Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography

I may not be a personality.

Everything that happens I get blamed for,

But on one thing all agree:

I’m just a nuisance to the Sergeant,

I don’t get any break at all,

I’m just the feller what peels the spuds,

I’m at everybody’s beck and call.

I’m just the guy who takes the can back;

They all think I’m dumb.

But I don’t care tuppence,

’Cos I know darn well I’m a hero to my mum.

As Lily emphasised, ‘It really was the biggest moment of my life.’ Fellow cast member Bryan Olive recalled how the last line would bring the house down: ‘He used to deliver it perfectly and it always brought laughter and applause.’ But it was also a moment that in later life Tony wanted to forget. Philip Oakes claimed that a production still of the act showing ‘a phenomenally lean Hancock’ with broom in hand singing robustly into the spotlight was ‘a weapon which could always be used to silence him in arguments about artistic integrity in later years’. Who does relish being reminded of one’s apprentice years? For the moment, though, the taste was sweet. He could put the bad times behind him – little realising they would return even worse – and relax into the relative security of a five-month run of the largest theatres in the land at the unheard-of salary of £10 per week.

Reader proved to be in his element as his production traced the birth, progress and achievement of the RAF with all his customary flair for the spectacular. Wherever the Gang Show had played during the war, however precarious the conditions, he had insisted upon full makeup, full costume and his trademark backcloth, a light blue curtain emblazoned with the words ‘Gang Show’. Now he was spoiled for choice. The local Blackpool press gave a rousing send-off to ‘these fine-looking lads and lasses who put all they knew into this heart-warming pageant of memory in which times, trumpets, tears and triumph are all served up in laughter and light and spiced with the wine of youth’. In truth the spectacle and ebullience had the edge over the comedy. The sketches were perceived as ‘a little long and a little futile, although the audience mostly liked them’. A scene on a troopship was described surprisingly – in the light of Reader’s standards – as ‘tiresome … with some risky “jokes” at which the young people were supposed to laugh and applaud … there is no excuse for questionable “humour” in a show as good as this’. Within a decade Hancock would go on to epitomise the humour of a new generation, and there was one single moment when the show provided a glimpse of what was in store. As he interrupted a gymnastic display set on Blackpool sands by shambling across the stage in a hopelessly ill-fitting uniform, an apoplectic Drill Sergeant yelled, ‘Where do you think you are? Just look at your trousers. Look at your jacket. You are a disgrace to the service. How long have you been in the Air Force?’ The shaking Hancock looked up, paused and, literally shrugging the words off his chest, replied resignedly, ‘All bloody day!’

The show boasted no stars as such, but semi-recognisable names in the company included John Forbes-Robertson, the grandson of the famous actor-manager; Brian Nissen, who had appeared in films for J. Arthur Rank and, like John, was still serving as an Aircraftman First Class; and Edward Evans, who would become famous as Mr Grove in the pioneer television soap opera The Grove Family. Ten motor coaches and many trucks were needed to transport cast and scenery from town to town. Among his comrades Hancock made a distinct impression. Bryan Olive, still technically a pilot within the service at the time, recalls that a vote was taken among a group of them as to who would achieve the greatest success in future life: ‘There was a first, a second and a third. He must have had a noticeable something even then, because he came first! And I’m not really certain we ever told him …’ In spite of playing to packed houses for most of the eighteen-week run, the show lost a staggering £32,000, losses met by the Air Council with the assistance of the Treasury in the cause of propaganda and the further recruitment drive for the service. The tour culminated in a special enhanced staging at the Royal Albert Hall on 14 September for a Battle of Britain remembrance show, when for one night only Richard Attenborough paid a personal tribute to those who fought the Battle of Britain, John Mills recited Tennyson’s ‘Loxley Hall’ and the evergreen George Robey with Violet Loraine reprised the tear-jerker that defined an earlier conflict, ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’.

