During
the seven years 1954 - 1961 the character created by Tony Hancock and
the writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson became the most popular and
admired comedian in the land. At his peak, in his 1961 television series,
he was reaching a third of the population - a huge figure when we remember
that the BBC was still fighting to win back some of the numbers it had
lost to the ITV network. Better than Hancock's ratings was the quality
of his success. Like all the great comedians he appealed to all levels.
The depth and truth in his comedy went far below the surface joke of
the funny man in baggy suits and astrakhan collar. The BBC recognised
this by inviting Hancock to play the classic part of Gogol's Government
Inspector. John Freeman, at the time a celebrated television interviewer
of those who were eminent and interesting, invited Hancock to be opened
up in his penetrating series, Face
to Face. The recognition that Hancock was something exceptional
lasted to the end of his life, and explained why when things began to
go wrong for him and he was placing himself beyond the reach of rescue,
he never lost the affectionate concern,he had earned. The public saw
in his decline - by a fateful symmetry it lasted another seven years
- the presence of authentic tragedy. When he died in 1968 the Hancock
of the great achievement had already died. Let me recall how great it
was. |
He was
born in Birmingham in 1924. When he was three the family moved to Bournemouth,
where his father was successful enough as publican and part-time entertainer
to send him to boarding and then public school. When he was 15, the
war broke out. He decided he had had enough of school, a decision which
may have been right for the stagestruck boy he was but which, typically,
the man he became regretted, feeling that his education had been incomplete.
The comic Hancock creation spent the war parachuting behind the German
lines, driving his tank single-handed for Berlin, leading daring submarine
raids on Nazi battleship bases. The real Hancock joined the R.A.F.,
shifted to entertainment, and toured the fronts for three years with
Ralph Reader's Number Nine Gang Show. When peace came he had his share
of the touring comedian's world of tatty digs, sharp-tongued landladies
and vile food, eventually taking his turn as resident comic at the Windmill.
He got into radio, in the early Fifties still the country's biggest
and most popular source of entertainment, by way of 'Workers' Playtime',
a modest lunchtime variety session aimed at factory canteen lunch-breaks,
and 'Happy Go Lucky', a series with the comedian Derek Roy. This was
important for him because he met Roy's writers, the two very young newcomers
Galton and Simpson, both aged twenty. |
In 1950
Hancock shot to the top in 'Educating Archie', a comedy series built
round the dummy created by the ventriloquist Peter Brough. Roy Speer,
its producer, had spotted a quality in Hancock that marked him from
others; he was more of a comic actor than a straight comedian. Speer
brought him in as tutor to Archie, the supposed schoolboy. In this part
Hancock was not the first, but he was the best, responding to scripts
(by Eric Sykes) in which he was a teacher who felt that the job of instructing
a wooden dummy was beneath him. The beginnings of the Hancock creation,
with its seedy grandiloquence and boastful, dashed pretensions, appeared
here. Hancock had arrived. And as so often happens to entertainers (actors
are luckier because the public does not expect to see them in more than
one play at a time) he was promptly and recklessly overworked. |
Jack
Hylton signed him up for a twicenightly revue in London and Blackpool,
and though Hancock came to dread the repetition, and hoisted distress
signals by drinking noticeably too much, they seem to have gone unnoticed.
His managers let him carry on with twice-nightly revue until 1956. Thereafter
he was able to concentrate on 'Hancock's Half Hour', which had established
a huge success on radio and was about to take him to a success on TV
beyond anything he or his writers could have dreamed of. |
Galton
and Simpson had begun to write for him in 'Calling All Forces'. In 1954
the three of them were ready for the so far unattempted adventure of
trying comedy about people, with a story that would run half an hour
without musical interludes, guest stars, gags, funny voices and catchphrases.
In the beginning it could not altogether give up the last two, simply
because the certain laugh they got couldn't be thrown away overnight.
But the qualities that would make the series grow were there from the
start, though they had to wait for television, slower and closer to
the pace of real life, before they blossomed into the richly natural
comedy everyone remembers. |
The essential
quality of Hancock, Galton and Simpson was that they held a consistent
point of view about the world and wanted their work to express it. It
was never enough just to get a laugh. They shared a view of comedy as
rooted in an honest, rueful, sympathetic stare at reality, which Hancock's
whole career was a steady process of examining and refining. He and
they saw the funny side of yearning and failure. From his beginning
to his end he retained in his theatre act the bad impersonations of
film stars as done by a ham who didn't know they were bad. He loved
old actor jokes, stories of disasters brazened out, of indignities heaped
on the dignified, of the blustering self-confidence that was leaking
away inside. None of us has ever bought a car, planned a holiday, got
married, ordered a meal, played a sport, and so on without end, without
doing at least some of them in the Hancock style of putting a brave
face on a hopeless situation while keeping absolutely unshaken the conviction
that it's all a ridiculous mistake, we aren't that kind of person at
all. It is the comic fantasy at the heart of golf, a game kept going
by every bad player's belief that he's a good one who, for some reason
he can't explain, is off his game that day, though he'll be on it tomorrow.
And this self-deception is the basis of the oldest and funniest of man's
consoling jokes. Hancock brought to it the sharpness that kept pathos
at bay. There was never a touch of pathos about Hancock's performance.
He was an aggressive, vainglorious mug, redeemed by a defiant stoicism.
|
How much
of the character was in the man? He was in the three of them. Galton
and Simpson shared his vision of the comic, revered writers and comedians
who enlarged it - Sid Field, W. C. Fields, Will Hay, James Thurber,
Stephen Leacock (a fertiliser of every one of the better writing talents
in broadcasting comedy) and, at first without knowing it, Dickens, from
whom they borrowed the use of fantastic, unexpected, precise imagery.
