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Anthony John Hancock, best known as Tony Hancock
(May 12, 1924 – June 24, 1968) was a major
figure in British television and radio comedy in
the 1950s and 1960s.

==Early Life and Career==

He was born in Birmingham, England, but raised in
Bournemouth where his mother and step-father ran a
small hotel formerly known as the Durlston Court,
but now known as the Quality Hotel. He was
educated at a boarding school in Swanage and
Bradfield College, Berkshire. He left school aged
15. In 1942 he joined the Royal Air Force|RAF
Regiment and following a failed audition for ENSA
(Entertainments National Service Association)
ended up with The Ralph Reader Gang Show.
Following the war he gained regular radio work in
shows like Workers' Playtime and Variety Bandbox,
and in 1951 he gained a part in Educating Archie,
where he played the tutor and foil to the real
star, a ventriloquist's dummy. Here he developed a
catchphrase — "flippin' kids" — that
was to earn him real recognition. In 1954 he was
granted his own BBC radio show: Hancock's Half
Hour.

==Hancock's Peak Years==
Working with scripts from Galton and Simpson|Ray
Galton and Alan Simpson the show lasted for five
years and over a hundred episodes, featuring Sid
James, Bill Kerr, Kenneth Williams and over the
years Moira Lister and Hattie Jacques. In the
radio series the James character would often be
dishonest and exploit Hancock's apparent
gullibility, rather than be the friend of the
television series.

Hancock was an enormous radio star. Like few
others he was able to clear the streets while
families gathered together to listen to the
eagerly awaited episodes. His character changed
slightly over the series but even in the earliest
episodes "the lad himself" was evident. Later
episodes were regarded as classics, even in their
time. "A Sunday Afternoon At Home" and "Wild Man
of the Woods" were top rating shows and were later
released as an LP.

"A Sunday Afternoon At Home" is not only among the
very best of the Hancock ensemble pieces but it is
also a near perfect evocation of those 1950s
afternoons. A time when things really were "all
shut up" as some sort of puritan and/or wartime
rationing hangover. 

Hancock's experiences were based in reality and on
observation and no more so than in this episode.
Comments about English cooking and the TV service
of the day may seem rather broad today but for the
time they contained more than an element of the
truth. Grown men did like watching the Flowerpot
Men; partly because of the novelty of just
watching television, remember this was the time of
the potter's wheel and the fish tank!

Perhaps it is the degree of authenticity in the
observation that convinces us that the rest is
true. Of course a fountain pen is no good for
writing on newsprint. Does this fact help us to
believe that Miss Pugh's gravy does not move
about? 

Of course it rains during the episode adding to
the gloom and enabled Hancock to get a laugh with
the line "you wait, in a minute it will go dark
and we will have to put the lights on". The fact
that he could get a laugh from such a line shows
how much Galton and Simpson had moved the
goalposts in British Comedy. 

From the "Look Back in Hunger" playlet in the East
Cheam Drama Festival Galton and Simpson showed
they were up to date with the British theatre.
Were they mimicking or precursing Pinter with the
sighs and silent pauses of this episode? The pace
of the episode must have been groundbreaking in
the days of fast talking Ted Ray, frantic Life
with Lyons, et al. when every second of airtime
had to be filled and "dead air" the cardinal sin.

With Galton and Simpson cranking out scripts at
the rate they did it is little wonder that
continuity was not given top priority. Life in
Railway Cuttings (incidentally it was Railway
Cuttings that was mythical, not East Cheam itself,
it is next to Carshalton) seems to vary as much as
the house itself. Not only is Hancock either
unemployed or a hopeless actor/comedian (here he
is a popular radio star on a par with Ted Ray) but
the dimensions of the actual house seem to change
to accommodate the cast. In later episodes Railway
Cuttings appears to be a two-bedroomed terrace,
here it seems to have at least three bedrooms and
Miss Pugh lives in. In other episodes she "comes
round" presumably from her own domicile.

Listeners at the time either did not notice or did
not care. To be fair the ephemeral and
non-commercial nature of the radio in those days
meant that recordings were not available and the
audience had to rely solely on their memory of who
lived where or did what in which episode. There
were not numerous repeats and reruns on other
channels, cassette tapes were unknown and records
issued irregularly. Certainly the domestic
situation could only be described as strange.
Hancock had the none/comedian job situation, Sid
we assume was on the fiddle in some way. Bill is
virtually unemployable, his relationship to the
others and origins unexplained. Miss Pugh is
Hancock's secretary, (who apparently has such a
loose job description that she cooks Sunday lunch)
although how she got paid or what she did for the
unemployed Hancock is another of life's mysteries.
However it probably is no more mysterious as to
how today's sitcom character can afford
transatlantic trips, car journeys across America
and seemingly unlimited holiday time for all their
adventures. How did Kramer make a living? How can
Homer keep his job at the power plant while being
a clown, Mr Plow, boxer, astronaut etc? It is a
tribute to the skill of all these writers and
players that the audience still accepts the
situation and willingly suspends disbelief.

