Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography

Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography
John Fisher

Tony Hancock was regarded as the best radio and television comic of his era. A man whose star burned brightly in the eyes and ears of millions before his untimely death. This is the first fully authorised account of his life.Tony Hancock was one of post-war Britain’s most popular comedians – his radio show ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ would clear the streets as whole families tuned in to listen.His peerless timing and subtle changes in intonation marked Hancock out as a comic genius. His character ‘Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock’ was an amplification of his own persona, a pompous prat whose dreams of success are constantly thwarted. The original British loser that we recognise in Victor Meldrew and Alan Partridge. Wonderfully supported by a cast including Sid James, Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams, and working with scripts from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, Hancock became a huge star. The show was commisioned for TV, showcasing his talent for hilarious facial expression, and he became the first British comedian to earn a thousand pounds a week.Behind Tony Hancock’s success however hid the self-destructive behaviour that plagued him all his life. Prone to self-doubt, and wanting to be the star of his own show, he got rid of James, and finally dismissed Galton and Simpson who had created the platform for his success.His private life was wracked by his ever increasing alcoholism and bouts of depression, and his relationships shattered by his capacity for violence. His ratings fell and, feeling washed up and alone after divorcing his second wife, he committed suicide in an Australian hotel room in 1968.Now, forty years after his death John Fisher explores the turbulent life of a man regarded by his peers as one of the greatest British comics to have ever lived.

TONY HANCOCK

The Definitive Biography

John Fisher

For Sue,

with love,

for always being there

CONTENTS

FOREWORD (#uf3f81074-2b6e-5857-afb1-fffe41bac34d)

Sid James used to claim that he learned his lines during the television commercials. That was always a sore point with me, a plodder who takes about three hours to learn one page. All the time I sweated over my own script, going through what I call my hair shirt routine, I imagined Sid looking up from a cornflakes advertisement and saying, ‘Hmm … yes, I’ve got that,’ and I could have killed him.

I shall always remember the day I went to Pinewood to watch him playing a part in Chaplin’s picture A King in New York. He had a foolscap page and a half of dialogue to learn. He handed it to me and said, ‘Give us a run through, will you?’ I rehearsed it with him a couple of times and by then he was word perfect.

I was lucky to get on the set at all. Chaplin liked to work on his film behind locked doors and it was a long time before his production assistant would admit me into the fortress. All I wanted to do was to watch a genius at work, and seeing A King in New York come to life under that man’s magic touch was an unforgettable experience. His vitality was astounding. He seemed to be everywhere at once, directing a scene here, playing in one there, and never sitting down for a moment.

Now there is a man who knew all along exactly where he wanted to go and got there. Without aspiring to be another Chaplin, I hope I shall be able to look back on my career and say the same.

Tony Hancock, 1962

Preface (#uf3f81074-2b6e-5857-afb1-fffe41bac34d)

‘REMEMBERED LAUGHTER’ (#uf3f81074-2b6e-5857-afb1-fffe41bac34d)

‘For a comedian to leave behind that kind of echo of remembered laughter – it is hard to think of his life as a complete tragedy.’ Denis Norden

He would have relished the fact that by Coronation Year his name had been immortalised in a dirty joke. As a performer he renounced smut at an early age, but years later my school playground rallied to the cheeky charade of which his idol, Max Miller, would have been proud. Four deft pats on their respective body parts posed the question – ‘Who’s this?’ – and said it all. ‘Toe – knee – han’ – cock!’ The playground, then as now, knew no taboos. We all performed it out of bravado. And it is reassuring to learn that while he never allowed his professional funny side to stray into the double entendre terrain of seaside comic postcards colonised by the great Maxie himself, nevertheless from an early age ‘the lad himself’ would have been at the harmless vanguard of such fun.

I had the edge over the other members of my peer group in that I had seen our eponymous hero with my own two eyes. Hancock first became crystallised in the national consciousness by the radio comedy series, Educating Archie, starring ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews. No sooner had the programme taken wing than Brough was touring the variety theatres with a stage show capitalising on its success. In November 1951 the pair arrived to spend a week at my local theatre, the Gaumont in Southampton. To a small child fast approaching seven years of age Archie was a real live boy, as genuine as any who would share that playground joke a year or so later. I prevailed upon my parents to take me to see my idol in the ‘flesh’. The parade of acts that preceded Brough’s ventriloquial turn stays etched in my memory to this day: Ossie Noble, a clown of antic finesse, able to fling an unruly deckchair across the stage in such a way that it stopped just short of the wings in perfect sitting position; Edward Victor, a hand shadow artist who secured the biggest applause of the evening with his pièce de résistance, a silhouette of Winston Churchill puffing at his cigar; Ronald Chesney, a virtuoso harmonica player with the uncanny knack of making his instrument talk; and a young girl singer hitting the high notes with, I now realise, a vocal control unusual for her years, Julie Andrews. The last two were regular members of the radio cast, as was the comedian on the bill, Tony Hancock.

