Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography

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 the character became confused along the way. Who can forget him in the launderette transfixed by the swirling display through the window of the washing machine and then sneaking a look over his neighbour’s shoulder: ‘I’m not interested in your washing – just thought you were getting a better picture on yours, that’s all.’ Nothing escaped the Hancock experience. Not for nothing was ‘you never had it so good’ – a phrase we shall come back to – described as the ‘token’ phrase of the new era.

Coping with the new shallow affluence was only one aspect of people’s lives that attracted Galton and Simpson. There was little in keeping with the times that bypassed them, even if they claimed years later that they were too busy working to notice the parade as it passed by their office window. They could almost have had a hotline to Mass Observation, the organisation that during the middle years of the century set out to record everyday life in Britain through a formal programme of observation and research. The later television show set in the bedsitter in which Hancock tediously, from his point of view, edges himself through another humdrum day might pass as a parody of one of the movement’s completed questionnaires – or ‘day surveys’ as they were called – if it were not so true. Nothing was not noted down, however mundane it might seem. One can imagine Hancock’s log: lay down, smoked cigarette, tried to blow smoke rings, did exercises, burnt lip, looked for ointment, applied butter instead, did impersonation of Maurice Chevalier, and on and on. One atypically appreciative newspaper article described the process as ‘a searchlight on living’ and it was taken seriously in many quarters. In recent years the archive has illuminated the era, but one questions whether it has done so more effectively than the accumulated observation of two brilliant scriptwriters and their unparalleled interpreter.

The Belgian philosopher Raoul Vaneigem might have had the measure of the phenomenon when he commented, ‘There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man’s life than in all the philosophies.’ Hancock’s character would have devoured the remark. His eager quest for easy knowledge was a doff of the Homburg to the Reader’s Digest cum Teach Yourself culture of the day. This reached comic heights as he struggled between Bertrand Russell and the dictionary in that same bedsit episode, before concentration plummeted and he took refuge in a whodunnit, Lady, Don’t Fall Backwards. The lad’s conversation is peppered with tortured quotes and gaffes of schoolboy-howler horror. When John Le Mesurier’s plastic surgeon describes a potential model for Tony’s new nose as ‘aquiline’, Hancock’s response is, ‘That means you can use it under water, doesn’t it?’ But there is no consistency: ‘“This is a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done” – Rembrandt!’ is compounded at a later date by the double sting in the tail of ‘Did Rembrandt look like a musician? Of course she didn’t!’ Often the character displayed an ornate use of language totally out of sync with the times, but entirely in keeping with the holy grail of self-education. As he prepares to get ready for a night on the town, he declares, ‘Time the peacock showed his feathers, I fancy.’ But then in no time at all we are brought down to earth by the uncouth slang of ‘ratbag’, ‘bonkers’, ‘stone me!’ and ‘a punch up the bracket’.

The turgid posturing is not the stuff of youth culture, and it is so easy to forget how young they all were. When Hancock’s Half Hour first went on air, its star was only thirty – albeit it has been said he was born middle-aged – and its two writers a mere twenty-four. The point is that at certain levels the show tapped into the preoccupations of the young in an amazing way. Young people had at last discovered that they had the money that had always been denied them, to use now at the time of their greatest energy and vigour. In one early radio show Hancock found himself in a dance hall of the time, the sequence now as secure an evocation of its era as it is possible to imagine. Characteristically our hero is unimpressed. When Bill asks him what he thinks of the Palais, he replies he feels ‘like Marty standing here’, a reference to the eternal wallflower portrayed in Ernest Borgnine’s current film hit. It is never the intention that Hancock should fit in: ‘I’m fed up with this chewing gum – I nearly swallowed it three times – swinging this perishing key chain’s getting on me nerves.’ In an impressive cameo Bill Kerr later departs from his usual characterisation to play a convincing version of the Marlon Brando street-wise hoodlum who sends panic through the dance hall. ‘I’ve never seen a hokey cokey break up so quickly in me life,’ observes Tony. But at other times he was more than content to frequent the frothy coffee outlets, the protest marches, the beatnik milieu.