Although many of the situations described are
alien to us today (Late starting TV and Cinemas
showing old films, shop shut, pubs closing early)
the human reaction to unfavourable situations
remains constant.

It is doubtful if there still are people who find
patterns not intended in the wallpaper –
Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen and numerous makeover
clones have put a stop to that. In the not too
distant past some clever publishers made quite a
little industry of the "hidden picture" phenomenon
– would they have been able to do that if
there were still had bunches of grapes wallpapers
rather than magnolia walls with a dado rail to
stare at? Is staring into space a lost art? The
frustrating experience of someone not seeing what
we think we are seeing and the final "wait till
you want me to see something" perfectly
encapsulates the wearisome nature of such a futile
enterprise.

Futility seems to be the key to "Sunday
Afternoon". What are Sundays for? Certainly for
children in 50's it was a question that regularly
occurred. There was nothing to do and nothing ever
happened. There was church and Sunday School.
Little or no playing out "because it is Sunday"
and we might disturb the rest day of the
neighbours. External entertainments, like TV and
Cinema were rationed. Virtually no shops were
open, those that were sold papers or food. There
was almost no professional sport played, and if it
was it was rarely televised. Even a Sunday
afternoon outing was not possible for most of the
population, if not because they did not have cars,
then because they did not have money.

Galton and Simpson's masterly writing encapsulates
all of this in under 30 minutes. The show does
begin to flag when Kenneth Williams appears but
the earlier exchanges must rank among the very top
moments of radio comedy in any era.

Hancock's television career as star began in 1956,
initially on ITV, but it was the BBC-TV version of
Hancock's Half Hour (later Hancock) that
established him in the medium. 

The classic Hancock characterisation referred to
himself as "Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock"
— being a larger-than-life version of
Hancock's real self. In the TV series the regular
cast was reduced to Hancock and James, allowing
the humour to come from the interaction of the two
men. James was the realist of the two, but also
with an unpretentious personality who would
puncture Hancock's pretensions. Hancock was to
become anxious that his work with James was
turning them in to a double act, and the last BBC
series in 1961 was without James. Despite the
contemporary criticism of Hancock, many consider
this to contain the best of Hancock's BBC work.

Two of the episodes of Hancock's last BBC
television series are probably his best-remembered
work. The Blood Donor, in which he goes to a
clinic to Blood transfusion|give blood. This
contains famous lines such as, "A pint? Why,
that's very nearly an armful!" (The doctor's
response: "You won't have an empty arm... or an
empty anything!") Another well-known episode is
The Radio Ham, in which Hancock plays a ham radio
enthusiast who receives a mayday call from a ship
in distress, but his incompetence prevents him
from taking its position. Both of these episodes
were later re-recorded for a commercial 1961 LP in
the style of radio episodes, and these versions
have been continuously available ever since. The
original TV versions have since been released as
part of VHS and DVD compilations, and the
soundtracks have also (a little confusingly) been
released on CD.

Shortly before recording the original version of
"The Blood Donor" Hancock was involved in a minor
car accident. He was not badly hurt, but his
confidence was shaken and he was unable to learn
his lines, with the result that the recording was
made with Hancock using teleprompters (TV monitors
displaying the relevant sections of script) so
that he could read the lines instead. Viewers of
the programme may notice that he is not looking
where, logically, he ought to be. Hancock came to
rely on teleprompters instead of learning scripts
whenever he had career difficulties.

Hancock was the cause of two important milestones
in comedy. The first was that he was the first TV
artist of any genre to be paid more then £1000
for a single half-hour program. Second was the way
that comedy was made.

Up until Hancock’s TV series, every comedy show
was performed live. In the Jimmy Edwards series
'Whacko', in which he played the Headmaster of a
Public School, the scenes were intercut with shots
of the school clock. This was because the studio
only had one set of cameras, and the insert shot
of the clock gave them ten seconds to move the
cameras into position on the next scene.
Temperamentally, Hancock's highly strung
personality made this impractical, with the result
that the programmes came to be pre-recorded,
initially as telerecordings and later recorded on
Ampex|2" video tape. The cost of this horrified
the executives at the BBC, but they agreed to give
it a try. All of a sudden, making a sitcom became
more like making a film. The difference this made
to the flow and continuity was immediately
apparent, as well as the ability to do location
shots. With a few years it had become standard
practice to work in this way.

