Peter Cook Overdrive: Vinyl Sharity Linkpark

Mr. Cook was the funniest Englishman of our times. I don't have to pull out any data charts or graphs to prove this.

Via Boot Sound Sales, here are some selected tracks from a Greatest Hits comp of his hugely influential work with Dudley Moore and BEYOND THE FRINGE -- I'm still amazed that even Cook could write a sketch as perfect as "A Leg Too Few" when he was just 17 -- and some of his satirical/muckraking PRIVATE EYE's flexidisc recordings.

Via Dinosaur Gardens, here's the OP vinyl version of Dudley Moore's soundtrack to his and Cook's classic film BEDAZZLED. The "Bedazzled/Love" Me seven-inch would easily make my Desert Island Discs shortlist -- considering most of production on the film must have been wrapped up prior to 1967's "Summer of Love," Moore and Cook did a remarkable job of predicting where pop music was about to go.

But the motherload of Cook audio goodness is "The Establishment" Peter Cook Appreciation Society, where you can enjoy several woefully out-of-print Cook/Cook & Moore/BTF LPs and rare recordings as well as the subversive call-in fantasies of his Sven radio pranks, and all sorts of other delights.

Andy Beckett's "Death of a Slacker" -- published in THE INDEPENDENT six months after Cook's 1995 death -- isn't entirely pleasant, nor is it entirely fair, but it does offer a compelling take on the post-Moore decade-and-a-half of Cook's life. It speaks to the man's greatness that somehow being less than superhuman -- standing as a key figure in the dawning of the '60s that we now think of as The '60s, directly influencing an entire generation of comedians and satirists who then directly influenced generations of later comedians and satirists, having a smash-hit Broadway revue, a hugely successful newspaper and the hippest performance club in London at the age of 27, before going on to change television, film, politics and society itself later in his life -- is considered something of a failure. It's like the entire world continues to play Ike making up to Cook's Tina; "Baby, I'm sorry I yelled at you -- but it's because you're so amazing that I get so mad when you don't do the great things I know you can do!" Anyway, Beckett write good, you go read now.

[ps. No need to point out how many of my heroes were polymaths who were nonetheless essentially wrung-dry professionally/creatively by the the time they were my age, playing themselves on talk shows at most -- Cook, Orson Welles, Paul Rhymer, Rod Serling. I already have had that pointed out to me twice.]