Many have commented that the decade of Hancock’s Half Hour was also that of Look Back in Anger, that Hancock corresponded to a comic version of Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, an angry – or at least frustrated – young man in a faux middle-aged shell. In one of the less typical radio episodes, The East Cheam Drama Festival, a third of the show is dedicated to a pastiche entitled Look Back in Hunger by John Eastbourne. As an exercise it is superficially funny, but in many ways redundant. Galton and Simpson through Hancock, their mouthpiece, were the comic complement to everything Osborne and his contemporaries represented. Porter was the first to rail at the excessive boredom of the British Sabbath – ‘God, how I hate Sundays! It’s always so depressing, always the same.’ Galton and Simpson took the disaffection and made it into arguably their most successful radio half hour. But there was never a sense that they were parodying the earlier work, nor were they consciously doing so. Even their most accomplished television script for the comedian, The Blood Donor, was pre-empted by Porter’s query, ‘Have you ever had a letter, and on it is franked, “Please Give Your Blood Generously”?’ When Porter, in an attempt to explain his supposed non-patriotism, declaims, ‘We get our cooking from Paris, our politics from Moscow and our morals from Port Said,’ we can almost hear the voice of Hancock and it becomes funny – or funnier – when we do. If one sets aside the emotional undertow of the play, there are passages – not least the more verbose monologues – that would become hilarious if Hancock were enacting them, in the same way that long swathes of Galton and Simpson dialogue would lose much comic lustre if performed by straight actors with no thought of comedy on their agenda. It is all in the perception.

While Hancock may share Porter’s feisty indignation, for all his bluster he lacks his overriding self-confidence. Jimmy always knows he is right. Hancock is never too sure. He may rail at the petit-bourgeois whim for having plaster ducks on the wall, while knowing full well he has them on his own. As the television critic Peter Black pointed out, ‘A deeper aspect of this was that he perfectly well knew it: the best part of the Hancock creation was his stoical acceptance of himself. He knew in his heart he was doomed.’ We certainly never knew which way he would turn. Conned by the consumer giveaway culture in one episode, in the next he can be talking like an ombudsman: ‘Ten packets of that muck! Do less damage taking your shirts down to the river and bashing them with a lump of rock.’ He is punctilious as he sets out his stance to the vicar at the tea table: ‘I’m no snob. It’s just that I think that if people expect to sit down at high-class tables, they can at least take the trouble to learn how to conduct themselves in a proper and mannerly fashion.’ Then, after a pause, ‘If you’re not having any more tea, can I pour my grouts in your cup?’ One of nature’s committed aristocrats one moment – his rare blood group is enough to convince him of that – the shabby keeping up of appearances becomes his very life force the next. Forced by circumstances to a menu of bread and dripping for Sunday lunch, he hastens to draw the curtains lest the neighbours should see a man of his calibre (always with the stress on the middle syllable) reduced to such means. As a comic icon he was and remains classless, and not merely because he succeeded in cutting across all demographic barriers. If one could have cloned Hancock a couple of times, only his size would have held him back from enacting all three parts in that classic sketch that featured John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. The conceit, like the idea of living in a classless society, is, of course, an illusion, one Hancock and his writers understood only too well.

