Читать книгу Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing: The Definitive Biography of a Comedy Legend - John Fisher - Страница 13

Upon his return to England, Tommy headed straight for the parental home at Langley. Gwen still had professional obligations to fulfil for the CSE in the Middle East and any semblance of a normal married life remained on the horizon. The drafts of letters he wrote to her from ‘Devonia’provide an insight into those early days of readjustment at all levels, professional, domestic, and emotional, as well as trite but touching testament to his undying love for her: ‘Have I told you I love you today? Well, my sweet, I do. I can’t live without you, longing for your arms around me. I love you, my beautiful wife. I’m thinking about you every minute of the day.’ He bounces her along continually with holiday camp enthusiasm – ‘Keep smiling and your chin up! It won’t be long now’–and goes out of his way to allay the anxieties Gwen obviously nursed regarding her family’s feelings vis-à-vis their marriage –possibly without their initial knowledge –so far from the white cliffs of Dover: ‘I told them all the news and put the matter to rest. So, my sweet, you have nothing to worry about as they are all happy and longing for your hasty return.’

It seems a typically cockeyed Cooper way of doing things that he should meet his in-laws without first being introduced by his wife, but the self-motivated initial bonding experience went well on a fleeting one-night visit to Eastbourne, during which he met her mother, father, brothers, and grandma, as well as being treated to a pub crawl, a car ride to Beachy Head (‘But boy was I cold up there!’) and a visit to his father-in-law’s metal works. The latter provided the red letter opportunity of the whole trip as he suffered withdrawal symptoms for the metal shop at the Hythe boatyard: ‘I must admit your father has a nice workshop indeed. He’s a very busy man. Then I broke up the work by showing some tricks for ten minutes. Your brothers were delighted with them and kept asking the time as they made sure they didn’t work after one o’clock. Ha! We all went back to lunch.’

He wasted no time in testing the shallows of full time show business: ‘This week I’m going to London to see an agent called Tommie Draper. Wish me luck, my sweet. How I miss you. With you here I wouldn’t be half so scared! Ha!! I know what you would say, “Now go out there, bighead, and kill ’em.” So roll on Friday.’ No record survives of his first civilian audition in Gerrard Street. Within weeks the happy couple are reunited and inevitably set their sights on a home together in London. But not before Tommy has written asking for another audition at the Windmill – not at this juncture forthcoming – and, more importantly, a further one at the BBC.

On 2 June 1947 he wrote from Langley to a Miss Cook at the Corporation requesting that he be given a chance: ‘My act consists of cod magic and comedy, which I think would be quite suitable for television.’ He received a response almost immediately. On 5 June he was summoned by the Television Booking Manager to attend a ‘preliminary audition’ at 25 Marylebone Road the following Monday, the ninth, at 11.45 a.m.: ‘Your performance should not exceed ten minutes in length.’ The outcome was negative in the extreme, recalling the notorious report given Fred Astaire’s initial screen test at Paramount: ‘Can’t act; can’t sing; slightly bald; can dance a little.’ Cooper was disparagingly immortalized as an ‘unattractive young man with indistinct speaking voice and extremely unfortunate appearance’. His act had taken seven minutes of their time. In truth his bizarre persona and anarchic approach defied classification among the starchy Corporation bigwigs of that time. As a postscript, the report card filled out on the day added, ‘nonchalant approach, but poor diction and unpleasant manner’. Someone wanted to add insult to injury. Not that Tommy saw this at the time. A courtesy letter arrived at his parent’s home a week later simply advising that his performance was deemed unsuitable for ‘our TV variety programmes as at present planned’. It is the irony of ironies that by the end of the year he had made his television debut, almost certainly with his audition act – it was his act – on a gala Christmas Eve variety show hosted by the musical comedy star, Leslie Henson. However, such a prestige booking belied the reality of the struggle ahead for the Coopers as they tried to come to terms with life on the first rung of the show business ladder in a shabby London town befogged by austerity and a Pyrrhic sense of peace.

It was impossible to meet Gwen in later years without understanding intuitively her contribution to her husband’s eventual success. Whatever reassurance he had expressed in his letters to her, she now reciprocated in the flesh, her cheerful, forceful personality being exactly what was needed to keep him on track: ‘There were times when he could be bloody difficult, sitting in the same chair all day, saying nothing, making cards and coins disappear. Then I would have to give him one of my pep talks.’ The idea of persisting professionally as a twosome was never on the cards: ‘I remember telling him that marriages in show business can easily fold up. So I told him to forget the double act and do the magic act on his own. Then you’ve got no one to fall out with but yourself.’ She constantly endorsed his decision to play the magic for laughs. She also insisted that his forty-eight pounds or so demob pay went on a decent Savile Row suit for the act. In addition he splashed out on a Crombie camel-hair overcoat with a tie belt: it seems that back then you couldn’t be taken seriously in show business without one. As he later claimed, ‘I was the best dressed out of work act in London.’ It is unlikely that he would have made it without her. She brought a smart editorial sense to the act that he had been quick to acknowledge when he was on the CSE circuit. He knew that if he wanted to be up there with Max Miller, Sid Field, and the rest of the greats he would be foolish to ignore it.

Work for a dysfunctional magician of whom no one had heard was sparse. Gwen acknowledged with typical forthrightness, ‘We were so poor, we hadn’t a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of if we had!’ In fact, they found a furnished room in Victoria for ten shillings a week and a landlady who bled them for every penny they had. She admitted that at one stage she used to scrub steps for other people, ‘but I was so proud I did it at midnight so nobody would see me.’ At a time when newly married wives were not necessarily expected to go out to work, Dove found more regular employment putting the eyes in dolls at a toy factory and then serving behind the counter in the gloves and leather goods department at Bourne and Hollingsworth, where she progressed to the rank of buyer. Their weekly luxury was a Sunday stroll into the West End for half a pint of bitter apiece at a pub in St Martin’s Lane where show business folk gathered. One night they went mad, had two halves each and then realized they did not have the bus fare to get back home. They were by now living in a meagre flat in Lavender Hill. Gwen in a sudden fit of expediency dashed into a shop doorway and whipped off the stockings she had just received as a present from overseas: ‘Nylons were like gold dust then and Tommy nipped into a pub and sold them for thirty shillings.’ It would not be the only occasion his ability as a salesman helped to save the day.

For Tommy the daily routine took in the hard slog of the agents’ offices. The legendary meeting place for out of work pros was the old Express Dairy in Charing Cross Road, where tea and consolation flowed in equal measure. But he showed more enterprise than most. As the others continued to bemoan the state of the country, the industry, their own careers, Tommy would suddenly bounce up and head for Leather Lane, Portobello Road or any of the countless markets in and around London. Four hours later he’d return to find the others still there with hardly a penny to their name, while his own pockets were considerably fuller. The magician, Bobby Bernard saw it happen.

The world of the street market trader enjoys its own mystique and has often overlapped that of the magician. Street entertainers like the legendary Charlie Edwards – they were more dignified to be dismissed as mere buskers and interestingly he sported a Crombie overcoat too – were a constant attraction at these affairs. One of Edwards’s specialities was the flick or ‘blow’ book, a small volume, the pages of which were cut at the edge in an ingenious way so that you could flick the pages to show them blank, or covered in letters of the alphabet, musical notes, crosswords, drawings or whatever. Having dazzled the crowd with his handling of this simple novelty, he would pitch them to all comers together with the secrets – as concise as the mottos in Christmas crackers – of his other miracles, tricks with playing cards, glasses, and knotted handkerchiefs. Many years later Tommy presented a deft demonstration of the flick book on one of his television shows. So adroit was his handling, one knew he too must have performed it many times in its natural outdoor environment all those years ago.

