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Tony Hancock
'Artiste' - A Tony Hancock Companion
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Introduction
This
book is a study of the professional career of Tony Hancock, who was
surely one of the greatest comics of our age. It is by now common knowledge
that his private life, particularly in his final years, was often unhappy;
and that while he often hurt those around him, he hurt himself far more.
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However,
it is not the brief of this book to enquire into his personal affairs
except in so far as they directly affected his work. Mention has to
be made of some of his difficulties, but the details have been aired
often enough. What matters is the legacy of his work, much of the best
of which still exists. To study these richly comic performances is to
gain an insight into the man, and the reasons why a great comic should
decline as he did in his last few years. |
The
first part of the book traces his career, illustrating its development
with script extracts and analyses of some of his performances. The behind-the-scenes
stories of his successes and failures are detailed, many of them for
the first time in print. For clarity, this section is not arranged purely
chronologically, but divides his work into stage, radio and television.
After an introductory chapter on Hancock himself, his stage career is
traced up to 1955, after which his regular television appearances prevented
his making many stage appearances. His radio career is then traced until
the end of the last radio series of Hancock's Half-Hour, after
which his radio broadcasts were almost entirely interviews. |
After
this, the narrative backtracks to 1948 to follow his television career,
continuing with the film appearances and the later stage and television
performances in the 1960s up until the last, incomplete, series made
in Australia. |
Part
Two provides the documentary evidence of his active career by listing
all his known stage appearances, broadcasts and films in detail. |
A
word about titles - most editions of Hancock's Half-Hour on
both radio and television did not originally have titles, so for convenience
I have, where necessary, invented them. A number of script extracts
are quoted in Part One, with the kind permission of the various authors.
Wherever possible these have been checked against actual recordings
so as to reflect any changes made during rehearsal. |
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Roger
Wilmut
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There were three publications of this particular book. They date from: 1978 to 1986, and are as follows:
You can find copies of this book second-hand, but in certain cases may not be an easy book to come by - dependant on which copy you'd prefer. The 1986 Bibliophile Books publication is as rare as they come, but for some probably the copy most worth having - being the revised edition. Saying that though, any of the other two should suffice if you can't find a copy of this rarer book. The revised edition has only minor revisions, mainly to the bibliography. |
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