in the same sentence as Bomber Harris.
We all of us, I suppose, add up to, come down to, a jumble of attitudes, and Innes’s, a code if not quite a creed, has taken something of a battering in recent years, both in the country and in the Corporation. It was no accident that he should have detested Mrs Thatcher to the comic extent that he did, because she stood for a single-mindedness, a want of magnanimity and an exclusiveness that challenged all the variety of qualities and attributes Innes celebrated in his work. They were, I suppose, the qualities of the old BBC, and in retrospect one can see how fitting it was that it should have been Innes who produced Roger Milner’s play about Reith.
Liberal, magnanimous, indifferent to criticism, Innes Lloyd was in the best sense old-fashioned. But, tolerant, various, prodigal, fearless and passionate, his standards are – or were – those of the BBC he served so faithfully for twenty-six years, and to see those values fought for, reinstated and celebrated again would be the best memorial to this steadfast, gentle, generous man.
Peter Cook, 1937–1995
An Address given at Hampstead Parish Church on 1 May 1995
It is thirty-five years, almost to the day, since I first set eyes on Peter, at lunch in a restaurant, I think on Goodge Street, with Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, the meeting arranged by John Bassett, whose idea it was that we should all work together writing the review that turned into Beyond the Fringe .
Having already written while still an undergraduate a large slice of the two West End shows Pieces of Eight and One Over the Eight , Peter was quite prosperous and it showed. He dressed out of Sportique, an establishment – gents’ outfitters wouldn’t really describe it – at the west end of Old Compton Street, the premises I think now occupied by the Café España.
There hadn’t really been any men’s fashions before 1960 – most of the people I knew dressed in sports coat and flannels, as some of us still do – but when I saw Peter he was wearing a shortie overcoat, a not quite bum-freezer jacket, narrow trousers, winkle-picker shoes and a silk tie with horizontal bars across it. But what was most characteristic of him, and which remained constant throughout his life, regardless of the sometimes quite dramatic changes in his physical appearance, was that he was carrying, as he always seemed to be carrying, a large armful of newspapers. He had besides a book on racing form, and I remember being impressed not merely that this was someone who bet on horses but that here was someone who knew how to bet on horses, and indeed had an account at a bookmaker’s.
But it was the newspapers that were the clue to him. He was nurtured by newspapers, and there’s a sense that whatever he wrote or extemporized, which he could at that time with a fluency so effortless as to make us all feel in differing degrees costive, was a kind of mould or fungus that grew out of the literally yards of newsprint that he daily digested. Newspapers mulched his talents, and he remained loyal to them all his life; and when he died they repaid some of that loyalty.
In those days I never saw him reading a book. I think he thought that most books were a con or at any rate a waste of time. He caught the drift of books though, sufficient for his own purposes, namely jokes, picking up enough about Proust, for instance, to know that he suffered from asthma and couldn’t breathe very well; he decided in the finish, according to Peter, that if he couldn’t do it well he wouldn’t do it at all, and so died – this one of the gems from the monologue in Beyond the Fringe about the miner who wanted to be a judge but didn’t have the Latin. How Proust had managed to work his way into the sketch I can’t now remember, because it was less of a sketch than a continuing saga which each night developed new extravagances and surrealist turns, the mine at one point invaded by droves of
We all of us, I suppose, add up to, come down to, a jumble of attitudes, and Innes’s, a code if not quite a creed, has taken something of a battering in recent years, both in the country and in the Corporation. It was no accident that he should have detested Mrs Thatcher to the comic extent that he did, because she stood for a single-mindedness, a want of magnanimity and an exclusiveness that challenged all the variety of qualities and attributes Innes celebrated in his work. They were, I suppose, the qualities of the old BBC, and in retrospect one can see how fitting it was that it should have been Innes who produced Roger Milner’s play about Reith.
Liberal, magnanimous, indifferent to criticism, Innes Lloyd was in the best sense old-fashioned. But, tolerant, various, prodigal, fearless and passionate, his standards are – or were – those of the BBC he served so faithfully for twenty-six years, and to see those values fought for, reinstated and celebrated again would be the best memorial to this steadfast, gentle, generous man.
Peter Cook, 1937–1995
An Address given at Hampstead Parish Church on 1 May 1995
It is thirty-five years, almost to the day, since I first set eyes on Peter, at lunch in a restaurant, I think on Goodge Street, with Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, the meeting arranged by John Bassett, whose idea it was that we should all work together writing the review that turned into Beyond the Fringe .
Having already written while still an undergraduate a large slice of the two West End shows Pieces of Eight and One Over the Eight , Peter was quite prosperous and it showed. He dressed out of Sportique, an establishment – gents’ outfitters wouldn’t really describe it – at the west end of Old Compton Street, the premises I think now occupied by the Café España.
There hadn’t really been any men’s fashions before 1960 – most of the people I knew dressed in sports coat and flannels, as some of us still do – but when I saw Peter he was wearing a shortie overcoat, a not quite bum-freezer jacket, narrow trousers, winkle-picker shoes and a silk tie with horizontal bars across it. But what was most characteristic of him, and which remained constant throughout his life, regardless of the sometimes quite dramatic changes in his physical appearance, was that he was carrying, as he always seemed to be carrying, a large armful of newspapers. He had besides a book on racing form, and I remember being impressed not merely that this was someone who bet on horses but that here was someone who knew how to bet on horses, and indeed had an account at a bookmaker’s.
But it was the newspapers that were the clue to him. He was nurtured by newspapers, and there’s a sense that whatever he wrote or extemporized, which he could at that time with a fluency so effortless as to make us all feel in differing degrees costive, was a kind of mould or fungus that grew out of the literally yards of newsprint that he daily digested. Newspapers mulched his talents, and he remained loyal to them all his life; and when he died they repaid some of that loyalty.
In those days I never saw him reading a book. I think he thought that most books were a con or at any rate a waste of time. He caught the drift of books though, sufficient for his own purposes, namely jokes, picking up enough about Proust, for instance, to know that he suffered from asthma and couldn’t breathe very well; he decided in the finish, according to Peter, that if he couldn’t do it well he wouldn’t do it at all, and so died – this one of the gems from the monologue in Beyond the Fringe about the miner who wanted to be a judge but didn’t have the Latin. How Proust had managed to work his way into the sketch I can’t now remember, because it was less of a sketch than a continuing saga which each night developed new extravagances and surrealist turns, the mine at one point invaded by droves of
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