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alexsarllFinally watched the Peter Cook biopic last night. Rhys Ifans may not have been perfect as Cook but he was pretty damn close, and if anyone but Cook could do a perfect Cook then we wouldn't idolise him so, would we? And the other bloke was perfectly adequate as the other bloke. You know, the "club-footed dwarf whose only talent is to play 'Chopsticks' in the style of Debussy". Let's face it, bar a bit of post-mortem revisionism when the sex thimble finally hopped off this mortal coil, this was always Cook's story. My main objection to the film was that it showed Peter as somehow needing Dud; they totally ignored Why Bother?, for instance (in which Cook paired with someone else who was actually funny, namely Chris Morris, and surpassed almost anything he did with Moore). I loved the reviews of the New York show at which Cook turned up @rseholed but still got all the praise, or the brilliant response he got at the Amnesty benefit. He was naturally very funny; Dudley had to rehearse endlessly in order to be mildly amusing. It's the same as his first wife's ponderings over how young they were when they met, and what might have been different were it otherwise: "You'd have been you, but I'm not sure I'd have been me".
They resisted the temptation for too much exposition, even if you had Pete & Dud as a kind of chorus watching Peter & Dudley, but I felt most of the important points were still made; several inchoate thoughts I had about Cook are now in much clearer focus. First and most important: he was not a failure. As he said early on, failure was the one thing he was no good at. And having succeeded and succeeded and succeeded, he realised he didn't want anything this world has to offer. There are plenty of old cliches about comedians; for instance, it is said that all satirists are moralists. To some extent that's true; satirical attack on false values is normally motivated by a sense of what real values should be. But Cook gives the impression that he's realised all values are ultimately hollow. Similarly, he takes the idea of comedian-as-teller-of-unpalatable-truths to its logical conclusion; that's why they called him cruel so often.
From all of which it follows - Peter wasn't envious of Dudley's success. He was Socrates envious of the pig's capacity for happiness. "He knew what he wanted, and he went and got it" - whereas what could an eye as piercing as Peter's ever really want?
And then, of course, as I'm taking all these notes, they have the rooftop reconciliation, and Dudley says how he used to see Peter "surrounded by sex-kittens and sycophants" but know that there was also, on the edge of the scene, "another you, keeping your distance, making notes". And I realise the side I take in all this may not be wholly unbiased.
The continuity announcers warnings of strong language in Every. Sodding. Ad. Break. were a bit trying, though.
On Boxing Day, in search of some suitably festive programming, Channel 4 finally deigned to start showing the brilliant prison drama Oz again. Over the course of last week they showed all eight episodes of the fifth season*, and reminded me just how good television can be. Rather than carry on with the sixth season, this week they begin saturating the schedules with Celebrity Big Brother. Granted, this is still a programme about the psychological impact of confinement but the characters are far less believable or interesting. And it's distinctly lacking in shankings and @n@l r@pe.
This whole 'three minute silence' idea? Sod off. The two minutes for the twin towers was bad enough. The minute's silence is a flat-rate currency, because otherwise compassion inflation sets in, and before you know it we'll all be taking Cistercian vows of lifelong silence because some particularly photogenic toddler has kicked the bucket. Hell, it's not even as if the tsunami claimed more victims than 1914-18.
*Including one double bill which became a triple bill at the last minute, so that even those few of us who scan the late night schedules diligently and set our videos with a margin of error were guaranteed to miss it. For this, they shall one day taste my steel.
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 11:15 am (UTC)Maybe we could create a scientific unit of catastrophe - the deciseal?
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Date: 2005-01-05 11:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 11:35 am (UTC)Take your places, choose your sins
Date: 2005-01-05 11:37 am (UTC)Incidentally, I asked a Norn Ironer how they pronounce 'pilchard'. The idea that the emphasis is on the second syllable = MYTH.
Re: Take your places, choose your sins
Date: 2005-01-05 11:43 am (UTC)Re: Take your places, choose your sins
Date: 2005-01-05 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 02:49 pm (UTC)Taking into account compassion fatigue I think we can expect compassionate silence to depend on the logarithm of the catastrophe, and to allow for the inflation apparent at the low end of the scale it is clear that ten times the disaster gives about four minutes more silence. Elementary arithmetic then shows that the Seventh Seal is about 6e24 times more tragic than the death of Queen Elizabeth last Empress of India, and hence we deduce:
A Mole Queen Mother is a Seal.
Good teleology, but poor zoology, like the rest of the book of Revelation.
HTFB
All that glisters is not silence
Date: 2005-01-05 11:18 am (UTC)Where I was working at the time, that was three minutes. But then we had 2 minutes for the death of the Queen Mother!
