`I feel nothing but an empty pride, a hopeless vanity, a dreadful arrogance, a stupefying conceit . . . but at least it's something to hang on to." Thus speaks Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, a character created by Peter Cook back in his Beyond the Fringe days in the 1960s.
Superficially, Steeb-Greebling is an eccentric aristocrat but this only washes if your definition of eccentric stretches to someone who has a £1,000-a-day crack cocaine habit and is a crook and liar who habitually murders people who stand in his way and shags anything around him that isn't nailed down.
From being imprisoned at the age of four and conscripted into the army at six, Streeb-Greebling has led an atypical life that latterly has seen him playing a pivotal role in Los Angeles riots and making a commercial killing from discovering the fossilised remains of the infant Christ - he says. Shortly before his death, in the interests of posterity, and a desire to "to get it all down on tape", he entered a recording studio to be interviewed by the only man capable of handling him - Chris Morris from Channel 4's Brass Eye.
While bootlegs of the Morris sessions have been doing the lucrative rounds of the many fans/obsessives of Peter Cook's work, it's only now that the BBC have officially released them under the curious rubric "Why Bother?". They represent not only an amazing comic document but the last substantial work Cook ever created - he was to die a year after the Morris sessions.
A comedy colossus, Cook, along with Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and his long time sparring partner Dudley Moore were the first real stars (apart from the odd Russian spy) to emerge from The Cambridge Footlights amateur drama society. At a time when Norman Wisdom was considered the height of sophistication, Cook and his comics-in-arms represented a vertical shift in the development of comedy as Billy Connolly and the Young Ones/Comic Strip tribe did decades later. Their now legendary Beyond The Fringe shows at the Edinburgh Fringe soon travelled around the world. While Bennett turned to writing, Miller to theatre and Dudley Moore to Hollywood, Cook always remained a purist.
A relentless satirist, he helped found Private Eye and as a trendy iconoclast he set up the Soho comedy club The Establishment. He famously defied the British government's barring order on Lenny Bruce and got him to do as many gigs at the club as possible.
Cook's real brilliance lay in characterisation. With Dudley Moore he created the Pete 'n' Dud Dagenham Dialogues and the wickedly vulgar Derek and Clive. Streeb-Greebling, though, remained his favourite creation and as a big fan of Chris Morris's work, he relished dusting down the mad aristocrat for a final run in 1994. The man who once declared that he had achieved his ambitions by the age of 30
and whose biggest regret in life was saving David Frost's life (a true story) is, quite simply, on fire in these recordings.
The point behind Streeb-Greebling (if one is needed) is that he represents a layer of British society which in its privilege and wealth remains shockingly stupid and insane.
Whether talking about the L.A. riots - "I like to think I mowed down as many whites as I did blacks . . . The Koreans did very badly out of the whole deal"; Eric Clapton - "poor Eric's been through an awful lot - having to play that bloody guitar all the time" or accidental deaths of business colleagues he owes money to - "I wouldn't say I murdered him, I just allowed him to die", Cook's audacious wit allowed him to extemporise on any topic that entered his head.
Chris Morris's role throughout the recordings is very much a back-seat one. "We just got the tapes rolling and I'd try to keep some sort of logic going in the conversation," he says. "His style of improvisation was very different from what I'd be used to working with Steve Coogan on The Day Today. Peter Cook would be doing `knight's move' and `double knight's move' thinking to construct jokes and ridiculous scenes flipping back on themselves, and it was amazing. I had held out no great hopes that he wouldn't be a boozy old sack of lard with his hair falling out and scarcely able to get a sentence out - but in fact he stumbled in with a Safeway bag of Kestrel lager and loads of fags and then proceed to skip about mentally with the agility of a grasshopper. Really quite extraordinary."
So everything was improvised? "Yes, it was just chat. He was so affable, saying to me `just ask me what you want and we'll see what happens'. We might have talked a quarter of an hour beforehand about doing something about the war but that was just to find the first question or a starting point. It was odd because I felt I was half interviewing Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling and half interviewing Peter Cook."
In the obituaries and ovations accorded to Cook when he died in 1995, there were some less than subtle references to his chronic drinking. There were those who felt drinking had dulled his abilities - Alan Bennett said at his funeral "and even in later years when he lost his powers and was evidently not the man he was. . .". This perception is flatly contradicted by these tapes, or as Chris Morris puts it: "He came in looking like a boozer but in fact there was an alarming amount of neural activity still there."
Why Bother? (Chris Morris meets Peter Cook) is available on tape and CD, on the BBC Radio Collection label.