It seems appropriate now that, on the show that introduced me to the delights and serendipity of variety, he should be there. Outside of the pantomime, he was the first comedian I saw perform on a theatre stage, and he set the standard thereafter. To those whose memory of Hancock is geared to his later Hancock’s Half Hour success, this performance would have been a total surprise, a triumph of visual athleticism as he threw himself into a series of impersonations of the sportsmen who featured in the opening titles of the Gaumont British Newsreel, preceded by a display of miming skill as he jerked and contorted his hands and arms and legs into an impression of an increasingly rampant robot to illustrate the song he was singing. When a few years later the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan outlined his concept of high-definition performance, he might have had Hancock in mind, although at the time all I cared about as he created physical patterns that seemed to linger in the air was the pain of laughter in my side.

Personal experience tells me that our favourite funny men inspire a loyalty that other entertainers seldom achieve. As Hancock’s career gathered momentum and prestige, he came to define the era of his greatest success – my childhood and teen years – with almost Proustian exactness, while his comparative fall from critical grace during the 1960s seemed to make its own comment upon a harsher and more cynical world. Only something transcending mere nostalgia can account for the emotional tug of war that his staunchest fans experienced as we observed the highs and lows of his career. When the slide set in, comedy – however brilliant Howerd and Steptoe and Pete & Dud proved to be – never seemed the same again. One was always waiting for Hancock to dazzle in a way that would cap the achievements of his rivals, but it never truly came. When I heard the news of his death in the summer of 1968, the hollowness of the moment seemed to say that we, his public, had failed him, that he had never been repaid for the great years. This book is an attempt to redress that debt.

Of the volumes produced on the life and work of Tony Hancock in the years following his demise, none has possibly made the impact of the first, a memoir by his second wife, Freddie Ross Hancock, written in association with that astute journalist David Nathan and published a stark year after his death. Temporarily the book, a frank and honest account of the troubles that beset the comedian down the years as well as a wider biographical treatment, turned its subject into basest clay. Emerging from a sheltered childhood protected by the enduring love of my parents’ marriage, I experienced the chill of disappointment to discover that the man I revered had been possessed by unconsidered demons. His apparent inconsiderateness and cruelty, awash in the dregs of an alcoholic despair, were nothing if not distressing to me at so impressionable an age. The book had been a gift from my parents and I recall wanting to keep it from them, so sensitive was I to the alienating aspects of its subject as he was depicted therein.

Maturity teaches that there exist the two clichéd sides to any story. In time I discovered that all star performers are marionettes whose strings are drawn upwards by the public’s expectation of them, whether on stage or off. We tend to place a burden on the object of our admiration that at times places honesty off limits. But the candour of Nathan’s text may have been self-defeating. In subsequent years the Hancock biographical record has not been helped by much that has been speculative and sensation-seeking. The doom and gloom of the final act of the story has always suggested a tragedy with few, if any, mitigating features, while in the years since his suicide in Australia in 1968 the myths have cohered and clung like barnacles to the hull of his reputation. It has therefore been rewarding to discover for much of the time a lighter, happier, even ordinary Hancock as the veils of my research have lifted; also a performer who managed to succeed for so long despite his innate insecurity, rather than someone who failed because of it. The alcoholic excess and its attendant troubles clouded only the last few years of a spectacular career, while, as Roger Wilmut, zealous chronicler of the Hancock career in all media, has pointed out, he was capable of giving fine stage performances far away in Melbourne as late as 1967. Forty years on he continues to stand tall as arguably the greatest British comedian of my lifetime. Certainly in terms of the broadcast media it is impossible to think of anyone who has subsequently surpassed his achievement. There was little that was funny about his insatiable desire for perfection and the self-doubt that came in its wake, but the sorrow at the end has to be balanced by the utter delight of a nation in his comic skills. As Denis Norden, the doyen of British comedy scriptwriters, has said, ‘For a comedian to leave behind that kind of echo of remembered laughter – it is hard to think of his life as a complete tragedy.’

Few comedians have affected the lives of their public in the way Hancock did. Even today it is impossible for a member of his audience to realise they have forgotten to cancel the newspapers while on holiday, to endure the agonies of the common cold, to be bored senseless on a Sunday afternoon, to get stuck in a lift, to donate blood, without enjoying again the bonus of the laughter he created when he found himself in those circumstances. In these contexts Norden’s phrase ‘echo of remembered laughter’ becomes especially relevant. Moreover even today the thought of what Hancock would have said or done in a particular situation provides a constant pick-me-up at moments of mounting frustration as bureaucracy and technology take more and more of a stranglehold on our lives. In this way he exercised – and continues to exercise – a strong emotional pull over his audience. It is the great paradox of his story that one to whom life became unbearable in its last few years should forty years after his death continue to make life bearable for others.

Chapter One (#uf3f81074-2b6e-5857-afb1-fffe41bac34d)

THE IMAGE OF HANCOCK (#uf3f81074-2b6e-5857-afb1-fffe41bac34d)

‘I was always trying to make life a little less deadly than it really is.’

