One Leg Too Few may be one biography too many

It’s no joke, writing about comedians. Their work is funny, their lives are not. Rightly honouring the former while accurately relaying the disasters of the latter is a challenge few writers can well meet.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore have been extensively studied before. Harry Thompson published his excellent biography of Cook in 1997, Barbara Paskin her authorised biography of Moore the same year; Alexander Games’s joint biography Pete & Dud followed in 1999. There have been memoirs of Peter Cook by his first and second wives, Wendy and Judy, and his third wife, Lin, has edited Something Like Fire: Peter Cook Remembered.

What’s to add? William Cook (no relation) has previously compiled two essential script anthologies, Tragically I Was An Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook, and Goodbye Again: The Definitive Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Now he has written not just another joint biography but a book explicitly centred on their relationship, based on the idea that ‘Cook and Moore each created some wonderful comedy individually, but the stuff that will endure is the stuff they did together’ — just like Lennon and McCartney.