Just like that! Tommy Cooper's final days

Tommy Cooper drew little distinction between reality and comedy - his life was his act. So it was in death, too. An inveterate practical joker since childhood, he loved nothing more than startling his family by stashing "severed" hands in the laundry basket or dropping plastic spiders in the bath.

He also liked to bamboozle unwitting strangers. On one celebrated occasion he chopped off the bottom of his trouser leg and presented it to a librarian, declaring: "There's a turn-up for the books".

No one was immune to his insatiable appetite to generate laughter, no matter how grand. When Cooper was presented to the Queen at the London Palladium for the Royal Variety Show back in 1964, a time when entertainers were expected to defer to royalty, he asked her whether she liked football. When she replied no, he asked her for her Cup Final tickets.

In 1984, once again in a packed London theatre, the big man clutched his chest and slumped to the floor, his trademark red fez clinging precariously to his outsize head. The audience, millions watching live on television at home and more than 1,000 packed into Her Majesty'sTheatre, roared their approval - thinking it was part of the act.

But the sound of the comedian gasping for breath, hauntingly amplified by his radio microphone, slowly stifled the laughter, as the crumpled clown fell grotesquely against the curtain.

Cooper was pronounced dead at Westminster Hospital later that night. He was 63.

The show, naturally enough, went on. The remaining turns performed their acts just a yard or so from the body of the comic legend as doctors battled to save him. Some even have it that his size 13 feet could even be seen poking out from underneath the curtain.

The comic's final days leading up to his death, live on air, are now set to be dramatised as a television film while an acclaimed biography of the troubled star is also poised to be brought to the small screen.

The man behind the project is Andy Harries, the producer of last year's British mega-hit, The Queen, starring Helen Mirren, who won an Oscar and a Bafta for her performance in the title role.

Mr Harries, a former head of drama at ITV, said he had long harboured a desire to recreate the comedian's last week. "Tommy Cooper's death live on stage is one of the most extraordinary moments of British television - dying as he did live on the Palladium stage while being broadcast live on ITV. To this day his peculiar mix of surreal humour and bad magic is remembered with great affection."

Plans for the film are still at an early stage and did not feature in recent discussions between ITV's new executive chairman Sir Michael Grade and Mr Harries, who is also developing an idea for a drama about the football manager, Brian Clough, for the BBC.

A spokesman for ITV said that initial talks had taken place, although the film had yet to be formally commissioned by the drama team led by Laura Mackie.

No names have been suggested as to who will play Cooper, although there will be no shortage of willing applicants to step into the vast shoes of Britain's best loved comic since Charlie Chaplin.

Although best remembered for his one-liners, Cooper was first and foremost a magician, courtesy of the Christmas gift of a box of magic tricks given to him by his Aunt Lucy at the age of 11.

The comedian's family moved from his birthplace of Caerphilly in Wales when he was just a few months old in search of the less polluted air of Exeter in the 1920s, where the comedian grew up .

Cooper spent much of his early years travelling between fairgrounds in the back of his parents' ice-cream van. It was not an altogether happy childhood.

It has been claimed that he lived a solitary existence, emotionally remote from his parents. Cooper's father, a former miner, had been invalided in the First World War.

The Cooper legend was born at an early age. As a 14-year-old apprentice at the British Power Boat Company his canteen conjuring show went hopelessly wrong and the youngster left the stage in tears. "The more I panicked, the more I made a mess of everything, the more they laughed," he later recalled. "I came off and cried, but five minutes later I could still hear the sound of the laughter in my ears, and was thinking maybe there's a living there."

Cooper was actually an accomplished magician and was later admitted to the Magic Circle. But like so many entertainers of his generation, war service intervened. Cooper served in Egypt where he acquired a lot more practice - performing as Trooper Cooper of the Blues - and of course, the famous red fez, plucked from the head of a passing waiter at a local YMCA. It was in the Middle East that he met his future wife Gwen, although he always called her by her pet name of Dove.

After demobilisation, Cooper plied his trade in the clubs and theatres of Britain, under the guidance of his agent, Miff Ferrie. Like many acts before him he received at least one notoriously harsh reception at the infamous Glasgow Empire, the so-called Comic's Graveyard. As the barracking reached unmanageable levels, Cooper calmly walked forward and told the audience to "fuck off" before striding off the stage.

By the mid-Sixties such memories were behind him and he was one of the highest paid entertainers in Britain, thanks mainly to his growing success on the emerging medium of television. He was voted ITV Personality of the Year in 1969 and went on to record nearly a dozen more television series until 1980.

