The Thoughts of E.L. Wisty

Yesterday’s blog about ingrained attitudes towards particular sports on account of upbringing reminded me of the late, great Peter Cook. Now, as far as I am concerned, a funnier human being never walked this earth. So imagine my surprise, upon reading the equally late Harry Thompson’s magnificent biography of the man -- imaginatively entitled Peter Cook -- A Biography -- a couple of years back, to happen upon the following:

“Peter became an expert at minority sports, from world championship darts to truck-racing live from Idaho on satellite…His least favourite sport was Rugby League, but he watched even that assiduously enough to acquire an encyclopaedic knowledge. The fact that he actually sat down to watch it at all suggests that he was innately bored, in the way that people who sit through entire TV shows in order to write outraged letters of complaint about them are innately outraged.”

Remind you of anyone? I know that this rugby union skeptic shuffled a little uncomfortably the first time he read it. Meanwhile, here Cook is again, below, on the BBC’s Michael Parkinson show in 1976. The interview as a whole is a delight but the offending moment comes 3 minutes 50 seconds in. However supposedly anti-establishment you are, once a public schoolboy always a public schoolboy, even when you are as amusing as Peter Cook. Blinkers in place, that’s that. They ain’t coming off for anyone.

Does any of this matter? Has it affected my view of Peter Cook? Not really, no, on both counts. At heart, Cook and his Beyond The Fringe colleagues were always more about sending the British class system up than bringing it down. And his pompous authority figures like Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling (or was it Greeb-Streeling) were clearly semi-autobiographical. Makes you think, though, dunnit? Do we actually like and dislike things in the way that we say we do -- or are we just taking up learned positions that we trot out regardless? Oh and while we are coming over all philosophical, whatever did happen to Parky? Not seen him down at Cougar Park lately…