Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography

’Cos a great day’s coming,

And about time too.

Hancock later claimed that Derek hated uttering a single word during the whole proceedings and that when he had to open his mouth ‘he would curl up into embarrassment at the sound of his own voice’. Interestingly, a small part of the act brought back family memories: ‘He did a grand job at the piano and boosted my morale no end, as my mother once boosted my father’s, by laughing all through the act. I had no need to turn round; I could hear him spluttering away behind my back. More often than not it was because something had gone wrong – that man went delirious over disaster – but no matter. It was heartening to know that he was enjoying himself, however firmly those blocks of stone out front might sit on their hands.’

The Variety Bandbox broadcast was still in the future when Scott and Hancock, billed as ‘Derek Scott and Hank’, played the Windmill Theatre for six weeks from 12 July 1948. It was the most encouraging sign yet to the young comedian that his career was on track, although why he had reverted to using his wartime Gang Show appellation is a mystery. To audiences on the Wings tour and in Oxford he had used his birth name, and there would appear to have been no rival ‘Tony’ in the new cast. The additional comedy support on a bill dominated by musical sequences and the so-called ‘scenas’ that featured bare expanses of the statuesque female form for which the theatre was famous was provided by a comedy ventriloquist with a dithering style who would one day drop his dummy, figuratively speaking, and a rather rough conventional double act. Van Damn really could afford only two of the three acts, but took them all on trial on the understanding that he could let one of the double acts go at the end of the first week. Harry Worth was safe, and Morecambe and Wise – they had recently changed their billing from their actual names, Bartholomew and Wiseman – fell by the wayside. No one needs telling that their talent and resilience were such that it did not matter. One wonders if Hancock, with or without his partner, would have bounced back from such early rejection.

What may well have been Hancock’s first mention in the national press appeared in a review in the Daily Herald the day after the Windmill opening, stating how ‘young comedian makes a hit’ performing his ‘brilliant thumbnail impressions of a “dud” concert party among the nimble youthful feminine pulchritude’ of what was the 214th edition of Revudeville, the revue in miniature with its coy intimation of nudity in its title, at the theatrical institution that could proudly boast of its wartime record, ‘We never closed,’ only for some wag to echo, ‘We never clothed!’ At a much later date Barry Cryer recalled his surprise at discovering that between shows, which were otherwise more or less continuous, a voice would boom over a loudspeaker with a request that patrons not climb over the seats to get nearer to the front for the next show, an announcement that was usually drowned out by the very sound of men clambering over the seats to get nearer to the first row. Jimmy Edwards, one of the most successful comedians to make his initial impact there, christened the ritual ‘The Grand National’. Every morning the theatre handyman had to tighten the bolts to ensure the seats were secure. The initial slogan, incidentally, referred specifically to the period between 16 September and 12 October 1940 at the height of the Blitz when the Windmill was the only theatre to remain open in London, and not the two weeks at the outbreak of war when all such venues were closed by Act of Parliament.

Later Hancock remarked that his season at the theatre just around the corner from Piccadilly Circus coincided with the London Olympics, and that the front six rows of the stalls were full of Mongolian discus-throwers and non-English-speaking Ethiopians. He was a little less flippant when John Freeman asked him about the experience: ‘It’s a marvellous place to run in an act. We did six shows a day, six days a week, and you learnt to die like a swan, you know, gracefully. The show used to start at 12.15. I used to go on at 12.19 to three rows of gentlemen reading newspapers, and nothing, you see, absolutely nothing, but you’d learn to die with a smile on your face and walk off. Then you came back again at two o’clock to see the same people, and you died again. But it was a great experience. I didn’t enjoy it at the time, but it’s been a great benefit afterwards … but I’ll tell you what was the best thing. The drunks used to come in about twenty past three, when the pubs were closed, and they were quite lively, so it made the day go.’ On a later radio interview, he added, ‘Windmill? Call it the Treadmill … either you’re a comedian after that or you’re out.’ Hancock boasted of arriving at the theatre with four minutes to spare before his first entrance, a situation helped by the decision, forced upon him by necessity, to wear his street clothes, the hardy pinstripe demob suit. ‘I wanted to appear casual,’ he would explain by way of excuse.

For all the pressure to succeed, these were obviously happy times with a close-knit family atmosphere backstage. Phyllis Rounce remembered how the girls would fall about with laughter backstage, unable to go on properly, as Tony mimicked the way they walked, his own penguin gait not entirely conducive to their elegant high-heeled demeanour. What he could never bring himself to do was to refer to Van Damm as V.D. in the way everyone else did. From the beginning he settled for ‘Sir’ or as he once admitted, ‘Mr – er – um – V – er – um – Mr Van – Damm’. His reticence had no effect on the success of his audition and continued until the end of their association. Also on the bill was a magician, Francis Watts, with whom Hancock shared a dressing room: ‘He had just time between shows to grab a cup of tea, then start putting the strings up his sleeves, folding the trick silk flags, putting the rabbits back in the hat … and he was on! Just time to get on stage. Perpetual motion.’ On one occasion the schedule did not go to plan. Someone knocked over a tray of drinks that were an integral part of the act. Hancock and Scott gallantly came to his aid, helping to load the various accoutrements into his bulging dress suit. Unfortunately not everything went into the right place, leaving the conjuror on stage more bewildered than his audience and Hancock helpless with laughter again at the side of the stage. Derek recalled that the big finish to the act was a paper-tearing trick that revealed a torn-out representation of a clock showing the time of the moment accompanied by the grand pronouncement, ‘As the time is now … whatever it was … I shall say good afternoon,’ or whatever was appropriate. The pressure of six shows a day, six days a week eventually got the better of Watts, and Tony would lose control as the magician found himself saying, ‘As the time is now nine thirty …’ when the paper clock told the world it was not yet teatime. As Derek added, the real tragedy was that no one noticed, which made the situation all the more appealing to Hancock. With their U-boat Commander binoculars around their necks, those out front had not come for miracles, let alone laughter, only for the nudes, or as Tony, perhaps ungraciously, once referred to them, ‘these little scrubbers with small tits like dartboards’.

