Artist on artist: Tim Etchells on the ‘delirious mania’ of Tommy Cooper

I don’t remember my first encounter with Tommy Cooper. He was part of that generation of post-Variety performers, people like Morecambe and Wise and Ken Dodd, who had made it onto television doing light entertainment. Looking back, it seems like he was always there through my teenage years as a kind of continuous presence on television. I remember being really aware of what a strange and particular presence he was.

There was always a slightly delirious mania to his act. In one sense he’s clearly gifted and really in control of what he’s doing; he’s a real genius of timing. But his whole persona and act is based on the shambolic. Things are falling apart; he doesn’t really understand what he’s doing; the tricks aren’t working; the tricks often seem as puzzling to him as they are to you as the audience. So, something is happening, but that same thing is also falling apart. It’s baffling, yet also funny and compelling in equal measure. 

There’s also a wonderful knowingness throughout his performance. He knows this isn’t working, we know it’s not working, he knows that we know. He knows he’s winding us up, we know he’s winding us up. It’s so clever in how it deals with the audience and our expectations and our knowledge. Often you see him embark on something patently ludicrous, pursue it for a few moves, and then he’ll give a look, to the audience or to the camera, that conveys that he’s having second thoughts – ‘why am I doing this, it’s stupid?’. And in doing that he makes us complicit in this as well. So, you enjoy the thing, but you also get to enjoy him being the victim of it.

I think his ability to be in control of something that looks so terribly out of control is what most appeals to me. Especially as I’ve spent so much time through my own work focussed on the idea of performance that looks like it might be falling apart, but nonetheless is still taking you somewhere. And he was the master of that double edge, where what he’s doing is woefully inadequate, these endless, really quite hopeless tricks that are decaying or just not working, but you’re still drawn to his handling of the situation, his bemusement by it.

I really enjoy those moments where you get to see him become a prisoner of his own ridiculous ideas. There’s a routine where he performs both sides of a dialogue between Romeo and Juliet and he decides to do Romeo’s dialogue on one side of the stage and Juliet’s on the other. Only he’s performing in this grand auditorium with a huge stage, and it’s quite a long way. So he does the first line from Romeo, and he walks across purposefully to the other side and does the first line from Juliet. And as he sets off back to where he came from to do the next line you can see him already thinking ‘that’s a long way’. And then he’s sighing as he has to set off again, because in its basis the routine is actually quite boring, there’s more walking than there is dialogue! He’s set up something very simple and then enjoys the process of it falling apart, whilst making us a part of it – that’s really very generous. And that also speaks to things I’ve worked on with Forced Entertainment, this situation where you’ve had an idea and now you’re committed to it – you’re stuck with it – so what are you going to do? There’s a great pleasure in watching that logic unfold.

Even though it’s more than 40 years since he was performing, there’s quite a contemporary feel to his act. What you’re seeing is somebody who’s got their own very particular physicality; he’s a big guy, a bit sweaty, he doesn’t really look comfortable in the suit he’s wearing. But he turns that to his advantage, and his not fitting into the expected groove becomes the material. He’s made a whole aesthetic and a whole world out of his own physicality, his energy, humour and mannerisms, everything; it’s all pretty unique. 

And the temporality of so much of what he does is really interesting. A lot of his material is actually really fleeting, bits or gags can be like eight seconds long; here’s a bit, here’s another bit, here’s another bit. It’s almost as if it’s been produced for a much more contemporary attention span. He’s really speeding through the material, and whilst you know there’s a structure to it, he’s also a man improvising madly. 

The routine of his that really sticks in my mind? There’s a great one where he comes on stage and says ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the next trick I’m about to do is very dangerous, so I’d like to take the applause first’. And the audience applauds, and he replies, ‘forget it, I’m not going to risk my life for that’. Those beautiful short moments of his are so tidy. I love that.

In many ways he’s quite disrespectful to the whole aura of what it is to be on stage. He can be really dismissive of his own performance; the object he’s trying to disappear will fall to the floor and he just shrugs and walks away. There’s something so subversive and mischievous about that, it’s really deconstructive; setting up to tell one story, and then generating a whole new energy by ruining the trick or showing how it’s done. And he’ll enter a dialogue with people who are supposed to be backstage, muttering about how it’s not his fault, or that a trick he’s just messed up worked earlier, breaking down that boundary of what should be for us as an audience and what is, notionally at least, subtext or information we shouldn’t be privy to. There’s a real joy in that too.

