Dimensions
153 x 234 x 30mm
To his many fans, Peter Cook was quite simply the funniest man they never met. Over a decade since his untimely death, his reputation as one of Britain's greatest comics shows no sign of shrinking.
Peter Cook was one of the most significant influences on British comedy of the last 50 years. Caustic, cruel but genuinely and effortlessly witty, Cook was one of the prime architects of the satire boom of the sixties, achieving fame first in the revue 'Beyond The Fringe' with Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, then in the television comedy sketch show 'Not Only But Also', starring himself and Moore.
Wendy Cook was a teenage art student when she first met the handsome Cambridge undergraduate in the early sixties. They married soon after and together founded the Establishment clubs in London and New York, and financed the satirical magazine 'Private Eye'. Wendy bore Peter his only children and they lived together during the most explosive time in Peter's amazing career. But the price of this stratospheric rise was high.
'I felt eventually I had to go my own way rather than stay with somebody who was that nihilistic. Alcohol strokes up the demons and a completely different person starts to emerge. He did know how to behave well, but it rotted into something else. At a certain point I thought, "This will be the end of me if I don't leave now".