Tony Hancock

Biography published in 1978 (1983 paperback reprint shown)

Anthony John Hancock (12 May 1924 – 24 June 1968) was a major figure in British television and radio comedy in the 1950s and 1960s, known as Tony Hancock.

Early life and career

He was born in Hall Green, Birmingham, England, but from the age of 3 was brought up in Bournemouth where his father, John Hancock, who ran the Railway Hotel in Holdenhurst Road, worked as a comedian and entertainer. After his father's death in 1934, Tony and his brothers lived with their mother and stepfather at a small hotel then known as The Durlston Court (now renamed The Quality Hotel). He was educated at a boarding school at Durlston in Swanage and Bradfield College, Berkshire. He left school at the age of fifteen. In 1942 he joined the RAF Regiment and, following a failed audition for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), ended up with The Ralph Reader Gang Show. Following the war he received regular radio work in shows such as Worker's Playtime and Variety Bandbox. In 1951, he gained a part in Educating Archie, where he played the tutor and foil to the nominal star, a ventriloquist's dummy. This brought him wider recognition and a catchphrase used frequently in the show; 'flippin' kids'. The same year, he made regular appearances on the BBC Television's popular light entertainment show Kaleidoscope. In 1954 he was given his own BBC radio show, Hancock's Half Hour.

Hancock's peak years

Working with scripts from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, Hancock's Half Hour lasted for five years and over a hundred episodes. The show starred Hancock as Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, a more expansive version of Hancock himself, and usually portrayed as an out-of-work comedian living in the shabby "Railway Cuttings" in East Cheam.

The show featured Sid James, Bill Kerr, Kenneth Williams and over the years Moira Lister, Andrée Melly and Hattie Jacques. The series rejected the variety format then dominant in British radio comedy and instead pioneered a style drawn more from everyday life; the situation comedy, with the humour coming from the characters and the situations they found themselves in. The show was an enormous success, and transferred to television in 1956. The television and radio versions then ran alternately until 1959. Hancock also made an ITV series The Tony Hancock Show during this period, which ran for two series in 1956-57.

During the run of his BBC radio and television series, Hancock became an enormous star in Britain. Like few others, he was able to clear the streets while families gathered together to listen to the eagerly awaited episodes. His character changed slightly over the series but even in the earliest episodes the key facets of 'the lad himself' were evident. Later episodes were regarded as classics, even in their time. "A Sunday Afternoon At Home" and "Wild Man Of The Woods" were top rating shows and were later released as an LP. The former is not only considered to be among the very best of the Hancock ensemble pieces, but also a near perfect evocation of a dreary 1950s afternoon.

As an actor with considerable experience in films, Sid James became increasingly important in the show as it transferred from radio to television. The regular cast was reduced to just Hancock and James, allowing the humour to come from the interaction between the two men. James was the realist of the two, with a down to earth approach that would puncture Hancock's pretensions. His character would often be dishonest and exploit Hancock's apparent gullibility during the radio series, but there appeared to be a more genuine friendship between the two in the television version.

Hancock was to become anxious that his work with James was turning them into a double act, and the last BBC series in 1961 was without James. Despite the contemporary criticism of this, many now consider this final series to contain some of the best of Hancock's television work. Two episodes are among his best-remembered work: The Blood Donor, in which he goes to a clinic to give blood, contains famous lines such as, 'A pint? Why, that's very nearly an armful!' (The doctor's response: 'You won't have an empty arm... or an empty anything!') Another well-known episode is The Radio Ham, in which Hancock plays an amateur radio enthusiast who receives a mayday call from a ship in distress, but his incompetence prevents him from taking its position. Both of these episodes were later re-recorded for a commercial 1961 LP in the style of radio episodes, and these versions have been continuously available ever since. The original TV versions have since been released as part of VHS and DVD compilations, and the soundtracks have also (a little confusingly) been released on CD.

Shortly before recording the original version of "The Blood Donor" Hancock was involved in a minor car accident. He was not badly hurt, but his confidence was shaken and he was unable to learn his lines, with the result that the recording was made with Hancock using teleprompters (TV monitors displaying the relevant sections of script) so that he could read the lines instead. Viewers of the programme may notice that he is not looking where, logically, he ought to be. Hancock came to rely on teleprompters instead of learning scripts whenever he had career difficulties.

Hancock had two notable milestones in comedy. The first was the way he and his writers changed the way that comedy was made; the second, that he was the first TV artist of any genre to be paid more than £1000 for a single half-hour programme.

