most sinister thing I’d ever found funny,” she says. “I really fancied him, and have had a thing for grumpy old bastards ever since. I searched out more of his stuff and loved it. I felt that he was Lennon to Dudley Moore’s McCartney. I found him indecently funny in every way.”

For Edmondson, working with Cook on Mr Jolly was “a dream come true. We were so in awe that we never quite got over being in his presence, which must have been tedious for him. Or flattering. Who knows? He lifted the piece to a different level, which I think is why it’s a sort of cult favourite still. We asked a lot of our heroes to do stuff with us over the years, but only two ever stooped so low as to accept: Terry Jones as the vicar in The Young Ones, and Peter Cook in Mr Jolly. Heroes.”

• Adrian Edmondson is in The Boy Friend at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 7 March. Lucy Porter is on tour from 7 February.