Tommy Cooper

Tommy Cooper's last act fooled us all

Millions tuned in to watch the hit variety show Live From Her Majesty's, only to see Tommy Cooper suffer a massive fatal heart attack right there on stage.

There has been nothing like Cooper's verbal style since W.C. Fields. He talks in an impressionistic blur that makes Eddie Waring sound like Julie Andrews. [...] Dressed in his evening fez, the one with the sequins, Cooper barges elegantly about, avoiding ducks, clearly unaware that somewhere far away, among his millions of grateful viewers, at least one jaded television critic is in hysterics.

Cooper's breathless speed with a story has by now, after years of practice, reached the limit of the intelligible. [...] Cooper does the opposite of milking a gag. He puts milk back in.

Everybody likes Cooper. He has the huge dignity and innocence of some large London statue with a pigeon sitting impudently on its head and a workman scrubbing him in impertinent places with a stiff bristled brush.

Cooper, also for Thames, offered a potted version of World War Two by appearing in a uniform which was half British, half German and adding moustaches, monocles and accents as the spirit moved him. [...] He reminds me of a shaggy dog who has somehow got involved in telling its own story.