Peter Cook: comedian, actor, writer, performer, owner of Private Eye magazine and towards the end, terrible drunk.
A few hand picked quotes I nabbed from various websites from Ian Hislop.
"It will be a tribute to the funniest man in the world," said Hislop. "He was a very good proprietor because he never interfered. He never asked why we were costing him millions of pounds."When I was being sued by Robert Maxwell Peter was at the back of the court waving his cheque book." I will miss his jokes. He invented the phrase 'this man is a proven Lawyer'. Surreal brilliance, impossible to match."
"My single favourite memory is the commando raid on the Mirror building that he organised in the late Eighties when Robert Maxwell was about to produce a magazine called Not Private Eye. Maxwell had sued us, WH Smith had pulled us off sale but were proposing to sell his magazine. We desperately needed to get hold of a dummy issue if we to stop them. No one could think how to do it, so Cookie sent over a crate of whisky to the Mirror office with his compliments, thinking, rightly, that the people working on the dummy didn't want to do it.Three-quarters of an hour later he rang them up to find they were legless and said, 'Oh, we'll come and join you.' so five of us got into a taxi, breezed over and went straight up to Maxwell's office. Cookie sat at Maxwell's desk and ordered champagne, we wrote Hello Bob on the windows and called him up in New York."
For more larks from the great man, click on "The Establishment" link to your right.
Enjoy your day xx
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