They were paid £30 a week. Hancock worked this out as the equivalent of about 4s. an hour. ‘At these rates,’ he added, ‘no wonder they never closed!’ It was, however, a small venue with a limited capacity of just over 300 and, at the time Hancock played there, entertainment tax to pay of £50,000 a year. But it was never just about the money. There was curiously the glory as well, or what would one day be perceived as such. It may be a myth that Van Damm had the skill of Nostradamus when it came to spotting comedy talent. The law of averages dictated that most of the acts that passed the Windmill audition were forgotten, while among those who failed Van Damm’s scrutiny were Spike Milligan, Benny Hill and Roy Castle. But ahead of Hancock, as the roll call of honour installed in the front of the theatre would show, were Jimmy Edwards, Harry Secombe, Alfred Marks, Michael Bentine, Peter Sellers, Arthur English and, noticeably, Bill Kerr. There became a sense of almost military pride in which those who survived the six-week campaign could vaunt their achievement. Galton and Simpson picked up on this in the radio episode where Hancock contemplated his old school reunion. Sid points out that the rest of his contemporaries may well be big-business tycoons and cabinet ministers by now, but Tony reminds him that he too has made his mark in his chosen profession. ‘You got your name up on the board outside the Windmill,’ Sid replies cynically. ‘What weight’s that gonna carry?’ Hancock is not impressed.

It can be recorded that Hancock’s first visit to the Windmill occurred before the war. He claimed that one afternoon on a trip to London with her son to purchase his school uniform, his mother, desperate for a respite from the pressures of shopping in the big city, suggested they pop in for an hour to a theatre advertising the convenience of non-stop entertainment that she had spotted up a side street not far from the statue of Eros. ‘When she saw the girls, she began pushing me under the seat,’ he added. The comment may have been his invention. He claimed he was seven years old at the time, but if the girls had caused an embarrassment he must have been older, since the idea of nudes had not been introduced into the Revudeville concept of continuous variety until much later in the 1930s. Whatever his age, whatever part the show played in his sexual enlightenment, the tale provides an amusing preface to his later association with the theatre.

No one became a star overnight through Windmill recognition, but its stage provided one of the key shop windows where agents and producers could spot emerging talent. Hancock and Scott were by now registered with an agent. Not much is known of Vivienne Black, outside of her early connection with Hancock, but while he was at the theatre his talents came to the attention of another representative, Phyllis Rounce, a founder of International Artistes. Hancock described her ‘as a charming thing who dropped in and said she was pleasantly surprised to hear people laughing at the Windmill and that indeed I was a funny man’, to which he responded, ‘Well, that lot only come to see Gladys starkers. It’s the hardest job in the world getting a laugh out of tired men who’ve been queuing in the rain since 10.30 with newspapers over their heads.’ ‘And that,’ explained Rounce, ‘is why I want to talk to you about a contract …’ Hancock, impressed by the fact that she was brave enough to sit, a lone female, in a front row full of men, felt flattered he had been discovered. At this time the quick route to fame lay in broadcasting. Names like Jimmy Edwards, Frankie Howerd, Derek Roy and Jon Pertwee were quickly becoming established favourites in radio comedy, while the newly reopened television service was slowly gaining a toehold. Not least with this in mind, Scott encouraged Hancock that they should enter the act in its embryonic form for a BBC audition. During the Windmill run Hancock had moved in with Derek Scott and his wife at their house in Wood Green. He remembered, ‘They had not long been married and hardly collected any furniture together. My bedroom had no curtains and the only way I could dress in the mornings was by lying flat on the floor.’ The roof over his head may have helped his decision to go along with his friend’s suggestion. When the call from the BBC came, Hancock was persevering with a week’s solitary cabaret booking at the Grand Hotel, Grange-over-Sands, overlooking Morecambe Bay. After some dithering, at the eleventh hour he accepted the invitation, and less than a month after they finished at the Windmill, on 14 September 1948, they were auditioning for BBC television at the Star Sound Studios in Rodmarton Mews, just off Baker Street.

With the express instruction that their performance should not exceed ten minutes, they registered reasonably well. The card index record made out after the event described ‘two pleasant young men in lounge suits’ providing 7¼ minutes of a ‘concert party burlesque’ that embraced ‘Yorkshire comic tenor, impressionist cameo, amateur talent competition winner, Western Brothers’. The recorded verdict was that they were ‘not untalented and perform with verve. Should prove suitable TeleVariety or Revue.’ Things moved quickly. A cryptic figure ‘8’ at the bottom of the card indicated that they would either be given a camera test or recommended direct to a producer. No record exists of a camera test. On 1 November at three in the afternoon Hancock made his television début with Scott on a programme called New to You for pioneer producer Richard Afton for a meagre 14 guineas, but not before a significant change had been made in the running of his business affairs. The venture provided the opportunity to break away from Vivienne Black, who disapproved of the audition and in doing so had revealed her distrust of the new medium, a view not uncommon among agents who still clung desperately to the old variety traditions. On 19 October 1948 Hancock signed an exclusive five-year contract with Phyllis Rounce. She was convinced his future prosperity resided in television.

Rounce, a one-time BBC secretary, had a background in Army Welfare Services – Entertainment, another area of forces show business. Resembling a more robust version of the actress Peggy Ashcroft, when peace was declared she went into partnership with her War Office boss, Colonel Bill Alexander, to form the grandly titled International Artistes Representation, not only on the premise that they already knew most of the acts that had entertained the troops, but also to manage young performers emerging from the war as fully fledged entertainers looking for the chance to break into professional show business. From beginnings in a bomb-shattered office – described by her as ‘a converted tarts’ parlour’ – in the remains of a brothel in Irving Street off Leicester Square, she would in time, with the Colonel, steer the careers of, most notably, Terry-Thomas, slapstick star Charlie Drake, television hocus-pocus man David Nixon and the Australian jack-of-all-talents Rolf Harris. For the first, born Terry Thomas Hoar-Stevens, she suggested the snappier name and inserted the hyphen: ‘I thought of it after looking at the gap between his two front teeth.’ As testimony to their success, International Artistes continues to flourish today, responsible for comedic talents as diverse as Paul Merton, Joe Pasquale and Alan Davies under the astute but genial stewardship of Alexander and Rounce’s protégé, Laurie Mansfield.