Seldom has a comic persona played a more tantalising tug-of-war with the character of the individual behind the mask than in the case of Hancock. It was Denis Norden again who voiced the opinion that rather than write a succession of scripts for Hancock, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson found themselves writing a novel, so fully rounded was the character they refined and defined while writing in excess of 160 radio and television Half Hours over a period of seven momentous years. Even had they set out to think this way – which they didn’t – they could have had no idea they were inadvertently compiling a virtual biography of their colleague at the same time. Irrespective of the extent to which the world view, mind-set, spoken idiom of the Hancock character belonged to the performer in real life, it is remarkable to discover that so many of the pivotal aspects of the Hancock saga and mythology are foreshadowed in their words. While they obviously did not create the man with all his problems and complexities, many of which still had to reveal themselves after they parted company professionally, there was, as we shall discover, scarcely a twist or turn in Tony’s corkscrew of a career that wasn’t pre-empted with spectacular – albeit involuntary – prescience by Alan and Ray, and sometimes poignantly so.

All great comedians from Chaplin and Keaton to Cooper and Tati have understood the idea of personal branding. With Hancock the process evolved more gradually through his collaboration with two scriptwriters of brilliance, until the outer trappings of the character they created together proved too constricting to bear and he attempted to change direction, ultimately parting from them, having already revised his wardrobe and locale. Nevertheless their shared creation is how he is most fondly remembered, and his portrayal of it remains his greatest achievement. This is the Hancock of his BBC years, from the start of the classic series on radio in 1954 until the last modified episode on television in 1961. There was much else on the credit side, a dazzling amount, including his earlier radio work, two feature films, more television of variable but not entirely negative quality, and a stage repertoire upon the extent of which many a lesser talent has fashioned an entire career. But the BBC was where most would say he belonged. It has even been said that the institution has ended up more like him than its former self. ‘The BBC is the corporate equivalent of Tony Hancock,’ observed Jeff Randall, the financial journalist, in the Daily Telegraph recently. ‘Full of talent but riddled with self-doubt.’ In Hancock’s day Auntie certainly seemed more assured of her identity, in spite of – even because of – the burgeoning competition from the commercial television sector. There was then a creative climate in which all associated with Hancock drew strength.

Half a century after his heyday there can be no disputing the earlier dominance of the individual whose dodgy initial aspirate could be seen as the template for the television aerial fast becoming attached to every rooftop in the nation, the technological icon of a new age. Comparisons with his contemporaries in the broadcast media are as irrelevant as applying the process to Chaplin’s place in the history of the cinema. Hancock’s Half Hour remains both pioneer and benchmark when the British situation comedy is discussed. Hancock represents the archetypal British telly comedy character, his single surname carrying the totemic resonance of that show-business elite that includes not only the little tramp, but Garbo and Bogart and Sinatra too. To my knowledge no other performer has been featured as often as seven times on the front cover of the flagship listings magazine, the Radio Times, six times during his short career and once posthumously. A correspondent to the New Statesman a short while after his death said it all. Having mislaid his passport on his return from Geneva, the writer became ensnared in a dialogue with a testy immigration officer at Heathrow. ‘Where do you live, sir?’ asked the official. ‘Cheam.’ ‘And what does the name Hancock mean to you?’ ‘But that’s East Cheam,’ countered the traveller. ‘You can go through,’ came the response. ‘No one who knows that could be anything but British.’ All was right with the world again.

It is sometimes difficult to accept that the character moulded by Galton and Simpson for Hancock had its origins in radio. It seems to have been tucked away in the visual folk memory of the nation, sharing space with intrinsically British icons like Mr Pickwick and John Bull, for far longer. And yet only in 1956, by which time as a radio show Hancock’s Half Hour had been triumphant for three series, did it transfer to the television screen and the combined instinct of writers, producer, wardrobe mistress and star conjure up the grandiose Homburg hat and oppressive black coat with its astrakhan fur collar that defined the pretensions and pomposity of his character as securely as the frock coat, cigar and painted moustache had summed up Groucho’s aspirations to upward mobility for another era. Already Hancock the man and Hancock the entertainer shared the physique that epitomised the sagging melancholy that contributed to his comic tour de force. ‘I look like a bloody St Bernard up the mountain without a barrel’ was a line that would creep into his act. The hunched shoulders, crumpled clothes, deflated stance – like a punctured Michelin Man recast as a sorry failure for a scarecrow – all made their morose contribution to one of the symbolic figures of the twentieth century. Within a short while the image had resonance for radio listeners as well. In an episode where Hancock is courted by Madame Tussaud’s, the waxwork technician played by Warren Mitchell knows exactly the look he is after. With all good reason he sees the model in astrakhan collar and Homburg, spats and patent-leather shoes. Hancock protests that this is merely his ‘walking out gear’. He envisages his look-alike in a more casual, homely pose: ‘silk dressing gown, cigarette holder, Abyssinian slippers, Cossack pyjamas and a fez’. Curiously our preconception of the first makes the second image funnier, since everything you need to know about the man, the catalyst for the laughter, is contained in the basic brand.