Tommy’s own al fresco speciality was a nifty little item called the Buddha Papers. A series of small paper packets with a penny in the innermost one were folded around one another. When they were unfolded the coin had disappeared or changed into a shilling. Much midnight oil was spent by Tommy and Dove cutting out, folding and sticking the gaily coloured tissue papers that gave the trick added carnival appeal. In addition there were packs of cards known as Svengali decks, one moment all different, the next all the same – a distant cousin of the flick book – and probably the money machine, the miniature mangle that printed your own pound notes and continued to hoodwink people long after Laurel and Hardy gave it wide exposure in the movie, A-Haunting We Will Go. For the first few months of his career the marketplaces of London provided his main stage. He had the personality and he got by. It is not an easy task holding a standing crowd, but he was impossible to miss in one, and the experience to be gained before a non-paying public was priceless, not least the knowledge of how people react to different actions, phrases, gags, and bits of business. The result is behavioural psychology at its most basic and most valuable. It is the inner secret of magic as a performance art.

Much of his market work appears to have gone in phases. There was a reasonably profitable period when he teamed up with an old stager who sold red Cardinal polish for doorsteps. Between them they could make three to four pounds a day. There was the less profitable occasion he acquired a handbag concession. He never forgot the spiel as long as he lived: ‘I had to sell them at twenty-five shillings a time and used to say, “I can’t tell you the name of the firm I represent, ladies and gentlemen, but it’s an important one. If I told you, you’d recognize it immediately. I would tell you except that we are opening a new major store soon and I’ve been warned to keep everything secret because our many rivals are constantly on the watch.” For all that the bloke who owned the stall only gave me four bob.’ That assignment lasted one day.

The product with which he remains most readily associated among his mates from that time was the radio ‘estabulator’ [sic] or wireless fake. This was a gizmo that you attached to an old valve radio supposedly to improve its reception. High tech did not come into it. The ‘interference suppressor’ was little more than a cardboard tube with a couple of wires attached with sealing wax. It sold for half a crown. By moving the radio around it was never difficult to get a better reception for a short period and that was the window of opportunity upon which a sale depended. Frequently his brother, David would come along as the shill to start the buying. Del Boy and Arthur Daley had nothing on the Cooper duo.

Accompanying Tommy on many of his market escapades was his close friend, the magician and mind reader, Dennis Rawlins. One day they missed out at the last minute on a pitch at Hitchin market and desperate for cash decided to try their hand at an old street swindle inexplicably labelled ‘Back of the Nut’. The following day was Derby Day. They bought a supply of small Manila seed envelopes, accessed a list of runners, and proceeded to write out the name of ‘the favourite’ on slips of paper that were inserted into the envelopes. Their knowledge of the racing scene rivalled what they knew about nuclear fission. They then took up position on the grass verge outside the nearby Vauxhall Motor Works. When the whistle blew, the workers spilled out and could not miss them. In the parlance of the trade, they ‘worked the wagon and the whip’, Tommy drumming up a crowd for Dennis who was mysteriously swathed in an imposing black blindfold, as befits the man who knows everything: ‘This man is so fabulous he saved the life of Cecil Boyd-Rochford and C.B-R.’s niece!’ Boyd-Rochford was the trainer of the time whose name the public knew. Once they had convinced everyone they had inside information on the big race, they had no trouble in shifting the tips at two shillings a time. They got out of town as fast as they could. The next day their recommendation failed to show in the first three and life moved on. After a while, by which time Tommy had secured a fledgling presence on television, he secured a lowly week’s work in variety at the Alma Cinema in Luton. He found himself on the early morning train, anxious to make band call in time. As Dennis told the story: ‘This other bloke got on. He looked at Tommy and said, “I know you.” In his non-committal, mock bashful way, Tommy replied, “Possibly. Possibly.” “I know you.” “Quite possible.” “Where, I wonder?” Then just as he goes to step off the train, he turns to Tommy and says, “Why, you’re that bastard who sold me that tip!”’ Tommy, one minute glowing incredulously in his new found television glory, turned instantly into a quivering wreck, saved by the slam of the door and the guard’s whistle.

For Gwen the worst part was seeing her husband having to get up at five o’clock in the morning, even earlier if longer distances were involved. If he didn’t arrive at certain markets between five and six he lost all hope of a stall for that day. The routine would have been even more tiring if he had performed a show the night before, but those who observed him in those days claim he was kept afloat outwardly by – in Bobby Bernard’s phrase – a puppy dog enthusiasm. Larry Barnes, a contemporary of his in early variety, attempted to explain his special kind of energy: ‘When you were in his presence you were always slightly worried that you were letting him down, that you were seen not to subscribe to his sunny side of life.’ Much of this outward attitude was unquestionably down to Gwen’s role as puppet mistress. There can be no doubt that she helped to bring out the extrovert in him in a social situation, triggering the ability to relax in other people’s company without a trick in his hand. To many performers it can be far harder to walk into a crowded room – unprotected, unjustified, unnoticed – than walk onto a stage before a thousand people. Meanwhile she also controlled the purse strings, taking pains to ensure he did not fritter away what little money he did earn.

According to Val Andrews the first professional stage job Tommy had back in England was not performing his act but working as a stooge for Harry Tate Junior, the son of the great music hall sketch comedian. Val recalls how funny he was in the wan make-up and the flat cap, playing the tall gormless caddy with a wheel on a stick in the golfing sketch: ‘Doing nothing, but doing everything’, all for two pounds ten shillings a week. There was some sporadic film extra work and three humble bottom-of-the-bill weeks in variety, at the Manchester Hippodrome, the Brighton Grand, and the Playhouse, Weston-Super-Mare during the middle of 1947, but not much else. Morale was kept up by the camaraderie of many of those in the same predicament. Once a week he would get together with a group of ex-servicemen who had committed themselves to comedy as a profession, a prospect that before the war would have seemed as unlikely as turning base metal to gold or fighting Hitler single-handed.

The number who not only made it in a relatively short space of time, but also stayed at the top is staggering. Wisdom, Edwards, Emery, Bygraves, Bentine, Milligan, Secombe, Sellers, Sykes, Howerd, Hancock, Hill, they all contributed to a seismic effect on British comedy that has not happened since and may be comparable only with the revolution in popular music a decade or so later. They did not all achieve a similar success. The names of Joe Church, Harry Locke, Norman Caley, Len Marten, Robert Moreton – all stalwart pros – failed to register in the national consciousness in the same way. Luck as well as talent had a part to play in the longevity of a career, but at the moment they all shared the same heady dream of household name stardom. It was certainly not the most congenial time to be contemplating such a future. The variety circuit was in a shaky condition, radio in spite of ITMA and Band Waggon had yet to find its golden age in comedy terms, and television had not established itself sufficiently before the service was curtailed on the outbreak of war for anyone to know whether it held out any lasting prospects at all.

