Comedy icon who couldn’t defeat his demons
Born 100 years ago, Tony Hancock’s complex legacy lives on to this day. IAN HERNON reports on a comedy legend as well known for his dark side as his iconic sketches.
COMEDY great Tony Hancock has continued to win over new fans more than half a century after his death. Born 100 years ago today, his classic episodes, including The Blood Donor and The Radio Ham, ensure he is consistently voted one of Britain’s favourite comics.
Fans include comedian Paul Merton and musician Pete Doherty, while his character inspired contemporary creations like Alan Partridge and David Brent. But there was a dark side behind the laughter.
He sacked pretty much everyone who helped propel him to TV stardom, such as Carry On icon Sid James, co-star on the Hancock’s Half Hour radio and TV series.
Long-time agent Beryl Vertue, who also represented comics Spike Milligan, Frankie Howerd and Eric Sykes, got the same treatment – as did scriptwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who went on to pen Steptoe and Son.
His insecurity, jealousies and lack of selfawareness, all brilliantly exposed in his fictionalised character, contributed to his tragically early death. Birmingham-born
but brought up in Bournemouth hotels run by his parents, Hancock left school at 15.
During the Second World War, while serving in the RAF, he was turned down by the services entertainment company ENSA. But post-war he was the resident comedian at London’s Windmill Theatre, notorious for its nude pageants.
He featured in various radio shows such asworkers’ Playtime,variety Bandbox and Educating Archie.
In the latter he was stooge to a ventriloquist’s dummy but the role gave him nationwide celebrity and led to his own BBC radio show.
Written by Galton and Simpson it ran on radio for more than 100 episodes and, from 1956, concurrently on TV.
It broke with the tradition of revue and sketch shows and can claim to being the first British sitcom.
It featured Hancock as a comic with aspirations of becoming a serious actor, living in the shabby 23 Railway Cuttings, in East Cheam.
The character, clearly based on the real-life Hancock, never realised that his lack of success was his own fault. Apart from Sid James, regular co-stars included Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques.
The format struck a chord with the public, and pubs cleared during its transmission. Hancock became the first star to get a £1,000 fee for each half-hour show. But he grew increasingly frustrated with the TV version as the cast was frequently reduced to himself and James, who constantly punctured his pretensions.
He believed they were becoming a double act and decided that one of them
had to go. He left it to others to tell James. His last BBC series, in 1961, simply retitled Hancock, was without James.
Ironically, it included two of his bestremembered episodes. As a blood donor – “A pint! That’s very nearly an armful!” – and as an amateur radio ham who botches the response to a mayday call from a yachtsman in distress.
After suffering concussion in a car accident, Hancock relied on cue cards and teleprompters rather than learning his lines.
Galton and Simpson wrote the 1961 film The Rebel in which Hancock played a City commuter who dreams of becoming a world-famous artist and briefly achieves that due to mistaken identity.
The movie is regarded as a cult classic thanks to many great lines but it flopped in the US. That year Galton and Simpson produced three scripts for Hancock’s second starring film project – all of which he rejected without bothering to read them.
At a meeting in October 1961, he fired them, along with long-term agent Vertue, who he accused of spending too much time on her other comedy clients.
THE BFI’S John Oliver wrote: “With a propensity for selfdestruction that was becoming a worrying side of his character, Hancock decided to ditch Galton and Simpson the same way he had discarded James.
“He was never again to find writers who so completely understood him and the quality of his comedy began to wane.”
Yet Hancock’s public profile was still high enough for big-budget film producers to cast him in such 1960s movies as Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and The Wrong Box.
He moved to ITV franchise giant ATV in 1963, just as Galton and Simpson’s Steptoe and Son took off in the ratings.
His new series, transmitted at the same time on the same night, did not do well.
He paid the bills with a series of TV adverts for the Egg Marketing Board and was even hired by Lord Beeching to extol his controversial rail cuts.
His last British TV work came in 1967. At the end of that year he was contracted by Australia’s Seven Network to make a 13-part series. He only completed three of them due to ill health and alcoholism.
Two days after his second wife divorced him, on June 26, 1968, Hancock was found dead in his Sydney flat alongside an empty vodka bottle and a scattering of barbiturate tablets. He was 44. One of several suicide notes said: “Things just seemed to go too wrong too many times.”
Spike Milligan, an equally tormented character, said: “Very difficult man to get on with. He ended up on his own. I thought, he’s got rid of everybody else, he’s going to get rid of himself and he did.”