Once entrusted with their task by producer Dennis Main Wilson and script editor Gale Pedrick, Galton and Simpson proved themselves magicians of the deftest skill in the way in which week in, week out they rang the changes on the character and his circumstances. Sometimes he was affluent; sometimes he had only one shirt to his name. Sometimes he was a failed theatrical, sometimes the successful star of a radio or television comedy series. Sometimes he was a law-abiding member of the community, sometimes an army deserter who had lain low in a cave on the Yorkshire Moors for six years. Sometimes the continuity might appear suspect, but the almost dreamlike flexibility never stood in the way of the naturalism in comedy which all three set out to achieve at the start. As Alan Simpson has commented, ‘He was what we wanted him to be at any given time. That was the great freedom one had in those days. On one show we had him as a barrister. Nobody commented on the fact that you need seven years training, you need diplomas. Nobody cared.’ Anyone asked in an over-the-top television quiz to name a top racing driver who in his spare time was a purveyor of quack medicines, who had served in the Foreign Legion and whose grandfather had been a member of ‘The Three Tarzans’ music-hall act, could do worse than hazard a guess at the personage of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, to give the character its full monicker. The question might as easily have been to nominate the derring-do test pilot who was stolen from his cradle by the gypsies, went on to inherit his great-uncle’s newspaper empire and ended up living as a hermit on Clapham Common. They both tick all the boxes. The Hancock invention was its own Pandora’s Box of possibilities.

Even later when he discarded the Homburg and fur collar the inner man somehow remained constant. Simpson uses the attitude to food and France to show how the character could paradoxically live within his own contradictions: ‘One week he would say, “I can’t stand that foreign muck. I want sausage, egg and chips.” And the next week he’d be haute cuisine: “I don’t eat that rubbish. Bring on the sea bass.” If he met an intellectual he might try to keep up with him or dismiss him with “what a load of old rubbish!” Never throw away a good joke – it all relies on what you think of.’ The approach gave them full rein to present Hancock as Everyman for the twentieth century. In time he was acclaimed ‘a massive caricature of mid-century man’. According to Philip Oakes, the comedian rather fancied the title. Every possible foible, every potential flaw was refracted though the persona. No comic has succeeded more admirably in making us laugh at our own fears, failures and insecurities. While Bob Hope majored on cowardice, Jack Benny on meanness and vanity, John Cleese on a manic paranoia, Tony Hancock was all our sins personified. Long ago Galton and Simpson described the character as ‘a shrewd, cunning, high-powered mug’. Roger Wilmut was more comprehensive in his cataloguing: ‘pretentious, gullible, bombastic, occasionally kindly, superstitious, avaricious, petulant, over-imaginative, semi-educated, gourmandising, incompetent, cunning, obstinate, self-opinionated, impolite, pompous, lecherous, lonely and likeable fall-guy’. Only a few redeeming qualities there, but then the funniest traits will always be the weaknesses.

That said, Hancock wasn’t just likeable – he was loved. His neuroses, grumbles and hang-ups were endemic in the larger proportion of his potential audience. As Philip Oakes has said, ‘He was truly representative and so he could be excused,’ right down, it would appear, to the murderer that lurks in us all. When he needs the cash to match a bet that he cannot go one better than Phineas Fogg and travel around the world in less than eighty days, he shows his shady resolve: ‘I’ll get the money. I’ve just remembered I’ve got a great grandfather up in Leeds – of a very nervous disposition. I think a good strong paper bag popped behind him should see me all right.’ He isn’t joking. On one occasion his attitude to Bill Kerr, humbled into carrying out some repair work underneath Hancock’s motor car, is positively sadistic: ‘I’ve a good mind to jump on his ankles. I’d love to see him spring up and hit his head on the big end.’ His disposition to petty larceny pales by comparison: when Richard Wattis checks his card at a hotel reception desk he soon discovers an outstanding issue from last time, ‘a little matter of four towels, a tea service and an ashtray’. The cleverness of the casting and character of Sid James as the great swindler rampant in Hancock’s life was that Tony himself was just as questionable in the honesty stakes. It was totally in character that he should be less successful at iniquity, although in one episode, The Scandal Magazine, he is revealed as being more corrupt than Sid. James is the editor who has the Chief Constable and the Director of Public Prosecutions in his pocket. After Hancock clears his name and wins a king’s ransom in damages, it soon emerges that the initial exposé on his sordid dalliance with a cigarette girl was not without foundation.