Each of these now famous names needed his own personal Mister Sandman to conjure dream into reality. The key to this was being seen, a procedure with its own built-in Catch 22: unless you already had a representative, how were you to secure a decent booking where you could be seen in the first place? One answer was the Nuffield Centre, a club for servicemen in Adelaide Street in the back of St Martin-in-the-Fields. A favourite haunt of agents and producers, it provided a free and easy showcase for many a comic emerging from the war. With or without this solitary oasis, talent would find a way and before long Norman had found a professional soul mate in an agent named Billy Marsh. Max discovered an advocate in Jock Jacobsen, Benny in Richard Stone, and ‘the lad himself’ in Phyllis Rounce. In each career one can point to one such strong individual working behind the scenes. As far as Tommy was concerned, Gwen could give him encouragement and guidance, but she did not have the professional qualifications to go the whole way. Miff Ferrie was waiting in the wings.

Miff was born George Ferrie in Edinburgh on 10 March 1911. A musician during his early life, he acquired his nickname in homage to the American trombonist ‘Miff’ Mole. The Thirties saw him recording alongside Roy Fox, Ambrose, Jack Hylton, Lew Stone and Carroll Gibbons at the height of the dance band craze, before deciding temporarily to set aside his trombone to form a permanent vocal trio. When Band Waggon hit the airwaves in January 1938, Miff Ferrie and the Jackdauz [sic] found themselves billed alongside comedy stars, Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch as one of the resident vocal attractions on the series. Encouraged by this success, he then formed his own combination featuring the vocal group as part of a seven-piece orchestra, The Ferrymen. With regular radio work, a Parlophone recording contract and tours of Great Britain and the Continent in his date book, Miff was riding high. Airs and Disgraces was a short-lived series based around his talents. One imagines him as a chirpy little showman in a dour sort of way. Many years later brilliant Scots comic, Chic Murray made an art form of the contradiction. Then the war intervened. Invalided out of the army, Miff acted as Musical Adviser to United States Organization, Camp Shows. His USO work involved him in auditioning hundreds of musicians and other performers as well as production administration.

After the war Miff and his band became the resident attraction at the Windermere Club at 189 Regent Street, his activities extending to those of ‘Entertainments Director’, in which capacity he was responsible for booking the cabaret. One Friday afternoon in November 1947 a nervous Tommy Cooper went along to audition for the floor show. Few places can be more dispiriting than a performing venue without its audience, the cold emptiness a cruel champion of fear. Tommy later said, ‘Unfortunately, the act I did that day was not suitable, but Miff made a few suggestions and told me to come back in a week or two. This I did, and to my amazement I made the musicians in the band laugh. I was working from then on.’

It is hard to know what he was thinking. His first audition act majored on a series of impressions of Hollywood stars, the comedy magic playing a minor role. The idea of the hysterical Cooper presenting a convincing parade of Jimmy Cagney, Charles Laughton and Edward G. Robinson defies belief. The route to show business as an impressionist was the most hackneyed of them all. Moreover, it was a difficult genre to burlesque. Accuracy was the keynote to success, unless you were Tony Hancock, a frustrated pretender and buffoon of a different kind, who made a big feature of his own lugubrious attempts to mimic these very names in his own stage act. Indeed he persisted with them into the mid Sixties by which time the originals were passing out of fashion. That he did so was criticized by some, but seen as an accurate reflection of what the quintessential Hancock character would purvey in a comically jaded variety act by others. Whatever, one does wonder whether somewhere along the way he witnessed the Cooper act at this stage and the idea was sewn.

The impressions aside, little did Miff know that the trick or two Tommy also managed to fumble that Friday afternoon were the tip of an iceberg of material already waiting in the wings. The return audition was not necessarily the challenge it might have seemed to the man requesting it. In later years Miff would himself take credit for suggesting to Cooper the idea of the burlesque approach to magic, to the extent of having Tommy apparently voice the claim himself in much early publicity, interviews that Miff in fact gave or provided copy for on his client’s behalf. There may have been a genuine misunderstanding – Tommy was now too busy and too increasingly successful to be bothered – but the claim was not based on fact, as we know from the approach Tommy had already adopted in the services and at his BBC audition. More importantly, at that second audition for Ferrie the frenzied fellow in the fez achieved one of the most difficult feats in show business. He reduced the band to hysterics. Surveying the debris of imploded conjuring tricks, Miff had no option but to offer him a week’s work at a salary of fifteen pounds, while thinking to himself, ‘My God, if we could recapture that and channel it, we’ve got something that no one else is doing.’ On and off Tommy played the Windermere for fifteen weeks over the coming year, initially as a supporting attraction to the exotic Marqueez – once described as the Pavlova of the music halls and now billed as the ‘Glamorous Star of the East, featuring her famous Dance of the Seven Veils.’ From that first booking, Miff continued to mastermind his career – through countless trials and tribulations between them – to the end of his life. At this early stage a surviving script suggests that he even muscled in on the act:

Tommy: Well, Miff, what do you think of my magic?

Miff: Your magic?

Tommy: Yes, you know, the way I make things disappear.

Miff: I haven’t seen anything disappear.

Tommy: You haven’t? (Tommy hands wrist watch over) Yours, I believe … (Then laughs head off)

Miff: Mr Cooper …

Tommy: (Still laughing) What’s that noise? (Looks around) Oh, it’s you. What now?

Miff: (Handing over a pair of socks) Yours, I believe … (Tommy pulls up trousers and displays bare legs. Registers consternation, then off)

It took Miff a while to adjust to the spotlight favouring Tommy and his few other clients at the expense of his own ego. In the early years of their partnership, he could never completely ignore an opportunity for his own self-promotion, as shown by this gratuitous attempt at humour from a standard Cooper press biography:

About a year ago, when coming from a rehearsal, he found a policeman waiting by his car. The following conversation ensued:

Tommy: Yes, officer.

Policeman: I shall have to book you for a parking offence.

Tommy: Book me? Oh, you’d better talk to Mr Ferrie, my agent.

His progress is indeed a tribute to Miff Ferrie, who brought Tommy into the business a little over three years ago and who has kept him working ever since.

As the years progressed and Cooper’s good fortune headed for the stratosphere, Miff was able to come to terms with his own feelings of inadequacy, although, with his background as a minor star, self-effacement would never come easily to him. In fairness, there was not a moment around the clock when this short, bespectacled Scot with the shrewd eyes behind their tinted lenses was not prepared to fight Tommy’s corner, but the relationship between them was never without its difficulties. Praise did not come as easily as reproach, while his comedy judgement proved little short of appalling, as epitomized by the time Miff sat stony-faced while Tommy demonstrated to him for the first time his classic routine with the cardboard box of ‘Hats’. After that it became a byword of the Cooper household – as well as the production crew of many a Tommy television series – that, in Gwen’s words, ‘If Miff thought it wasn’t funny, you can bet it was.’ She used to smile, conceding that when Tommy wanted to upset Miff, he’d call him George. As we shall see, there were times when things became far more serious, Tommy conducting what amounted to a war of psychological attrition against him, but Miff – ‘that little Scottish fellow sprouting red horns’, as Tommy would refer to him – stood steadfastly firm with typical native fortitude. For the magician it remained a case of ‘better the devil you know’. For all Ferrie assumed the notoriety of a monstre sacré as the power behind Cooper, and a short while later Bruce Forsyth too, he remained among his fellow agents one of the most respected players in the game.