==International Dreams and Introspection==
Hancock also starred in the 1960 film The Rebel
(1961 movie)|The Rebel (a.k.a., Call Me Genius in
the USA) where he plays the role of an office
worker turned artist who meets international
acclaim after moving to Paris, but only as the
result of mistaken identity. The film was not well
received in the United States; owing to a conflict
with a contemporary series the film had to be
renamed and this inflamed American critics.
Hancock was later to dismiss the film as crude and
its failure was a contributory factor in his
disastrous break with his writers, Galton and
Simpson, after the last television series for the
BBC. This was famously the worst decision of his
career.

Hancock always dreamed of being a major
international star, but tradition holds that he
failed to realise how uniquely British his style
of humour was — too uniquely British, that
is, to have universal appeal. This was
demonstrated by his second starring vehicle, The
Punch and Judy Man (1962), in which he plays a
struggling seaside entertainer who dreams of a
better life. Sylvia Syms plays his nagging social
climber of a wife, and John Le Mesurier plays a
sand sculptor. The film's humour is bittersweet
and understated and was perfectly tailored to a
particular British audience of the time. The vast
American entertainment industry, whose moguls were
used to a more brash style of humour, dismissed it
as slow-moving and dull. His BBC shows were,
however, frequently broadcast in Australia and
Canada.

In early 1960 Hancock appeared on the BBC's Face
to Face, a half-hour in-depth interview programme
conducted by former Labour MP John Freeman.
Freeman asked Hancock many searching questions
about his life and work. Hancock, who deeply
admired his interviewer, often appeared
uncomfortable with the questions — but
answered them frankly and honestly. Hancock had
always been highly self-critical, and it is often
argued that this interview heightened this
tendency, contributing to his later depression.

Hancock’s self-doubt led to self destructiveness
— he slowly sacked all those who rose to
stardom with him -Bill Kerr, then Sid James,
Kenneth Willaims and Hattie Jacques, and finally
his script writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.
His reasoning was that to be truly international
he had to ditch the catchphrases and become
realistic. His classic example, once you had
launched him on this subject, was Kenneth
Williams. He argued that whenever an ad-hoc
character was needed, such as a policeman, it
would be played by someone like Kenneth, who would
come on with his well known oliy' Good Evening'
catchphrase. Hancock said the comedy suffered
because people did not believe in the policeman,
they know it was just Kenneth doing a funny voice.

So he slowly got rid of all his friends. His final
BBC TV series, was performed with ordinary actors
playing the comedy parts, and by doing so, he
created a new way of doing comedy. After the last
BBC series he sacked Galton and Simpson. As
compensation, the BBC gave them a series of one
off comedy shows, one of which was called 'The Rag
and Bone man', the forerunner to the epic, classic
comedy Steptoe and Son, played (as Hancock would
have approved) by two straight actors, Wilfrid
Brambell and Harry H. Corbett.

To write 'The Punch and Judy Man', Hancock hired
an up and coming writer called Philip Oakes, who
moved in with Hancock to write. The depth to which
the character of Anthony Hancock had merged with
the person is clear in the film. The scene at the
start of the where Tony and his wife eat breakfast
in total silence is a direct observation of Tony
in real life. When Hancock first read the scene,
he looked at Phillip Oakes, and his only comment
was 'you bastard...' Hancock knew that the film
was going to be about him, in reality, and in fact
the whole film is about Hancock’s memories of
being a child in Bournemouth.

Hancock read huge amounts, desperately trying to
find out the 'why we are here' of life. He read
large numbers of philosophers, classic novels and
political books, barely understanding half that he
read. He would sink into alcoholic depressions,
decrying it all as pointless. Its possible that in
his last alcoholic depth, he finally saw himself
in a cosmic perspective, and it was too much for
him. In his suicide note he wrote 'things just
went wrong too many times'.

==Later Years==
He moved to Associated Television Network
Limited|ATV in 1963 with different writers.
Godfrey Harrison was the main writer of these
series and had found success first on radio then
television with A Life Of Bliss (starring George
Cole) but had also scripted Hancock's first ever
regular television appearances on Fools Rush In
(British television)|Fools Rush In (a segment of
Kaleidoscope (television series)|Kaleidoscope).
Harrison had trouble meeting deadlines, so other
writers assisted including Terry Nation. 1

Coincidentally, the series clashed in the
television schedule with Steptoe and Son written
by Hancock's former writers, Galton and Simpson.
Comparisons were not flattering. 

Hancock continued to make regular appearances on
British television until 1967, but by now
alcoholism had dissipated much of his talent.
Hancock went to Australia in March 1968 and he
committed suicide in Sydney in June.

There is a statue in his honour in Birmingham and
a plaque on the wall of the hotel in Bournemouth
where he spent some of his early life..

In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian,
Hancock was voted amongst the top 20 greatest
comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy
insiders.