Re: All that glisters is not silence
Date: 2005-01-05 11:20 am (UTC)Re: All that glisters is not silence
Date: 2005-01-05 11:29 am (UTC)Re: All that glisters is not silence
Date: 2005-01-05 11:40 am (UTC)Re: All that glisters is not silence
Date: 2005-01-05 11:44 am (UTC)Re: All that glisters is not silence
Date: 2005-01-05 11:48 am (UTC)Re: All that glisters is not silence
Date: 2005-01-05 11:50 am (UTC)Re: All that glisters is not silence
Date: 2005-01-05 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 11:51 am (UTC)Also…the sadistic pleasure Peter Cook got from making Dudley corpse in Pete & Dud or Derek and Clive mode became almost addictive for him, fuelled him on; likewise with his caustic attacks on Moore. Pete need Dud as an outlet for some of his demons.
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Date: 2005-01-05 12:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 12:19 pm (UTC)-x-
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Date: 2005-01-05 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 12:01 pm (UTC)Mmm. Ifans was good, they all were.
My quibbles are with presentation. And possibly then also the newly found holes in my biographical knowledge. In that I really did not think he was such a selfish boring jealous monster. (The aspects of c*nt I was readier for.) Showing Cook at college swoooping away in his tattered gown, prancing like a tit. Holding court in the most self-conscious way.
Was gratified to read a rebuttal by Cook's first wife in the weekend papers, pointing out he was a little kinder & sweeter & less irritating than he had been portrayed. Oh, and while she was here, she herself was a little less of a naive idiot.
(The aggrived martyr stance somewhat ruined by her declaring a need to publish her own side of the story, solely to get the facts straight...)
Oh, and there was no mention of 'Supergirl'. Dagnabbit.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 12:03 pm (UTC)I was always under the impression that he was a monster - my first real memory of him was a very dark interview on Clive James - but then many great men are. It's only natural that those who loved him might, with time, come to gloss over that.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 12:13 pm (UTC)Tend to agree about Cook needing Moore, on a personal rather than professional level. Cook didn't need anyone professionally, and I think everyone knew it. He certainly did. I also don't think Moore needed Cook. With his musical talent, he would have been a success even if he hadn't gone into comedy, and though he wasn't anywhere near as good a writer as Cook (but then, nobody was), he was IMO a much better actor.
Course, on one level, each of them was precisely the worst thing for the other. And I thought the film brought that out extremely well.
On another note, my Mum managed to phone me up at five to twelve and keep me talking all the way through the three minutes' silence. Cheers, Mum!
no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 12:16 pm (UTC)This is interesting, because one of the bits I remember from that Clive James interview was some very unpalatable stuff about male attitudes to daughters.
"I also don't think Moore needed Cook. With his musical talent, he would have been a success even if he hadn't gone into comedy, and though he wasn't anywhere near as good a writer as Cook (but then, nobody was), he was IMO a much better actor."
I watched Santa Claus - the Movie when I was young and undemanding. Even then I thought the elf was rubbish. As to my more recent attempt to watch Arthur - let us never speak of that again.
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Date: 2005-01-05 12:25 pm (UTC)Just some redeeming feature beyond the ability to bibble with kids and be able to pour out funny.
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Date: 2005-01-05 12:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 09:48 pm (UTC)More from Channel4, at least.
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Date: 2005-01-05 02:45 pm (UTC)as to whether Peter Cook needed Dudley Moore - i suppose it depends on what you mean needed for - listening to the Derek and Clive tapes Cook is leading the whole thing and being very sharp and creative, while Moore is generaly being smutty in an attempt to keep up with him. but maybe Cook on his own in the earlier stuff would have been too much for the viewing public, and Moore softened it with his music and slapstick comedy and helped them both become successful?
re: success, i remember reading some obituaries for Peter Cook, which were along the lines of - he was so talented, he could have acheived so much more - presumably gone to hollywood like Moore. but i think that he is a good example of how it is the quality of what you do, rather than the quantity, that people will consider in the end.
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Date: 2005-01-05 03:24 pm (UTC)I'm not sure how accurate the film was, but it showed Moore trying to get Cook to tone down Beyond the Fringe and veto the release of Derek & Clive. So if Cook had actually listened to Moore, he'd have crippled himself.
And really, what else *could* Cook have achieved?
no subject
Date: 2005-01-06 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-07 10:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-07 11:02 am (UTC)but it's all just speculation anyways...
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Date: 2005-01-05 05:52 pm (UTC)Naturally I first thought this read "those rare breasts"....
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Date: 2005-01-05 05:55 pm (UTC)