Who do you do?

There used to be three impressions that every Brit could do - Tommy Cooper, Frank Spencer and Michael Caine. If you were a light entertainer and wanted to drop an impression into your routine these were the default settings. All of these characters date from the 1970s - anyone attempting them now is either being ironic or so out of touch that they think there are still only three TV channels.

Tommy Cooper was a comic genius, a shambling giant of a man who combined seemingly inept magical routines with corny one liners, and made it work. His catchphrase was 'Just like that', accompanied by a shimmying movement of the hands and his unmistakable 'aharharharhar' laugh. And he wore a fez, - fezzes were cool long before The Doctor adopted one.

For an sample of his material visit http://www.guy-sports.com/humor/comedians/comedian_tommy_cooper.htm

Spoon Jar Jar Spoon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc3u9bVV6s4

Frank Spencer was a character played by Michael Crawford in a BBC sircom called 'Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em'. He played an ineffectual accident prone mothers' boy who had somehow married Betty, played by Michelle Dotrice. Everything he touched would turn out to be a spectacular disaster. And we are talking spectacular here - Frank's accidents would often involve some terrifying stunt work, which Crawford would do himself. I remember being spellbound by the episode where Frank ends up hanging from the bumper of a Morris Minor which is threatening to tip over the edge of Beachy Head, the highest cliff on the South Coast. It's a pity that when you look at them today, the stunts remain impressive, but the rest of the scripts are sooooo dated. The stock phrase of Frank's simpering "Oooh. Betty! the cat's done a whoospie on my beret' gives you an idea of the level of humour involved.

For the start of the Beachy Head sequence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LuuqDlCKXs

Michael Caine, everyone knows. But his two catchphrases were actually donated to him by an impressionist, Mike Yarwood. One was the rather obvious 'My name is Michael Caine', a phrase which became so famous that the band Madness wrote a song around it, and got the real Michael Caine to voice it on the record. The other was based on a Parkinson interview where Caine was forever coming up with odd facts, but never actually used the phrase 'now, not a lot of people know that'.

Here's a much later Parkinson interview, with Michael Caine impersonating himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0F3kY3uxU

The fourth frame is of course Groucho Marx. You know who he is.