There would be no further call on Hancock’s services by television until February 1950 when he appeared in a variation of Fairweather’s old conjuror routine in Flotsam’s Follies. The new service was extremely limited, with only one channel on air for only a few hours a day. More crucial to his career at this stage was a second BBC audition, this time specifically for Bryan Sears, the producer of the successful radio show Variety Bandbox, in December 1948. The audition took the form of an actual warm-up for the show, in which Hancock and Scott resorted to their Western Brothers parody, ‘without’, as Tony liked to boast, ‘an intelligible word being spoken’. On 9 January he made his début on the show billed as ‘Tony Hancock’, but accompanied by Scott with, as we have seen, a reworking of the concert party sketch. It would be the first of fourteen appearances on the programme, alongside ten outings on other traditional variety offerings like First House – Look Who’s Here, Workers’ Playtime and Variety Ahoy, over a period of three years. The last two series, broadcast on behalf of national morale from factory canteens and naval bases throughout Britain, saw him performing from the Sterling Metals works in Coventry, HMS Woolwich off Harwich, HMS Indefatigable off Portland, the Royal Naval Hospital at Gosport, and within one week in 1951 three factories distributed through County Antrim and County Down. One imagines that his new agent had to coax her client gently into the seeming drudgery of such bookings, but as long as she was prepared to battle on his behalf he could hardly refuse.

According to Roger Hancock, his brother couldn’t stand Colonel Alexander, joking that the only commission he ever secured was from his artists. Phyllis was a different matter. If she impressed Tony with her vision, he also admired her pluck. In the wake of his growing success on Variety Bandbox, she wrote in November 1950 to Pat Newman, the BBC Variety Booking Manager, to draw his attention to the anomaly that while her client was now receiving 12 guineas a show, on his last outing his script had cost him 10 guineas – by special arrangement with the writer who usually charged more – and his band parts had amounted to 4. Declaring this to be an uneconomic proposition, she requested an increase to 18 guineas for his next broadcast, to which Newman agreed. The economics still seem a little shaky, but Hancock was the first to acknowledge the value of the exposure as well as the need to keep material fresh. It had not taken him long to discover the insatiable appetite of broadcasting for new material. In his interview for The Laughtermakers in 1956 he observed: ‘I wrote a lot of the material myself, and very bad it was. The audience reaction was often terrific, but from the radio point of view it was a waste of time. The trouble was that I liked doing visual work and it was very, very hard to adapt myself to the other thing … I gradually got the feel of the medium, [but] I was never very happy about the single act. At the back of my mind I knew I could do better with the sketch, the comic situation.’ However, any aspirations he had to become the new Sid Field – who never made an impact in radio – did not prevent him from becoming a semi-resident on the programme. But Hancock was philosophical: ‘I welcomed that because I realised that before I could do the thing I wanted to do, I should have to make some sort of a name even if my heart wasn’t in the means I had to employ.’

To Hancock, Rounce proved more than an agent. ‘Nursemaid’ is one word that comes to mind. Grooming him was a constant challenge. Shortly before her death at the age of 89 in 2001 she reminisced: ‘It was an absolute nightmare to get him kitted out in anything. He’d say, “I’m not going to put that on,” and you’d say, “Well, it’s an audience out there, darling. You can’t go out in that ghastly, filthy suit. Take the thing off!” It was all that all the time, but it kept me on my toes … I was forever having to haul him out of wherever he was and drag him along. And the moment he was in the studio he was magic. But it was very tiring as well. I’m surprised I’m still alive to tell the tale!’ Shoes presented a special challenge. Well aware of the comic importance of his feet, he became paranoid that the laughs would not come when an old pair wore out: ‘He was awful, absolute hell, because we had to get him new ones and get somebody else to run them in before he would put them on. I’d put them there for him in the dressing room and he’d hide the new ones – on the ledge outside the window, in the toilet cistern – and put on his old ones and then the management would come to me.’ Matters came to a head when he began to play the prestigious Moss Empire circuit. Cissie Williams, who booked the chain, was a disciplinarian who did everything by the book. She argued, ‘If he comes in those shoes, Miss Rounce, he will not be allowed on the stage.’ ‘Coming from her,’ said Phyl, ‘that meant that he would not be allowed on the stage.’ Eventually, halfway through the week, when Rounce made the point that the shoes were integral to his character, Williams conceded, as long as he polished them. Rounce also knew in her innermost heart that they represented his security blanket too: ‘Without those old shoes he was a dead duck. He fumbled and mumbled and nearly blew the whole thing. It was quite extraordinary.’

In her unpredictable life it was nothing for his agent to receive a phone call at four o’clock in the morning begging her to come round on her bicycle to see him. There was no sexual agenda; he just needed someone with whom he could share his anxieties, be they professional, psychological or philosophical. Rounce became used to him invading her office at all hours of the day, sinking himself into her largest armchair in his ‘grey bear coat’ while she carried on with the business of running a talent agency. Sometimes no words would pass between them at all. Several hours later he would suddenly shock himself out of this haven and announce, ‘Well, I suppose I had better be going then.’ On less frequent occasions he could be bright, talkative and playful, reminding her of a chatty sea lion. Phyl was never less than understanding: ‘I think most people on the edge of being a genius are like that … he never got a big head because he was so frightened and that’s what made audiences adore him … he was marvellous, impossible, lovable and hurtful – all rolled into one.’

Shortly after Tony’s début on Variety Bandbox, Hancock and Scott went their separate professional ways, Derek’s family ties keeping him in London while his partner remained on call to the last gasp of the variety tradition that could spirit him away to any part of the country at a moment’s notice. Rounce secured for her client what appears to have been his first conventional variety booking for the week commencing 11 April 1949 at Feldman’s Theatre, later the Queen’s, in Blackpool. Also in a lowly ‘wines and spirits’ spot on a bill topped by the magician, Raoul, was another soul mate, Harry Secombe. The roly-poly Goon, who would one day deputise for his friend in the most bizarre fashion on his radio series, never forgot celebrating with Hancock the birth that week of his first daughter with fish and chips and Tizer – the pubs had shut by the time they left the stage door. Afterwards these two young clowns, high on sentiment and bursting with ambition, strolled down to the promenade together. Harry remained nostalgic for the moment they leaned against the railings and discussed their futures together peering out across the Irish Sea: ‘We had the same kind of feeling about things. We were both ex-servicemen, tadpoles in a big pond hoping to become frogs … we shared the same dreams of success and we argued about what we would do with the world now that we had fought to save it, looking into the dark sea and seeing only brightness.’ In those days Harry found his chum ‘gentle and self-mocking’. Hancock was, in fact, not scoring particularly well, and Robina Hinton, who was on the same bill appearing with her husband as ‘The Hintonis’ in their hand-balancing act, has described the struggle endured by Hancock – no longer cocooned by the solidarity and propaganda of the Wings tour – in order to adapt to the Blackpool crowd. Noisy and restless, one night the audience even resorted to throwing things on the stage: ‘He was in a painful state and in tears at one point. My husband, who had started his act in the twenties and had survived far worse, spent a long time with Tony, trying to give him some confidence.’ Hancock, of course, knew better than most that a seaside resort out of season can be dull and dispiriting. It might have cheered him to know that within a couple of months he had a conventional summer season ahead of him much nearer to home. On 13 June 1949 he opened in Flotsam’s Follies at the Esplanade Concert Hall, Bognor Regis, for £27 10s. a week.