If any physical aspect defined the man it was his feet. He had the exact measure of them. ‘My feet don’t seem to be with me,’ Tony muttered to one interviewer. ‘They’re living a separate existence. They’ve been put on all wrong. They don’t join the ankle properly. Sometimes they feel as if they’re flapping like penguin flippers.’ Poise was never on the agenda at the comic academy, but it irked him just the same. ‘Let’s face it,’ he admitted to his friend Philip Oakes, ‘I look odd.’ When Oakes’s basset hound produced puppies he refused the offer of one as a pet. Someone had pointed out the similarity between his own feet stuck at their quarter-to-three position and the splayed paws of the animal. ‘Can you just see us trotting along together?’ he queried. ‘They’d be entering me for Cruft’s next.’ If his feet were something of an obsession with Hancock, Galton and Simpson were only too happy to latch on to the characteristic. In one episode, having failed the driving test for the seventy-third time, Hancock protests, ‘Me feet are too big – that’s the trouble. They overlap. I put me foot on the brake, half of it goes on the accelerator as well and we’re off again!’ On another occasion Sid James surprises Tony with his nickname from the time he supposedly served in the Third East Cheam Light Horse, ‘Kippers Hancock’. He is nonplussed that Sid could have known this, but as James explains, ‘With your feet what else could they call you?’ They were, in fact, a normal size 8½ and the man, not his writers, should be given the final word on the subject: ‘I feel as though I’ve got the left one attached to my right leg and the right one attached to the left leg. Quite horrible. If you examined my feet closely, you would see they were only good for picking up nuts.’

Jacques Tati claimed that comedy begins with the feet up, and if so Hancock might appear to have had it made from day one. The fact remains, however, that his greatest physical asset was his face. What his body lacked in definition was compensated for by the quicksilver precision of his features, capable of conveying every single nuance of the human condition with ease. Boredom, frustration, worry, exasperation, misery, insomnia, complacency all became funny when Hancock registered them, not least because of the skill with which he could appear so effortlessly to pick them out of the ether. At odds with the sagging jowls and the baggy eyes, he could transmit the subtlest thought with a simple twirl of a lip, the merest quiver of a cheek. On occasions the eyes defied you to tell him what he was thinking. You knew and laughed and he didn’t even have to speak. In many ways he was sited on a line equidistant between Chaplin and Buster Keaton, combining the chameleon flexibility of one and the abstract quality of the other. The unfortunately named ‘stone face’ of Keaton, upon which cinemagoers were able somehow miraculously to project their feelings, may have something to do with it. However, the comic effect he could achieve with the laugh that simmers, the frown that explodes, the word unspoken that came to the tip of his tongue to be swallowed almost instantly were totally Hancock’s and Hancock’s alone.

His facial prowess made him absolutely right for the emerging medium of television, but that fact only serves to underline that Hancock’s initial claim to attention was as a radio presence. At all stages of his career it helped that he had a voice that sounded as he looked. As we shall discover, the Hancock of Educating Archie sounded totally different from that of the performer remembered today. His microphone voice became modified considerably over the years, but once it found its natural level, consistent with the naturalism he and his writers were anxious to cultivate in comedy, it was hard to imagine him speaking in any other way. Plump, rounded and listless, given to sudden explosions of protest or triumph, it conveyed everything about the look and the attitude of his complex character. The emphatic caution with which he pronounced the aspirates of the title of his show – ‘H-H-H-H-Hancock’s Half Hour’ – dated from the very beginning of the radio show in 1954 and the device became a vocal calling card that firmly set the mood for each episode.

It is a paradox of the Hancock phenomenon that while he remained indisputably recognisable, understandably inimitable, he nevertheless proved well-nigh impossible to impersonate. The irony of the last radio script that Galton and Simpson wrote for him is that it revolved around the premise of someone who could do so successfully and in so doing take from the character profitable work in a television commercial that the lad deemed beneath his dignity. In this episode, the variety impressionist Peter Goodwright made a fair stab at the task and succeeded to a degree, but something was missing, even in sound alone. In later years Mike Yarwood would don the Homburg and astrakhan collar, but the impression always seemed stillborn, lacking the freedom and joie devivre that he and others achieved with the likes of Cooper, Dodd, Morecambe, Howerd and all the other comic icons from and around the same period. The answer may reside partly in public perception. In Cooper and company we – and that means Yarwood on our behalf – saw uninhibited Masters of the Revels to whom in a Saturnalian moment we all wished to aspire: who hasn’t waved an imaginary tickling stick, or donned a makeshift fez and, arms outstretched, fumbled his way through a cursory attempt at ‘jus’ like that’? On the other hand, in Hancock we saw our basic selves and perhaps thought best to leave well alone. The subtler, lower register of the Hancock voice did not help either, nor did the depth of the character as portrayed by the writers who shifted the personality of the man they knew up a gear or two to bring about their marvellous shared creation. It is ironic that one of the weaknesses of that character should be an irresistible urge to drop into impersonation at the drop of a hat, in his case the Chevaliers, Laughtons and Newtons of a bygone Hollywood age.

