Tommy Cooper was a comedian who could, according to legend, make an audience laugh simply by walking onto the stage. On April 15^th 1984 his comic ability was sealed forever as he made millions of television viewers laugh at him dying in front of them. Yet looking back on his career without the benefit of rose tinted glasses, you can’t help but concede that Tommy Cooper wasn’t as funny as people remember. When I was a child, ITV used to cut and paste his old sketch shows into ‘Best Of’ programmes as summer filler in the early evening, (before the soaps where on every day), and you soon realised that the well of material wasn’t as deep as it should have been. When he was on form he was of course brilliant, but for every hit that has stood the test of time there were a lot of duds.

My parents saw Tommy Cooper on stage at The Commodore in Nottingham at the worst possible stage of his career; he was an hour late and pissed beyond capability, the audience were disgusted and went away feeling cheated.

The trend for the dark biopic of a much loved comedian is one that has rolled on for a few years, with Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd, Kenny Everett, and Steptoe & Son all given the ‘behind the laughter’ treatment. Tommy Cooper is the latest name to be dramatised, and I finally got round to watching Not Like That, Like This today.

At the back of my mind when I watch this kind of thing is the question of exactly how much of what you see on the screen actually happened. The writer obviously felt the need to throw in several Cooper-isms that we’re all familiar with, such as the famous story about the Egyptian market trader who said “Just like that” when Tommy tried on a fez despite having never heard of the star, but every time an Englishman tried on a fez they did the impression. They didn’t really serve a purpose beyond reminding us that we were watching a programme about someone that we all thought of as a loveable man-child, but was in fact a heavy drinking, mean spirited, adulterous mass of nerves and self loathing. A couple of the familiar things were a little inaccurate (if you really want to be pedantic); the handing a teabag to the television studio chauffer and telling him to have a drink was actually pulled on a taxi driver, and the scene when he turned up late to a script meeting in his pyjamas declaring that he couldn’t get out of bed was told on a ‘talking head’ show by Eric Sykes about meeting him in the pub. A lot of it was based on a couple of books written by his wife and his mistress, so a lot of the at home scenes would have been fairly true.

What made the programme though was David Threlfall in the lead role. Portraying a real person comes with the risk of descending into a caricatured impersonation, but Threlfall managed to capture every essence of Cooper without looking like a parody. If you didn’t know then you could have been watching Tommy Cooper during the reenactments of the stage act. If the acting doesn’t work out then he could tour as a tribute act, such is the way that he disappeared into the role. Even the scene where he died on stage during the televised show Live From Her Majesty’s was spot on, (yes I have seen the real footage on YouTube, but only to compare). Given Cooper’s polished pretence in messing up magic tricks, the audience can be forgiven thinking it was a joke. However when you look back, (perhaps with the benefit of hindsight), the look on his face said that he was suffering. That old maxim about the show must go on must have had a hollow ring to it that night when Les Dennis and Dustin Gee had to follow and try to be funny while backstage their hero had just died. All comedians fear dying on stage, but hopefully it won’t happen this way.

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