Messing with the Judge

I couldn't resist the temptation to post a little bit more on the late Peter Cook.

One of his 'finest hours' came in 1976 when he produced a scathing parody of Mr Justice Cantley. Cantley, a doddering old judge who had just presided over the trial of Jeremy Thorpe (a minor politician who had achieved huge notoriety when accused of conspiring to murder a man who had been attempting to blackmail him over his alleged homosexuality), had betrayed an outrageous personal bias in his summing up speech to the jury, and this had no doubt played some part in Thorpe's acquittal. Cook's rendition, hilarious though it is, is scarcely more extreme than Cantley's all-too-earnest original. (Either or both could be usefully studied at Bar School as examples of how not to address a jury.)

I seem to recall that the piece was performed at a charity concert for Amnesty International shortly afterwards; and it was supposedly composed on-the-spot, on the last day of the trial itself. (John Cleese once ruefully, enviously remarked that, whereas it could take him and his 'Monty Python' writing partner Graham Chapman a whole day of hard slog to work up a three-minute sketch, "it used to take Peter about three minutes".)

Cook's Cantley sketch - usually titled "Entirely A Matter For You", a standard judicial phrase which here acquired a heavy irony - begins:

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is now my duty to advise you on how you should vote when you retire from this court.

In the last few weeks we have all heard some pretty extraordinary allegations...."


And it ends:

"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....

And now, being mindful of the fact that the Prudential Cup begins on Saturday.... putting all such thoughts from your mind, you are now to retire (as indeed should I).... you are now to retire, carefully to consider your verdict of 'Not Guilty'."


Aha! At last the sketch has shown up on YouTube.