For all Hancock would cling to exhibitionist tendencies fashioned in another era, no comedy show caught more astutely the social history and culture of its own day, as its hero came to terms with the new prosperity to emerge from the post-war gloom, the new consumerism, the new media consciousness. Its only contender to any sort of crown in this regard was radio’s The Goon Show, the anarchic comic explosion that sounded like a verbal hybrid of freak show and firework display played out in celebration of our accumulated imperial past. But for all its energy, invention and a three and a half year start, it was less accessible than Hancock’s Half Hour and, in spite of varying attempts, had the disadvantage of being impossible to translate to television. It needed to be heard. Its four original chief protagonists – Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers – had recently, like Hancock, been catapulted out of the armed forces into performing careers that would have seemed impossible when hostilities began. All knew each other socially. If one concedes to Milligan the creative advantage, it is feasible that had the comedy pack been shuffled in a different way Hancock could have ended up in the first show in lieu of one of the other three performers. Both programmes shared the same producer, the wiry and dynamic Dennis Main Wilson, and Milligan’s co-writer in the early days, Larry Stephens, was an even closer friend of Tony and the author of the bulk of Hancock’s stage material. Moreover, Hancock had still properly to formulate his views on naturalism in comedy, a quality that amounted to anathema in the parallel universe of the Goons. Both shows in their contrasting ways drew regular comic inspiration from the folk memory of a conflict that now seems so distant and yet in those bleaker times loomed like an unwelcome ghost in people’s lives.

Hancock the man had served in the RAF. Hancock the character, being all things to all men, had, albeit in tall-story-dom, served on all fronts. In the episode where he gets stuck in a lift he describes himself as an old submarine man, to whom the confined space of the moment is a mere bagatelle. When the vicar, played by Noël Howlett, retorts that he thought he had just said he had been in the army, Hancock, resourceful as ever, claims that he was actually attached to a Commando unit being transported by submarines to blow up the heavy-water plants in Norway: ‘Very tricky stuff, heavy water, very tricky. Have you ever handled it?’ For another episode he had spent the hostilities punishing the Hun high in the clouds: ‘Did me victory roll over Hendon airport picking up packages off the tarmac with me wing tips. Nerves of steel – 144 missions and never turned a hair!’ Most memorably, when asked at the blood donor clinic whether he has given before, his imagination spiralled into new levels of derring-do: ‘Given, no. Spilt, yes. Yes, there’s a good few drops lying about on the battlefields of Europe. Are you familiar with the Ardennes? I well remember von Rundstedt’s last push. Tiger Harrison and myself, being in a forward position, were cut off behind the enemy line. “Captain Harrison,” I said. “Yes sir,” he said. “Jerry’s overlooked us,” I said. “Where shall we head for?” “Berlin,” he said. “Right,” I said, “and the last one in the Reichstag’s a sissy!”’ However outrageous, such reminiscences not only provided the perfect platform for the overblown conceit of the character; they also resonated with an audience to whom much of his swagger touched upon reality.

The Hancock character has been rightly described as 1950s man, a Charlie Chaplin for the Welfare State. For all he might rattle on about his vainglorious past, the present provided the real challenge. Long before the character reached television, the public could visualise perfectly the world he inhabited. Rationing may at long last have been heading for the ‘exit’, but we should not be deluded by nostalgia. Britain was still a pretty grim place, and his writers’ evocation of Hancock’s home base, the seedy side of sprawling suburbia epitomised by East Cheam, only served to make it even grimmer. Not for nothing did the philosopher Henri Bergson chide that to understand laughter we must put it back into its natural environment, ‘which is society’. Hancock’s specific address at 23, Railway Cuttings signified grime and austerity. One could never quite imagine the sun shining through the soot that persisted in the damp, dank air; never envisage the streets entirely free of potholes and puddles. Hancock’s disaffection was perfectly captured in the depiction of a National Health Service that for all its promise was rapidly becoming over-stretched: when he goes to the doctor to cure his cold, only to find the medic can’t even help his own, he pontificates, ‘I don’t pay ten and threepence a week to cure you!’ Not that he was without a chippy optimism, born of the patriotism that was his life’s blood. Even Hancock expected things to get better, that he would arrive, in the words of one fan, the film director Stephen Frears, at a sunlit upland where he would be treated with the right degree of respect and have a comfortable life. He certainly knew his priorities, ever ready with a Churchillian swagger ‘to strike a blow for the country that gave us our birthright, our freedom, our parliamentary democracy and our two channelled television set’.