This is the place to lay to rest once and for all the myth of the contract that existed between performer and agent. No arrangement in show business history has been more misrepresented. Tommy always claimed that Miff signed him unwillingly to a lifetime contract that guaranteed him a wage of twenty pounds a week for the first seven years, however many shows he performed. Gwen claimed she was livid when she heard he’d signed, guaranteeing Miff fifteen per cent – as distinct from the then standard ten – into the bargain. It became the most notorious agreement of its kind since the one that kept Sid Field out of the West End, a prisoner of the provinces, until he was nudging forty. However, even had the hearsay been true, it should be stressed that twenty pounds was a fair recompense at a time when the average supporting magic or comedy act was earning little more than ten pounds a week.

The original document as signed by T. F. Cooper over its pink and magenta sixpenny stamp on 28 November 1948, which is now in the possession of the author, is a totally honourable Sole Agency Agreement, as endorsed by the Council of the Agents’ Association Limited. There is nothing to stipulate that Tommy should not receive the total earnings he has achieved in any one week, minus the commission that is set at the agreed fifteen per cent. The arrangement covers an initial period of five, not seven years during which Miff is expected ‘to use all reasonable efforts to procure employment for me … and to guide and advise me with respect to my theatrical career and to act for me as Manager and Personal Representative in all matters concerning my professional interests whenever you are called upon to do so.’ It granted Miff exclusivity in the area of ‘Manager, Agent, and Personal Representative’.

Clause Six is a key one and certainly caused the greatest aggravation to Tommy over the years:

The period of this agreement may be extended by you (i.e. Miff) from year to year by your giving me one month’s notice in writing prior to the end of the said period or any extension of that period. Each extension and the determination of such extension shall be governed by the preceding Clause (5) except that the figure of earnings for such extended period shall be based on my earnings for the last year of the original period where only one extension takes place, or for the last extended period of one year immediately preceding the new extension, where more than one extension takes place.

As for Clause Five, there was no reason for Tommy to quibble. It was there to protect the performer as much as the agent, giving him the opportunity to walk away had Miff failed in his obligation to provide work in any four month period that failed in less technical language to reflect his average earnings in the previous twelve months. Here it is for the record:

Should I at any time during the term hereof fail to obtain a bona fide offer of employment (sufficient to produce for me during the time this agreement shall have run a sum not less than the equivalent of my average earnings taken over the twelve months immediately preceding the date of this agreement) from a responsible employer in a period in excess of four consecutive months, during all of which time I was ready, able and willing to accept such employment, either party hereto shall in such event have the right immediately to terminate this contract by a notice in writing to such effect sent to the other party by registered mail, provided, however, that such right shall be deemed waived by me, and any exercise thereof by me shall be ineffective if, after the expiration of any such four months period and prior to the time I attempt to exercise such right, I have received an offer of employment from a responsible employer.

Down through the years Miff religiously exercised his renewal option and the large stack of registered envelopes gathered in Cooper’s files are their own testimony not only to the hold Miff undeniably held over him, but to the successful way in which he managed Cooper’s career from a financial standpoint. From the moment Tommy signed with Miff his whole career represented a constant upward curve – helped not a little by the meteoric rise in fees triggered by the northern club boom – until the last few years when it became eroded by ill health. On this score the client never had reason to complain. Between the time of their first meeting and the end of the financial year in April 1948, Miff had secured Tommy work worth £223.00. The following twelve months, during which the agreement came into operation, saw him earning £738.00. By the time he reached April 1950 his earnings had more than doubled to £1,586.00, and by April 1951 almost doubled again to £2,987.00.

Tommy commenced his first week for Miff at the Windermere on 8 December 1947 and was held over for a fortnight. Almost twelve months passed before the agreement was signed. Miff appears not to have been in a hurry. On 12 February 1948 Tommy, by now living in a flat at 105 Warwick Avenue in Maida Vale, wrote to Miff: ‘I wish to thank you for all the engagements you have procured for me in the past, and would be happy if you would conduct my future business.’ While Miff continued to find bookings for him, nothing was formalized until the end of the year. On 25 November, having moved yet again to a flat at 13 Canfield Gardens off the Finchley Road, he wrote to Miff a second time. After expressing again his gratitude ‘for the help and care with which you have conducted my business in the past,’ he continues: ‘I would be very grateful if you would accept fifteen per cent commission, continuing to look after my interests in the future as personal manager unless this agreement should be terminated by mutual agreement. Hoping this is quite satisfactory and thanking you again, Yours faithfully, Tommy Cooper.’ Two days later Miff wrote to Tommy expressing his satisfaction with this arrangement and the following day the situation was formalized. On the same day he dropped Miff a note, doubtless at the manager’s suggestion, which stated, ‘I hereby give you the authority to sign all or any contracts on my behalf.’ Gwen claimed that Tommy told her he was shaking when he signed on the dotted line. There is no reason to suppose that this was anything more than the nerves of inexperience we all feel at formal turning points in our lives. It had not been a shotgun marriage.

Why he should have misrepresented the case against Miff so vocally in the years to come is a complex matter. He certainly came to dislike the man in other respects, feeling he treated him like a schoolboy and it is not difficult to imagine this prim Scots Presbyterian in the guise of some male Jean Brodie figure, although Mary Kay described him in a letter as possessing an additional dash of Uriah Heep: ‘I recall the ghastly meetings with Miff in darkened doorways where he would pay his fees in old pound notes. He used to beckon Tommy with the first finger of his right hand and expect him to come running. He even expected Tommy to come over to him at parties where, perhaps, he was having a chat with the Duke of Edinburgh. Miff really thought he was the original Svengali and nothing pleased Tommy more than to totally ignore him.’ Ferrie may have been insensitive, even loathsome to the performing temperament – surprising since he had been a performer himself – and he may at times have been editorially wrong, but in business matters he appears never to have been ethically incorrect. Whatever Gwen may have thought in the early days, his fifteen per cent was a fair enhancement on an agent’s typical return if management duties were involved as well, and in a realistic moment towards the end of her life even she had to concede that Miff was as straight as a die.

Two of Cooper’s early conjuring friends, Alan Alan and Bobby Bernard share a theory that Tommy spread the rumour about his contractual plight as cover for his own innate parsimony. It also explains why he never challenged Miff in the law courts as Bruce Forsyth eventually did. To do so would have exposed the lie of his own behaviour. Bruce never claimed he had been held to a punitive and restricted wage, only that his arrangement tied him unfairly to Miff for life. In the end nothing was found against Ferrie and Bruce paid £20,000.00 for the privilege of extricating himself from his clutches. Tommy would have thought twice about such expenditure. But the agent situation had its lighter side. The whole idea of paying commission to anyone preyed both on his mind and on his sense of humour. Enjoying a meal with Tommy in the late Forties after a Magic Circle show at, of all places, the Chislehurst Cricket Club, Michael Bailey saw that he was separating the cherry stones around the edge of his dessert plate. ‘What are those for?’ queried the future president of The Magic Circle, pointing towards the few set aside from the others. ‘Oh, those are for my agent!’ was the unexpected reply. It would appear that everything was viewed through the commission prism, even matters of life and death: ‘I’ve got a clause in my contract that says I have to be cremated. That way my agent can get fifteen per cent of my ashes.’ It matters little that Groucho had done the line before him.

