Satirists From England

"I'll leave with a story whose victim, Sir David Frost, won't mind it being told, because he tells it himself. David Frost rang Peter Cook up some years ago. "Peter, I'm having a little dinner party on behalf of Prince Andrew and his new bride-to-be Sarah Ferguson. I know they'd love to meet you, big fans; Be super if you could make it: Wednesday the twelfth." "Hang on... I'll just check my diary." Pause and rummaging and leafing through diary noises. And then Peter said "Oh dear. I find I'm watching television that night.""

"Being British in this part of the century meant living in the country that had Peter Cook in it. There are wits and there are clowns in comedy, I suppose. Peter was a wit, it goes without saying, but he was funny in an almost supernatural way that has never been matched by anyone I've met or even heard about. It wasn't to do with facial expression or epigrammatic wit, or cattiness or rant or anger or technique: he had funniness in the same way that beautiful people have beauty or dancers have line and grace. He had an ability to make people gasp and gasp and gasp for breath like landed fish."

"The funniest man who ever drew breath."

"And wuv, twue wuv, wiww fowwow you fowevah —"

"Mawwage. Mawwage is what bwings us togethew today. Mawwage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam within a dweam."

"You are now to retire, as indeed should I, carefully to consider your verdict of "Not Guilty"."

"You will probably have noticed that three of the defendants have very wisely chosen to exercise their inalienable right not to go into the witness box to answer a lot of impertinent questions. I will merely say that you are not to infer from this anything other than that they consider the evidence against them so flimsy that it was scarcely worth their while to rise from their seats and waste their breath denying these ludicrous charges..."

"All right, you great git, you've asked for it. I'll cover the world in Tastee-Freez and Wimpy Burgers. I'll fill it with concrete runways, motorways, aircraft, television, automobiles, advertising, plastic flowers, frozen food and supersonic bangs. I'll make it so noisy and disgusting that even you'll be ashamed of yourself! No wonder you've so few friends; you're unbelievable!"

"I've done a good deed. I gave that little twit his soul back. Wasn't that generous?"

"Tell God not to go away. I'll be back in a minute."

"And the magic word: Julie Andrews!"

"In the words of Marcel Proust — and this applies to any woman in the world — if you can stay up and listen with a fair degree of attention to whatever garbage, no matter how stupid it is that they're coming out with, till ten minutes past four in the morning... you're in."

"Job was what you'd technically describe as a loony."

"There was a time when I used to get lots of ideas... I thought up the Seven Deadly Sins in one afternoon. The only thing I've come up with recently is advertising."

"Now, then, what'd you like to be first? Prime Minister? Oh, no — I've made that deal already."

"It's the standard contract. Gives you seven wishes in accordance with the mystic rules of life. Seven Days of the Week, Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Seas, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers..."

"What terrible sins I have working for me. I suppose it's the wages."

"You realize that suicide's a criminal offense — In less enlightened times they'd have hung you for it."

"The thing that makes you know that Vernon Ward is a good painter is if you look at his ducks, you can see the eyes follow you around the room."

"Well, it's always very difficult to say what prompts anybody to do anything, let alone getting underwater and teaching ravens to fly. But I think it probably all dates back to a very early age, when I was quite a young fellow. My mother, Lady Beryl Streeb-Greebling, you know, the wonderful dancer — 107 tomorrow and still dancing — she came up to me in the conservatory — I was pruning some walnuts — and she said "Arthur" — I wasn't Sir Arthur in those days — she said "Arthur, if you don't get underwater and start teaching ravens to fly, I'll smash your stupid face off," and I think it was this that sort of first started my interest in the whole business of getting them underwater."

"The leg division, Mr Spiggot. You are deficient in it to the tune of one. Your right leg, I like. I like your right leg, it's a lovely leg for the role. That's what I said when I saw it come in. I said, "that's a lovely leg for the role". I've got nothing against your right leg. The trouble is — neither have you. You fall down on your left."