Hancock had the full measure of the new ITV – ‘Just like the BBC, but with advertisements instead of breakdowns!’ – just as Galton and Simpson had their grip on the consumer revolution that would provide the rose-tinted panacea for the times. The recognition sparked and enlivened the comedy. Their scripts soon became a repository of marketing lore for subsequent generations. Hancock proved a sucker for the ‘individual fruit flan’, ‘the drink on a stick’, ‘the flavour of the month’. Only hours before his shows members of the audience would have been purchasing such commodities, the thought of laughter far from their minds. But on the next trip to the supermarket, the next treat at the cinema, the product would register and produce a second laughter response, ‘remembered laughter’ on a shorter time scale. When he goes to the movies himself, the lad is more anxious to see the advert where the toffees wrap themselves up and jump into their cardboard box than the main feature. At times his aspirations seem defined by the process. When his character shows ambitions to be a chef, it is to enable him to have his picture on the buses holding up a packet of salt; when leading man parts fail to come his way, he remains hopeful that the actor playing the old retainer who holds the barley water can’t last forever; his cricketing dream has less to do with playing for England than taking Denis Compton’s place on the hair cream ads. One of the most brilliant sequences ever enacted by Hancock was the running commentary on London at night as he sits side by side with Sid on a bus ride to the big city. The posters, the shops, the neon signs come to life as he peers through the window provided by the television screen and explodes with enthusiasm at the two scruffy kids sniffing gravy, the sea lion pinching the zookeeper’s Guinness and the animation provided by a myriad of light bulbs that announces the arrival of Piccadilly Circus. This has long had him puzzled: ‘I always thought there was a little bloke behind with a big bag of shillings belting up and down working a load of switches!’

In his engrossing survey of such matters, Queuing for Beginners, social historian Joe Moran has shown how the cheap free gift in the cereal packet became the symbol of the tacky promises of consumerism. An episode where Hancock fights a by-election as a Liberal candidate is made doubly funny by a subplot featuring his obsession with finding the elusive trumpet player to complement a full band of plastic guardsmen given away with cornflakes. Another ruse entailed sending in a requisite number of packet-tops for a supposedly free gift. In a parallel scenario– well before ‘salvage’ was made fashionable in the green interest as ‘recycling’ – Hancock bemoans his absence once again from the New Year’s Honours List and resolves that never again will he put his country first by sacrificing his cereal packets to the paper cause: ‘Never again! They can whistle for their salvage in future. I’m gonna stock myself up with Davy Crockett hats and bus conductor sets and assorted scenes from Noddy in Toyland. We’ll see who’s the loser in the long run.’ But a social tide had turned and it was all about winning. The relatively cheap accessibility of foreign travel and entertainment, the easy automation of household tasks, the national obsession with football pools and newspaper competitions were all symbolic of a new acquisitiveness. Sometimes the character became confused along the way. Who can forget him in the launderette transfixed by the swirling display through the window of the washing machine and then sneaking a look over his neighbour’s shoulder: ‘I’m not interested in your washing – just thought you were getting a better picture on yours, that’s all.’ Nothing escaped the Hancock experience. Not for nothing was ‘you never had it so good’ – a phrase we shall come back to – described as the ‘token’ phrase of the new era.

Coping with the new shallow affluence was only one aspect of people’s lives that attracted Galton and Simpson. There was little in keeping with the times that bypassed them, even if they claimed years later that they were too busy working to notice the parade as it passed by their office window. They could almost have had a hotline to Mass Observation, the organisation that during the middle years of the century set out to record everyday life in Britain through a formal programme of observation and research. The later television show set in the bedsitter in which Hancock tediously, from his point of view, edges himself through another humdrum day might pass as a parody of one of the movement’s completed questionnaires – or ‘day surveys’ as they were called – if it were not so true. Nothing was not noted down, however mundane it might seem. One can imagine Hancock’s log: lay down, smoked cigarette, tried to blow smoke rings, did exercises, burnt lip, looked for ointment, applied butter instead, did impersonation of Maurice Chevalier, and on and on. One atypically appreciative newspaper article described the process as ‘a searchlight on living’ and it was taken seriously in many quarters. In recent years the archive has illuminated the era, but one questions whether it has done so more effectively than the accumulated observation of two brilliant scriptwriters and their unparalleled interpreter.

The Belgian philosopher Raoul Vaneigem might have had the measure of the phenomenon when he commented, ‘There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man’s life than in all the philosophies.’ Hancock’s character would have devoured the remark. His eager quest for easy knowledge was a doff of the Homburg to the Reader’s Digest cum Teach Yourself culture of the day. This reached comic heights as he struggled between Bertrand Russell and the dictionary in that same bedsit episode, before concentration plummeted and he took refuge in a whodunnit, Lady, Don’t Fall Backwards. The lad’s conversation is peppered with tortured quotes and gaffes of schoolboy-howler horror. When John Le Mesurier’s plastic surgeon describes a potential model for Tony’s new nose as ‘aquiline’, Hancock’s response is, ‘That means you can use it under water, doesn’t it?’ But there is no consistency: ‘“This is a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done” – Rembrandt!’ is compounded at a later date by the double sting in the tail of ‘Did Rembrandt look like a musician? Of course she didn’t!’ Often the character displayed an ornate use of language totally out of sync with the times, but entirely in keeping with the holy grail of self-education. As he prepares to get ready for a night on the town, he declares, ‘Time the peacock showed his feathers, I fancy.’ But then in no time at all we are brought down to earth by the uncouth slang of ‘ratbag’, ‘bonkers’, ‘stone me!’ and ‘a punch up the bracket’.