One looks to his comrades for some insight into Hancock’s approach to his work and his aspirations during those days. His artistic integrity stood out. John and Freda Maud, who met on the show, remembered him as a ‘forthright and honest character’ who, even though he seemed to prefer the company of the amateurs to that of his fellow civvies, ‘stood out as a professional – he couldn’t perform something if it wasn’t right’. Olive noted that while not without a sense of humour, Hancock came over at times, although mainly with hindsight, as melancholy for one so young: ‘I think it was obvious that in a subtle way, even then, he had designs on becoming a big international star and also strangely I think he had a touch of snobbery in him, again in a somewhat subtle way.’ This did not prevent him coming over to one and all ‘as a friendly sort of guy’, although one who sensed his limitations. When an opportunity arose for some of the company to hold an informal concert of their own, Bryan distinctly recalled overhearing one of the lads urging Tony to do something, but he would not comply: ‘I can’t without a script.’ He could be, added Olive, ‘a bit mysterious and/or complicated’. Elsa Page might have understood: ‘There was a depth to Hank, a more serious side to our pal than just a clown … mind you, in the old Nuffield centre days, we WAAF and WREN mates had to buy him a few pints before we could get him up to dance with us!’

The pomp of the Royal Albert Hall extravaganza could only have heightened the sense of letdown that the tour was over. For a while he shared a house, or part of it, with Edward Evans in Grey Close, Hampstead Garden Suburb. It was back to straitened circumstances until a more conventional booking came his way, the part of an Ugly Sister in pantomime at the Oxford Playhouse. But before then an epiphany had occurred in his life that would have a major effect on his comedy outlook. Throughout 1947 the current comedy idol of the West End held sway in the revue Piccadilly Hayride at the Prince of Wales Theatre, right across the road from the Nuffield Centre. There was no escaping the fact that Sid Field was the man to be seen. Hancock and Stark went together, and to this day Graham can enact the experience: ‘We were kicking the seats in front of us – it was so funny – he was magic – we’d never laughed so much.’ He recounts the moment in a Shakespearian burlesque from the show in which Sid played King John and a young Terry-Thomas his cook, Simnel. Taking one look at the man-at-arms standing nearby in full suit of armour, Field commented, ‘You wanna get a fourteen pound hammer and put a crease in them.’ That was the moment a convulsed Hancock turned to his friend and whispered his allegiance: ‘He’s the one. He’s the one for me.’ The ability to give an inconsequential line comic depth was only one attribute that would in due course find an echo in Hancock’s work. It helped that Sid had also been born in Birmingham.

Field was a revue comic who shone in situations provided by sketches as distinct from a stand-up comic with a direct line of attack to his audience. In this respect he was multi-faceted, ringing the changes on a succession of comic types that included the wide boy, the effete photographer, the apprentice golfer, the moonstruck musician and more. While Hancock, by contrast, evolved into a single-character man, the comic projection of himself, he nevertheless found a way of absorbing many aspects of Field into his central persona, although he did sidestep the camp quality of much of his idol’s work. It was osmosis born of hero-worship, rather than conscious copying. In one sketch Sid played a landscape painter pestered by the attentions of an irksome schoolgirl. One can hear Hancock delivering the response: ‘Why don’t you go and play a nice game on the railway lines – with your back to the oncoming engines?’ And then, after he has pacified her by producing a bottle of lemonade, ‘Get the bottle well down your throat.’ Throughout Hancock’s career comedy aficionados with sharp ears could detect the influence of Field in his own delivery. When Sid James attempts to correct Tony during a boxing lesson, Hancock becomes aggrieved: ‘There is no need to shout. I didn’t know. I wish I hadn’t come.’ We could be listening to Field the golfer on the first tee with his instructor, Jerry Desmonde. When Hancock gets into an altercation in the cinema, the breathy belligerence gives him away: ‘What’s the matter with you? Hold me coat. You picked a right boy here. I’ll knock him back in the three and nines. A quick left and he won’t know what’s hit him.’ It could be Field’s boisterous cockney spiv, Slasher Green, remonstrating. When the emigration officer explains that all potential immigrants must be vetted and documented, Hancock sighs, ‘What a palaver!’ It must have been difficult to resist switching it for Sid’s catchphrase. ‘What a performance!’ the older man would seethe, as his dignity was destroyed, his patience unravelled. Even the arch preening of Field’s society photographer, if not the camp sexual ambivalence, was caught in the television episode where Tony applies his hand to the camera and prepares to take Sid James’s portrait. All Sid expects is a ‘snap’; Tony, all aflutter in large floppy velvet bow tie and smoking jacket, is intent on creating a ‘symphony in emulsion’.

