[BITList] Call the Tune

[John Feltham]

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Cooper,  Joseph Elliott Needham  (1912-2001), musician and broadcaster, was born on 7 October 1912, at Southdene, Southfield Road, Westbury-on-Trym, near Bristol, the youngest of the three children of Wilfrid Needham Cooper, manager of the Westbury branch of the National Provincial Bank, and his wife, Elsie Goodacre, nee Elliott. His musical talents were soon apparent and, after attending two local preparatory schools, he was awarded a music scholarship to Clifton College in 1926. This was followed in 1931 by an organ scholarship to Keble College, Oxford. While at Clifton, Cooper had combined his serious musical studies with an enthusiasm for dance music and he maintained this double life at Oxford. 'Sleepy', a popular song he had composed for the Oxford University Drama Society 'smokers', was overheard in rehearsal by the actress Fay Compton, who asked if she could use it in the West End. Naturally Cooper agreed and, in due course, the song was published, under the name of Joe Cooper so as not to offend the dons. These activities took their toll on his academic work, however, and he was not awarded the second part of his BMus. In search of the money he needed to resit the examinations, he approached Alberto Cavalcanti of the GPO film unit, who engaged him to write music for information films, including Spring on the Farm. Cooper returned to Oxford in 1936, and passed the BMus at his second attempt.

On leaving Oxford, Cooper began to build a career as a concert pianist. He took lessons with Egon Petri and was preparing for his London debut at the Wigmore Hall when the Second World War intervened. Cooper joined the 66th Searchlight Regiment and there taught himself aircraft recognition, soon achieving such a high standard that he was appointed chief instructor at the newly formed 3rd anti-aircraft group school. Cooper's lectures, which made very unregimental use of balsa wood models and (occasionally risque) humour, became hugely popular and he was soon seconded to the 1st US Army, for whom he found himself addressing audiences of 2000 troops in converted cinemas. After D-day he was posted to Brussels, and there he met his first wife, (Marjorie) Jean (1918/19-1973), daughter of Sir Louis Greig, naval surgeon, air force officer, and deputy ranger of Richmond Park. Cooper returned to London in 1946 and prepared again for his London concert debut, while also appearing in the BBC's light 'smoking concerts', disguised as 'Roger Elliott'. His performances included the first broadcast examples of the 'hidden melody', which would become an important feature of Face the Music. Cooper's first London recital took place belatedly at the Cowdray Hall in October 1947, and on 15 November he married Jean.

Concert engagements followed in Bristol, Bournemouth, and at the Proms, and a national career quickly developed. In 1955 Cooper was approached by Walter Todds, a BBC talks producer, offering him the chairmanship of Call the Tune, a new radio music quiz, in which a panel of three personalities would be joined by a guest musician, and asked to identify a hidden melody. The series began on the Home Service on 4 July 1955 and ran for four years. During this period, Cooper's concert career ran in parallel with his broadcast work, which included presenting the first schools music series on television. Soon, though, it was clear that his piano-playing was suffering and, after an 'erratic and lacklustre' performance at the 1958 Proms  (Cooper, 162), he began to concentrate entirely on broadcasting. He presented the magazine programme Here Today for the television company TWW for five years from 1959, extending his range beyond music to include an interview with a lion tamer whose lion knocked him to the floor, provoking shocked headlines in the national press. He had maintained contact with Walter Todds and in 1966 they collaborated on a television version of Call the Tune, although initially only as a one-off entertainment for Christmas.

This first edition of Face the Music appeared on Boxing day 1966, and was followed by a short series in August 1967. Then the programme was not seen again until its first run of twelve programmes in 1971. Although clearly a highbrow show, Face the Music soon gained a large and loyal audience, which at its peak reached 4 million. In his autobiography Cooper explained why this was: 'The public and the press warmed to a music quiz which had no kind of scoring, where the panel were seen openly to cheat and whisper to each other, where there was no priming of the panel beforehand'  (Cooper, 181). In addition, there were at that time many celebrities with a love and knowledge of classical music, while Cooper showed once more his rare ability to combine the informative with the comic. With Todds he devised a series of amusing and challenging games, including 'Funny Opera', in which the panellists watched an excerpt from one opera while listening to the music of another, and had to name both; the 'Hidden Melody', in which a popular song was played in the style of a famous composer; and, most famously, the 'Dummy Keyboard'. In this curious ritual Cooper played a famous piece of piano music on a keyboard which produced no sound apart from the clattering of its wooden keys. A recording of the piece was faded up towards the end for the benefit of the audience, but the panellists had to identify the piece solely by watching Cooper's hands. This round captured the public imagination and became the show's equivalent of a catchphrase: Cooper proudly recalled being addressed in the street as 'Mr Dummy Keyboard'.

In June 1972 Jean Cooper, for twenty-five years her husband's manager and assistant, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She received an emergency mastectomy, but died on 18 August 1973. Cooper asked Carol Vivien Nelson Borg (1938/9-1996), of the agents Ibbs and Tillett, to sort out his paperwork: a closer relationship developed and they were married on 4 July 1975. She was the daughter of Charles John Nelson Borg, chartered accountant, and the sister of Alan Borg, museum director.

Face the Music produced numerous spin-offs: Cooper recorded an LP record of popular piano works for Decca, which appeared as The World of Joseph Cooper in 1974; he published three collections of hidden melodies and, in 1979, an autobiography, Facing the Music. Face the Music reached its hundredth edition in 1977; it ran until 1984, when Cooper retired from television, and the format, now starting to seem a little dated, retired with him. He returned to the musical limelight in 1991: he proposed the most plausible solution to the 'enigma' of Elgar's Enigma Variations, the mysterious theme that, according to the composer, lies behind the piece but is never heard. Rather than proposing a counterpoint or a conceptual theme, as many others had done, Cooper pointed out that the Variations' theme occurs in full, albeit in the major, in the slow movement of Mozart's 'Prague' symphony.

Cooper lived for many years in a converted terrace of cottages in East Horsley, Surrey. Carol Cooper died, still relatively young, in 1996; Cooper died, after a short illness, at the Nuffield Hospital, Guildford, on 4 August 2001. There were no children from either marriage.

Stephen Follows 

Sources  J. Cooper, Facing the music: an autobiography (1979) + J. Evans, The Penguin TV companion, 2nd edn (2003) + The Times (6 Aug 2001) + Daily Telegraph (6 Aug 2001) + The Guardian (9 Aug 2001) + The Scotsman (11 Aug 2001) + The Independent (15 Aug 2001) + WW (2001) + b. cert. + m. certs. + d. cert.
Archives  FILM BFINA, documentary footage + BFINA, performance footage SOUND BL NSA, performance recordings
Likenesses  photograph, 1953, repro. in The Times [see illus.] · photograph, 1964, Press Association, London; repro. in The Independent · photograph, 1979, repro. in Daily Telegraph · J. Ward, pen and wash drawing, exh. Fieldborne Galleries 1981 (Face the music) · photograph, repro. in The Scotsman · photographs, repro. in Cooper, Facing the music
Wealth at death  £1,151,039: probate, 25 Oct 2001, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



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