Flotsam, alias B. C. Hilliam, had been one half of the famous ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’ songs-at-the-piano double act that had registered in radio as early as 1926. Hilliam was the high-voiced one: ‘The songs sung by Jetsam are written by Flotsam.’ Malcolm McEachern was the one with low voice: ‘I sing the low notes – you’d wonder how he gets ’em.’ Their most famous number conjured up the magic and romance of the early days of wireless:

Little Miss Bouncer loves her announcer

Down at the BBC.

She doesn’t know his name,

But how she rejoices,

When she hears that voice of voices.

Following his partner’s death in 1945, Hilliam, the droll, piano-playing half of the team, found considerable success with his own radio show under the Flotsam’s Follies banner for several years, a ‘weekly musical, lyrical and topical half-hour’ produced by Tom Ronald, who would, come 1958, be responsible for the radio production of Hancock’s Half Hour. The Bognor season was presented by another notable name in the history of radio comedy, Ted Kavanagh, the legendary script-writer of Tommy Handley’s long-running radio success, ITMA, unquestionably the top show of the time.

Hancock always gave full credit to Hilliam for helping to turn him into a really professional act. In doing so Flotsam complemented the work already done by Fairweather and Reader, and had at his disposal the device of the traditional seaside summer show – ironically guyed for so long by Hancock – before it became superficially slicker, ‘streamlined’ by impresarios like Bernard Delfont and Harold Fielding into lavish resident revues with no changes of programme during the season. Hilliam expected his young comedian to provide five separate acts to ring the changes required from June through late September. Tony provided four and Flotsam let him off the fifth. To complement the concert party parody and the comedy impressions he found himself drawn towards visual and prop comedy. He later joked, ‘I found that to get an act on stage I needed fifteen flying ballet dancers, seventy-eight trumpeting elephants and anything else a scrounging stage manager could lay his hands on.’ The Stage reported that ‘a new and original comedian, Tony Hancock, has registered strongly and his travesties of human life are a feature of every programme’. At the end of the season he combined what he considered the highlights of the four different spots into a single act, and this served as the foundation of his immediate stage work. More importantly the show enabled him to appear in sketches, provided by the production, with other members of the cast.

Meanwhile Rounce refused to take her foot off the pedal when it came to driving along Hancock’s broadcasting ambitions. On 11 August the Bognor season delivered one bonus in the form of a radio transmission of an extract from the show, in which Tony was featured. As has been noted, Flotsam gave him a second break on television early the following year. It is tempting to suppose that the person who would exert the greatest influence on his radio career made several forays to the South Coast to watch him during the summer. On 22 February 1949 Rounce had written to BBC television at Alexandra Palace requesting they take note of a performance her client was due to give at the Nuffield Centre the following Friday evening. Now relocated to premises within the old Gatti’s restaurant in Adelaide Street in the back of St Martin-in-the Fields, just off the Strand, the forces club had become an unofficial testing ground where aspiring performers with a service background could get up and entertain in a free-and-easy atmosphere on Tuesday and Friday evenings. There was no pay, just the compensation of copious coffee and sandwiches afterwards. It soon became a favourite haunt of agents and producers. Hancock had needed persuasion from Phyl to go on at all, but looking back on those days he pinpointed the difference between the Nuffield Centre, ‘where the audience laughs at anything’, and the Windmill, ‘where nobody laughs at anything, because they haven’t come to laugh’.

A copy of Rounce’s letter, with its recommendation that here was ‘an ideal intimate act for television as there is a lot of excellent facial expression and miming’, was forwarded to the desk of radio’s unofficial head of auditions. Dennis Main Wilson – he inserted the ‘Main’ to avoid confusion with the musician of the same name – was a recently demobbed Armoured Cavalry officer who after the war, while still in uniform, had ended up ‘liberating’ the German radio station in Hamburg, replacing Nazi-style broadcasting with his own brand of humour under the remit of the Control Commission for Germany. At the age of twenty-three he had subsequently joined the staff of the BBC radio variety department, where his first assignment was to find new talent. He was never less than conscientious, and it is unlikely he would have needed prompting to have been there on any evening newcomers were scheduled to do their stuff. He was already a familiar face to the likes of Bentine, Hill, Secombe, Monkhouse and all the other comics who had appeared at the venue. ‘I was the only one on a regular salary,’ he recalled. ‘Guess who bought the drinks?’ In the notes he made for an autobiography Hancock recalled his first encounter with the man: ‘Not that anyone would ever have taken him for a BBC producer at sight. He could not have looked less like the part. He was dressed very formally with a bowler hat and rolled umbrella, but he was only a junior producer at the time. He has got over that phase since then. He was always a man of wild enthusiasm. He never stayed still for a moment and would sit up all night thrashing out an idea for a show. Nothing was impossible to him.’

That Friday night was important for both of them, not least for Dennis, whose eventual production of Hancock’s Half Hour on radio more than five years later provided this eager, bespectacled man with a credit that would one day stand alongside shows for both radio and television that included The Goon Show, Till Death Us Do Part, Citizen Smith, Marty, The Rag Trade, Barry Humphries’ Scandals and many more. His enthusiasm and nervous energy were prodigious, while his instinct and insight as a talent-spotter were capable of seeing the potential of a performer several leagues down the line from the moment of discovery. If you were a member of ex-service personnel it was not difficult to obtain a BBC audition at this time, and during one six-month period it was estimated that in excess of 6,000 hopefuls were put to the test. Many of these would have come under Main Wilson’s appraisal. He recollected that the quality left a lot to be desired: ‘Most were no better than village hall turns. You were as kind as you could be and told them to go home.’ When it came to comedy, Dennis was probably at his most ruthless. As he said, ‘You can pretend to be serious, but you can’t pretend to be funny.’ At the Nuffield Hancock delivered a variation of his concert party act. Dennis was not too impressed by the material, but noted that ‘the characterisations were fabulous … he did the stand-up comedian, the juvenile lead in a ham play, the tenor, the impressionist … you sensed there was a tremendous latent talent there’. In that respect he considered he stood out from all the other ex-service comedy types. He also noted that ‘he had no body language from the shoulders down. He would slouch on stage. His entire comedy was from his face and his facial expressions.’ Perhaps at that early stage even Main Wilson would have expected Hancock to have made his major impact on the small screen.

