Posted by Ian on 2009-04-18
in Celebrity
When people ask me what sort of magic I do, I’m still reluctant to call myself a comedy magician. And the reason lies in two words: ‘Tommy Cooper’. He died twenty five years ago and yet his influence still hangs over us magicians today who attempt to perform humour with our magic – far more than it does with the still very much alive Paul Daniels.
And it’s not just my generation. Pete Firman, one of the successful young comedy magicians around, who I suspect wasn’t even born in Tommy Cooper’s lifetime, for a period performed the Multiplying Bottles – a trick that Cooper had made famous. At one of his shows, as Pete was walking on, somebody shouted out in a Tommy Cooper imitated voice: “bottle, glass”. Pete stopped doing it from that moment on.
My own gut feeling is that not many people actually saw Tommy Cooper live. John Fisher points out in his recent biography of Cooper that he wasn’t capable of selling out a theatre on his own. He didn’t have the pulling power that somebody like Max Miller or Ken Dodd did. John Fisher’s theory is that he didn’t appeal to women in the same way that the latter two did.
What people remember, of course, is the clips on television. And have we had those in the past two and a half decades? Every year there seems to be some sort of anniversary compilation of Cooper’s greatest hits with the same talking heads telling us there will never be another like him. What they usually fail to mention is that in his later years he found work hard to get (partly, but not wholly, due to the fact that he was an alcoholic) and television really wasn’t that interested in him.
I did actually see him once live - at the Oxford Playhouse. Sadly I can’t recall much about the performance. I know that he got plenty of laughs by pretending he was locked in the dressing room before he came on stage. The only joke I can remember is him taking out a box of tissues and dropping a couple onto the floor whilst reciting: “a tissue, a tissue...we all fall down.” Like the majority of Tommy Cooper’s jokes it only works if you can imagine him saying it.
One thing about the show which surprised me was that the sound system was playing up; there was feedback from the microphone. And he didn’t make any reference to it. Maybe he thought it best to ignore it and plough on; or perhaps he was on auto-pilot and didn’t really notice it. It didn’t have an adverse impact on the audience’s enjoyment but I did feel, at the time, it was rather strange not even to mention that there was a problem.
In recognition of the silver anniversary of his death, Radio 4 has just put out a tribute programme called ‘Spoon Jar... Jar Spoon’ which, for once, actually concentrated on his love of magic rather than his comedy. Fascinating to magicians like myself but I’m not quite sure if it would have had quite the same interest to the general listener.
Opinion amongst the participants seemed to be rather divided as to whether Cooper was much good at magic. A couple, the late Ali Bongo and a magician of amazing knowledge, Pat Page, insisted that he did one or two tricks very well. Paul Daniels was less impressed – putting him only just above average. I guess it doesn’t matter very much; they all agreed that he was fanatical about magic and loved the company of magicians.
Somebody told me that when Bob Hope was performing at the London Palladium, Tommy Cooper was in the audience. Bob Hope, who didn’t know him from Adam, introduced him from the stage. Tommy stood up and said “hello.” He wasn’t trying to be funny at all – but that was sufficient: he brought the house down by simply doing that. Bob Hope didn’t know what to do. It’s the difference between a good joke-teller and a comic genius.
Now you know why I don’t like calling myself a comedy magician: nobody could or can, even twenty five years after his death, follow Tommy Cooper.
And it’s not just my generation. Pete Firman, one of the successful young comedy magicians around, who I suspect wasn’t even born in Tommy Cooper’s lifetime, for a period performed the Multiplying Bottles – a trick that Cooper had made famous. At one of his shows, as Pete was walking on, somebody shouted out in a Tommy Cooper imitated voice: “bottle, glass”. Pete stopped doing it from that moment on.
My own gut feeling is that not many people actually saw Tommy Cooper live. John Fisher points out in his recent biography of Cooper that he wasn’t capable of selling out a theatre on his own. He didn’t have the pulling power that somebody like Max Miller or Ken Dodd did. John Fisher’s theory is that he didn’t appeal to women in the same way that the latter two did.
What people remember, of course, is the clips on television. And have we had those in the past two and a half decades? Every year there seems to be some sort of anniversary compilation of Cooper’s greatest hits with the same talking heads telling us there will never be another like him. What they usually fail to mention is that in his later years he found work hard to get (partly, but not wholly, due to the fact that he was an alcoholic) and television really wasn’t that interested in him.
I did actually see him once live - at the Oxford Playhouse. Sadly I can’t recall much about the performance. I know that he got plenty of laughs by pretending he was locked in the dressing room before he came on stage. The only joke I can remember is him taking out a box of tissues and dropping a couple onto the floor whilst reciting: “a tissue, a tissue...we all fall down.” Like the majority of Tommy Cooper’s jokes it only works if you can imagine him saying it.
One thing about the show which surprised me was that the sound system was playing up; there was feedback from the microphone. And he didn’t make any reference to it. Maybe he thought it best to ignore it and plough on; or perhaps he was on auto-pilot and didn’t really notice it. It didn’t have an adverse impact on the audience’s enjoyment but I did feel, at the time, it was rather strange not even to mention that there was a problem.
In recognition of the silver anniversary of his death, Radio 4 has just put out a tribute programme called ‘Spoon Jar... Jar Spoon’ which, for once, actually concentrated on his love of magic rather than his comedy. Fascinating to magicians like myself but I’m not quite sure if it would have had quite the same interest to the general listener.
Opinion amongst the participants seemed to be rather divided as to whether Cooper was much good at magic. A couple, the late Ali Bongo and a magician of amazing knowledge, Pat Page, insisted that he did one or two tricks very well. Paul Daniels was less impressed – putting him only just above average. I guess it doesn’t matter very much; they all agreed that he was fanatical about magic and loved the company of magicians.
Somebody told me that when Bob Hope was performing at the London Palladium, Tommy Cooper was in the audience. Bob Hope, who didn’t know him from Adam, introduced him from the stage. Tommy stood up and said “hello.” He wasn’t trying to be funny at all – but that was sufficient: he brought the house down by simply doing that. Bob Hope didn’t know what to do. It’s the difference between a good joke-teller and a comic genius.
Now you know why I don’t like calling myself a comedy magician: nobody could or can, even twenty five years after his death, follow Tommy Cooper.
