Beryl Cook: Artist or Entertainer?

Louisa Buck’s joyful centenary celebration of the popular artist who had critics looking down their refined noses…until now.

In Beryl Cook’s centenary year, art critic Louisa Buck travels to Plymouth, where the exhibition Pride and Joy at The Box is finally giving Cook the retrospective she never had, and asks the question that has followed her work for fifty years: was she a serious artist, or an entertainer?

Cook’s plump, ribald pub and seaside scenes sold in their millions as prints and postcards while the critics looked away, and when Hunter Davies put one on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine in 1976 his own art department dismissed it as amateur. Walking the city with Cook’s son John and daughter-in-law Teresa, Louisa finds a woman too shy to attend her own openings, a self-taught painter who started in her forties and sketched in secret on cards in her handbag, and a quiet chronicler of Plymouth’s queer life.

With Jeremy Deller, Joe Scotland, Terah Walkup and Hilary Bracegirdle.

Produced by Victoria Ferran

Broadcast: 1st September 2026