Tragically I Was an Only Twin : The Complete Peter Cook

Rating:
Summary: I'm still waiting for Cook to live up to the hype
Review: Clive James said: "In an hour of casual talk he spilled out enough wit and perception---in him the two things were uncommonly near allied---to keep anybody else going for a whole television series. That was the cruel fact which so few of his obituarists, even at their most laudatory, could bring themselves to face: he wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something *again*. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it."

After all the pious testimony about Cook's genius, I was hoping this book would convince me of it. It didn't. Most of Cook's newspaper writings are submediocre. And the intermittent brilliance of his interview improvisations is just that---intermittent. William Cook's essay is a masterpiece. It's just a shame that Peter Cook was a lazy wastrel who failed to live up to his potential.

Rating:
Summary: Genius
Review: Peter Cook is beyond description, so genius will have to do. This book, while imperfect and incomplete, is the best argument yet for his canonization. Buy it, read it again and again. My only beef (and it's a small one) is there no Bedazzled script.