David Sexton

One Leg Too Few may be one biography too many

William Cook's dual narrative of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore is forced and deterministic

David Bowie with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in 1973 (Photo: Keystone/Getty)

It’s no joke, writing about comedians. Their work is funny, their lives are not. Rightly honouring the former while accurately relaying the disasters of the latter is a challenge few writers can well meet.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore have been extensively studied before. Harry Thompson published his excellent biography of Cook in 1997, Barbara Paskin her authorised biography of Moore the same year; Alexander Games’s joint biography Pete & Dud followed in 1999. There have been memoirs of Peter Cook by his first and second wives, Wendy and Judy, and his third wife, Lin, has edited Something Like Fire: Peter Cook Remembered.

What’s to add? William Cook (no relation) has previously compiled two essential script anthologies, Tragically I Was An Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook, and Goodbye Again: The Definitive Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Now he has written not just another joint biography but a book explicitly centred on their relationship, based on the idea that ‘Cook and Moore each created some wonderful comedy individually, but the stuff that will endure is the stuff they did together’ — just like Lennon and McCartney. ‘One Leg Too Few is a sort of love story, the story of a doomed romance,’ he says, pushing it from the start.

William Cook knows this familiar story all too well (although he never met either of his subjects): Dudley, born with a club foot, growing up in Dagenham, short, cheeky, his musical talent taking him to an organ scholarship at Oxford, joining Beyond the Fringe in Edinburgh in 1960, playing the straight man to Cook until Cook’s alcoholism broke up the partnership, while Moore found surprising stardom in Hollywood with 10 and Arthur; Peter, tall, handsome, educated at Radley, famous while still an undergraduate at Cambridge, incomparably funny in his twenties and later too, but, always prone to boredom and loneliness, becoming addicted to both drink and drugs, to the gross impairment of his genius, dying from liver failure in 1995, aged 57.

But as well as lacking in new information, the narrative of One Leg Too Few is over-determined and sententious, always looking forward to the end and back from it.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in