'Models, all bones and salt cellars.' 'I've got toes like globe artichokes.'
|
Hancock
the character's cultural allusions came from Galton and Simpson's own
frenzied catching up on their reading in the sanatorium where they had
met as TB patients. Hancock the person used to shut himself in his room
struggling to take in Kant. They were all eternally amused by the same
joke, the collapse of the grand into the ungrammatical and baffled.
As the following scripts so abundantly illustrate, they built a whole
person, inflated and coloured by a funny, melancholy, outrageous clown
who served and was nourished by two exceptionally gifted young writers.
|
The TV
scripts retained at first the radio characters created by Hancock and
Sid James. It was never quite clear what Hancock was supposed to be.
His life support system sometimes he was a ham actor, sometimes a would-be
councillor, sometimes an old Desert Rat - was left as vague as Mr. Pickwick's.
Sid James, a South African actor with a seamed and craggy face that
everyone liked, was the earthy realist, short of any kind of culture,
a crudely materialistic deflator of Hancock's aspirations for a more
noble life. Here they are in 'The Reunion Party'. Hancock is awaiting
three old comrades from the War. Sid deplores this morbid clinging to
the past: |
And on
it goes, laconic, quiet lines without a gag in them, two men talking
in the living room, the laughter welling unforced out of character reacting
to situation. The series ran until 1961. Then Hancock decided it was
time to move on from Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, and the James-Hancock
characters. Some show business writers simplified his motives into one
of the Hollywood backstage musical plots - boy meets boy, they make
good, one becomes a star and ditches the other. The only resemblance
between the myth and the facts was in the star's growing reliance on
drink as comforter and unwinder. He insisted there was nothing left
to say about East Cheam. He did not want to stay fixed as half a double
act - not because he was vain, as the myth implied, but because he was
a creative artist driven by the itch to stretch his talent. He went
on to prove that his judgment was quite right. The series he made on
his own, the last that Galton and Simpson wrote for him, contained the
best comedy he ever did. |
I suppose
most of us would pick `The Blood Donor' as the best of the best. It
had a very neat, circular plot. (As with all their most successful scripts
the writers had thought of the ending first.) Hancock volunteered to
give some blood, complacently learned that his was from a very rare
group, fainted as the needle went in, revived to have a fatuously learned
conversation with Hugh Lloyd as another donor, drove the doctor crazy
by telephoning to ask who'd been given his blood, finally had it put
back in himself after gashing his hand on a bread knife. The complete
Hancock-Galton-Simpson creation was in it. And if I had to choose a
passage that illustrated the hopeful, truculent, blusterer and the writers'
gift for finding the sudden, vivid, unexpected, ludicrous mental image,
I could pick no better than the following: |
Those
who saw it will not read these lines without hearing the voice and seeing
his face. His physical presence was so right for the words that it is
impossible to imagine the scripts ever being revived with some sub-Hancockian
comedian playing his part. Indeed, when we come to consider the ending
to it all, it is impossible not to wonder if the long and close involvement
of the man with the character was a major cause of it. |
In real
life Hancock was a serious, untidy, introspective person, sometimes
marvellous fun to be with but too much of a worrier, a sensitive perfectionist,
to enjoy his success. He never thought of himself as successful. He
didn't like himself very much. He believed he was unattractive and awkward.
He identified with the quarry, never with the hunters. His huge earnings
worried his sense of social justice. Too often his escape from anxieties
and tensions was by way of the bottom of an upturned glass; the strings
of girls, fast cars, yachts and racehorses were never for him, except
as part of the comic world he and his writers had built. He had an unshakable
sense of general doom. |
Accepting
what everyone concerned with his career agreed, that the scripts were
to a very large extent about Hancock, one can imagine the effect on
a man of his temperament of this prolonged and searching examination.
It is not surprising that in addition to the normally mixed feelings
of the actor about writers (part gratitude for the words, part resentment
against seeming to be their creature) he should have felt that they
were moving in and taking possession. Seven years! Given the concentrated
stare of a half-hour script they amount to another lifetime. This is
why I could never see in his break with Galton and Simpson the vanity
suggested by the myth. It could have been a desperate wrench to recover
himself. |
The fact
is he paid a price for doing the Hancock we remember. He had his share
of bad luck. He was unlucky to have got himself trapped in the destructive
theatre revues. His marriage was unlucky, for his wife (who was unluckier
still) soon gave up hope of controlling his drinking and joined him
at it, according to his biographers
in the only book about him that we have. |
We might
add that he was unlucky to be one of the handful that cannot use drink
sensibly. He was unlucky to have succeeded so hugely in television,
a medium that depends on repetition to entertain an audience that always
prefers what it had last time. I know no writer and performer who has
not been urged to repeat a success and discouraged from trying anything
new - including Galton and Simpson, whose 'Steptoe and Son' about a
pair of junk men was really a reworking of the James-Hancock situation,
deeper and more realistic because it was written for actors. |
Finally,
he was unlucky that when he tried to move on he wasn't successful, partly
because he never found writers who could light him up as splendidly
as Galton and Simpson, partly because the drinking had begun to eat
away at his performance. When I last saw him, in a one-man show from
the Festival Hall, London, he seemed badgered, frustrated, as though
his mind would no longer obey his will. He seemed to know that the drive
to perfect his talent had gone too far wrong for him to be able to get
it back. When he killed himself in Australia in 1968, he was only 44
but the news evoked more pity than shock. |
His memorial
is in this selection of scripts, from a total of 101 for radio and 63
for TV. To read them more than ten years after their first performances
is to rediscover with joy that Galton and Simpson when still in their
early twenties were writing some of the most gloriously funny low comedy
in the language. It is not given to television to create immortals;
but here in these pages a fine comedian, one of our finest, still lives. |
button
to go back