Initially dates were sporadic. The Coconut Grove, the Panama and the Blue Lagoon were regular haunts, in addition to the Windermere. The names sound glamorous, but today alongside countless similar venues that he would play in due course, like the Bagatelle, Churchill’s, the Embassy, the Colony, the Astor, Quaglino’s, Kempinski’s, they represent for the most part a litany of shallow sophistication and B-movie glamour, a world of Max Factor make-up, Lucie Clayton poise and Freddie Mills machismo brought down to earth by Soho smog. In contrast, August 1948 saw Miff dispatching Tommy on a five week CSE tour of Europe at fifteen pounds a week. The signing of the contract between them was celebrated by a drop in pay. The week commencing 29 November saw him working his first fully fledged week in an English variety theatre, bottom of the bill at the old Collins’ Music Hall on Islington Green for a basic salary of ten pounds. Gwen, Dennis Rawlins and his wife, Betty, dutifully acted as unofficial claque in the tiny suburban hall. Tommy needed theatre experience and 1949 saw Miff targeting the provinces as the next step in his client’s climb to stardom. It must have been dispiriting trudging around the country for a year playing the infamous Number Twos for a year at twenty pounds a week. Variety was on its last legs and these would be the first to go. To a travelling performer provincial theatre is still a world of smelly, Spartan digs and cold, grimy dressing rooms in strange, ostensibly colourless places. Away from the more glamorous Stoll and Moss circuits, the despair descending over acts who until now had regarded the halls as a modest, but constant source of livelihood must have added to the shabbiness. Food rationing would not have helped.

Tommy admitted many times that in those early days some audiences did not fully realize that his magic was supposed to go wrong: ‘I remember one dreadful week. Top of the bill was the singer, Steve Conway, and I was second spot on. I went all through my act and there was not a titter from the audience. Nobody made a sound except me. I was laughing on the outside but crying on the inside. That happened every night. People said, “There’s a big feller up on the stage and he should be working down the pit. Our little Charlie can do tricks better than him.” It got so bad I couldn’t go out in the daylight in case somebody who’d seen the show recognized me. Even my landlady turned against me. It really unnerved me.’ This could have happened at the Workington Opera House, the Barrow Coliseum, the Tonypandy Empire, the Maesteg New or one of a score of other less than glittering palaces of entertainment. But however depressing the venue, the experience was to prove invaluable and he soon developed the resilience to cope.

In November 1952, he had graduated to the Moss Empires circuit and was playing the dreaded Glasgow Empire, feared throughout the business as the ‘Comics’ Graveyard’. They didn’t care for him at the first house. By the second open warfare had been declared. With a nonchalance he could not have mustered three years earlier Tommy simply came down to the footlights and told them all to ‘fuck off’. He went straight to the dressing room, packed his bags and caught the first train back to London. Next morning, Cissie Williams, the highly respected booker for the Moss circuit, made her routine call to the theatre to see how the acts had fared the night before. The manager was forced to tell her that Cooper had returned to London. ‘What happened?’ she asked. He gave her the gist of the situation but was too embarrassed to use the exact words. Cissie Williams insisted: ‘He must have said something that upset them. He couldn’t have just walked off.’ The manager bit the bullet and told it to her straight. ‘Great,’ she replied, ‘it’s about time someone told those bastards to fuck off!’ One can hear every comic she ever consigned to failure on that stage cheering Tommy in unison whenever that story is told.

It is arguable that the nightclubs of the metropolis were no less difficult, not least because of the additional challenge of having to keep oneself and one’s audience awake at two o’clock in the morning. What passed as conventional stand up comedy was out of the question if one was going to grab the attention of the crowd above the clink of glasses, the chatter of waitresses, the come-on of high-class call girls. A heady brew of alcohol, sex, and violence hung in the air. It was a heavy drinking environment with many clubs encouraging the consumption of liquor by promoting what were known as ‘bottle parties’. Customers were served whole bottles of spirits which had a gauge fitted on the side. At the end of the night this showed how much had been consumed and their bill was worked out accordingly. The same bottle could also be kept in reserve for a customer on a future evening. To forestall violence among a partly gangster clientele some clubs, notoriously the Blue Lagoon in Carnaby Street, insisted that the bouncers on the door remove all guns on the way in.

He possibly came closest to his ‘Glasgow Empire’ experience in nightclub terms when he was playing the Bag of Nails in Kingly Street. Happily in that company he was more wisely restrained. The venue had a reputation for harbouring the real hard men of London. Most of the audience would have had a police record, or were coming close to acquiring one. One night no sooner had he stepped on stage than the heavy mob started to pelt him with bread rolls. His fez became an instant target. He was scared out of his mind, but had to say something and came back with a weak, ‘Stop that.’ As he described the occasion, ‘The place came over all strange. “Stop what?” shouted this geezer. I said, “Why, stop throwing all these bread rolls at me.” “And why should I stop?” he shouted back. “Well, because I haven’t got an ad lib for people throwing bread rolls at me.”’ The audience were immediately on his side. As he said, things were never quite so hard after that, but you were never completely home and dry.

One advantage of the smaller clubs was the intimacy they allowed the performer to develop with his or her audience. The great American comedienne, Fanny Brice once summed up her relationship with a supportive crowd as ‘much like sensing the presence of a friend in the dark’. The truly great British performers of the day like Max Miller and Gracie Fields had learned how to achieve this rapport however large the venue. Gracie herself referred to it as weaving a silver thread between herself and her audience. In time Tommy would join their company, although strangely, even at the height of his fame, he always refused to play a cabaret date in the vast Great Room of the Grosvenor House. For the moment though, every date played, every audience mood judged, every joke timed brought him a step closer to his own distinctive style, his unique tempo and the confidence required to drive him to the top.

Doubling clubs was not unusual, the Colony and the Astor being a frequent combination. One night in the spring of 1948 on his way between the Blue Lagoon and the Panama he was stopped in Regent Street by a policeman suspicious of someone walking through the West End of London with a couple of suitcases at such an ungainly hour. When he asked what he had in the cases, Tommy told him, ‘Magic!’ The officer was not satisfied and demanded he open them there and then. Slowly the sparkling spoils of his conjuror’s routine spilled out onto the pavement: ‘When he saw all the vases and rings sparkling under the lights he was still suspicious. He thought I was a burglar who had just done a job. At that moment, another copper came along and he happened to be an amateur conjuror, so to prove I was the real thing he made me perform one of the tricks. There I was in the middle of Regent Street at half past midnight doing “Glass, bottle. Bottle, glass.”’ Meanwhile Max Bygraves, with whom he was sharing the cabaret that week, was covering for him like crazy back at the Panama. By the time he walked on to do his act he appeared even more flustered than usual. He walked off shattered, turned to his friend and said, ‘Max, I’ve had a frustrating day. Let’s get pissed!’ According to Max, they did.

