Anthony John Hancock (12 May 1924 – 24 June 1968) was a major figure in British television and radio comedy in the 1950s and 1960s, known as Tony Hancock.
He was born in Hall Green, Birmingham, England, but from the age of 3 was brought up in Bournemouth where his father, John Hancock, who ran the Railway Hotel in Holdenhurst Road, worked as a comedian and entertainer. After his father's death in 1934, Tony and his brothers lived with their mother and stepfather at a small hotel then known as The Durlston Court (now renamed The Quality Hotel). He was educated at a boarding school at Durlston in Swanage and Bradfield College, Berkshire. He left school at the age of fifteen. In 1942 he joined the RAF Regiment and, following a failed audition for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), ended up with The Ralph Reader Gang Show. Following the war he received regular radio work in shows such as Worker's Playtime and Variety Bandbox. In 1951, he gained a part in Educating Archie, where he played the tutor and foil to the nominal star, a ventriloquist's dummy. This brought him wider recognition and a catchphrase used frequently in the show; 'flippin' kids'. The same year, he made regular appearances on the BBC Television's popular light entertainment show Kaleidoscope. In 1954 he was given his own BBC radio show, Hancock's Half Hour.Working with scripts from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, Hancock's Half Hour lasted for five years and over a hundred episodes in its radio form. The show starred Hancock as Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, a more expansive version of Hancock himself, and usually portrayed as an out-of-work comedian living in the shabby "Railway Cuttings" in East Cheam.The show featured Sid James, Bill Kerr, Kenneth Williams and over the years Moira Lister, Andrée Melly and Hattie Jacques. The series rejected the variety format then dominant in British radio comedy and instead pioneered a style drawn more from everyday life; the situation comedy, with the humour coming from the characters and the situations they found themselves in. The show was an enormous success, and transferred to television in 1956. The television and radio versions then ran alternately until 1959. Hancock also made an ITV series The Tony Hancock Show during this period, which ran for two series in 1956-57.During the run of his BBC radio and television series, Hancock became an enormous star in Britain. 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 key facets of 'the lad himself' were 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. The former is not only considered to be among the very best of the Hancock ensemble pieces, but also a near perfect evocation of a dreary 1950s afternoon.As an actor with considerable experience in films, Sid James became increasingly important in the show as it transferred from radio to television. The regular cast was reduced to just Hancock and James, allowing the humour to come from the interaction between the two men. James was the realist of the two, with a down to earth approach that would puncture Hancock's pretensions. His character would often be dishonest and exploit Hancock's apparent gullibility during the radio series, but there appeared to be a more genuine friendship between the two in the television version.Hancock was to become anxious that his work with James was turning them into a double act, and the last BBC series in 1961 was without James. Despite the contemporary criticism of this, many now consider this final series to contain some of the best of Hancock's television work. Two episodes are among his best-remembered work: The Blood Donor, in which he goes to a clinic to give blood, 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 an amateur 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.Returning home with his wife from recording "The Bowmans" episode, a parody of The Archers, Hancock was involved in a minor car accident. He was not badly hurt, but he did suffer concussion and he was unable to learn his lines for "The Blood Donor", the next episode. The result was that the recording had to be almost completely made with Hancock reading from teleprompters (TV monitors displaying the relevant sections of script). 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 had two notable milestones in comedy. The first was the way he and his writers changed the way that comedy was made; the second, that he was the first TV artist of any genre to be paid more than £1000 for a single half-hour programme.Up until Hancock’s TV series, every British comedy show was performed live. (For instance, 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 the demands of live shooting a constant worry, with the result that the Hancock programmes came to be pre-recorded, initially as telerecordings and later recorded on 2" video tape. The cost of this horrified the executives at the BBC, but they agreed to give it a try, no doubt influenced by the success of American sitcoms such as I Love Lucy or Sgt. Bilko, which had been pre-filming their material for several years. The result was that making a British sitcom became more like making a film. At this time, it was usually only practical to shoot individual scenes; any serious problems would only necessitate returning to the beginning of a scene. The difference this made to the flow and continuity of a show was immediately apparent. Within a few years, it had become standard practice to work in this way.
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.The usual argument is that Hancock’s self-doubt led to self destructiveness. In this view he slowly removed those who rose to stardom with him: Bill Kerr, Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques, and finally his script-writers, Galton and Simpson. His reasoning was that to refine his craft, he had to ditch his catchphrases and become realistic. He argued, for example, that whenever an ad-hoc character was needed, such as a policeman, it would be played by someone like Kenneth Williams, who would appear with his well known oily catchphrase 'Good evening'. Hancock believed the comedy suffered because people did not believe in the policeman, they knew it was just Williams doing a funny voice. His final BBC TV series, was performed with actors playing the supporting parts, and by doing so, he created a new way of doing comedy.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. He would sink into alcoholic depressions, decrying it all as pointless.Hancock starred in the 1960 film The Rebel (released as Call Me Genius in the USA) where he played 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 television series, the film had to be renamed and the new title inflamed American critics. Hancock was later to dismiss the film as crude, and its failure in America was a contributory factor in his disastrous break with his writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, after the last television series for the BBC. This has often been described as the worst decision of his career.His break with Galton and Simpson took place at a meeting held in October 1961, where he also broke with his long-term agent Beryl Vertue. During the previous six months the writers had developed without payment three scripts for Hancock's second starring film vehicle in consultation with the comedian. Worried that the projects were wrong for him, the first two had been abandoned incomplete; the third was written to completion at the writers insistence, only for Hancock to reject it. Hancock is thought not to have read any of the screenplays. The result of the break was that Hancock chose to separately develop something previously discused and the writers were ultimately commissioned to write a Comedy Playhouse series for the BBC, one of which, "The Offer", emerged as the pilot for Steptoe and Son, played (as Hancock would have approved) by two straight actors, Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett. To write that "something previously discussed", which became The Punch And Judy Man, Hancock hired writer Philip Oakes (1928-2005), who moved in with Hancock to co-write the screenplay.In The Punch and Judy Man (1962), Hancock played a struggling seaside entertainer who dreams of a better life; Sylvia Syms played his nagging social climber of a wife, and John Le Mesurier a sand sculptor.The depth to which the character played by Hancock had merged with that of the actor is clear in the film. The scene at the beginning, where Hancock and his wife eat breakfast in total silence, is drawn from the star's own 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, and the film owes much to Hancock’s memories of his childhood in Bournemouth.The film's humour is bitter-sweet and understated, and this has been cited as contributing to its commercial failure, both in Britain and America. Other commentators cite the change of script-writers after Galton & Simpson's departure; Hancock himself blamed Mr Punch.He moved to ATV in 1962 with different writers, who Oakes, retained as an advisor did not value, and they severed their professional relationship. The principal writer of Hancock's ATV series, Godfrey Harrison, had scripted the George Cole radio and television success A Life Of Bliss, and also Hancock's first ever regular television appearances on Fools Rush In (a segment of Kaleidoscope). Harrison had trouble meeting deadlines, so other writers assisted, including Terry Nation.Coincidentally, the series' transmission clashed in the early months of 1963 with Steptoe and Son written by Hancock's former writers, Galton and Simpson. Critical comparisons did not favour Hancock's series.Hancock continued to make regular appearances on British television until 1967, but by now alcoholism had affected his performances. After hosting two unsuccessful variety series for ABC Television The Blackpool Show and Hancock's, he was contracted to make a 13-part series for the Seven Network of Australian television. Hancock went to Australia in March 1968, but only completed three programmes before committing suicide in his Sydney hotel-room. In his one of his suicide notes he wrote: "Things just went wrong too many times".
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