In his appearance on The Frost Programme in January 1967, Hancock brilliantly conjured up the magic of his hero for a whole new audience:

And Jerry Desmonde would come on and say, ‘Now ladies and gentlemen, with great pleasure I would like to introduce England’s leading exponent of the tubular bells, Mr Eustace Bollinger.’ And Sid would come on with two mallets, and a terrible wasp waistcoat and bicycle clips – which have always seemed to me to be funny anyway. He used to say to the musical director, ‘What do you think I should play?’ and he’d say, ‘Why don’t you play Beethoven’s 15th Movement of the 7th Symphony in E flat minor with the modulated key change to G flat major?’ and Sid had a good long look at him, and then he got hold of one of these mallets and said, ‘Yes, I thought you’d suggest something like that,’ and tried to belt him with this stick. Then the orchestra all rose up and tried to clout him with their violins, so nobody was in any doubt as to what the relationship was for a start! Then a voice from the box said, ‘Maestro,’ but Sid knows it’s not true. That was the beauty of it. Anybody calling him ‘Maestro’, he knew the man was a fool. And on a table by the side he’d got a Ludo set, a toy fire engine, a toy poodle – by the side of these tubular bells – and this bloke in the box says, ‘Maestro, what’s all the junk on the table?’ ‘Junk?’ ‘Yes, what is all that junk on the table?’ ‘That’s not junk,’ says Sid. ‘That’s prizes!’ That paralysed me. You could just imagine him sort of cycling up from Sidcup or somewhere, with his clips on and all this gear on his bike. Most of it is in your imagination. Like any great comic, Sid relied a great deal on the imagination and warmth of his audience.

In Field’s work Hancock saw the comedy of exasperation, as taught to him by George Fairweather in the magician sketch, raised to its highest level so far. Hancock’s world of ‘stone me!’ moroseness, of ‘how dare you!’ indignation was partly derived from his own character and background, partly the product of his writers’ creation; but a small corner of it – one forever Birmingham – will always remain a legacy from Sid Field. This blissful, benign comedy god died from a heart attack on 3 February 1950 at the sadly premature age of forty-five, with, as Tynan observed, alcohol and self-criticism his pall-bearers. The whole world of theatre mourned: according to Phyllis Rounce, Tony’s agent at the time, ‘It was the only time I ever saw him in tears.’ He was so besotted by him he christened his first two cars accordingly, one ‘Sid’ and the other ‘Harvey’, after the invisible rabbit of the play of the same name in which he was playing at the time of his death. Not discovered on the West End stage until March 1943 after years of provincial touring, Field had packed the cream of his achievement into seven years. The same time span reverberates in any assessment of Hancock’s own greatest success, the darker echoes of alcoholism, anxiety and self-doubt providing their own disturbing postscript to his own story.

No one can say how much of Field’s ambience rubbed off on the young Hancock as he trod the boards of the Oxford Playhouse that Christmas. Frank Shelley, the artistic director of the Playhouse, had offered him the part of the Ugly Sister after being impressed by his performance in Wings at Oxford’s New Theatre the previous August. In one scene he had to sit on his sibling’s shoulders as they lurched down a flight of stairs together. In a fit of mischief on the third night Hancock had the funnier idea of throwing his skirt over his partner’s head. Unable to see a thing, the latter staggered across the stage and then tried to steady himself above the footlights before losing all equilibrium and landing them both in the orchestra pit. From that moment Hancock decided to play things by the script, in which he was billed as the Hon. Sarah Blotto. His counterpart, the Hon. Euphrosyne Blotto, was played by the actor John Moffatt, who much later would become familiar to television viewers as Coméliau, the prickly superior judge to Michael Gambon’s Maigret in the Granada series based on the stories by Georges Simenon. What most impressed Moffatt was Hancock’s ‘great good taste – he couldn’t bear any kind of vulgarity on stage. I played the haughty, pretentious sister and Tony played the draggle-tail who was always letting me down, so he had great opportunities to be vulgar, but he never was.’ The Oxford Mail praised their clowning as ‘slapstick of a very high order’. Hancock, with a nod to the dreaming spires, joked that it was a very intellectual panto: ‘Three minutes of Latin in the wood scene – which had to go – and people chatting about Nietzsche during the ballroom scene. Lots of philosophical chat. Extremely successful for Oxford.’