His apprenticeship took a special turn and the provincial trek a welcome break at the beginning of October 1949. His dream of a Windmill audition had been brought to reality by Miff and at the fifth attempt he joined the distinguished roll call of contemporaries who had jumped this hurdle ahead of him, including Jimmy Edwards, Harry Secombe, Alfred Marks, Michael Bentine, and Peter Sellers. Tommy stayed for six weeks at this legendary temple of static nudity in the seedy shadow of Eros, earning thirty pounds a week. Disreputable and innocent at once, the venue had a reputation as ‘The Comic’s Dunkirk’. No one pretended that the predominantly male audience came for the jokes; they came for the girls. Johnnie Gale, the theatre’s resident stage director, recalled how nervous the comic conjuror was: ‘Occasionally we wondered whether the nervousness was entirely genuine. One afternoon he dashed into the property room in a state of agitation, grabbed a pudding basin and put it on his head instead of a fez. Then he went to take his cue. The basin was whipped off him before he got very far, but the stage staff laughed – and that seemed to please him.’

In the first week he doubled with an appearance at The Magic Circle’s annual Festival of Magic at the Scala Theatre in Charlotte Street, enabling him to boast for evermore that in one week he had performed as many as fifty-two shows. At this time the Windmill (six days a week) had a ‘six shows a day’ policy, so how this was achieved may be something only The Magic Circle (six nightly shows and two matinées) can explain. Maybe there were some late night cabarets that did not get recorded properly, in which case he would have been moonlighting as far as Miff was concerned. The canny Scot was scrupulous in ensuring that everything that earned the merest penny was entered in the books. This included another diversion at the end of the year when he found himself spending Christmas at Morecambe playing an Ugly Sister in Cinderella. The comedy bandleader, Syd Seymour played ‘Buttons’; ‘Ermyntrude and Tinkle’ were played by Tommy and Cyril Andrews, of whom nothing seems to have been heard since; and specialities were provided by Syd’s ‘Madhatters’, Cooke’s Pony Revue, Suzie the Cow, and Tommy Cooper – presumably divest of drag for a seven minute turn. Three weeks in Morecambe were followed by single weeks in Stockton and Oldham. It was the last time he wore a frock for an extended period on stage and began a love-hate relationship with pantomime that would ironically have an effect on his television career, as we shall discover.

After the Christmas season Tommy returned to the hit and miss pattern of the London cabaret circuit. The value of both the Windmill and the Scala engagements is that they had given him a chance to be seen in a conventional theatre by conventional theatre managements. On 22 May 1950 he was given his first bona fide West End theatre engagement by the producer, Cecil Landeau. It was the heyday of what was known as intimate revue, a now seemingly dated combination of whimsical musical numbers and ever-so-gently satirical sketches, with the opportunity for an act by a key solo performer here or there. The Cambridge Theatre was perhaps a little too large for the true intimacy the format required, but Landeau had had some success there the previous year with his production, Sauce Tartare. It featured a rota of names that were only just the right side of fashion, like Ronald Frankau, Renée Houston and Claude Hulbert. For his new show, Sauce Piquante he adopted a fresher approach involving many of the rising young Turks of the comedy establishment, including Norman Wisdom, Bob Monkhouse, Harry Locke and Tommy. All four shared a tiny dressing room. Bob recalled the huge man, whose props crowded the room, always trying to find the space to put on his shirt. One night Tommy handed Bob a dark stick of Leichner make-up and said, ‘Write “B – A – C – K” on my back. Bob complied and Tommy said, ‘That should end the confusion!’ He then put on his shirt and continued in the confidence that he now really did have one thing less to worry about. With this insight into his own private madness, Bob loved the man from that moment on. Norman’s recollections are much more basic: ‘His feet smelled like rotting fish! Whenever his shoes came off, I would swish a newspaper frantically around the dressing room and moan. “Phew – Tommy! Your feet!” “What’s wrong with them?” he’d ask. “Cor, didn’t anyone ever tell you about Lifebuoy soap?” “Well, at least they’ll keep the mosquitoes away,” he replied.’

The distinguishing feature of both Landeau shows is that they featured an ingénue from the chorus who would go on to achieve a stardom greater than all the comics combined. At no point did she appear on stage with Cooper, other than in the finale of the show, but her chic and his gaucheness would have made an irresistible combination. Her name was Audrey Hepburn. She was on fifteen pounds a week, Norman well on his way to being the highest paid attraction in British variety was on a hundred, and Tommy was on twenty-five. The show folded after seven weeks. Tommy had joined only halfway through the run to replace an act that had failed to make the grade. By the end Norman took a drop in salary to fifteen himself, but Miff made sure that Tommy made no sacrifices.

He also refused to take his eye off the ball presented by the main challenge on the horizon, television. The records show that Tommy owed his debut in the 1947 Christmas Eve variety show to Miff. If he ever had cause to be grateful to the Scot – not as yet his sole agent – it was for the opportunity this gave him to cock a snook at the audition panel that had sneered at him a few months before. A few spasmodic appearances followed in the early part of 1948. At twelve guineas a time a career in television alone was not going to keep the wolf from the door. A suggestion from Miff to pioneer producer, Richard Afton in September 1948 for Tommy to star in a show called Ferrie-Go-Round in which Tommy played the part of a ‘screwy steward’ on board ‘a ferryboat or pleasure steamer’ with guest acts as the passengers and Miff supplying the band proved a non-starter. There was no further interest from the medium until Afton gave him a spot in a music hall programme televised from the Poplar Civic Theatre on 13 May 1950. In August he broadcast from Alexandra Palace in a show called Regency Room for another pioneer, Michael Mills. In November Miff decided to take advantage of a relationship from his radio days. Ronnie Waldman had produced several shows featuring Miff and the Jackdauz in his early days as a radio producer, including Airs and Disgraces. In January 1950 he transferred from radio to a position as Senior Producer, Light Entertainment, having already achieved a genial presence on the screen himself in Puzzle Corner in 1948. By October 1950 he was already Acting Head of Light Entertainment, Television.

Miff wasted no time in writing to his old colleague recommending Tommy as one of several artists of possible interest. On 28 November Waldman was able to respond: ‘As you have probably gathered, there was hardly any need to remind us of Tommy Cooper, since we have now booked him for our big show on 23 December.’ He was referring to the gala opening of their new studios at Lime Grove. Tommy’s inclusion may have been prompted by the query scrawled on a memo to Waldman from Cecil McGivern, the Controller of Programmes, dated 13 November: ‘I understand that some of the governors have asked when they are going to see Tommy Cooper on television again!’ In the context of his original audition this represented true vindication. Miff managed to negotiate a special fee of twenty guineas. The show aired at 8.45 in the evening and featured Tommy as support to Dolores Gray, on the back of her triumph in Annie Get Your Gun, star ventriloquist Peter Brough with Archie Andrews, veteran droll Jimmy James, and assorted acrobats and ladder balancers.

Miff quickly followed up the situation with a meeting in Waldman’s office on 2 January. A letter dated 23 January 1951 suggests they were treating this extraordinary talent with caution. With his variety and cabaret bookings Tommy was available immediately only for Sunday shows. These carried an added prestige. Ronnie made clear that the BBC was concerned that it could do Cooper more harm than good by launching him into a show of his own at such a time. They did not want to risk his reputation by using him in the wrong way. He was too valuable for that. Eventually 1951 would provide Tommy with only two occasions to shine on the small screen. In February he appeared as a guest of the wise-cracking violin virtuoso, Vic Oliver and in September on a programme, the title of which left no one guessing: For the Children – Variety. However, by the end of the year the pendulum of interest had swung from wariness through indifference to enthusiasm. On 4 December Waldman wrote again to Miff stating unequivocally that the sooner he can let him know when Tommy Cooper is free for a series the better it will be for all concerned.

