Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
in those days there weren’t the coloured lights there are now. We used dead white light and when you were on stage you had to have a full make-up, which in the daylight was hideous. It was a brown-red make-up with blue eyelids, lovely maroon lips and mascara on the eyes. But when you finished the show, so that you wouldn’t lose the audience who were watching for nothing, you had to dive down out in the open air and go through with the box, which they used to call “the bottle”. Tony used to kill himself laughing seeing me coming in this awful make-up with all the local yobbos going “bloody ’ell”.’
Now reacquainted, Fairweather remembered Hancock as ‘not gloomy in those days – bright as a button – terribly conceited – knew everything like we all did when we were young’. More importantly George discerned the awakening of a talent, even if he felt he was using it in the wrong way. By his own admission Hancock had already been accumulating material, much of which he was far too young to understand: ‘from stage acts, from jokes that other people got laughs with in pubs. All was grist to the mill. If it got a laugh, into the act it went.’ With a certain logic he clung most tenaciously to the gags that raised the biggest reaction, which were invariably the most risqué. Suddenly his shorthand skills were serving a use he may not have anticipated as his hand skedaddled across the page of his notebook to record the latest comic gem. In the spring of 1940 through friends of his father he was booked for a smoking concert at the Avon Road Labour Hall. For what was almost certainly his first professional engagement he was paid a fee of 10s. 6d. Precociously billed as ‘Anthony Hancock – the Man Who Put the Blue in Blue Pencil!’ he sashayed on stage like a juvenile Max Miller, the comic icon of the day, whose outrageous motley of technicolour patterned suit with plus fours, jaunty white trilby and corespondent shoes he attempted to replicate with a check jacket, top hat and a pair of the aforesaid two-tone shoes that cost him a complete week’s Civil Service salary of £2 10s. Hancock had not reckoned with the beer served throughout his act. The clinking of glasses and the rowdyism of the crowd made it difficult for him to be heard by the few who were prepared to listen.
In later years Miller and Hancock could be seen as cultural counterpoints: ‘The Cheeky Chappie’ who took the art of communication with a live audience to a zenith never repeated with greater panache and personal assurance, and ‘The Lad Himself’, pioneer and unsurpassed exponent of the more distant and paradoxically more intimate medium of television. Tony never lost his affection for the man John Osborne celebrated as ‘a saloon bar Priapus’. He was totally outrageous, but never really blue, at least in a mucky sense. If the colour applied at all, it was more in keeping with the defining sparkle of his laser-beam eyes. The pair have come to epitomise the cavalier and the roundhead of British comedy, and not just in a visual sense. The day would come soon when Hancock – by now styling himself ‘The Confidential Comic’ in outright homage to his idol – would renounce vulgarity, however honest, however clever, however exhilarating, for ever.
Fairweather agreed to give Tony a try-out in one of his shows at the Theatre Royal. It may be hard to imagine that you could play to army audiences of the day without being suggestive, but George was adamant this was not the style he required. ‘But the troops laughed,’ protested the younger man. ‘Of course they laughed,’ said his father’s friend. ‘Put four or five hundred soldiers in a hall and they’d laugh if you came on and said “arseholes”. But it’s not artistry.’ For all Fairweather’s advice, he had still to learn his major lesson. Fuelled by misguided zeal, he accepted an independent booking at the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Church Hall on Richmond Hill. Fairweather was incredulous when he was told. When he queried whether he intended to use his old material, Tony replied, ‘Why not? They’re troops.’ George explained there would also be Sunday school teachers and church officials serving the refreshments, but he had made up his mind. When the older man next saw him Tony was in tears, blubbering, ‘If only I’d listened to you.’ In time the detail came out. No sooner had he leaned across the footlights to tell the joke about the commercial traveller and the blonde than three old ladies got up to catch an early bus. When he gave them the one about the sergeant major and the ATS officer, silence hung in the air: even the troops were stunned into embarrassment. The one involving the land girl and the farm labourer might have worked had it been heard above the sound of the general exodus that was now taking place. Fairweather adjudged it the dirtiest act he had heard. The words of the priest as he reluctantly paid off the comedian remained with him forever, like the stain of some mortal sin: ‘Hancock, I know your parents well, and I’m sure if they had been here they would have been as disgusted as I am.’ As he dragged himself off the platform, the lady who had booked him told him not to return for his scheduled second spot, adding, ‘We want to fumigate the stage.’ He told Philip Oakes that he subsequently burned his script and in time disposed of the hat and the shoes. Although he was far from a puritan in his private life, in the years to come he would as a performer treat risqué humour with the obsessive contempt of someone with a compulsive cleanliness disorder. He even went as far as questioning a classic line in The Blood Donor. Alan Simpson explains: ‘It wasn’t his line. It was Patrick Cargill’s, when he says, “You won’t have an empty arm, or an empty anything!” “Do we need the ‘empty anything’?” queried Tony. Patrick said, “I like it.” Since it was his line, Tony let it stay.’
The experience strengthened his respect for George Fairweather, who was thirteen years his senior. In return, the relative old stager, impressed by his promise never again to use smut on stage and seeing the conceit knocked out of him as a result of the church hall incident, became all the more inclined to help him, even if in the young Hancock he saw the total opposite of his father. Whereas Jack both on and off stage had represented the epitome of elegance, immaculate down to his fingernails – ‘the reason he used a cigarette holder was because he couldn’t stand nicotine on his fingers’ – Fairweather would refer to his son as ‘the unmade bed’: ‘He had no idea about clothes – just threw them on to keep him warm.’ Soon an emotional bond built up between the two. The younger man never stopped plying his mentor with questions about his father: ‘It was as if going over things again and again somehow brought Jack back to life. He never really got over his father’s death.’ Hancock began to adapt his act with George’s advice, instructing him to learn by watching others, without actually copying their material. Early inspiration was provided by the newly popular radio comedian Cyril Fletcher, whose plummy voice imported a comic solemnity to his famous ‘Odd Odes’, a phrase that entered the language. Hancock’s original instinct had been to spice them up for the troops; Fairweather made sure he removed anything that might be considered off-colour.
In time he broadened his writing efforts to embrace the surrealist travesty approach of the music-hall comedian Billy Bennett, whose billing ‘Almost a Gentleman’ summed up the social inadequacy he projected on stage in shrunken dress suit, curling dickey and chunky hobnailed army boots. The eulogy to the Sheriff of Toenail City dates from this period, together with rhymes like these, which he happily shared with his friend, the actor Jim Dale, in later years:
He came from the mud flats of Putney,
His tongue hanging out like a tie.
From the tip of his toes to the top of his head,
He must have been fourteen stone high.
That was just the first verse. There were twenty-five more, of which Dale also recalls:
The force of the bang was horrific,
Every man was blown out of his shoes,
And a block of tall flats by the side of the road
Caught the blast and was turned into mews.
The assumption is that he did write them himself. Without access to Bennett’s complete canon there is no way of checking, but neither is there any reason to suppose that his relish for sharing them with Dale was fed by anything other than nostalgic pride for the minor achievements of his youth.
Hancock also admired the style of the monologist Reggie Purdell, who became better known as the voice of the magician in the famous BBC children’s radio series Toytown. To the