Half a century after his heyday there can be no disputing the earlier dominance of the individual whose dodgy initial aspirate could be seen as the template for the television aerial fast becoming attached to every rooftop in the nation, the technological icon of a new age. Comparisons with his contemporaries in the broadcast media are as irrelevant as applying the process to Chaplin’s place in the history of the cinema. Hancock’s Half Hour remains both pioneer and benchmark when the British situation comedy is discussed. Hancock represents the archetypal British telly comedy character, his single surname carrying the totemic resonance of that show-business elite that includes not only the little tramp, but Garbo and Bogart and Sinatra too. To my knowledge no other performer has been featured as often as seven times on the front cover of the flagship listings magazine, the Radio Times, six times during his short career and once posthumously. A correspondent to the New Statesman a short while after his death said it all. Having mislaid his passport on his return from Geneva, the writer became ensnared in a dialogue with a testy immigration officer at Heathrow. ‘Where do you live, sir?’ asked the official. ‘Cheam.’ ‘And what does the name Hancock mean to you?’ ‘But that’s East Cheam,’ countered the traveller. ‘You can go through,’ came the response. ‘No one who knows that could be anything but British.’ All was right with the world again.
It is sometimes difficult to accept that the character moulded by Galton and Simpson for Hancock had its origins in radio. It seems to have been tucked away in the visual folk memory of the nation, sharing space with intrinsically British icons like Mr Pickwick and John Bull, for far longer. And yet only in 1956, by which time as a radio show Hancock’s Half Hour had been triumphant for three series, did it transfer to the television screen and the combined instinct of writers, producer, wardrobe mistress and star conjure up the grandiose Homburg hat and oppressive black coat with its astrakhan fur collar that defined the pretensions and pomposity of his character as securely as the frock coat, cigar and painted moustache had summed up Groucho’s aspirations to upward mobility for another era. Already Hancock the man and Hancock the entertainer shared the physique that epitomised the sagging melancholy that contributed to his comic tour de force. ‘I look like a bloody St Bernard up the mountain without a barrel’ was a line that would creep into his act. The hunched shoulders, crumpled clothes, deflated stance – like a punctured Michelin Man recast as a sorry failure for a scarecrow – all made their morose contribution to one of the symbolic figures of the twentieth century. Within a short while the image had resonance for radio listeners as well. In an episode where Hancock is courted by Madame Tussaud’s, the waxwork technician played by Warren Mitchell knows exactly the look he is after. With all good reason he sees the model in astrakhan collar and Homburg, spats and patent-leather shoes. Hancock protests that this is merely his ‘walking out gear’. He envisages his look-alike in a more casual, homely pose: ‘silk dressing gown, cigarette holder, Abyssinian slippers, Cossack pyjamas and a fez’. Curiously our preconception of the first makes the second image funnier, since everything you need to know about the man, the catalyst for the laughter, is contained in the basic brand.
If any physical aspect defined the man it was his feet. He had the exact measure of them. ‘My feet don’t seem to be with me,’ Tony muttered to one interviewer. ‘They’re living a separate existence. They’ve been put on all wrong. They don’t join the ankle properly. Sometimes they feel as if they’re flapping like penguin flippers.’ Poise was never on the agenda at the comic academy, but it irked him just the same. ‘Let’s face it,’ he admitted to his friend Philip Oakes, ‘I look odd.’ When Oakes’s basset hound produced puppies he refused the offer of one as a pet. Someone had pointed out the similarity between his own feet stuck at their quarter-to-three position and the splayed paws of the animal. ‘Can you just see us trotting along together?’ he queried. ‘They’d be entering me for Cruft’s next.’ If his feet were something of an obsession with Hancock, Galton and Simpson were only too happy to latch on to the characteristic. In one episode, having failed the driving test for the seventy-third time, Hancock protests, ‘Me feet are too big – that’s the trouble. They overlap. I put me foot on the brake, half of it goes on the accelerator as well and we’re off again!’ On another occasion Sid James surprises Tony with his nickname from the time he supposedly served in the Third East Cheam Light Horse, ‘Kippers Hancock’. He is nonplussed that Sid could have known this, but as James explains, ‘With your feet what else could they call you?’ They were, in fact, a normal size 8½ and the man, not his writers, should be given the final word on the subject: ‘I feel as though I’ve got the left one attached to my right leg and the right one attached to the left leg. Quite horrible. If you examined my feet closely, you would see they were only good for picking up nuts.’
Jacques Tati claimed that comedy begins with the feet up, and if so Hancock might appear to have had it made from day one. The fact remains, however, that his greatest physical asset was his face. What his body lacked in definition was compensated for by the quicksilver precision of his features, capable of conveying every single nuance of the human condition with ease. Boredom, frustration, worry, exasperation, misery, insomnia, complacency all became funny when Hancock registered them, not least because of the skill with which he could appear so effortlessly to pick them out of the ether. At odds with the sagging jowls and the baggy eyes, he could transmit the subtlest thought with a simple twirl of a lip, the merest quiver of a cheek. On occasions the eyes defied you to tell him what he was thinking. You knew and laughed and he didn’t even have to speak. In many ways he was sited on a line equidistant between Chaplin and Buster Keaton, combining the chameleon flexibility of one and the abstract quality of the other. The unfortunately named ‘stone face’ of Keaton, upon which cinemagoers were able somehow miraculously to project their feelings, may have something to do with it. However, the comic effect he could achieve with the laugh that simmers, the frown that explodes, the word unspoken that came to the tip of his tongue to be swallowed almost instantly were totally Hancock’s and Hancock’s alone.
His facial prowess made him absolutely right for the emerging medium of television, but that fact only serves to underline that Hancock’s initial claim to attention was as a radio presence. At all stages of his career it helped that he had a voice that sounded as he looked. As we shall discover, the Hancock of Educating Archie sounded totally different from that of the performer remembered today. His microphone voice became modified considerably over the years, but once it found its natural level, consistent with the naturalism he and his writers were anxious to cultivate in comedy, it was hard to imagine him speaking in any other way. Plump, rounded and listless, given to sudden explosions of protest or triumph, it conveyed everything about the look and the attitude of his complex character. The emphatic caution with which he pronounced the aspirates of the title of his show – ‘H-H-H-H-Hancock’s Half Hour’ – dated from the very beginning of the radio show in 1954 and the device became a vocal calling card that firmly set the mood for each episode.
It is a paradox of the Hancock phenomenon that while he remained indisputably recognisable, understandably inimitable, he nevertheless proved well-nigh impossible to impersonate. The irony of the last radio script that Galton and Simpson wrote for him is that it revolved around the premise of someone who could do so successfully and in so doing take from the character profitable work in a television commercial that the lad deemed beneath his dignity. In this episode, the variety impressionist Peter Goodwright made a fair stab at the task and succeeded to a degree, but something was missing, even in sound alone. In later years Mike Yarwood would don the Homburg and astrakhan collar, but the impression always seemed stillborn, lacking the freedom and joie de vivre that he and others achieved with the likes of Cooper, Dodd, Morecambe, Howerd and all the other comic icons from and around the same period. The answer may reside partly in public perception. In Cooper and company we – and that means Yarwood on our behalf – saw uninhibited Masters of the Revels to whom in a Saturnalian moment we all wished to aspire: who hasn’t waved an imaginary tickling