Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing by John Fisher

to be hoped that they would cultivate the habit on a regular basis once Civvy Street reclaimed them.
    Tommy was now in his element, although there were those in this newly acquired audience who might have had second thoughts. In his exhaustive study of service entertainment, Fighting for a Laugh , Richard Fawkes reported the recollections of the actor John Arnatt, under whose jurisdiction Cooper the trouper at one point found himself in Cairo: ‘In one of John’s shows was an unknown conjuror making a virtue of the fact that his tricks didn’t always work … he had not done anything before … certainly not as a professional.’ According to Arnatt, ‘He was a bastard to be with as an officer because he delighted in getting you up on the stage to help him out and then he would take the mickey out of you something terrible. He had the entire audience on his side and if you weren’t careful you came out of it looking none too dignified.’ Interestingly in later years Tommy almost entirely dispensed with audience participation on stage and left the mickey taking – always a dubious form of pastime when members of the public are involved – to others. For the time being the rough and ready forces environment was the perfect setting for such spectator sport.
    He had the intuitive sense to deliver what the troops required, making great play of the trick in which some of thecards in the packet held by the officer on one side of the stage magically found their way into the packet held by the officer on the other, becoming distracted along the way as he kept breathing on their pips and shining them all the while. The crowd roared. In later years he never lost his disrespect for military authority. The magician and writer, Val Andrews recalls seeing him lose his temper with people who insisted on using their service rank outside the military environment: ‘Colonel this! Major that! Tell everyone you’ve just met Sergeant Cooper!’ Back at base, echoing his childhood, he remained paradoxically a man isolated in his own world, immune to the popularity his extrovert performing talent should have won him with the rank and file. His colleague, Jack Chambers is on record that Cooper remained a man it was hard to get to know: ‘We’d be sitting together after the show – drinking cups of tea out of sawn down beer bottles – and he didn’t join in. He never had a mate or anything like that.’ All his personality was now diverted into his act. Had there been other magicians in the unit, I am sure he would have found a bosom pal for life.
    When the fighting drew to a close he joined the Combined Services Entertainment Unit attached to the War Office giving shows for the troops left scattered throughout the Middle East. With a restless conscript army, morale boosting was as essential at a time of keeping the peace as it had ever been while the greater distraction of fighting was taking place. It was now that Tommy decided he wanted to dedicate his life to being an entertainer. It was also in Cairo that the performance took place that must come close to the one in the Hythe canteen for qualifying as the most defining of his career. As Jack Chambers has explained, it was a cardinal offence for a soldier to be improperly dressed, even down to not wearing your cap: ‘So if you can imagine one thousand troops sittingthere and onto this stage comes a chap wearing very scruffy shorts and socks down to his boots – well, it was a masterly stroke and he just stood there with this gormless grin on his face and then he’d do the laugh.’ To add to the anarchy he wore a pith helmet, a cloak, and had the word ‘hair’ written across his chest. One night at the YMCA at RAF Heliopolis he forgot the pith helmet and at the expense of cliché the rest is history.
    Tommy told the story a zillion times of how this night he mislaid the helmet and happened to pinch the fez from the head of a passing waiter. It is unlikely that the move was