To economise he bypassed the standard theatrical digs and rented a gypsy caravan for £1 a week in a field outside the city. It sounded a good idea until the first morning a herd of cows gave him their version of an alarm call when they vigorously started butting the sides. The farmer had his explanation, one it is difficult not to imagine Hancock himself delivering in that rortiest of rustic voices he reserved for the part of Joshua Merryweather in Galton and Simpson’s travesty of The Archers, The Bowmans: ‘Them cows allus go round that there ’van first thing in the morning. Allus have done. They sharpens their ’orns on it.’ The last night arrived and in best theatrical tradition the ladies in the cast were plied across the footlights with chocolates and flowers. Then, unannounced, two youths bounded out of the audience and regaled Sarah and Euphrosyne with bouquets fashioned from onions, carrots, cabbages and bottles of stout. It was not until many years later that Moffatt discovered that one of those lads was an enthusiastic young theatre buff named Ronnie Barker, whose own career received a substantial boost shortly after when he joined the Playhouse’s repertory company under Shelley.

In 1993 Barker dedicated his autobiography to the director, one of ‘the three wise man who directed my career; without men like these, there would be no theatre’. Hancock could not have disagreed. By the end of April he was back at the Playhouse, although Moffatt admits he cannot vouch for the story that Shelley offered him the job when he bumped into Tony picking up a penny from the pavement in Charing Cross Road, saying, ‘Well, if you’re as hard up as all that, I can use you in this large-cast play we’re doing.’ The piece was Noël Coward’s Peacein Our Time. He had three small parts and re-enacted them with relish in the years to come: ‘The first role – it said “A man” and I had to say “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck.” That’s all. I walked straight into the juvenile lead, who said to me, “Get out of my bloody way, you bastard.” Every night I used to say “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck,” “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck,” “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck.” It all meant something. Nothing! Then I played a German civil servant with a pork pie hat on. And the producer said, “Will you keep an undercurrent of German throughout the scene.” And I had bifocals on and I couldn’t even find my drink and I was fumbling under the table to find my glass and keeping up an undercurrent of German. “Auch was ist ummm Bahnhof ummm ich habe nien ummm Düsseldorf.” Then I finally appeared as a drunken, brutal Nazi soldier. I had the lot on. The jackboots, the gun, the swastika armband. And for this character Coward had written the worst line he had ever written without any question. I said, “Bitte.” “The bitter’s off but we’ve got some old and mild,” the landlord replied. And I thought when I was playing it even then, “Jesus, what is this man doing?”’ He returned to London and the pursuit of comedy – intentional comedy, that is.

There had been a second agenda for visiting the Prince of Wales Theatre those several months ago. Another old RAF colleague, Derek Scott, was in gainful employment there as the accompanist to Terry-Thomas in his impressionist act, Technical Hitch, a remarkable display of virtuosity in which the rising star played both a frantic disc-jockey and the voices – Paul Robeson, Ezio Pinza, Richard Tauber and Hutch were a few – on the records that he had mislaid, or, if the budget of the show allowed, broken. Scott, who had a profitable career ahead of him as a musical director and consultant in commercial television, would become a life-long friend of Hancock. One night at a party Tony, against type, found himself improvising an act with Derek, on the keyboard, acting as feed. It was a great success and at Scott’s suggestion they set about polishing it with a view to offering it to Vivian Van Damm, the legendary impresario of the Windmill Theatre, the venue where, as Denis Norden has remarked, ‘young ladies were barely paraded and comedians were barely tolerated’. In later years Derek recalled one of the gags that surfaced in their efforts: ‘Shall we walk down to the pub and have a pint, or shall we take a bus and have half a pint?’ Roger Hancock remembered another, something about a stag’s head on display in a pub: ‘He must have been going at a hell of a lick to get through that wall.’ Tony, who will never be celebrated as a joke teller as such, clung to the latter until the end of his life.