The turgid posturing is not the stuff of youth culture, and it is so easy to forget how young they all were. When Hancock’s Half Hour first went on air, its star was only thirty – albeit it has been said he was born middle-aged – and its two writers a mere twenty-four. The point is that at certain levels the show tapped into the preoccupations of the young in an amazing way. Young people had at last discovered that they had the money that had always been denied them, to use now at the time of their greatest energy and vigour. In one early radio show Hancock found himself in a dance hall of the time, the sequence now as secure an evocation of its era as it is possible to imagine. Characteristically our hero is unimpressed. When Bill asks him what he thinks of the Palais, he replies he feels ‘like Marty standing here’, a reference to the eternal wallflower portrayed in Ernest Borgnine’s current film hit. It is never the intention that Hancock should fit in: ‘I’m fed up with this chewing gum – I nearly swallowed it three times – swinging this perishing key chain’s getting on me nerves.’ In an impressive cameo Bill Kerr later departs from his usual characterisation to play a convincing version of the Marlon Brando street-wise hoodlum who sends panic through the dance hall. ‘I’ve never seen a hokey cokey break up so quickly in me life,’ observes Tony. But at other times he was more than content to frequent the frothy coffee outlets, the protest marches, the beatnik milieu.

Many have commented that the decade of Hancock’s Half Hour was also that of Look Back in Anger, that Hancock corresponded to a comic version of Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, an angry – or at least frustrated – young man in a faux middle-aged shell. In one of the less typical radio episodes, The East Cheam Drama Festival, a third of the show is dedicated to a pastiche entitled Look Back in Hunger by John Eastbourne. As an exercise it is superficially funny, but in many ways redundant. Galton and Simpson through Hancock, their mouthpiece, were the comic complement to everything Osborne and his contemporaries represented. Porter was the first to rail at the excessive boredom of the British Sabbath – ‘God, how I hate Sundays! It’s always so depressing, always the same.’ Galton and Simpson took the disaffection and made it into arguably their most successful radio half hour. But there was never a sense that they were parodying the earlier work, nor were they consciously doing so. Even their most accomplished television script for the comedian, The Blood Donor, was pre-empted by Porter’s query, ‘Have you ever had a letter, and on it is franked, “Please Give Your Blood Generously”?’ When Porter, in an attempt to explain his supposed non-patriotism, declaims, ‘We get our cooking from Paris, our politics from Moscow and our morals from Port Said,’ we can almost hear the voice of Hancock and it becomes funny – or funnier – when we do. If one sets aside the emotional undertow of the play, there are passages – not least the more verbose monologues – that would become hilarious if Hancock were enacting them, in the same way that long swathes of Galton and Simpson dialogue would lose much comic lustre if performed by straight actors with no thought of comedy on their agenda. It is all in the perception.

While Hancock may share Porter’s feisty indignation, for all his bluster he lacks his overriding self-confidence. Jimmy always knows he is right. Hancock is never too sure. He may rail at the petit-bourgeois whim for having plaster ducks on the wall, while knowing full well he has them on his own. As the television critic Peter Black pointed out, ‘A deeper aspect of this was that he perfectly well knew it: the best part of the Hancock creation was his stoical acceptance of himself. He knew in his heart he was doomed.’ We certainly never knew which way he would turn. Conned by the consumer giveaway culture in one episode, in the next he can be talking like an ombudsman: ‘Ten packets of that muck! Do less damage taking your shirts down to the river and bashing them with a lump of rock.’ He is punctilious as he sets out his stance to the vicar at the tea table: ‘I’m no snob. It’s just that I think that if people expect to sit down at high-class tables, they can at least take the trouble to learn how to conduct themselves in a proper and mannerly fashion.’ Then, after a pause, ‘If you’re not having any more tea, can I pour my grouts in your cup?’ One of nature’s committed aristocrats one moment – his rare blood group is enough to convince him of that – the shabby keeping up of appearances becomes his very life force the next. Forced by circumstances to a menu of bread and dripping for Sunday lunch, he hastens to draw the curtains lest the neighbours should see a man of his calibre (always with the stress on the middle syllable) reduced to such means. As a comic icon he was and remains classless, and not merely because he succeeded in cutting across all demographic barriers. If one could have cloned Hancock a couple of times, only his size would have held him back from enacting all three parts in that classic sketch that featured John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. The conceit, like the idea of living in a classless society, is, of course, an illusion, one Hancock and his writers understood only too well.

Once entrusted with their task by producer Dennis Main Wilson and script editor Gale Pedrick, Galton and Simpson proved themselves magicians of the deftest skill in the way in which week in, week out they rang the changes on the character and his circumstances. Sometimes he was affluent; sometimes he had only one shirt to his name. Sometimes he was a failed theatrical, sometimes the successful star of a radio or television comedy series. Sometimes he was a law-abiding member of the community, sometimes an army deserter who had lain low in a cave on the Yorkshire Moors for six years. Sometimes the continuity might appear suspect, but the almost dreamlike flexibility never stood in the way of the naturalism in comedy which all three set out to achieve at the start. As Alan Simpson has commented, ‘He was what we wanted him to be at any given time. That was the great freedom one had in those days. On one show we had him as a barrister. Nobody commented on the fact that you need seven years training, you need diplomas. Nobody cared.’ Anyone asked in an over-the-top television quiz to name a top racing driver who in his spare time was a purveyor of quack medicines, who had served in the Foreign Legion and whose grandfather had been a member of ‘The Three Tarzans’ music-hall act, could do worse than hazard a guess at the personage of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, to give the character its full monicker. The question might as easily have been to nominate the derring-do test pilot who was stolen from his cradle by the gypsies, went on to inherit his great-uncle’s newspaper empire and ended up living as a hermit on Clapham Common. They both tick all the boxes. The Hancock invention was its own Pandora’s Box of possibilities.