But there was a dark side too, although Tommy Cooper was no Tony Hancock or Peter Sellers. His chief demon was stage fright - a condition he found could be alleviated to some extent by drinking large quantities of alcohol. He once told his fellow comedian and friend Eric Sykes: "People say I've only got to walk out on stage and they laugh. If only they knew what it takes to walk out on stage in the first place. One of these days I'll just walk out and do nothing. Then they'll know the difference." In the end he could barely perform without a drink or eight and the alcohol slowly began to impair his act. Promoters grew increasingly dismayed when he peremptorily cut short performances, rambled or simply bombed. There were of course efforts to cut down on the drink. On a good day he could confine himself to three bottles of Dubonnet in each binge.

The drinking and relentless touring also had an impact on his weight, which he fought with illicit slimming pills. His poor health was exacerbated by the 40 cigars a day he chain-smoked. Meanwhile, Cooper suffered a myriad of ailments from poor circulation to insomnia and bronchitis. In an uncanny echo of his future demise, he suffered a near-fatal heart attack while performing to IBM executives in Rome in 1977.

Friends proved ever willing to forgive him his shortcomings, not least his notorious meanness. This parsimony took both financial and spiritual forms. According to John Fisher, author of the biography Tommy Cooper: Always Leave them Laughing - which is set to be televised - this could be deeply hurtful to those on the receiving end. In the book he recalls one old pro who had given Cooper the idea for a winning gag - about an old paraffin heater that he used on stage to "warm up the audience". A few days later after a Soho drinking session with the comic and his entourage, he was told to make his own way home after asking for a lift.

"I'm not a fucking taxi service," Cooper sniped.

But taxi drivers were not immune from the comic's pathological meanness either. On arriving at his destination, Cooper liked to slip a used tea bag into their pockets with the quip: "Have a drink on me."

Harder to forgive - especially for the fans that worshipped him - were his affairs and outbursts of violence, normally directed towards his devoted wife, Dove, although both admitted the other gave as good as they got. She claimed only to have found out about one long-standing relationship with a television stage manager after his death. Loyal even after the end, she told reporters it had merely been a one-night-stand.

His friend Bob Monkhouse once described him as a "child with an infant's rage as many waiters will tell. But he was fundamentally a lovely man". Cooper never seriously entertained the thought of leaving his wife and children in their Chiswick family home and bitterly regretted his drunken rages.

Exactly what made his act so funny is hard to pinpoint. Many say it was the aura of perfect childlike innocence he projected from the body of an oafish giant. Others have argued it was his relentless literal mindedness. But jokes such as "I went into this pub, and I ate a ploughman's lunch. He was livid," never worked so well from the mouth's of other comics.

The veteran comedian Barry Cryer has claimed Cooper entered a unique and sophisticated pact with his audience. "He knows it's a terrible joke and he knows they know it is terrible. They are laughing less at the joke itself than at how bad it was, not to mention his effrontery in sharing it with them."

Fisher, who will act as a consultant on the forthcoming film and documentary believes Cooper's comic genius would have translated well to "serious" theatre, arguing he would have been brilliantly cast in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Yet today, nearly a quarter of a century after his untimely death, a generation has grown up never having heard that famous throaty chuckle and once ubiquitous catchphrase "just like that". His return to the small screen looks set to highlight the scale of the comic talent lost amid the fading laughter that night 23 years ago.

His finest jokes

* I'm on a whisky diet. I've lost three days already.

* A man walks into a greengrocer's and says: "I want five pounds of potatoes please." And the greengrocer says: "We only sell kilos." So the man says: "All right then, I'll have five pounds of kilos."

* I slept like a log last night. I woke up in the fireplace.

* My wife had a go at me last night. She said: "You'll drive me to my grave." I had the car out in 30 seconds.

* A man walks into a bar. Didn't half hurt. It was an iron bar.

* I've got the best wife in England. The other one's in Africa.

* I went to the doctor. He said: "What appears to be the problem?" I said: "I keep having the same dream, night after night, beautiful girls rushing towards me and I keep pushing them away." He said: "How can I help?" I said: "Break my arms."

* I had a ploughman's lunch the other day. He wasn't half mad.

* So I went down my local ice-cream shop, and said: "I want to buy an ice-cream." He said: "Hundreds & thousands?" I said: "We'll start with one." He said: "Knickerbocker glory?" I said: "I do get a certain amount of freedom in these trousers, yes."

* My dog took a big bite out of my knee. A friend of mine said: "Did you put anything on it?" I said: "No, he liked it as it was."

* "Doctor, I can't stop singing 'The Green Green Grass of Home'." "That sounds like Tom Jones syndrome." "Is it common?" "It's not unusual."