Free Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing by John Fisher Page A

as one man and I’m in a heap on the ground.’ The look of dismay on his big, baffled face as he gathered himself up from the floor would have been worth the price of admission.
    His regimental misadventures could fill a book or certainly an episode of one of those forces comedies that, in the Fifties, Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko brought to a comic zenith worthy of Cooper himself. In the British theatre of service comedy it is easy to picture William Hartnell as the sadistic sergeant going the rounds to prod Cooper and his cohorts out of their slumbers for roll-call at four o’clock in the morning. As Tommy remembered it, “‘Good morning.” “Good morning.” “Good morning.” And he had a bayonet in his hand!’ Outside it was pitch black and the corporal used to emerge with a huge hurricane lamp. ‘Good morning, men,’ he’d shout. ‘Good morning, lamp,’ Cooper would answer back. It was a fair response. They were too blinded by it to see him. Michael Medwin or Harry Fowler would have been spot-on casting for the barrack room lawyer who led the protest when the sergeant insisted on a rifle inspection no less than ten minutes after they had come back from a route march and flopped exhausted onto their beds. His departure was the cue for said barrack room lawyer to lay down their rights: ‘I’m not going to clean mine at all. The King’s rules and regulations say we’re entitledto half an hour’s rest. It says so – under section twenty-nine, subsection six.’ ‘I listened to him, I did,’ said Tommy, ‘I believed him. Then the sergeant came in. He said, “Right, get your rifles ready.”’ Cooper stepped forward and stood up to him through clenched teeth, ‘We’re not cleaning them.’ The sergeant was taken aback. ‘We’re not cleaning them, are we fellows? Are we fellows?’ As his voice became more questioning, the realization dawned that the rest of the troop behind him were working away like the clappers. It is unlikely that any member of the British comedy acting establishment could have done justice to the crestfallen vulnerability of our hero at a moment like this.
    One incident in Cooper’s military career has practically assumed the status of an urban myth, although on separate occasions Tommy assured both Barry Cryer and myself that it did take place and that it happened to him. He was lucky not to be court-martialled. One morning in the early hours he was on sentry duty and dozed off standing up by the side of the sentry box. Within seconds the sergeant came round the corner with the orderly officer: ‘And all of a sudden I open my eyes just a little bit and I can see them standing there. So I’ve got to think of something now or otherwise I’m going to end up inside. So I wait for a second and I’m standing there and I open my eyes fully and I say, “Amen!”’ Assuming they noticed at all, it did the trick and nothing was said. Many years later the episode became the basis of a regular routine in his stage act, Tommy playing his dozy self and the fierce sergeant major in mimed counterpoint amid a flurry of ‘not like that’s’ and ‘like that’s’. But there was no denying the potential seriousness of the situation: ‘I fell asleep. I did. That’s a crime, isn’t it? You could go to the Tower for that.’
    The comic capital he made out of the incident perhaps compensated for the downside of a life spent constantly standingto attention and stamping on parade. He put many of his later health problems – varicose veins, phlebitis, thrombosis in the leg, ulcers too – down to his guardsman’s duties. In fact, he could have had treatment for the veins while he was in the services. He told his friend, Bobby Bernard of the occasion he went into the surgery to see the medical officer about the problem. Another soldier was standing there in his shorts. He turned to Tommy and said, ‘Look at mine. They’re getting better.’ According to Tommy, ‘His veins were worse