The Worst Job I Ever Had: lessons from the man without Latin.

He was crude, abusive and cruel; intelligent, creative and quick. All this clicking and sliding, burning and sparking within his tall and beautiful frame. He spoke just enough or incessantly and his timing was perfect. He smoked, was frequently drunk and died too early, one of the funniest men that ever lived.

            Unlike Dudley Moore his diminutive sidekick of many years, Peter Cook never courted Hollywood fame or fortune. Instead he revelled in the sheer pleasure of his pursuits: anarchic satire, exploring the absurd and making others laugh. He has breathed life into some weird and wonderful characters: Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, EL Wisty and Martin Trout for example. He was especially kind to the legal profession giving us the iconic and timeless ‘Biased Judge’s Summing Up’ and ‘I could have been a judge but I never had the Latin’.

             
He loved to perform, revelling in expression and word play and dismantling and remaking the world. Accolades and even payment were secondary to him. We know this because later in life he performed anonymously, calling up late night talk-back shows in the guise of various    characters including Sven from Norway. Sven   complaints about fish and describes his search for his missing wife.

Cook was much mellowed by then, the debauched days of his alter ego Clive, of Derek and Clive fame, long past. There was much about those days and those performances that was wrong. Both Moore and he were rough. Both men conjurring images that unsettled and offended and that would have seen them stoned to death, metaphorically if not actually, today.

Lobsterisimus Bummakissimus

‘The Worst Job I Ever Had’ is one such performance. Smart, funny and offensive. With typical abandon and creative excess Cook reminisces about the worst job he ever had, one that of course no one could ever in fact have. Moore contributes, endlessly naïve and feeding Cook with stupid questions that see the farce spiral like an out-of-control rocket.

It’s the sort of performance that leaves the rest of us mortals chasing something of it when we have completed or failed at some difficult task. Some lines have become folk law, much like Chief Brody’s 'we’re gonna' need a bigger boat', or  Python’s ‘of course we had it tough, lived in a shoebox in middle of motorway’.

More than once it has inspired me to contemplate the worse job I ever had, and for a barrister that means the worst client. I am not alone in this. Barristers practicing in every field do it. Civil litigators have their untrustworthy charlatans that leave one feeling unclean and PI barristers their ungrateful clients who crave payouts that enrich rather than merely compensate.

When it comes to bad clients criminal barristers are spoilt for choice. Offenders against children who expect unnecessary cross-examination of their victims are bad enough. Psychopaths who kill without compunction are bad too, though very rare in my experience. Those with crippling addictions, though forgivable are still diabolically difficult to represent. And of course any client who refuses to take one’s sage advice is worrisome.

'"Natural my arse." You've had surgery.'

However the most consistently bad are - wait for it - fraudsters. Yes, these fish are the ones most likely to test one’s patience with crazy denials and mad instructions crafted to explain the inexplicable. They are the ones who when confronted with an unassailable prosecution case respond with ‘but I didn’t do it’.

Today fraud is easily proved by the electronic equivalent of paper trails. If you are a part-time bookkeeper for a small business with enormous sums of money inexplicably flowing from the business account to your personal account then you have some explaining to do. If the monies are apparently payments for non-existent products or services, supported by crudely crafted dummy invoices from non-existent companies, then no amount of explaining will do. None. Your goose is cooked buddy. Best put your hand up and take your medicine.

Such a scenario might well play out like this old oft repeated war story, attributed to a senior, experienced and plain speaking counsel.

CLIENT: So what do you reckon of my chances at trial?

COUNSEL: Well, I’ve been through the brief of evidence with a fine-toothed comb.

CLIENT: Yeah.

COUNSEL: I’ve carefully reviewed the forensic accountants’ statements.

CLIENT: Good.

COUNSEL:  Checked and re-checked the bank statements, invoices and receipts.

CLIENT: As I expected.

COUNSEL: Paid careful heed to your comprehensive instructions, reviewed the law and re-read the committal transcript.

CLIENT: And?

COUNSEL: And having done all that and bringing thirty years of trial experience to bear I have formed a clear view about your chance at trial.

CLIENT: Which is?

COUNSEL: Well … you’re fucked.

Fraud clients are the ones most likely not to take this advice. They are the ones most likely to deny responsibility even in the face of overwhelming evidence. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that in order to commit offences of monumental and continuing dishonesty they either possess or develop a capacity for self-delusion. In the end, sometimes after years of offending, they really do believe that they were entitled to what they took or that their accounts have been hacked or they are the victim of conspiracy.

If they ever do plead guilty it is often after a war of attrition against the prosecution and their own lawyers. It comes only with the belated realisation that a conviction after trial is inevitable and they will forfeit the leniency that attaches to a plea of guilty.

Chinese women swimmer: 'Coach told me it was cough syrup'.

So they plead guilty sometimes, eventually, or go to trial and get convicted - often. Either way they frequently go to goal but the story often doesn’t end there. Be ready for an appeal against conviction and sentence with juicy grounds like ‘incompetence of counsel’, ‘I was bullied into a plea’, or curiously, ‘I was bullied into a trial’, ‘my barrister said I wouldn’t go to gaol’ or ‘the judge was biased’. They rarely come to much but a lot of mud might be thrown in the mean time.

We can do without clients like this. More than once I have finished a fraud case thinking, please lord, let the next one be a murder.