More relevant was the main thrust of the routine, which owed a little to Terry-Thomas and no doubt far more to George Fairweather. The theme was an impromptu concert party with, as Hancock put it, a lot of ‘dashing on and off, and putting on funny hats and things’. It was reprised for his second radio broadcast, when he made his début on the Sunday night hit show Variety Bandbox on 9 January 1949. The script he used for the occasion survives. One has no difficulty guessing where he obtained the inspiration for the opening:

I want you to imagine that it’s cold and wet. The scene is a seaside town in the middle of summer. You’re sitting on the sand, the umbrella raised as the rain beats softly down. You’re patiently waiting for the commencement of the local concert party, probably the world’s worst concert party, complete with ancient jokes and aspiring tenor and so on. The curtain jerks slowly back and the Tatty Follies are about to begin – so on with the show.

A few lines into the opening song, we are introduced to some of the cast:

I’m Bertie Higginbottom and I’ll make you smile

And I will serenade you for a little while.

I’m the brightest young soubrette that you have ever seen,

And I’ll impersonate for you the stars of stage and screen.

A rousing burst of ‘Colonel Bogey’ then takes us straight into the comic’s act:

By gow, it’s grand to be back here at Tatty-on-Sea. I’ve got a couple of funny stories here for you. I think they’ll make you laugh. I were coming along to the theatre the other day. A fella came up to me. He says, ‘Joe.’ He says, ‘D’you know why the chicken crossed the road?’ He says, ‘Well, I’ll tell you. It’s for some foul reason.’ Aye, well, we’ll not bother with that one. I’ve got a bit of poetry for you. There was a young lady from Ryde, who ate some green apples and died. The apples fermented inside the lamented, and made cider inside ’er inside. By gow, yon were a hot ’un.

The chicken joke was vintage Max Miller; the limerick doubtless Hancock’s own; the idiom that of variety’s broad Lancastrian rapscallion Frank Randle. He goes on to introduce Sinclair Farquhar, the show’s tenor, who gives us a burst of Ivor Novello’s ‘Shine through My Dreams’ before cueing ‘Knightsbridge March’, the signature tune for In Town Tonight, the popular radio interview programme of the day. This was a device that had also been used by Terry-Thomas in a second spot on Piccadilly Hayride, also accompanied by Scott. The two comedians remained close throughout their lives, so obviously they had an amicable understanding on the matter. Even then Hancock was deliberately milking the outdatedness of his material: ‘My first impression is, I believe, entirely original. I think I am right in saying it has never been presented on any stage before, at any time, in any country. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty.’

No one ever bellowed ‘Mis-tah Chris-tian … I’ll have you hung from the highest yardarm in the Navy’ to the imaginary Clark Gable with greater disdain or to funnier effect than Hancock. This was obviously the point in the concert party routine where he could expand or contract accordingly, limited only by the scope of Fairweather’s own repertoire and anything he had the nerve to add. For the radio broadcast he fell back upon Quasimodo, with its echo of Laughton again, although the contorted freakishness of the character would have been lost on the home audience, together with a visual gag, for which Hancock needed to keep his hair at a special length, in which he discovers he cannot see the audience and then with a deft flick of his head rights the matter, often the cue for applause.

And now, ladies and gentleman, I feel that up to now we’ve had a certain amount of levity, jocularity, laughter and gaiety and I do feel that the time has come to strike a rather more serious note in the programme. So put the children under the seats, while I pull my hair over my face to get right into the character of the Hunchback of Notre Dame … where are they? … Oh, there you are. I’m terribly sorry … got the hair in my eyes and couldn’t see!

Derek would then join Tony to evoke the upper-class cadences of Kenneth and George, the Western Brothers, with words that this time around amounted to so much gibberish:

Scapa on the haybox with scanson on the skay

Forlip with the cranston on the line

Jayboy in the chipmunk and the omi on the tray

Forlip with the cranston on the line

Scarfan is the skipmark with a scarpment in the plee

Nante with the bullcut and the trampot at the gee

But scara scara scara and a flagnap on the ree

Forlip with the cranston on the line

Or something like that, before a brief burst of double talk, a reprise of the nonsense verse and a parody of a rousing chorus song to finish. ‘A Song to Forget’ may have been penned specifically for Variety Bandbox, since it was credited to two rising names, musician and scriptwriter Sid Colin and musician and broadcaster Steve Race.

Everybody shout it,

Sing a song about it,

If you ever doubt it you’ll be blue.

Oh the drums are drumming,