By the end of 1949 writer Larry Stephens had replaced accompanist Derek Scott as Hancock’s best male chum and working partner. Stephens is recollected by Graham Stark as a red-complexioned ex-commando captain who was ‘possibly too genteel for this profession’. When Rounce referred to the accommodating scriptwriter in her 1950 letter to the BBC, she almost certainly meant Larry, whom she had introduced to Tony in the autumn of 1949. Larry wrote much of the material that would continue to complement Fairweather’s original routine and the concert party take-off in Hancock’s stage act until the end of his days. He would be best remembered for his collaboration with Spike Milligan in the early period of The Goon Show and subsequently for his contributions to the The Army Game, commercial television’s early standout comedy success from Granada, prior to his premature death at the age of thirty-five from a cerebral haemorrhage in 1959. Spike’s affinity with them both became a fait accompli from the moment he eavesdropped on the pair improvising a fictional family seat for Hancock’s ancestors: ‘In 1883 they built a west wing, the following year they added an east wing, and the year afterwards … it flew away!’

It may have been through Hancock that Spike met Stephens. As the less gifted members of the post-war comic surge drifted away to more mundane roles, so a camaraderie – strengthened by their combined ambition – built up among the survivors, often centred on the pub in Archer Street opposite the Windmill or, more especially, the Grafton Arms, the tavern run by Jimmy Grafton at Strutton Ground, Victoria, where the plans for The Goon Show appear to have been hatched with all the complicity of a second Gunpowder Plot. Grafton, an ex-major, would ostensibly go on to manage Secombe’s career and become himself a serviceable scriptwriter; in truth he acted as champion, catalyst, confessor in varying degrees not only to the Goons, but to Eric Sykes, Max Bygraves, Tommy Cooper, Jimmy Edwards, Alfred Marks, Benny Hill, Stephens and Hancock. For those few post-war years when pennies were scarce, work constituted a luxury and dreaming was everything, his hostelry represented arguably the most exciting enclave in the history of British comedy. Among this select breed, an unofficial cooperative system good-naturedly fell into place. Hancock never lost his affection for those days: ‘There was a very special atmosphere. We all seemed to know each other. Anyone who was working helped the others.’ Dick Emery was a member of the club. He once visited Hancock backstage at the Windmill. He was nearly destitute and Tony insisted on tucking a note into his top pocket. When Dick protested, his benefactor insisted, ‘It’s only money.’ A few months later, when Dick was doing well at the same theatre and Hancock – wandering around with that laundry under his arm – was out of work, Dick came to the rescue. ‘It’s only money,’ Emery shouted as his friend went on his way back down Lisle Street.

For a while Hancock and Milligan were particularly close. For extended spells Spike would sleep under Jimmy Grafton’s grand piano, feeding Hancock’s theory that the Milligan comic genius derived from the brain damage he suffered by constantly knocking his head on the bottom of the instrument when he woke up. Tony struck Milligan as ‘always generous to people worse off than himself’. Spike recalled the occasion he had been in a psychiatric ward: ‘He sent me a letter through Larry saying that he wanted a script as they seemed to have dried up. I wrote what I thought was a very funny one about Father Christmas and Tony paid me a fiver for it. Later I asked him if he ever used it and he said “no”.’ He never needed it in the first place. Spike was also struck by the bond between Larry and Tony: ‘They were like brothers … they seemed to have come from nowhere. They both liked to laugh at the human race and they’d have hysterical laughing bouts. Sometimes they didn’t go to bed at night and I’d come in in the morning as I was writing a script with Larry and there would be this hysterical laughter and it was hurting their heads to laugh.’

At the end of 1949 Hancock and Stephens were sharing a flat in a derelict book and magazine warehouse in St Martin’s Court, the theatre alley off Charing Cross Road. It was the first of several residences scattered across London where they could be found during the next six months, all the way from Bayswater via Primrose Hill to Covent Garden. In order to keep abreast of his debts, Hancock turned his attention to making some pin money bookmaking. This was illegal and dangerous and, as Spike Milligan confided to David Nathan, resulted in him having to change address ‘very quickly – and very quietly’. Nevertheless, it was the flat at St Martin’s Court that acquired the greatest mystique. To gain access you had to pass down a long, narrow corridor that was still the worse for war damage and then lower yourself precariously through a trap door. Phyllis Rounce was never allowed past that point and remembered having to get down on her hands and knees in order to have a conversation through the opened flap. Dick Emery did succeed in penetrating the inner sanctum to discover no furniture whatsoever. As he explained to his partner Fay Hillier: ‘There was just a sink, a gas cooker, and a loo down a gloomy passage. There wasn’t even a mirror. He shaved in front of a polished copper geyser.’ When Dick asked Tony where he slept, he pointed to a pile of newspapers in the corner, explaining: ‘Fresh sheets every day, matey! And I put a coat over myself for warmth.’ What little food he could afford he would eat standing up at the mantelpiece.

All the while Rounce wore her fingers to the bone attempting to fill the long gaps that yawned in her client’s calendar between the occasional broadcasts and the seasonal shows. In this regard pantomime proved a godsend, even if her client regarded the format with the nausea of a spoilt child being forced to swallow its medicine. No sooner had Phyl taken over his career than Hancock was reprising his role as an Ugly Sister in Frank Shelley’s version of Cinderella at the Dolphin Theatre, Brighton, for the Christmas of 1948. The season ran for a mere two weeks. At the same time Sid Field was playing in his out-of-town tour of Harvey at the resort’s more prestigious Theatre Royal. He might have drawn some consolation from the fact that from an early stage Field too had hated the festive genre, the perfectionist within him complaining that he was constantly distracted by the hum and murmur of the children in the audience. In 1962 Tony noted that the nearest he came to meeting his hero was when he found himself sitting near him one day in the pub behind the Theatre Royal, Brighton: ‘But even if my name had meant anything to him I wouldn’t have had the heart to introduce myself. He looked too miserable. I remember he wore a jockey cap, a ghastly black and white affair. I can’t think why unless he needed something to cheer him up. He was just breaking in “Harvey” and the strain of wondering whether the public would accept the transition after those years on the halls was written all over his face.’

