At times, he seemed fine; he kept his end up in interviews and enjoyed evenings out with Stephen Fry. “Often I’d go round and ring on his buzzer and say, ‘Hello Wizard, it’s Wicked,’ ” says Weiss “And he’d say, ‘Oh Wicked, I’m tired. “He’d have been quite happy to die that evening.”The next time Cook’s friends all got drunk together would be after his memorial service. His mini-revival had continued during 1994, with a well- observed piece of video whimsy called Peter Cook Talks Golf Balls and some droll radio chats with new prankster Chris Morris, but Cook’s health was growing fragile He put on weight and stopped seeing Weiss. “Everyone there said they’d never seen so many celebrities at one party,” says Weiss. It ended at 7am with Cook charging up Perrin’s Walk with a video camera, commentating at speed as Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood headed for the top of the mews “It was probably the happiest I ever saw Peter,” says Weiss.
On the night, the wide, weird panoply of Cook fans was on display – David Gower, Dave Stewart, Sam Torrance and the Rolling Stones all in the same room. The party continued at Perrin’s Walk, where a sopping wet Cook greeted guests, having jumped in his fishpond after setting himself on fire lighting candles. When he was with any of the old crowd, he was trying to be at his best.”Cook’s last performance before his peers came in 1993. After being judged just too offensive for 14 years, the video of Derek and Clive Get The Horn was finally granted a release. Moore flew back from Los Angeles to do the old routines, and a launch party was held at the Cobden Working Men’s Club in west London, a favourite venue for fashionable celebrity parties. He admired him, and hoped that Clary would admire him.” And, says George Weiss, “The most brilliant I ever saw him was at his place once when Jonathan Miller came round.
It was a fit Cook was keen to make; despite all his defiant slacking, Cook still cared for his reputation: “I remember him having a birthday party and him being rather nervous,” says Enfield, “because Julian Clary was coming. And Cook buried the ghosts of previous talkshow disasters by appearing, triumph-antly, as four different guests on Clive Anderson Talks Back.Cook seemed to be on song, to be fitting in with bright young things. He got to ramble on about his hatred of rabbits as a guest on BBC 2’s Room 101. He twice went on Have I Got News For You and nearly out-deadpanned Paul Merton. He did the voice-over for a televised version of Viz comic’s Roger Mellie, a foul-mouthed chatshow host who spent a lot of time playing celebrity golf. His drinking was still not continuous, and there were signs that his kind of comedy was coming into favour again People started ringing Cook up, and he started saying yes. It was a success: Cook “genuinely loved and cared for her”, says Weiss, “and were it not for her devotion to him he wouldn’t have lived to enjoy his 47th birthday, never mind his 57th.”Predictably, Cook and Chong’s relationship was unconventional.