Great-ish Performances - Peter Cook As George Spiggott In Bedazzled
"And the magic word: Julie Andrews!"
The Devil has many names (Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Simon Cowell) and can assume many forms. A horned behemoth (Legend), a serpent with an Irish-American accent (The Bible), a very naughty boy (Little Nicky), him out of City Slickers (Deconstructing Harry): hell, director Josef Von Sternberg even insisted that The Devil Is A Woman. And then there's the time Old Nick disguised himself as a 6' 4'' man with a hard-to-impress air, a middle-class drone and a highly improbable name.
George Spiggott ("I'm the Horned One, The Devil. Let me give you my card") is arguably Satan's bizzarest incarnation. While other demons relish the opportunity to bring forth fire and brimstone, Spiggott is a legal beagle ("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 brides for seven brothers..") who doesn't so much revel in his post as seem resigned to it.
Summoned by Dudley Moore's Stanley Moon, a burger jockey unhappy with his lot in life, Cook's Spiggott (the moniker was a favourite of the duo and had previously been used in their 'One Legged Tarzan' sketch) swans about, fulfilling Moon's wildest dreams while simultaneously shattering them before the Essex boy's eyes with the help of Anger, Gluttony, Lust and Co.
Even while he raises merry hell, it's apparent that Spiggott is also dissatisfied with the hand life has dealt him: he argues with God, curses his acolytes ("What terrible sins I have working for me. I suppose it's the wages...") and mourns the fact that inspiration has long since deserted him ("There was a time when I used to get lots of ideas," he sighs. "I thought up the seven deadly sins in one afternoon. The only thing I've come up with recently is advertising").
If Spiggott is a disenchanted deity, he is also an insufferably superior one. "Don't let me interfere with your doing away with yourself," he unhelpfully interjects when Moon’s on the brink of suicide. Fond of saying that his favourite thing in life was bulling the diminutive Dudley, making Moore's life a misery on-screen must have been an incredible delight for Cook.
Not that cheap shots were the only thing the taller man took from the relationship. Indeed, watching the couple here when they were at the peak of their powers - Cook yet to be undone by drink and boredom, Moore light years away from believing all that 'sex thimble' crap - one understands why Cook would later resist the psychiatry Dud so readily embraced: all the therapy he needed he got from working with Dudley.
With natural wit the key to successfully playing the Devil (a fact that makes the casting of Elizabeth Hurley in Harold Ramis' utterly redundant remake more baffling still), Cook was better equipped than most to take on the part. However, he was well aware of the limits of his genius (he claimed that few of his ideas could sustain more than a five-minute sketch) and his acting talents. Best suited to cameo roles (the word-mangling bishop in The Princess Bride, Whoops Apocalypse's Sir Mortimer Chris, the Prime Minister convinced unemployment is caused by pixies); Spiggott could easily have gone the way of Cook's various film follies.
While its structure might have proved a challenge for ace director Stanley Donen (who was always at pains to point out that it was he who asked to work with Pete and Dud rather than the other way round), Bedazzled works precisely because it is a series of sketches, and since Peter doesn’t have to worry about character arcs and grace notes, he’s free to cut loose in his own brilliantly bizarre fashion. The fact Cook wrote the script might also account for his comfort on camera: Spiggott naturally gets most of the best lines. (“A soul’s rather like your appendix: totally expendable.”)
Spiggott also stands apart from Cook’s other screen creations since the role allowed him to tame his own wildest fantasy - that of becoming a rock star. So fond of singing he only agreed to present a chat show on the grounds he’d be allowed to close each show with a song, Pete’s finest moment in Bedazzled comes when he ruins Stanley’s pop star dreams by showing up on Top Of The Pops as Drimble Wedge, the charismatic lead singer of The Vegetations, who wows the audience with a song of utter romantic indifference.
“I’m not interested. It’s too much effort. Don’t you ever leave off?,” Wedge moans, his every knockback greeted with an excited squeal from an adoring crowd who even embrace his most devastating putdown: “You fill me with inertia.”
The top hat on one of cinema’s most idiosyncratic comic performances, the number’s among the finest entries in the comedy son cannon. But then isn’t there an old saying about the Devil having all the best tunes…?