Up until Hancock’s TV series, every British comedy show was performed live. (For instance, in the Jimmy Edwards series "Whacko!", in which he played the Headmaster of a Public School, the scenes were intercut with shots of the school clock; this was because the studio only had one set of cameras, and the insert shot of the clock gave them ten seconds to move the cameras into position on the next scene.) Temperamentally, Hancock's highly strung personality made the demands of live shooting a constant worry, with the result that the Hancock programmes came to be pre-recorded, initially as telerecordings and later recorded on 2" video tape. The cost of this horrified the executives at the BBC, but they agreed to give it a try, no doubt influenced by the success of American sitcoms such as I Love Lucy or Sgt. Bilko, which had been pre-recording their material for several years. The result was that making a British sitcom became more like making a film. The difference this made to the flow and continuity of a show was immediately apparent, as well as the ability to do location shots. Within a few years, it had become standard practice to work in this way.

International dreams and introspection

Hancock also starred in the 1960 film The Rebel (released as Call Me Genius in the USA) where he played the role of an office worker-turned-artist who meets international acclaim after moving to Paris, but only as the result of mistaken identity. The film was not well received in the United States; owing to a conflict with a contemporary television series, the film had to be renamed and the new title inflamed American critics. Hancock was later to dismiss the film as crude, and its failure in America was a contributory factor in his disastrous break with his writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, after the last television series for the BBC. This has often been described as the worst decision of his career.

In his second starring vehicle, The Punch and Judy Man (1962), Hancock played a struggling seaside entertainer who dreams of a better life; Sylvia Syms played his nagging social climber of a wife, and John Le Mesurier a sand sculptor. The film's humour is bitter-sweet and understated, and this has been cited as contributing to its commercial failure, both in Britain and America. Other commentators cite the change of script-writers after Galton & Simpson's departure (Hancock himself co-wrote the film with Philip Oakes), or even the supposedly unlucky subject matter.

To write The Punch And Judy Man, Hancock hired inexperienced writer Oakes, who moved in with Hancock to write. The depth to which the character played by Hancock had merged with that of the actor is clear in the film. The scene at the beginning, where Hancock and his wife eat breakfast in total silence, is drawn from the star's own life. When Hancock first read the scene, he looked at Phillip Oakes, and his only comment was 'You bastard...' Hancock knew that the film was going to be about him, and the film owes much to Hancock’s memories of his childhood in Bournemouth.

In early 1960, Hancock appeared on the BBC's Face To Face, a half-hour in-depth interview programme conducted by former Labour MP John Freeman. Freeman asked Hancock many searching questions about his life and work. Hancock, who deeply admired his interviewer, often appeared uncomfortable with the questions, but answered them frankly and honestly. Hancock had always been highly self-critical, and it is often argued that this interview heightened this tendency, contributing to his later depression.

Hancock’s self-doubt led to self destructiveness. He slowly sacked those who rose to stardom with him: Bill Kerr, Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques, and finally his script-writers, Galton and Simpson. His reasoning was that to refine his craft, he had to ditch his catchphrases and become realistic. He argued, for example, that whenever an ad-hoc character was needed, such as a policeman, it would be played by someone like Kenneth Williams, who would appear with his well known oily catchphrase 'Good evening'. Hancock believed the comedy suffered because people did not believe in the policeman, they knew it was just Williams doing a funny voice.

His final BBC TV series, was performed with actors playing the supporting parts, and by doing so, he created a new way of doing comedy. After the last BBC series, he sacked Galton and Simpson. As compensation, the BBC gave them a series of one-off comedy shows called Comedy Playhouse, of which one was called "The Offer", becoming forerunner to the classic comedy Steptoe and Son, played (as Hancock would have approved) by two straight actors, Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett.

Hancock read huge amounts, desperately trying to find out the 'why we are here' of life. He read large numbers of philosophers, classic novels and political books. He would sink into alcoholic depressions, decrying it all as pointless. It is possible that in his last alcoholic depth, he finally saw himself in a cosmic perspective, and it was too much for him. In his suicide note, he wrote, 'Things just went wrong too many times'.

Later years

He moved to ATV in 1963 with different writers. The principal writer of Hancock's ATV series, Godfrey Harrison, had scripted the George Cole radio and television success A Life Of Bliss, and also Hancock's first ever regular television appearances on Fools Rush In (a segment of Kaleidoscope). Harrison had trouble meeting deadlines, so other writers assisted, including Terry Nation. [1]

Coincidentally, the series clashed in the television schedule with Steptoe and Son written by Hancock's former writers, Galton and Simpson. Comparisons did not favour Hancock's series.

Hancock continued to make regular appearances on British television until 1967, but by now alcoholism had affected his performances. Hancock went to Australia in March 1968 and the following June, committed suicide in Sydney.

Personal life

In 1950, Hancock married model Cicely Romanis, after a brief courtship. It was a turbulent relationship; Hancock hit her on occasion, but her knowledge of martial arts meant that Hancock usually came off worst in these altercations. Alcohol was the ultimate source of the conflict, as his wife developed her own dependency, and Hancock could not handle a woman being drunk.

