The slow process of discovering Tony Hancock
For a long time,
Tony Hancock was nothing more than a name to me... mentioned in a
kind of wistfully nostalgic context by my parents and grandparents.
His TV and radio career had peaked before I was even born, and by the
time I was of an age to take notice, the repeats had mostly fizzled
out. My introduction to him was almost certainly via a series of
television ads for the Egg Marketing Board, in which he featured
alongside Patricia Hayes; although I had no awareness of him outside
of these 30-second mini-comedies.
Dating from 1965,
and with their memorable slogan ‘Go to Work on an Egg,’ the EMB
commercials were some of Hancock’s last visibly successful
endeavours in the British media. By this time, his personal life was
a car-crash, the details of which were not widely known until much
later, and his career decisions had been relentlessly off-target
since splitting with his long-term writers Galton and Simpson around
1961. Increasingly alienated by the British media, and burdened by a
worsening reputation for reliability, his appearances on the small
screen became fewer and fewer, until one final offer of a TV series
in Australia…
I have the dimmest
recollections of my parents and other grown-ups reacting to the news
of Hancock’s suicide in 1968, and I must have half-heard one or two
radio repeats over the next few years; but for me, Tony Hancock
remained essentially unknown territory until the mid-1970s. The first
mention in my diary comes on Monday 9th August, 1976: a
series of repeats had been running on Radio 4 at 6.15pm for several
weeks, and by early August I was sufficiently familiar with the
series to add an elongated squiggly line after the letter H, in
reference to Hancock’s characteristically drawn-out pronouncement
of his name in the programme introduction. Running for eleven weeks,
this repeat season presented a selection of classic episodes drawn
from the six series Hancock made for BBC Radio between 1954 and 1959.
In a short space of time, I came to recognise all the familiar
characters: Hancock himself, vain, irascible, prone to ludicrous
flights of fancy; and alongside him, swindling spiv Sid James, dopey
antipodean Bill Kerr, secretary Miss Pugh (Hattie Jaques), and
Kenneth Williams as just about everybody else, including a
particularly silly voice (identified in the scripts as ‘Snide’)
who would habitually turn up about five minutes from the end of a
given episode. If I was still a little unfamiliar with Hancock himself, the
presence of three Carry On stars in the episodes added greatly
to their appeal.
Although these
repeats are the first mention of Hancock in my diary, it’s more
than likely that I had already heard from ‘the lad’ prior to this
date, as at least two of my schoolfriends were wont to mention him
whenever the talk turned in that direction. In both cases, their
parents owned some of the LPs of Hancock that had been released on
various labels since the late 50s, which accounted for their
familiarity with the series, and indeed had played a large part in
keeping the character fresh in people’s memories.
The 1976 radio
repeats represented the longest unbroken run of Hancock’s Half
Hour since the late 1950s, and were followed by a shorter season
over four weeks during the autumn of 1977. Despite the late
scheduling of these 1977 repeats (10.30pm on Tuesdays) I made a
special effort to tune in for all of them, even going so far as to
note details of the plot and characters in my pocket diary, eg.
‘Kenneth Williams (+ silly voice) is the Governor’ (The
Conjuror, 13/9/77).
On screen, I’d
already seen Hancock in the film The Punch and Judy Man,
broadcast on Tuesday 18th September 1973 in BBC1’s
‘British Film Night’ season, although the film was quite
different from the radio and television series. An episode of the
latter was shown as part of the BBC’s ‘Festival 40’ season in
August 1976, providing an interesting comparison with the radio
episodes running concurrently. The example chosen for this repeat
broadcast, The Blood Donor,
was, alongside the radio episode A Sunday Afternoon at Home,
the one Tony Hancock show that everybody seemed to remember, due in
no small measure to its having been released (in re-recorded form) on
a 12” LP. It had last been broadcast during a season of repeats in
1969, although the lateness of these episodes (9.55pm) meant that
they eluded me – as had other Hancock repeats on BBC television
during the 1960s.
Unfortunately,
prior to watching the 1976 repeat of The Blood Donor, I’d
read an accompanying article in that week’s Radio Times,
which related the story of how Hancock, having suffered minor
injuries and concussion following a car accident, had been unable to
learn his lines the week of the recording and, for the first time in
his TV career, had been forced to rely on the autocue or teleprompt
device (a monitor screen placed in the actor’s eyeline on which the
script is displayed in a rolling fashion similar to a programme’s
end credits). The fact that he was reading his lines was glaringly
obvious, and rather took the edge off my introduction to the
television Hancock.