==Personal Life==
In 1950, Hancock married model Cicely Romanis,
after a brief courtship. It was a turbulent
relationship; Cicely was beaten by her husband,
but her knowledge of martial arts meant that
Hancock came off worst. Alcohol was the ultimate
source of the conflict, as his wife developed her
own dependency, and Hancock could not handle a
woman being drunk. 

The situation became more complicated as Freddie
Ross (who worked as his publicist from 1954)
became more involved in his life, eventually
becoming his mistress. This relationship was also
to be scarred by Hancock's capacity for violence.
He was divorced by his first wife in 1965, and
married Freddie in December of that year. This
second marriage was to be short-lived. During
these years Hancock was also involved with Joan Le
Mesurier, the new wife of actor John Le Mesurier,
Hancock's best friend and a regular supporting
character actor from his television series. Joan
was later to describe the relationship in her book
"Lady Don't Fall Backwards", including the fact
that her husband readily forgave the affair
— if it had been anyone else, he said, he
wouldn't have understood it; but with Tony
Hancock, it made sense 2. This is a powerful
reminder of the huge personal appeal of a man
whose life story alone often reads as particularly
cold and cynical. In July 1966 Freddie took one
overdose too many; she had been trying to shock
Hancock in to reforming himself. Arriving in
Blackpool to record an edition of his variety
series, Hancock was met by pressmen asking about
his wife's attempted suicide. His wife, he felt
had tried to destroy his career. The final
dissolution of the marriage took place a few days
ahead of Hancock's suicide.

Hancock's first wife died as a result of her own
problems with alcohol in 1969, the year after her
former husband. Freddie Hancock has been based in
New York City for many years.

==Recordings==
In the last few years, the BBC has issued CDs of
the surviving 74 radio episodes in six box sets,
one per series, with the sixth box containing
several out-of series specials. This was followed
by the release of one large boxed set containing
all the others in a special presentation case
— while it includes no extra material, the
larger box alone (without any CDs) still fetches
high prices on online marketplaces like eBay,
where Hancock memorabilia remains a thriving
industry. There have also been video releases of
the BBC TV series, but only two
DVD#Region_codes|Region 2 DVDs to date, the first
"Hancock: The Best of Hancock" featuring five
episodes from the last TV series, the second
"Hancock's Half Hour: Volume One" containing the
surviving episodes of the second and third TV
series (none of the first series are known to
exist), plus a Christmas special. Presumably if
the latter is successful further volumes of
remaining episodes will be released.

Episodes of the radio series may be heard on the
digital radio station BBC 7 each Tuesday, for
instance on-line at 19:00 London time (=GMT during
the winter months) at http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7
the official BBC7 site.

==Additional Film Appearances==
*Orders are Orders (1954) 
*The Rebel (1961 movie)|The Rebel/Call Me Genius
(1961)
*The Punch and Judy Man (1962) 
*Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
(1965) 
*The Wrong Box (1966)

==Biographies==
*Tony Hancock: 'Artiste', A Tony Hancock Companion
— (1978) by Roger Wilmut
:Contains full details of Hancock's stage, radio,
TV and film appearances.

*When the Wind Changed: The Life and Death of Tony
Hancock — (Arrow, 2000) by Cliff Goodwin
:An extended, comprehensive biography.

*Hancock, — (1996) by Freddie Hancock, BBC
Consumer Publishing, ISBN 0563387610

==References==
1 http://www.bodnotbod.org.uk/kettering/ Kettering
Magazine Issue #2 p5 — Hancock At ATV


2
http://home.btconnect.com/howejam/dadsarmy/books/b
io_jlm_lady.htm Lady Don't Fall Backwards by Joan
Le Mesurier (ISIS, 1990, ISBN 185089406X)

==External links==
*http://homepage.ntlworld.com/patricia.wildey/face
_to_face.htm Transcript of Face-to-Face interview
at Railway Cuttings fansite
*http://www.tonyhancock.org.uk/ Tony Hancock
Appreciation Society
*http://home.achilles.net/~howardm/hancock/tony.ph
p "The Original Tony Hancock Website"
*http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/hancock Hancock in
Birmingham
*http://www.birminghamuk.com/tonyhancock.htm Tony
Hancock page from "BirminghamUK.com"
*http://www.durlstoncourt.co.uk/administration/Han
cock.htm Page about Hancock at his old school,
Durlston Court
*http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&
GRid=7789110&pt=Tony%20Hancock Hancock's page at
FindaGrave.com. Photos of gravestone, bio,
tributes.
*http://www.galtonandsimpson.com/ Ray Galton and
Alan Simpson — Official Website
*http://www.kennethwiliams.org.uk/ Kenneth
Williams Appreciation Society