"We believe this to be the work of thieves, and I'll tell you why. The whole pattern is very reminiscent of past robberies where we have found thieves to be involved. The tell-tale loss of property — that's one of the signs we look for."

"I would like to like to make one thing clear at the very outset and that is, when you speak of a train robbery, this involved no loss of train, merely what I like to call the contents of the train, which were pilfered. We haven't lost a train since 1946, I believe it was — the year of the great snows when we mislaid a small one."

"I've always been after the trappings of great luxury. But all I've got hold of are the trappings of great poverty. I've got hold of the wrong load of trappings, and a rotten load they are too, ones I could have very well done without."

"I could have been a Judge, but I never had the Latin for the judgin'. I never had it, so I'd had it, as far as being a judge was concerned... I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal."

"If a dog starts biting you, you can't kick it up the throat like it deserves. People always say "Oh dear, poor little dog, he was only trying to be friendly. That's the way he tries to be friendly, sniffing at your ankles and biting you, you cruel, wicked man.""

"I've been reading a very interesting book recently. It's called The Universe and All That Surrounds It by T J Bleendreeble. It's an extremely good book about it. It's about seventy pages long, so it's fairly comprehensive about the whole thing and it's fairly interesting. Bleendreeble specialises in the universe. He doesn't branch out much beyond that. But he's quite interested in this limited field."

"It seems that a lot of people, who haven’t known of me as a pianist, think I’ve just started off as a comedian. And so for them the piano was something extra. But, of course, playing the piano was something that came before all of what’s happened now."

"Maybe the memory does play tricks. Increasingly, I'm thinking, 'What was their name? I knew that name yesterday.' I think that's what happens. At some point, I'll forget that I ever worked with Peter Cook, I suppose, and Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller."

"It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow."

"Delay is the deadliest form of denial."

"Expenditure rises to meet income."

"Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay."

"The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself."

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion... Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced. The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson's Law and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish, or even disappear. The importance of Parkinson's Law lies in the fact that it is a law of growth based upon an analysis of the factors by which that growth is controlled."

"A perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse."

"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."

"With allies in the class struggle like Auberon Waugh the middle class has no need of enemies. Last night ATV transmitted the third and last programme in his series This is Waugh, in which he pleads for his right to go on living in the large and comfortable country house his father left him in Somerset, while the workers go on doing their own thing somewhere as far away as possible."

"Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power."

"It has been heartbreaking to see a legitimate and important cause—the survival of the middle class ethic—defended three weeks running by a procession of utterly unsympathetic nutters."

"Of the two crises facing us this Christmas — the caviare crisis and the Gulf crisis — I must admit finding the caviare crisis the more immediate. Many people — including children — are actually having to do without any caviare at all this Christmas."

"I don't want 'constructive criticism'. I want praise."

"He wrote to no agenda or party line. He did not believe it was the job of journalists to run the country or to advise politicians, but to nip at the heels of sacred cows and expose the inadequacy of the emperor's new clothes. He never pontificated about family values but he lived them, deeply. And however cruelly he wrote on occasions, he was unfailingly kind in real life. He believed that it was our duty to be happy as long as possible because tomorrow we die."

"He that complies against his will. Is of his own opinion still."

"With crosses, relics, crucifixes, Beads, pictures, rosaries, and pixes,— The tools of working our salvation By mere mechanic operation."

"True as the dial to the sun, Although it be not shin'd upon."

"But still his tongue ran on, the less Of weight it bore, with greater ease."

"We idly sit, like stupid blockheads, Our hands committed to our pockets, And nothing but our tongues at large, To get the wretches a discharge: Like men condemn'd to thunder-bolts, Who, ere the blow, become mere dolts; Or fools besotted with their crimes, That know not how to shift betimes, And neither have the hearts to stay, Nor wit enough to run away."

"For those that fly may fight again, Which he can never do that's slain."

"With books and money plac'd for show Like nest-eggs to make clients lay, And for his false opinion pay."