The shift was inevitably due to the change in Tommy’s theatrical fortunes. In July 1950 he had filled in as a replacement for Michael Bentine as the top comedy attraction in the Folies Bergère revue at the London Hippodrome. As a result he found himself in the running for a place in the second edition of the show. When Encore des Folies opened on 6 March 1951 the critic from the Daily Telegraph considered that the ensemble lacked inspiration and gave evidence of under-rehearsal, but conceded that ‘the best individual turn was provided by Tommy Cooper as a hopelessly incompetent magician. I have never before seen anybody do as little as Mr Cooper and yet be so terribly funny.’

A transcript of the patter for his spot survives, courtesy of the lingering practice of having to submit all spoken material for such a show to the Lord Chamberlain:

I would now like to show you fifteen hours of magic and by way of a change I shall do my first trick first. Now you’ve all seen that very famous trick of sawing a lady in half, so to heck with it. (Throws saw over shoulder) A red silk handkerchief. I will now produce a bowl of goldfish … what … no table? (Makes ‘bowl’ disappear under silk instead) Every magician carries a magic wand. I can do anything you like with this wand. You could tell me what to do with it, and I could do it. There is a white tip here and a white tip there. Now the reason for the white tips is to separate the ends from the centre … I get worse! The magic wand clings to my hand. It can’t fall down … (Turns hand) … because I have my finger there. Wake up fellows, I’m on.

I’ll do my encore while you’re still here. There is the bottle and here is the glass. The bottle will now change places with the glass. The tubes are empty. I feel very tired tonight. Been breathing all day! Bush! Bush! (Gesticulates with hands) Doesn’t mean anything, just looks good. Music, please. (A single note or two) That’s enough. And the bottle has changed places with the glass. (Failure) My next trick. This is called the Demon Wonder Box and was given to me by a very famous Chinese magician called Hung One. His brother was Hung Too. Box open … box empty. I now produce a blue silk handkerchief. I mean red. See the way I stand. Well, what if I am! I place the handkerchief in the box; say the magic words ‘Hocus Pocus, Fish Bones Choke Us.’ That’s my best joke. Okay! And the handkerchief disappears from the box and makes its way into my left pocket. Please don’t applaud. Just throw cigarettes. Place the handkerchief in the pocket so and produce it from the box. Go home, fellows. I’ll lock up. The red handkerchief will now change to blue. In this racket you have to be crazy, otherwise you go nuts.

Yes … we now come to the bottle and the glass again. Music please. That’s enough. (Failure again) This is the egg and this is the bag. You all know what an egg is and you know what a bag is. I will now make the egg vanish. Now I will make the egg come back. A child of three could do this trick. Wish he was here now! Where is the egg? (Places bag on table and audience hear egg ‘talk’) My next trick. I have fifty-two cards here. I will now make sure there are fifty-two. (Riffles edge of pack to ear) Sorry, fifty-three. Would you please think of a card? (To gentleman in audience) Two of Clubs? Correct! (Tosses card aside without showing face to front) I will now restore the two pieces of rope into one piece. I’m a liar. I expect you are wondering what this is. (Picks up and discards strange object) So am I. I can’t help laughing. I know what’s coming next. Here is the skull of the magician who gave me that trick. And here is the skull of the same magician when he was a boy. (Brings out miniature skull) Watch! Watch! (Produces large clock behind cloth) And now the bottle will change places with the glass. The bottle has changed places. (Exposes two bottles and two glasses) Oh, to heck with it! (Exit)

For an encore he came back to produce the bunch of flowers from the empty ‘vase or vayse’, flicking the switch on the plinth to produce the bouquet when everyone least expected it. The band played a chord and jubilantly Tommy declared, ‘I wrote that music myself!’ In his own typed version of the above the words I have put in italics have been crossed out. One presumes that he would sneak them in for a nightclub show or in provincial variety when the man with the blue pencil was not around. The camp reference is, of course, a straight steal from Max Miller’s act, where it never worried a soul. But innuendo was never Tommy’s forte and it is significant to see him – or the Lord Chamberlain on his behalf – refining his style at this early stage. There were also variations during the run. At a later date he would produce a large skeleton of a fish in lieu of the goldfish bowl that never came: ‘I’ll kill that cat!’

The bottle and glass subjected itself to much business, not obvious from the basic outline. For one of the transpositions he gained considerable mileage from the old spotlight gag, walking to the other side of the stage with the beam following him, running back in the dark to switch bottle and glass around, then returning to the spotlight which was now frantically looking for him. At a later date for the third stage he would shriek, ‘The bottle has now changed places with the glass’ without lifting the tubes, then continue, ‘The most difficult part of the trick is to make them go back again.’ He’d then go into lightning reveals beneath the tubes of bottle and glass, glass and bottle, bottle and glass, glass and bottle again, before disastrously showing two glasses at one time, then two bottles, then in quick succession leaving all four objects in view on the table and flinging the tubes aside. The speed for the finish was incredible, while the words on the page can give no impression of the overpowering presence and nervous energy that drove the act along. As The Magic Circular, the magazine of The Magic Circle, reported, ‘The skill with which he ruined his act was amazing.’ Val Andrews also makes the observation that at this early stage in his career when he was relatively unknown to audiences it was something of a surprise when his tricks began to misfire. When he became famous the comedy had to come from another direction: no sooner had he picked up a prop than he would then laugh in anticipation of the disaster that was almost inevitable.

The Hippodrome season signified that he was on his way to the big time and Miff was determined Tommy should not spoil things for himself. He wrote to Val Parnell, the Managing Director of Moss Empires which owned the venue, asking for permission to pop into the theatre from time to time to view his client’s act, since ‘it is necessary, in the interests of his career, that I view his stage performance from time to time.’ He made it clear he was not asking for complimentary tickets. Parnell replied stating that it was not customary for agents to make frequent visits to view their clients, but that in the circumstances he would have no objection to Miff looking into the theatre occasionally. For the eight minute spot, which with laughs could never have played for less than ten, Tommy was billed as ‘Almost a Magician!’ his most familiar billing from the early part of his career. His first ventures into variety had been tagged ‘Six Feet of Fun’, followed, when Miff came on board, by ‘Television’s Mad Magician’. The new label paid homage to that surreal ragamuffin of the halls, Billy Bennett, whose ‘Almost a Gentleman’ had gone out of service upon his death in 1942. One wonders if Tommy was also aware of the early bill matter of the suavely sarcastic American radio comedian, Fred Allen at an earlier career phase when he was known as ‘Freddy James – Almost a Juggler’.

He was not receiving a lavish wage. Bentine in the previous edition of the Folies had worked his way up to seventy-five pounds a week, but Tommy’s forty pounds was enhanced by frequent cabaret work at venues that now included the Savoy, the Dorchester, and the Berkeley, for which he regularly received an additional salary of seventy-five pounds. More importantly the press began to take notice. The most important young critic in the country, Kenneth Tynan went out of his way to eulogize him in the Evening Standard, describing him as our best new clown: ‘Cooper is the hulking, preposterous conjuror, who is always in a jelly of hysterics at the collapse of his own tricks. Convulsed by his own incompetence, holding his sides, he staggers helplessly from trick to trick; no man was ever less surprised by failure. Cooper, you see, has a distinct attitude towards life; a stoic attitude, a gurgling awareness of the futility of human effort. And this is what raises him above the crowd.’ No wonder Ronnie Waldman had pulled his enthusiasm up a notch or two. Even if Tynan failed to register fully Tommy’s inherent panic, acknowledge the look that cried ‘Help, what am I going to do next?’, a perceptive person reading between the lines of his appraisal would have spotted something of crucial importance, namely that Cooper was capable of being more than a just a novelty act guaranteed to enliven an otherwise dull bill. Like Howerd, like Wisdom, like Terry-Thomas he need not be shackled within the confines of being a turn.