At the end of 1949 Cinderella beckoned again, but this time in a new production with Hancock as the comedy lead, Buttons, at the Royal Artillery Theatre, Woolwich. He would never don skirts, which he abhorred, for the Christmas institution again. The review in the Stage was impressive: ‘Tony Hancock shows himself the master of subtly differing styles of humour and his affection for Cinderella carries a conviction comparatively rare in pantomime.’ The words must have settled on his stomach like cold Christmas pudding. Dennis Main Wilson, fast becoming a friend Hancock could trust, mustered together a bunch of mates to provide him with moral support. Actress Miriam Karlin and comedian Leslie Randall were two who dragged themselves along with him to the eastern extremities of the capital to cheer Tony on his way. The nadir for Hancock came when he had to coax an audience of children into singing from a song-sheet ‘Chick-chick-chick-chick-chicken, lay a little egg for me.’ At this performance, the voice of his friends drowned out the juvenile chorus. By the end of the exercise, Main Wilson and his cohorts had been asked to leave the theatre.

The following Christmas he was able to venture into other areas of the story book, cast as Jolly Jenkins, the silly-billy, well-meaning page to the Baron in the tale of Red Riding Hood, with a young Julie Andrews in the title role at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham. This engagement showed a considerable advance in status within the profession, the venue being one of the country’s prime provincial dates. The show also carried the prestige of being a Tom Arnold production: Arnold had arguably the foremost reputation as a producer of spectacular entertainment for the provinces at this time. Tony owed everything to the power of the radio exposure Rounce had been building for him, principally through his bookings on Variety Bandbox. The run of the panto extended from 23 December until 10 March 1951 and must have seemed like a prison sentence. Hancock endured personal degradation every time he had to sing ‘Every little piggy has a curly tail …’. He recalled, ‘There followed five minutes of mutual dislike. Every night I felt like walking up to the footlights and having it out with them: “You don’t like it and neither do I, believe me. It’s too long anyway. Why don’t we call it off and go home?”’ Dame Julie recalls, ‘I knew him a little and liked him … In his hilarious sketches life was always tough and he would stand, gazing out at the audience with thick-fingered, “wet fish” hands at his side, trying to understand the trials and tribulations that befell him.’

Hancock would play pantomime only once more, when he returned to Nottingham for Tom Arnold as Buttons for Christmas 1953. By this time he was a recognisable name with full-blown star billing. During the run he received a letter from Pat Newman from the BBC, who with tongue in cheek drew to Tony’s attention a criticism from an acquaintance who lived there, namely that he was acting in the manner that a Nottingham panto was beneath him. Newman quickly removed the sting by adding that he would almost certainly prefer his performance if this were the case. Tony replied, ‘Regarding the remarks from the young lady from Nottingham, I found them a little hard to take after casting fourteen stone of exhausted Hancock twice a day to the ground solely for the pleasure of the children … best wishes, head down, left arm stiff, foot pointing to the sky, Tony.’ Hancock was not necessarily speaking metaphorically. He made his entrance in the ballroom scene by sliding down a flight of stairs from the wings to the centre of the stage on his heels, pausing at an intermediate landing, and then sliding down another flight to arrive at the front of the stage. Main Wilson paid him a visit during the season and was immediately impressed by the feat, whereupon Hancock promised to take the flights at a single run the following night. On the first part of his descent, however, he slipped, fell the rest of the way and brought the house down, together – literally – with part of the scenery and two chandeliers. ‘The incident provoked gales of laughter from the audience,’ said Dennis, ‘but Tony worried about it.’ During this visit Main Wilson had his realisation that Hancock could raise laughs merely with a look confirmed. George Bolton, a raucous variety comic of the old school, played the Baroness. One night, when Dennis was in the wings, he overheard Bolton say to Hancock just before the kitchen scene, ‘We’ll do the teapots.’ He was referring to an old piece of pantomime business of which the uninitiated Hancock had never heard. But there was no time to learn now and for the next few minutes Bolton was forced to go through a solo version of the routine, while Buttons stood by with a look of bewilderment and resignation that gained most of the laughs.

A sense of Hancock in pantomime can be gained from a radio episode where Galton and Simpson, prompted no doubt by their star’s anguished memories of his experiences, decided to parody Cinderella. This time Tony himself, prevented by Bill and Sid from attending the National Film Board Ball, is forced to stay behind in the kitchen coping with the drudgery of housework: ‘Here I am, a pathetic-looking figure – huddled round an empty grate – no friends – no one to care for me – miserable and lonely – the sort of thing Norman Wisdom dreams about!’ At other times the nostalgia is more specific. As he is driven around Moravia in an open-top car in a not dissimilar pastiche of The Student Prince, he rhapsodises, ‘Ah, this is the life – I never got treated like this when I played Buttons at Woolwich.’ On a television episode, possibly with the Stage review for Woolwich in mind, he chides Sid for not taking his talents seriously: ‘You never did see me in pantomime, did you? My rendition of Buttons had a depth of meaning that astounded everybody who saw it … the whole performance in the best tradition of the Russian theatre and Stanislavski.’ When Sid suggests he didn’t get any giggles, Hancock adds, ‘I didn’t try to get any giggles. I saw the part as a tragedy.’ He was able to get his own back on what he saw as the whole demeaning tradition when towards the end of 1957 he was invited to participate in Pantomania, a Christmas Night television spectacular with a high ‘works outing’ element attached, as the likes of Eamonn Andrews, Huw Wheldon, Cliff Michelmore and Sylvia Peters stepped out of their presenting roles to let their hair down in a burlesque romp loosely based on Babes in the Wood. All goes well until Hancock as Aladdin wanders into Sherwood Forest and the deconstruction – helped by Sid as a disobliging genie – begins.

