For all Hancock would cling to exhibitionist tendencies fashioned in another era, no comedy show caught more astutely the social history and culture of its own day, as its hero came to terms with the new prosperity to emerge from the post-war gloom, the new consumerism, the new media consciousness. Its only contender to any sort of crown in this regard was radio’s The Goon Show, the anarchic comic explosion that sounded like a verbal hybrid of freak show and firework display played out in celebration of our accumulated imperial past. But for all its energy, invention and a three and a half year start, it was less accessible than Hancock’s Half Hour and, in spite of varying attempts, had the disadvantage of being impossible to translate to television. It needed to be heard. Its four original chief protagonists – Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers – had recently, like Hancock, been catapulted out of the armed forces into performing careers that would have seemed impossible when hostilities began. All knew each other socially. If one concedes to Milligan the creative advantage, it is feasible that had the comedy pack been shuffled in a different way Hancock could have ended up in the first show in lieu of one of the other three performers. Both programmes shared the same producer, the wiry and dynamic Dennis Main Wilson, and Milligan’s co-writer in the early days, Larry Stephens, was an even closer friend of Tony and the author of the bulk of Hancock’s stage material. Moreover, Hancock had still properly to formulate his views on naturalism in comedy, a quality that amounted to anathema in the parallel universe of the Goons. Both shows in their contrasting ways drew regular comic inspiration from the folk memory of a conflict that now seems so distant and yet in those bleaker times loomed like an unwelcome ghost in people’s lives.
Hancock the man had served in the RAF. Hancock the character, being all things to all men, had, albeit in tall-story-dom, served on all fronts. In the episode where he gets stuck in a lift he describes himself as an old submarine man, to whom the confined space of the moment is a mere bagatelle. When the vicar, played by Noël Howlett, retorts that he thought he had just said he had been in the army, Hancock, resourceful as ever, claims that he was actually attached to a Commando unit being transported by submarines to blow up the heavy-water plants in Norway: ‘Very tricky stuff, heavy water, very tricky. Have you ever handled it?’ For another episode he had spent the hostilities punishing the Hun high in the clouds: ‘Did me victory roll over Hendon airport picking up packages off the tarmac with me wing tips. Nerves of steel – 144 missions and never turned a hair!’ Most memorably, when asked at the blood donor clinic whether he has given before, his imagination spiralled into new levels of derring-do: ‘Given, no. Spilt, yes. Yes, there’s a good few drops lying about on the battlefields of Europe. Are you familiar with the Ardennes? I well remember von Rundstedt’s last push. Tiger Harrison and myself, being in a forward position, were cut off behind the enemy line. “Captain Harrison,” I said. “Yes sir,” he said. “Jerry’s overlooked us,” I said. “Where shall we head for?” “Berlin,” he said. “Right,” I said, “and the last one in the Reichstag’s a sissy!”’ However outrageous, such reminiscences not only provided the perfect platform for the overblown conceit of the character; they also resonated with an audience to whom much of his swagger touched upon reality.
The Hancock character has been rightly described as 1950s man, a Charlie Chaplin for the Welfare State. For all he might rattle on about his vainglorious past, the present provided the real challenge. Long before the character reached television, the public could visualise perfectly the world he inhabited. Rationing may at long last have been heading for the ‘exit’, but we should not be deluded by nostalgia. Britain was still a pretty grim place, and his writers’ evocation of Hancock’s home base, the seedy side of sprawling suburbia epitomised by East Cheam, only served to make it even grimmer. Not for nothing did the philosopher Henri Bergson chide that to understand laughter we must put it back into its natural environment, ‘which is society’. Hancock’s specific address at 23, Railway Cuttings signified grime and austerity. One could never quite imagine the sun shining through the soot that persisted in the damp, dank air; never envisage the streets entirely free of potholes and puddles. Hancock’s disaffection was perfectly captured in the depiction of a National Health Service that for all its promise was rapidly becoming over-stretched: when he goes to the doctor to cure his cold, only to find the medic can’t even help his own, he pontificates, ‘I don’t pay ten and threepence a week to cure you!’ Not that he was without a chippy optimism, born of the patriotism that was his life’s blood. Even Hancock expected things to get better, that he would arrive, in the words of one fan, the film director Stephen Frears, at a sunlit upland where he would be treated with the right degree of respect and have a comfortable life. He certainly knew his priorities, ever ready with a Churchillian swagger ‘to strike a blow for the country that gave us our birthright, our freedom, our parliamentary democracy and our two channelled television set’.
Hancock had the full measure of the new ITV – ‘Just like the BBC, but with advertisements instead of breakdowns!’ – just as Galton and Simpson had their grip on the consumer revolution that would provide the rose-tinted panacea for the times. The recognition sparked and enlivened the comedy. Their scripts soon became a repository of marketing lore for subsequent generations. Hancock proved a sucker for the ‘individual fruit flan’, ‘the drink on a stick’, ‘the flavour of the month’. Only hours before his shows members of the audience would have been purchasing such commodities, the thought of laughter far from their minds. But on the next trip to the supermarket, the next treat at the cinema, the product would register and produce a second laughter response, ‘remembered laughter’ on a shorter time scale. When he goes to the movies himself, the lad is more anxious to see the advert where the toffees wrap themselves up and jump into their cardboard box than the main feature. At times his aspirations seem defined by the process. When his character shows ambitions to be a chef, it is to enable him to have his picture on the buses holding up a packet of salt; when leading man parts fail to come his way, he remains hopeful that the actor playing the old retainer who holds the barley water can’t last forever; his cricketing dream has less to do with playing for England than taking Denis Compton’s place on the hair cream ads. One of the most brilliant sequences ever enacted by Hancock was the running commentary on London at night as he sits side by side with Sid on a bus ride to the big city. The posters, the shops, the neon signs come to life as he peers through the window provided by the television screen and explodes with enthusiasm at the two scruffy kids sniffing gravy, the sea lion pinching the zookeeper’s Guinness and the animation provided by a myriad of light bulbs that announces the arrival of Piccadilly Circus. This has long had him puzzled: ‘I always thought there was a little bloke behind with a big bag of shillings belting up and down working a load of switches!’
In his engrossing survey of such matters, Queuing for Beginners, social historian Joe Moran has shown how the cheap free gift in the cereal packet became the symbol of the tacky promises of consumerism. An episode where Hancock fights a by-election as a Liberal candidate is made doubly funny by a subplot featuring his obsession with finding the elusive trumpet player to complement a full band of plastic guardsmen given away with cornflakes. Another ruse entailed sending in a requisite number of packet-tops for a supposedly free gift. In a parallel scenario– well before ‘salvage’ was made fashionable in the green interest as ‘recycling’ – Hancock bemoans his absence once again from the New Year’s Honours List and resolves that never again will he put his country first by sacrificing his cereal packets to the paper cause: ‘Never again! They can whistle for their salvage in future. I’m gonna stock myself up with Davy Crockett hats and bus conductor sets and assorted scenes from Noddy in Toyland. We’ll see who’s the loser in the long run.’ But a social tide had turned and it was all about winning. The relatively cheap accessibility of foreign travel and entertainment, the easy automation of household tasks, the national obsession with football pools and newspaper competitions were all symbolic of a new acquisitiveness. Sometimes