He has this ability to draw you into another world, one with another way of seeing, another set of expectations. So even on those occasions when his tricks do work it rarely feels like the climax – they’re no more impressive because you’ve been pulled into this strange economy with a slightly imbalanced idea of what’s enjoyable and what’s not. There’s this weird shonky sort of energy that’s retained through his performance, a rhythm that’s always on the off-beat. You become captivated by it when rationally you ought to step back and ask ‘what exactly is this?’ 

His performance really does seem driven by the fact that terror is never far away. That the idea he’s working with is so precarious and so thin that the potential for it all to collapse is always there. At his most manic you really do fear for the imminent collapse of the whole thing, but at the same time you know it won’t because he’s always on top of it. Yet he floats that idea in such a vivid way that I do wonder how close the relation to actual failure and actual collapse is.

He’s a really inspiring figure; he’s right there in the constellation of artists that have steered my understanding of performance. And I’ll always talk to performers and other performance makers about him, because he offers such a strong, unique take on what it is to be working in front of an audience and doing so with failure and self-consciousness. He’s brilliant for that. I think you can draw a strong line between him and a number of performance artists of the last 50 years who’ve developed quite idiosyncratic personas. In a very pure sense, Tommy Cooper is somebody who’s working with their own aesthetic, with their own body, with their own sense of timing, within a very particular set of bounds, to explore what it is to be a person in front of an audience.

His obsession with the thing that doesn’t work, that’s been a real influence on my work. With Forced Entertainment we’ve pursued that idea down a great number of rabbit holes! There’s this thing that doesn’t work, but if you follow that where does it take you? What does it mean when it’s not working? And what do we see of the performer? Because when things aren’t working we see something very different of the performer compared to when all is glorious. And there’s a great allure in seeing through those cracks that begin to appear when things aren’t quite falling into place. We’ve done so much work that tries to set up situations like that; situations that are in a sense failing, but because they’re failing, they’re also succeeding because something else is happening. 

People can be really puzzled by Tommy Cooper. Internationally he’s not that well known and I’ve had a billion conversations with people when touring mainland Europe which inevitably lead to me finding Tommy Cooper clips on YouTube and sharing them. And so I get to see these people watching him for the first time, wondering ‘what is this?’ until the penny drops. But often when I’m working with performers, or students in workshops, when I’m trying to get them to think about what their persona is when they’re performing, what works and what doesn’t work, I find myself talking about him, because he’s got such a particular take on that. 

Though I don’t remember the first time I saw him, I do remember the day he died. We’d gone to our local pub and the landlord was talking about it to another regular. I remember him saying, ‘And I thought, what a terrible way to end your act’. Because it’s such a legendary performer demise, the comedian who literally died on stage, clutching at the curtain during a televised performance. Because of his troubled presence on stage, the sense of panic running through so much of what he did, his death could seem like a direct extension of his performance; it fits the narrative quite perfectly, uncanny and uneasy as that seems.

It’s a real regret that I never saw him live. At the time I wasn’t really in the habit of going to see comedy, and if I had I probably would’ve gone to see someone like Alexi Sayle. But looking back now I would have loved to see him live, and see the dynamics of his work in a live situation because it would have been so different to how his performances were served up for television. It would have been a real treat.

If I had the opportunity to ask him anything, I’d want to understand where he places that balance between the improvised and the rehearsed? Not in terms of how much of each element is there, because that doesn’t matter, but what’s the level of control? It’s a thing that people often ask of Forced Entertainment’s work; people are very curious about how much is fixed, and how much is improvised. So technically, as a maker, I’d really love to understand that aspect of Cooper’s work; what’s the relationship between the planning and practicing and the pure momentary improvisation? I’d love to have that conversation with him.

When I think of Tommy Cooper I think of this lone performer at a table with a bunch of props laid out, which he’s either trying to make work or struggling to get to work. That idea of the lone person who’s trying to deal with this situation of being in front of the audience and all he has is a bunch of slightly obstinate materials, that he appears to be puzzled by. That’s the image. And duress, the idea of duress, in as much as things are all happening a little bit too quickly and he doesn’t seem to quite know how to catch the moment, how to bring things under control. 

Tim Etchells was speaking to Glen Wilson