Even later when he discarded the Homburg and fur collar the inner man somehow remained constant. Simpson uses the attitude to food and France to show how the character could paradoxically live within his own contradictions: ‘One week he would say, “I can’t stand that foreign muck. I want sausage, egg and chips.” And the next week he’d be haute cuisine: “I don’t eat that rubbish. Bring on the sea bass.” If he met an intellectual he might try to keep up with him or dismiss him with “what a load of old rubbish!” Never throw away a good joke – it all relies on what you think of.’ The approach gave them full rein to present Hancock as Everyman for the twentieth century. In time he was acclaimed ‘a massive caricature of mid-century man’. According to Philip Oakes, the comedian rather fancied the title. Every possible foible, every potential flaw was refracted though the persona. No comic has succeeded more admirably in making us laugh at our own fears, failures and insecurities. While Bob Hope majored on cowardice, Jack Benny on meanness and vanity, John Cleese on a manic paranoia, Tony Hancock was all our sins personified. Long ago Galton and Simpson described the character as ‘a shrewd, cunning, high-powered mug’. Roger Wilmut was more comprehensive in his cataloguing: ‘pretentious, gullible, bombastic, occasionally kindly, superstitious, avaricious, petulant, over-imaginative, semi-educated, gourmandising, incompetent, cunning, obstinate, self-opinionated, impolite, pompous, lecherous, lonely and likeable fall-guy’. Only a few redeeming qualities there, but then the funniest traits will always be the weaknesses.

That said, Hancock wasn’t just likeable – he was loved. His neuroses, grumbles and hang-ups were endemic in the larger proportion of his potential audience. As Philip Oakes has said, ‘He was truly representative and so he could be excused,’ right down, it would appear, to the murderer that lurks in us all. When he needs the cash to match a bet that he cannot go one better than Phineas Fogg and travel around the world in less than eighty days, he shows his shady resolve: ‘I’ll get the money. I’ve just remembered I’ve got a great grandfather up in Leeds – of a very nervous disposition. I think a good strong paper bag popped behind him should see me all right.’ He isn’t joking. On one occasion his attitude to Bill Kerr, humbled into carrying out some repair work underneath Hancock’s motor car, is positively sadistic: ‘I’ve a good mind to jump on his ankles. I’d love to see him spring up and hit his head on the big end.’ His disposition to petty larceny pales by comparison: when Richard Wattis checks his card at a hotel reception desk he soon discovers an outstanding issue from last time, ‘a little matter of four towels, a tea service and an ashtray’. The cleverness of the casting and character of Sid James as the great swindler rampant in Hancock’s life was that Tony himself was just as questionable in the honesty stakes. It was totally in character that he should be less successful at iniquity, although in one episode, The Scandal Magazine, he is revealed as being more corrupt than Sid. James is the editor who has the Chief Constable and the Director of Public Prosecutions in his pocket. After Hancock clears his name and wins a king’s ransom in damages, it soon emerges that the initial exposé on his sordid dalliance with a cigarette girl was not without foundation.

That may have been an extreme case. As Dennis Main Wilson explained, ‘The beauty of it was that you could identify him not with yourself, but with your Uncle Fred or your next-door neighbour. Johnny Speight gave the objectionable characteristics to Alf Garnett, but much more harshly, much more cruelly, in a much later, crueller world. We did the Hancock shows in a much happier world.’ At least they appeared to become happier as the new prosperity took hold. The analogy with Alf Garnett, as immortalised by actor Warren Mitchell, is significant, reminding one that much about Hancock would now be considered sexist, racist and politically incorrect. Much of his sexist disgruntlement was directed at the buxom and bounteous Hattie Jacques, in her radio role as the mountainous secretary Miss Griselda Pugh. When she is too busy to take a letter because she is knitting herself a jumper, Hancock acknowledges the fact: ‘Of course. I saw the lorry bringing the wool in this morning.’ When she is conscripted into service as a teacher at the school Sid has coaxed him into opening, she suggests adding ‘Cantab’ after her name, to which Tony responds, ‘No. I think Oxon would be better for you.’ In the music-hall era his comments would have been labelled ‘fat’ jokes. Here they serve the comedy of characterisation and produce some of his biggest laughs. When the similarly endowed Peggy Ann Clifford boards a crowded bus, he refuses to offer her his seat: ‘You wanted emancipation. You got it. Stand there and enjoy it.’ In the last television show Galton and Simpson wrote for him, he curtly dismisses one of the candidates for his hand in matrimony: ‘I can’t imagine her staying at home all day mangling.’