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 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 Independent: