It seems appropriate now that, on the show that introduced me to the delights and serendipity of variety, he should be there. Outside of the pantomime, he was the first comedian I saw perform on a theatre stage, and he set the standard thereafter. To those whose memory of Hancock is geared to his later Hancock’s Half Hour success, this performance would have been a total surprise, a triumph of visual athleticism as he threw himself into a series of impersonations of the sportsmen who featured in the opening titles of the Gaumont British Newsreel, preceded by a display of miming skill as he jerked and contorted his hands and arms and legs into an impression of an increasingly rampant robot to illustrate the song he was singing. When a few years later the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan outlined his concept of high-definition performance, he might have had Hancock in mind, although at the time all I cared about as he created physical patterns that seemed to linger in the air was the pain of laughter in my side.
Personal experience tells me that our favourite funny men inspire a loyalty that other entertainers seldom achieve. As Hancock’s career gathered momentum and prestige, he came to define the era of his greatest success – my childhood and teen years – with almost Proustian exactness, while his comparative fall from critical grace during the 1960s seemed to make its own comment upon a harsher and more cynical world. Only something transcending mere nostalgia can account for the emotional tug of war that his staunchest fans experienced as we observed the highs and lows of his career. When the slide set in, comedy – however brilliant Howerd and Steptoe and Pete & Dud proved to be – never seemed the same again. One was always waiting for Hancock to dazzle in a way that would cap the achievements of his rivals, but it never truly came. When I heard the news of his death in the summer of 1968, the hollowness of the moment seemed to say that we, his public, had failed him, that he had never been repaid for the great years. This book is an attempt to redress that debt.
Of the volumes produced on the life and work of Tony Hancock in the years following his demise, none has possibly made the impact of the first, a memoir by his second wife, Freddie Ross Hancock, written in association with that astute journalist David Nathan and published a stark year after his death. Temporarily the book, a frank and honest account of the troubles that beset the comedian down the years as well as a wider biographical treatment, turned its subject into basest clay. Emerging from a sheltered childhood protected by the enduring love of my parents’ marriage, I experienced the chill of disappointment to discover that the man I revered had been possessed by unconsidered demons. His apparent inconsiderateness and cruelty, awash in the dregs of an alcoholic despair, were nothing if not distressing to me at so impressionable an age. The book had been a gift from my parents and I recall wanting to keep it from them, so sensitive was I to the alienating aspects of its subject as he was depicted therein.
Maturity teaches that there exist the two clichéd sides to any story. In time I discovered that all star performers are marionettes whose strings are drawn upwards by the public’s expectation of them, whether on stage or off. We tend to place a burden on the object of our admiration that at times places honesty off limits. But the candour of Nathan’s text may have been self-defeating. In subsequent years the Hancock biographical record has not been helped by much that has been speculative and sensation-seeking. The doom and gloom of the final act of the story has always suggested a tragedy with few, if any, mitigating features, while in the years since his suicide in Australia in 1968 the myths have cohered and clung like barnacles to the hull of his reputation. It has therefore been rewarding to discover for much of the time a lighter, happier, even ordinary Hancock as the veils of my research have lifted; also a performer who managed to succeed for so long despite his innate insecurity, rather than someone who failed because of it. The alcoholic excess and its attendant troubles clouded only the last few years of a spectacular career, while, as Roger Wilmut, zealous chronicler of the Hancock career in all media, has pointed out, he was capable of giving fine stage performances far away in Melbourne as late as 1967. Forty years on he continues to stand tall as arguably the greatest British comedian of my lifetime. Certainly in terms of the broadcast media it is impossible to think of anyone who has subsequently surpassed his achievement. There was little that was funny about his insatiable desire for perfection and the self-doubt that came in its wake, but the sorrow at the end has to be balanced by the utter delight of a nation in his comic skills. As Denis Norden, the doyen of British comedy scriptwriters, has said, ‘For a comedian to leave behind that kind of echo of remembered laughter – it is hard to think of his life as a complete tragedy.’
Few comedians have affected the lives of their public in the way Hancock did. Even today it is impossible for a member of his audience to realise they have forgotten to cancel the newspapers while on holiday, to endure the agonies of the common cold, to be bored senseless on a Sunday afternoon, to get stuck in a lift, to donate blood, without enjoying again the bonus of the laughter he created when he found himself in those circumstances. In these contexts Norden’s phrase ‘echo of remembered laughter’ becomes especially relevant. Moreover even today the thought of what Hancock would have said or done in a particular situation provides a constant pick-me-up at moments of mounting frustration as bureaucracy and technology take more and more of a stranglehold on our lives. In this way he exercised – and continues to exercise – a strong emotional pull over his audience. It is the great paradox of his story that one to whom life became unbearable in its last few years should forty years after his death continue to make life bearable for others.
‘I was always trying to make life a little less deadly than it really is.’
Seldom has a comic persona played a more tantalising tug-of-war with the character of the individual behind the mask than in the case of Hancock. It was Denis Norden again who voiced the opinion that rather than write a succession of scripts for Hancock, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson found themselves writing a novel, so fully rounded was the character they refined and defined while writing in excess of 160 radio and television Half Hours over a period of seven momentous years. Even had they set out to think this way – which they didn’t – they could have had no idea they were inadvertently compiling a virtual biography of their colleague at the same time. Irrespective of the extent to which the world view, mind-set, spoken idiom of the Hancock character belonged to the performer in real life, it is remarkable to discover that so many of the pivotal aspects of the Hancock saga and mythology are foreshadowed in their words. While they obviously did not create the man with all his problems and complexities, many of which still had to reveal themselves after they parted company professionally, there was, as we shall discover, scarcely a twist or turn in Tony’s corkscrew of a career that wasn’t pre-empted with spectacular – albeit involuntary – prescience by Alan and Ray, and sometimes poignantly so.
All great comedians from Chaplin and Keaton to Cooper and Tati have understood the idea of personal branding. With Hancock the process evolved more gradually through his collaboration with two scriptwriters of brilliance, until the outer trappings of the character they created together proved too constricting to bear and he attempted to change direction, ultimately parting from them, having already revised his wardrobe and locale. Nevertheless their shared creation is how he is most fondly remembered, and his portrayal of it remains his greatest achievement. This is the Hancock of his BBC years, from the start of the classic series on radio in 1954 until the last modified episode on television in 1961. There was much else on the credit side, a dazzling amount, including his earlier radio work, two feature films, more television of variable but not entirely negative quality, and a stage repertoire upon the extent of which many a lesser talent has fashioned an entire career. But the