The situation became more complicated as Freddie Ross (who worked as his publicist from 1954) became more involved in his life, eventually becoming his mistress. This relationship was also to be scarred by Hancock's capacity for violence. He divorced his first wife in 1965, and married Freddie in December of that year. This second marriage was to be short-lived. During these years Hancock was also involved with Joan Le Mesurier, the new wife of actor John Le Mesurier, Hancock's best friend and a regular supporting character-actor from his television series. Joan was later to describe the relationship in her book Lady Don't Fall Backwards, including the fact that her husband readily forgave the affair; if it had been anyone else, he said, he wouldn't have understood it, but with Tony Hancock, it made sense. This is a powerful reminder of the huge personal appeal of a man whose life story alone often reads as if he was particularly cold and cynical. In July 1966 Freddie took one overdose too many; she had been trying to shock Hancock into reforming himself. Arriving in Blackpool to record an edition of his variety series, Hancock was met by pressmen asking about his wife's attempted suicide. His wife, he felt, had tried to destroy his career. The final dissolution of the marriage took place a few days ahead of Hancock's suicide.

Hancock's first wife died as a result of her own problems with alcohol in 1969, the year after the death of her former husband. Freddie Hancock has been based in New York City for many years; she is a prominent member of the New York chapter of BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Legacy

There is a sculpture by Bruce Williams (1996) in his honour in Old Square, Corporation Street, Birmingham, a plaque on the house where he was born in Hall Green, Birmingham and a plaque on the wall of the hotel in Bournemouth where he spent some of his early life.

In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, Hancock was voted the twelfth greatest comedian by fellow comics and comedy insiders.

The last eight or so years of his life was the subject of a 1991 BBC 'Screen One' television movie, called Hancock, starring Alfred Molina.

The Manic Street Preachers latest album Send Away The Tigers is a reference to Hancock's battles with alcohol. Hancock used this phrase when he had a drink to 'remove his inner demons' [1].

Recordings

Episodes (and anthologies) from the radio series were released on Vinyl LP in the 1960s, as well as several re-enactments of television scripts; an annual LP was issued of radio episodes (without the incidental music) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Much of this material was also available on cassette in later years.

More recently, the BBC has issued CDs of the surviving seventy-four radio episodes in six box sets, one per series, with the sixth box containing several out-of-series specials. This was followed by the release of one large boxed set containing all the others in a special presentation case; while it includes no extra material, the larger box alone (without any CDs) still fetches high prices on online marketplaces like eBay, where Hancock memorabilia remains a thriving industry. There have also been VHS video releases of the BBC TV series, but only four Region 2 DVDs to date, the first, "Hancock: The Best Of Hancock" featuring five episodes from the last series, and the second, "Hancock's Half Hour: Volume One" containing the surviving episodes of the second and third series, plus a Christmas special. (No episodes of the first series are known to exist.) The third DVD, "Hancock's Half Hour: Volume Two", contains the five surviving episodes from the fourth series. Presumably, if the latter is successful, further volumes of remaining episodes will be released. (This has now happened with the release of "Hancock's half hour: volume three" and "Hancock's Half Hour: volume four." These are both double dvds with some notable inclusions, not least of which is the famous episode: "The Missing Page.")

Episodes of the radio series may be heard on the digital radio station BBC 7 each Tuesday, for instance on-line at 19:00 London time (GMT during the winter months) at the official BBC7 site.

Film appearances

Orders Are Orders (1954)
The Rebel (US title: Call Me Genius) (1961)
The Punch and Judy Man (1962)
Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines (1965)
The Wrong Box (1966)

Biographies

Tony Hancock: 'Artiste', A Tony Hancock Companion; (1978) by Roger Wilmut

Contains full details of Hancock's stage, radio, TV and film appearances.

When The Wind Changed: The Life And Death Of Tony Hancock; (Arrow, 2000) by Cliff Goodwin

An extended, comprehensive biography.

Hancock; (1969 [1996]) by David Nathan and Freddie Hancock, BBC Consumer Publishing, ISBN 0-563-38761-0

Hancock's Last Stand: The Series That Never Was; (June 1998) by Edward Joffe, foreword by June Whitfield, Book Guild Ltd Publishing, ISBN 1-85776-316-5

A fascinating insight into the final days of the lad himself, written by the man who found Hancock's body after his suicide.

References

[1] Kettering Magazine Issue #2 p5; Hancock At ATV

[2] [2] Lady Don't Fall Backwards by Joan Le Mesurier (ISIS, 1990, ISBN 1-85089-406-X)

[3] The Libertines mention him in their song "Your My Waterloo", stating "But I’m not Tony Hancock baby" after the line "But you’re my Judy Garland".

[4] The 2007 album 'Send Away The Tigers' by Manic Street Preachers was named in reference to Hancock, and the phrase he used when going off to drink.

External links