It wasn’t until
the mid1980s that a proper Hancock revival took place on television,
with selected classic episodes broadcast in a Sunday evening prime
time slot – unheard of for a black and white piece of archive
television. Beginning on Sunday 23rd February 1986, BBC1
broadcast no fewer than twelve classic TV Hancocks, at 7.15pm,
beginning, inevitably, with another repeat for The Blood Donor,
but going on to include such classics as The Lift, The
Bowmans (a rather barbed parody of The Archers) and, a
personal favourite of mine, The Economy Drive. Many of these
episodes were, by this time, familiar to me, having been released the
previous year on a series of VHS cassettes. The BBC weren’t overly
generous with these releases, each of which contained just three
episodes – but it was a start.
It was obvious to
me watching these TV Hancocks that the superior episodes were those
that saw him paired with Sid James. Hancock, in a drive for
increasing realism, had demanded that the ‘repertory company’ of
guest characters from the radio series be dropped for the transition
to television, and although Kenneth Williams’ popular ‘Snide’
character did put in a few appearances on screen, he was quickly
removed, reducing the regular cast to Hancock and James. Yet even
this wasn’t enough for the increasingly fractious Hancock, and for
the last BBC television series, James was deemed surplus to
requirements. Many commentators point to some of these 1961 episodes
as being amongst the best of Hancock, and his solo performance in The
Bedsittter is certainly a classic, but for me, Hancock was at his
best when he had a regular sidekick like James to bounce off. I never
warmed to the other comic foils like John Vyvyan and Mario Fabrizi
who regularly appeared in the TV episodes, and the continual
reappearance of such players in minor roles can only have served to
mitigate against the realism that Hancock himself sought.
It’s easy to
dismiss Hancock’s ambitions in this direction as pretentious or
delusional, but listening to some of the radio episodes, one can
perhaps begin to appreciate where he was coming from. Realism and
continuity never troubled writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who
would frequently bend the format (along with the laws of
time/space/physics) in the service of a gag. Some of the time, it
works. On other occasions, you can sense Hancock’s frustration as,
for example, his colleagues act out of character to swindle him out
of £4,000 (The Prize Money) or absurd, physically impossible
events take place. This kind of madness came as a result of the radio
format, with Galton and Simpson exploiting the advantage of the
listener’s not being able to see anything. An exchange such as that
between Hancock and James in the episode Hancock’s Car makes
full use of the fact that the audience can’t see the vehicle in
question:
HANCOCK : Don’t like the colour scheme? Orange and heliotrope? Very
voguey, that is.
SID: I think it’s the tartan hood that spoils it.
Realism is swept
even further aside by the revelation that Hancock’s car has been
standing at the kerb for so long that the surrounding street is
several inches higher after being resurfaced on several occasions.
But it’s all good, comic stuff, and once the listener accepts the
surreal, ever-shifting nature of 23 Railway Cuttings and its
inhabitants, such nonsensical ideas become an expected part of the
format. Even so, Galton and Simpson could get carried away with such
flights of absurdity, to which Hancock raised increasingly vocal
objections.
It’s not for me
to take pot shots at such sacred cows, but taken as a whole, Galton
and Simpson’s work on Hancock’s Half Hour is, I feel,
somwhat of a mixed bag. Grinding out scripts week after week, year
after year was no mean feat, and the hit rate of ‘classic’
episodes is still remarkable. Yet the writers’ reputation often
comes with an implication of comic infallibility – the suggestion
that they could literally do no wrong with a genius like Hancock to
work for. And yet many of the radio episodes – as well as some of
the TV examples – fail to sparkle, relying too heavily on
well-established conventions (such as Sid James’ character’s
villainy, a card played far too often) or bending reality until it
breaks. Others start out with some neat ideas, which fail to develop:
The Prize Money, for instance, begins with a note-perfect
parody of Take Your Pick, before descending into an unpleasant
out-of-character piece wherein Hancock’s friends cruelly trick him
out of the money he’s won. There’s only so far that any script
can take its characters away from their established personalities
before they simply become obnoxious. Another example from the same
series, The Sleepless Night, comes complete with what should
be a classic Hancock set-up: ‘the lad’ needs to be up early the
next morning for a new BBC engagement, and takes the precaution of
going to bed at seven p.m. Yet somehow, it fails to gel as, via a
series of increasingly contrived situations, Hancock fails to get a
wink of sleep. By this time, Galton and Simpson were writing both for
the radio and television series, and The Sleepless Night would
probably have made a much better episode in the latter medium.