Returning to his earlier career, one finds Hancock’s slow climb to the top characterised by sporadic dates that came to bear the doomed hallmark of his emerging comic persona. There was the cabaret booking at the Victoria Hotel, Sidmouth, in November 1949, when he arrived a full week early. With two pennies and a halfpenny in his pocket – enough for a life-saving cup of tea at Micheldever Station and no more – he returned to London on the slow train, only to have to go back a week later: ‘I think I made a net loss of about five quid on the deal.’ There was the cabaret for the Election Night Ball at Claridge’s on 23 February the following year. As Hancock proceeded with his act, the toastmaster, who had not endeared himself by introducing him as ‘Mr Hitchcock’, would hold up his hand for Tony to freeze mid-impression while the next result was announced. Only after each seat was declared was he allowed to continue stop-start fashion until the act was through. Tucked away in a corner of the room as he was, he felt he needn’t have bothered. It was a Tory function and he always claimed that at that point he became a committed socialist. The summer of 1950 saw him spend three months at Clacton as principal comedian for impresario Richard Stone – later to mastermind the career of Benny Hill – in the Ocean Revue, initially at the Jolly Roger Theatre on the Pier, and then at the Ocean Theatre at the pier entrance. He neither forgot nor forgave the fierce competition he encountered from the scenic railway known as ‘Steel Stella’: ‘It always seemed as though she reserved her loudest clang and her passengers’ loudest screams for the moment I came to the end of a joke. Every performance it was always a running fight between her, them and me.’ He then added, ‘While I was playing at Clacton I got married.’

He had supposedly been engaged before. While he was appearing in Cinderella at Brighton for the 1948 Christmas season, the local press carried a news story heralding the forthcoming marriage between the Ugly Sister and Prince Charming, played by the actress Joan Allum. The article announced that they had met at rehearsals only a fortnight before and had become engaged on Christmas Eve. It went on to give a boost for Tony’s début on Variety Bandbox the following Sunday, and added bizarrely that at midnight, during the New Year’s Eve Ball attended by the Duke of Edinburgh at Earl’s Court, Allum had been chosen as ‘Miss 1949’. It would be flippant to dismiss the whirlwind fairytale romance as a publicist’s ploy, since the pantomime had only days to run. But although the wedding was mooted for March, Miss Allum does not appear to have featured again in Hancock’s life. There had been an earlier pantomime romance with another actress, Celia Helder, in Oxford the previous year. She had played the unexplained part of Lady Llanfachlfechlfychl. On Hancock’s death she looked back on their liaison: ‘Tony had great, big haunted eyes, but he was as slender as a reed and an extremely attractive person. He was very sweet and gentle, the kind of boy of whom any girl would say, “He’s a dependable chap.”’

He had been introduced to Cicely Romanis by Larry Stephens, whose girlfriend, Diana Forster, worked with her as a model. The occasion was a skating party held by Cicely to celebrate her twentieth birthday at the Bayswater ice rink on 3 April 1950. According to Phyllis Rounce, on the day after the party he wandered into her office and announced, ‘I’ve just met the woman I want to marry.’ The Hancock–Stephens ménage had relocated to Covent Garden by now. Forster had become inured to the shabby, Spartan conditions in which they lived just around the corner from the noisy fruit and vegetable market, a fact that may have eased the way for Cicely’s own acceptance. It was long before My Fair Lady would romanticise the environment; Pygmalion never quite had. For a long period of their courtship his fiancée found herself commuting between Clacton, where Tony had moved out of digs and into a one-bedroom flat to set up home with her, and wherever the fashion world demanded her presence. In the more strait-laced moral climate of the day, the arrangement would have caused some consternation with her parents.

Cicely was born Cicely Janet Elizabeth to William Hugh Cowie and Dorothy Romanis at home at 120 Harley Street on 3 April 1930. Her father was a senior surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital, who in the late 1920s had written with Philip H. Mitchener The Science and Practice of Surgery, a book that remains one of the definitive handbooks on surgical procedure. With her Dinah Sheridan looks, she was already successful in her profession as a mannequin, being one of the first British models to tread the catwalk for Lanvin in Paris. She had stunning auburn hair and a zest for life to match. With an athletic background and nothing if not strong-willed, by the time she met Hancock she had taken a course in judo to protect herself from unwelcome suitors, an occupational hazard of her profession, and revealed an aptitude for motoring at the wheel of a sports car of which her future husband would become envious. Both activities would affect their life together in what – in those early, innocent days – were unexpected ways. They presented an incongruous couple, the elegant fashion plate and the slumped shaggy figure of a man enveloped in the duffel coat he wore for all seasons. His secretary Lyn Took, however, takes pains to insist that she was never ostentatious: ‘She always looked groomed, always wore lipstick, and had a penchant for straight, close-fitting trousers and simple tops when they were the fashion.’ It is said that Fred gave Ginger class, while Ginger gave Fred sex appeal. Cicely had the class already. Whatever frisson connected Tony and Cicely, the attraction between them was not diminished by the fact that she laughed at most of what he said.

They were married at Christ Church, Kensington, on 18 September 1950. Hancock had fun recalling the honeymoon: ‘I had to dash to Clacton for the show. She had a fashion parade. She arrived at Clacton at 6.45. I was onstage at seven. And she had to leave at six the next morning for another engagement.’ It scarcely needs adding that he only just made the church in time and had to rely on his best man for sartorial help: ‘In my rush to catch the train to London I just dived into the wardrobe and snatched together what I mistook for a complete suit. It turned out in the unpacking to be the jacket of one striped suit and the trousers of another. So there I was gaping at myself in the mirror in a ridiculous ensemble of blue above the waist and grey below. Larry lent me a pair of trousers to match the jacket. I felt it would be churlish to complain about the cigarette burn just below the knee and so I covered it up as best I could!’ It appears that at the last moment the Clacton season had been extended by a week, a situation that would explain the raggedness of the arrangements. Cicely’s elder sister, Doreen Harland, recalls the unpredictability that surrounded the occasion, notably the moment ahead of the service when the best man dropped the gold wedding ring down a grating in the church floor. Expediency demanded that he borrow Doreen’s platinum ring ‘temporarily’. No one was more surprised than Cicely when later her betrothed put the differently coloured ring on her finger. It would be six months before Tony brought her another and Doreen had her ring returned. The original was never recovered from the grating.