At the end of the run in February 1952 Miff punctiliously wrote to Parnell thanking him for his courtesy and cooperation during the run of Encore des Folies. The letter gave him an opportunity to tell Parnell that Tommy would be starring in his own television series commencing 12 March. On 21 December 1951 Waldman had written to the BBC Television Booking Manager, expressing his desire to build a new show around Tommy, in which he would not only give his usual performance of lunatic conjuring, but also act as compère and provide the central core of the production by reappearing all the way through. The water needed testing with Miff from a money standpoint, but Waldman admitted to his colleagues within the Corporation that he was prepared to go up to a weekly fee of eighty guineas for eight shows. Eventually Miff settled for sixty. Tommy and Gwen could feel pleased with themselves. Immediately after the Folies they flew off to Barcelona for two weeks’ holiday. Around this time they moved to their most desirable residence yet, a two-guineas a week basement flat in a stately red-brick mansion block, Waverley Mansions, in Kenton Street, not far from Russell Square. Tommy could also boast his first car, a new Vanguard Estate, which he later claimed was the best vehicle he ever owned, dismissing in turn the Triumph Renown, the Ford Estate and the Mercedes that saw him through to the end of his days. Most importantly the combination of a long theatre run and a television series enabled him to be back in town with his mates, not only the comics whose trials and tribulations he shared, but also the magicians with whom he felt most at home.

The most vivid picture of Tommy the person at this point in his life can be gained from his magical cronies. Living near Russell Square he was only a short walk from the premises of L. Davenport and Company at 25 New Oxford Street. Every Saturday morning this mystical emporium – advertised as ‘Where the Tricks Come From’ – became the unofficial rallying point for a small group of young aficionados. Regular attendees included Bobby Bernard, Val Andrews, Billy McComb, Alex Elmsley, Cy Endfield and Harry Devano. It was not unknown for Orson Welles to add his weight to the gathering if he was in town. Between them they represented a motley bunch of professionals and amateurs bound together by a common enthusiasm. When they had outstayed their welcome at the magic store, the caravan would repair to a nearby Lyons’ Corner House for the rest of the afternoon.

According to Val, Tommy was always on the look out for the latest novelty in the pocket trick line and was quite unable to contain himself from the headstrong demonstration of his latest acquisition as soon as they were in the café. He often had no idea how the trick worked and the Nippies, the Lyons waitresses in their short trademark aprons, would gather around in hysterics as he tried to master the intricacies of this newly purchased miracle. He once took great pride in genuinely fooling Bobby with a new version of the trick in which a coin was secretly concealed beneath one of three small red cups. In the old version you had only to look for the secret hair attached to the penny to announce where it was. Bobby had no idea what Tommy was up to as time and again he discovered the hidden coin. Cooper would register his excitement with what became a characteristic gesture, clapping his hands together like flippers and saying, ‘Dear, oh dear! Dear, oh dear!’ Except that in those early days the words were expletive based, a trait he had to purge from his behaviour when he started to mix with the Delfonts and the Grades. But as Bobby says, ‘We all knew what he was really saying!’

For all his success he never bought a tea or a coffee for anyone. He used to say, ‘You get the teas, boy’– a clue to his Welsh ancestry – ‘and I’ll get the chairs.’ If the place was crowded he gave you the impression he was doing you a favour. It was a ploy he had developed in crowded NAAFI canteens. Then once you had brought over the teas that you had bought, he would launch into a lecture on how scandalous the charges were, working out the number of cups of tea that you should be able to extract from a packet for less than a farthing a cup. When he really had been broke, word got around that he had been unable to pay his Magic Circle subscription. According to Gwen he walked out on stage at one Magic Circle show and said, ‘You can all stop talking about me – it makes no difference.’ He turned around and there was a rubber dagger sticking out of his back. The audience was in uproar. When he became better off than most of his colleagues, it suited him to keep his hands in his pockets. Jack Benny kept up the pretence of meanness as a key trait within his comic persona; Max Miller, who supposedly never bought a drink for anyone, was a humanitarian by contrast when it came to secret good deeds. Alas, Tommy’s behaviour was a psychological kink in his make-up that had no bearing on his comic perspective whatsoever.

Bobby can become quite agitated about his old chum. Put bluntly the Cooper of those early years was ‘a ruthless opportunist – he’d never pay for anything if he could find a way of getting you to give it to him.’ Or pay you what you wanted if he could find a way of getting it for less. He became the acknowledged expert at discovering he had left his wallet or chequebook at home. In this context the Bill Hall story is legendary. Hall was an eccentric double-bass player on the variety circuit in the act known as ‘Hall, Norman and Ladd’. In his spare time he was quite a deft caricaturist and had developed a sideline of reproducing sketches of his fellow pros as postcards for publicity purposes. One day Val spotted him in Lyons’ clutching a packet of postcards for Tommy. Bill told Andrews he was charging him three pounds for the service. Val was sceptical, but Hall assured him he knew how to go about things. Tommy arrived and quickly got to the point, ‘Bill, I’ve been thinking about the three quid …’ ‘That’s right,’ interrupted Hall, ‘unfortunately I gave you the wrong quote. I forgot to include the price of the special bromide paper they were printed on.’ Tommy took out his wallet and three pounds were extracted with the speed of jet propulsion: ‘No, a price is a price. You said three pounds. There it is!’

For Val the vagaries of such behaviour were offset by the sheer dedication he put into his work, the midnight oil he would spend practising: ‘He worked harder at perfecting his act than any other performer I ever knew.’ The latest pocket tricks aside, he was a shrewd judge of the material that best suited him. And he was always fun. As Val says, ‘He had many good qualities and could be great company and was fun to be with. But I always felt that his obsession about the cost of things spoiled things for himself and others. I was sorry for anyone who had a business arrangement with him.’ Tommy used to get through three ‘Electric Decks’ a week, specially gimmicked packs of cards that create a convincing illusion of the cards flowing from hand to hand like a waterfall, until you take the lower hand away and they are seen to be strung together on a length of elastic. Val made these for the magic shops where they sold for seven shillings and sixpence. One day he told Tommy he was prepared to give him a special deal, bypassing the retailer on the way: ‘I’ll give you three at a time, twelve and six for three, or better still six for a pound.’ He wouldn’t play: ‘It seemed like more, it sounded more, and he couldn’t make the mental leap to see the bargain. So he missed out. Or thought I had some devious plan to cheat him which he could not fathom. There were times when he was not too bright.’ To an extent his caution with money reflected the hard times of his past, but was carried through to an extreme that bordered on the paranoid. Such may be the psychological fallout of having money sewn into your clothes as a child. It is a character trait that we shall need to return to before this story is over, but first there are further triumphs on stage and on television to chart, as well as the whole question of where he acquired his professional material.