 |
| 'Bags me be the boot!' The ever-enterprising Chad Valley managed to make a board game out of Hancock's Half Hour, which looks like a cross between snakes and ladders and Monopoly… |
Eventually, after
scripting an ambitious feature film The Rebel, that saw
Hancock transplanted to the streets of Montmartre among a beatnik
community of artists, Galton and Simpson parted company with ‘the
lad’ who now also broke away from the BBC, defecting to commercial
rival ATV. ATV must have been very pleased to have secured the
services of the nation’s favourite comedian, but they can’t have
known that they were buying damaged goods. Hancock was well past his
best, and his troubled personal life was beginning to show in his
performances.
New writers were
brought in, including Richard Harris (who would go on to create Man
in a Suitcase), Dennis Spooner and Terry Nation (a story in
circulation has Hancock ‘creating’ the Daleks in a moment of
madness, but it was invented by the author of a certain biography).
Hancock scholar Roger Wilmut, reviewing the ATV episodes for his 1978
book ,Tony Hancock ‘Artiste’ , describes them as ‘mediocre
without being actually bad.’ Attempts to release them on DVD have
continually been hampered by tricky negotiations to secure the
rights, and it is unlikely that the ATV Hancocks will ever be widely
available. By all accounts, we’re not missing very much.
Hancock’s career
never returned to the high watermark of the late ’50s; but the
severance of his working relationship with Galton and Simpson paved
the way for two more classic creations of TV comedy: Steptoe and
Son. The warring rag-and-bone men’s first appearance came
courtesy of a Comedy Playhouse script, from a season of
one-off ‘pilots’ that the BBC offered to G&S to fill the gap
left behind by Hancock’s departure. Galton and Simpson would write
four Steptoe series during the 1960s, before reviving the characters,
this time in colour, for a further four during the ’70s. The
success of Steptoe and Son must go a long way towards
explaining why further such ‘pilot’ seasons were offered to
Galton and Simpson, with two ‘Playhouse’ collections for ITV in
1969 and 1977. One might speculate as to the failure of these
endeavours to light the blue touchpaper behind any new situation
comedies, although not all of the scripts lent themselves to series
development. Equally, with two such comic classics as Hancock and
Steptoe behind them, Galton and Simpson may well have felt they had
nothing left to prove.
For Hancock fans
once starved of material, the situation has improved immeasurably,
with most of the radio episodes being recovered from various sources
(including privately-taped copies), and creditable remakes of the
small number still missing from the archive. The television episodes,
many of them broadcast live, are sadly under-represented, although
every available example has now been released (including a famous
instance wherein a ‘collapsing’ set failed to perform as
expected). These days, Hancock’s appearances in the media are
confined to the almost continual repeats of his radio programmes on
BBC Radio 4 Extra (some of which I am even now coming to for the
first time), and infrequent broadcasts of his two cinema films, with
even these items now largely confined to specialist-interest
channels. It’s doubtful that Hancock will ever be broadcast in
quantity on BBC television again, and the mid-80s prime time repeats
are now as distant as were the original broadcasts at the time.
DVDs are still
available to purchase, but as the trend for home media begins to
shift away from physical media and towards online platforms, will
such archive items continue to be available? What, indeed, is the
status of the BBC’s original film prints? One hopes that they are
carefully preserved in a controlled environment somewhere, and have
at the very least been archived as digital copies. But digital
broadcast standards are ever-evolving, and that which is considered
acceptable today may not remain so for much longer. There is a danger
that Hancock, and other archive classics, may one day be formatted
out of existence. And, as I’ve written in my last entry, the
dwindling audience for such items will one day dwindle down to
nothing. It’s not inconceivable that, by the end of this century,
the name Tony Hancock will mean as little to a future generation as
that of Dan Leno does to ours. You have been warned…
As the lad himself
would have said: ‘innit marvellous!’
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