Two days later the Hancocks were both back in London to officiate as witnesses at Stephens’s marriage to Diana. For a few months they kept on the Clacton flat, an arrangement of greater inconvenience to the bride than the groom, with her frenetic modelling schedule and the metropolitan life style that accompanied it. However, it is significant that while Hancock gave his own profession as ‘actor’ on the marriage certificate, Cicely left that space blank. After the first of his Nottingham pantomimes, heartened by her faith in him – she admitted later, ‘I knew he was going to be a big star’ – she essentially gave up her career to look after her husband. In time, they moved in with Cicely’s parents, now relocated to Cornwall Gardens, Kensington, before acquiring their own apartment at 20 Queen’s Gate Place in Knightsbridge during the summer of 1952. It happened to be on the fifth floor of a Victorian mansion block without a lift. ‘We knew who our friends were in those days,’ Hancock would joke. ‘They had to be friends to climb up all those stairs.’ The climb kept Cicely’s figure in even finer trim, while Hancock was often known to be breathless upon arrival at his own front door.

Meanwhile any pretence at domestic routine would be disrupted by the growing demand for Tony’s services in provincial variety. In February and March 1950 he achieved four weeks at mainly minor syndicate halls; by October he was booked into a four-week run of the mighty Moss Empires. With his increasing radio popularity, 1951 saw fourteen weeks of varied work on the halls between pantomime and the end of the year. Initially he was billed in succession as ‘The Modern Clown’, ‘The New-Style Humorist’, and then with a semi-catchphrase that had been surfacing in his radio work, ‘Isn’t it sickening?’ For Phyllis Rounce a kind of breakthrough came when he was invited to support Nat King Cole for a couple of dates – Birmingham and Liverpool – on his 1950 British tour. Even today Graham Stark relives the excitement: ‘There he was at one of the lowly London halls – first house on the Thursday night – dying like a dog – he always tried to do a clever act, but nothing …! The next day he received the call from his agent to tell him he was going out with Nat King Cole, which was like saying you’d won a million pounds. Cole was a great star and whoever went out with him got to play only the best dates. Tony couldn’t believe it. He said, “What happened?” “Well,” explained Phyl, “Val Parnell – the Moss Empires chief – happened to be in on Thursday first house and saw your work.” But Tony said, “I died the death.” “Ah,” she said, “he realised that and the audience were terrible, but he said to me, ‘I’ve never seen a comic work so hard to try to get an audience as he did. He didn’t get them, but that isn’t the point – he did work’,” and that’s why Parnell gave him the break.’ So far Hancock had been a supporting act to the comedians Dave and Joe O’Gorman and radio name Carroll Levis with his Discoveries, solid but unspectacular attractions that enabled variety to hang in there with fortitude during its last dying years. But there were not too many stars of Cole’s international stature who were prepared to slog their way around the British hinterland, and Tony was soon back adding his weight to bills topped by staunch veterans like the comedy band Dr Crock and his Crackpots, Murray the Escapologist and the close-harmony singing brothers from Ted Ray’s radio show, Bob and Alf Pearson.

1951 was also the year when television began to show a more constructive interest in his talents. Breaking up the dreary grind of provincial weeks was a run of five appearances between May and June in a fortnightly series called Kaleidoscope, an entertainment magazine in which Hancock played a character called George Knight, ‘a would-be rescuer of damsels in distress’, in a segment entitled ‘Fools Rush In’ written by Godfrey Harrison, who later achieved fame with the delightful A Life of Bliss in both radio and television. The short sketches represent Hancock’s first foray into situation comedy. Roger Wilmut describes one in which ‘he rashly takes over the job of a hotel receptionist so that she can go and meet her boyfriend, and gets himself into a state of total confusion with the telephone switchboard, an irate colonel and a confused foreigner’. On 1 August 1951 he was also featured in the first episode of another Harrison television project, The Lighter Side – a humorous slant on current affairs. The subject of the first programme was food, and Hancock was cast as a civil servant, the bureaucratic bêtenoire against whom before long he would himself have some of his most memorable encounters in the medium.

That August represented a mensis mirabilis. It should not be forgotten that sound broadcasting was still the dominant entertainment medium in the country. What might have been construed as a potential setback to Hancock’s radio career had occurred in June 1951 when the decision was taken at the pilot stage of a new comedy series entitled Dear Me, written by Ted Kavanagh for the laconic Michael Howard, to drop him from a supporting role in the project. Hancock and the producer, Jacques Brown, appear to have been in accord that there was a similarity between the vocal intonation of the star and his own. He seemed far from perturbed. He may already have been aware of other irons in the fire. Over 2 and 3 August his career in radio would take two enormous leaps with his first resident appearances in two series featuring other established wireless stars. One would make him a household name; the other, while less successful, brought him into proper working contact with the man who never lost faith in him, Dennis Main Wilson, and in the process effect the meeting with the two men who would take his comedy to heights of hilarity and credibility that have arguably never been attained in the broadcasting medium since.

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

RADIO WAVES (#uf3f81074-2b6e-5857-afb1-fffe41bac34d)

‘Did you write that? … Very good!’

Without warning of any kind the landscape of radio comedy changed dramatically on 9 January 1949. This had nothing to do with Tony Hancock’s début on Variety Bandbox, radio’s top Sunday evening showcase for variety talent. With a precision bordering on poignancy, it had everything to do with the colossus of the medium who shared his initials and had dominated the genre for the past decade. At 5.30 that Sunday the 310th edition of ITMA enjoyed its customary weekend repeat. At the end of the broadcast there was a pause before the reader of the six o’clock news stunned a nation into silence with these words: ‘The BBC regrets to announce the death of Mr Tommy Handley, the comedian.’ Only hours before he had been struck down with a massive cerebral haemorrhage. Although long regarded as a senior figure of the broadcasting establishment, Handley was only eight days short of fifty-seven when he died. Hancock recalled the moment: ‘We were in the middle of the recording when someone came in with the news that the most revered of radio comedians had suddenly died while bending to pick up his collar stud. The whole studio went cold with the shock of it.’ Tony failed to mention if he had completed his contribution. The show’s star Frankie Howerd, whistler Ronnie Ronalde and comedienne Avril Angers were more established artists whose professionalism would have been tested in the circumstances. Not that Hancock needed or should have expected excuses. According to Phyllis Rounce, his performance was lacklustre in the extreme: ‘Tony was petrified and the broadcast was a shambles. The producer said, “Never bring that man near me again.”’ Mercifully Rounce was able to persuade Bryan Sears to give Hancock a second break on the show eleven weeks later, and his broadcasting career gradually acquired impetus from that point. In the heat of the moment Sears would have given no second thought to his words to Phyl, but they contained an uncanny echo of those behind the acronym of the Handley show – ‘It’s That Man Again.’