LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

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