That may have been an extreme case. As Dennis Main Wilson explained, ‘The beauty of it was that you could identify him not with yourself, but with your Uncle Fred or your next-door neighbour. Johnny Speight gave the objectionable characteristics to Alf Garnett, but much more harshly, much more cruelly, in a much later, crueller world. We did the Hancock shows in a much happier world.’ At least they appeared to become happier as the new prosperity took hold. The analogy with Alf Garnett, as immortalised by actor Warren Mitchell, is significant, reminding one that much about Hancock would now be considered sexist, racist and politically incorrect. Much of his sexist disgruntlement was directed at the buxom and bounteous Hattie Jacques, in her radio role as the mountainous secretary Miss Griselda Pugh. When she is too busy to take a letter because she is knitting herself a jumper, Hancock acknowledges the fact: ‘Of course. I saw the lorry bringing the wool in this morning.’ When she is conscripted into service as a teacher at the school Sid has coaxed him into opening, she suggests adding ‘Cantab’ after her name, to which Tony responds, ‘No. I think Oxon would be better for you.’ In the music-hall era his comments would have been labelled ‘fat’ jokes. Here they serve the comedy of characterisation and produce some of his biggest laughs. When the similarly endowed Peggy Ann Clifford boards a crowded bus, he refuses to offer her his seat: ‘You wanted emancipation. You got it. Stand there and enjoy it.’ In the last television show Galton and Simpson wrote for him, he curtly dismisses one of the candidates for his hand in matrimony: ‘I can’t imagine her staying at home all day mangling.’

When Tony wishes to show solidarity with Sid he slaps him on the back with a triumphant, ‘Sid, you’re a White Man. When they made you, they threw away the mould.’ In the blood donor clinic the question of his nationality brings out a primitive nationalism: ‘Ah, you’ve got nothing to worry about there … British. Undiluted for twelve generations. One hundred per cent Anglo-Saxon with perhaps a dash of Viking, but nothing else has crept in … You want to watch who you’re giving it to. It’s like motor oil. It doesn’t mix, if you get my meaning …’ As Ray and Alan have observed, in those days no one batted an eyelid at material that would today be considered squirm-inducing: there were other things to worry about, not least ‘the threat of annihilation by a nuclear holocaust’. It was also a time when ordinary decent people were unconsciously fed the prejudices that emanated simply from feeling different from what they were not. And who is to say that the expression of such a difference could not then be channelled in the direction of comedy?

Hancock, as a gauge for the human condition and the worst excesses of its folly and aspirations, remains timeless. However, now – or in a hundred years’ time – it is conceivable that anyone from another time or place wanting an inkling of what it was like to live in the Britain of the 1950s could do worse than listen to Hancock’s Half Hour. It is certainly significant that as the man for his day he should reflect the three key prime ministers of the decade as colourfully as he did. We have already seen he was capable of a sly impression of Churchill when the mood took him. The bulldog image fitted all his own delusions of political grandeur, although these were not given full rein until May 1955 when in one episode Galton and Simpson exchanged No. 23 for No. 10, at least in Hancock’s dreams, by which time another Anthony, namely Eden, had been in office for two months. His espousal of the Homburg as his favourite headgear first reached television screens in July 1956, the month that Eden, with whom the style had long been associated, was confounded by Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company. Hancock later claimed, ‘Homburg hats have always struck me as the acme of self-importance.’ Most significantly Hancock’s peak period coincided with the period of office of the politician dubbed by Enoch Powell as the last of the old actor-managers, Harold Macmillan. If Galton and Simpson have a fondness for one facet of the Hancock characterisation, it is for the faded thespian reduced to dragging his threadbare cultural offerings to the far reaches of the kingdom. That tedious train journey to the Giggleswick Shakespeare Festival readily comes to mind. Later when Hancock finds himself reduced to appearing in a commercial for pilchards he sighs for the past: ‘Oh for the days of the actor-manager, me own theatre and that [the thumb goes to the nose] to all of them.’