Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
all his material in manuscript form, but by the early 1950s, when his true style was fast emerging, it represented an anachronism. According to Philip Oakes, Tony also admitted to an early fascination with the comic alphabet that defines letters in an ersatz cockney accent. Probably first brought to wider recognition in the 1930s by Clapham and Dwyer, who dubbed it their ‘Surrealist Alphabet’, it also surfaced in the Purdell repertoire. Part of the fun was in the number of variations that could be rung on the basic theme: ‘A for ’orses, B for mutton, C for yourself, D for ’ential, E for Adam, F for vescence,’ all the way to a rousing finale of ‘X for breakfast, Y for God’s sake, and Z for breezes.’ It needs to be read aloud to make full sense.
Hancock continued to ply the loop of small-time club bookings and trudge around the service camps gaining experience with Fairweather and his hard-working gang. In the spring of 1941 encouragement came when he attended an audition in the café of Bobby’s department store in Bournemouth for the BBC Bristol-based producer Leslie Bridgmont. Bridgmont would eventually become a stalwart of the medium with shows like Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh, Waterlogged Spa, Stand Easy and, for the aforementioned Cyril, Fletcher’s Fare, as well as playing a modest role in Hancock’s later career as a radio star. For the occasion Tony performed a monologue entitled ‘The Night the Opera Caught Fire’ and won a booking. Bridgmont never forgot him: ‘He was dressed in his best dark grey suit. My goodness, he was nervous – absolutely gibbering with fright. He had a script that he had written himself and it was absolutely terrible … still, I could see the boy had an individual style that was quite out of the ordinary, so I gave him a chance.’ His contract stipulated he submit his material in typescript. In the excitement Tony got carried away. He explained, ‘Being raw in the business, I took this to mean having this set up by a printer and so at great expense I arranged with a local firm to do it that way. They made a handsome job of it, but I have never been able to convince Leslie Bridgmont that it was not a gag.’ The producer never forgot his surprise upon receiving the copy of Hancock’s words laid out in heavy Gothic type elaborately bound in thick paper. Bridgmont later recalled not only his suspicion that this was an illuminated address that had been torn out of a book, but also his concern that had it not been original with Hancock it would be of no use for the show. When Tony met up with the producer, Leslie explained, ‘A typewritten copy would have done.’ One can picture Hancock’s expression. The job had cost him £3. He later joked, ‘It was cheap at the price: only ninety per cent of my fee.’ A month later at 11 a.m. on 6 June 1941, billed in the Radio Times as Tony J. Hancock, he made his first broadcast on a programme entitled A la Carte, described as ‘a mixed menu of light fare’. Transmitted from Bristol on the Forces station, the forerunner of the Light Programme, it was not an amateur talent show as has been surmised. The others appearing were all established broadcasters including Jack Watson, the comedian son of veteran Nosmo King as ‘Hubert’ and Al Durrant’s Swing Quintet.
Hancock may not have known at the time that the person he had most reason to thank for the broadcast was the actor and variety artist Jack Warner, later to become legendary as the evergreen copper ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ of television fame and in those early days of the war basking in the radio success of his show Garrison Theatre. Indeed the phrase ‘blue pencil!’ – as in ‘not blue pencil likely’ and adapted by Tony in his early billing matter – had, alongside ‘Mind my bike!’ and ‘Little gel’, been one of several catchphrases that Warner had used to boost morale in those times. In his autobiography, Jack of All Trades, Warner recounts the occasion his mother and his wife Mollie were staying at the Durlston Court Hotel when the proprietress confided she had a son who was desperate to enter show business and asked whether Jack might be able to help. This led to Warner watching a performance by the young Hancock, presumably when he was appearing at the Pavilion Theatre for the week of 14 April 1941 in the stage version of his Garrison Theatre hit. Making all the allowances in the world for his inexperience, Jack ‘knew at once that he had a great future before him. He was truly Chaplinesque in the way that he could make pathos and comedy come together.’ Warner arranged an introduction or two, as a result of which the invitation to audition for the producer transpired a month later. Bridgmont had given Jack one of his own big breaks in radio only a few years before. As Tony continued to struggle for recognition, he wrote to Mollie Warner, possibly out of gratitude, although it is not that aspect that impressed her husband when he recalled the letter: ‘It was almost entirely devoted to self-criticism, and written in a mood of desperate melancholia.’ When it was possible the star returned to see his act again and offered all the encouragement he could muster, but, mused the kind-hearted maestro in later life, ‘just how do you convince a very funny man that he is a great comic when he is convinced that he isn’t?’ The doubt, like the talent, was always there.
With one broadcast to his name there was no rush by the BBC to provide Hancock with a repeat booking, but his confidence received another lift that summer when George Fairweather at last invited him formally to join his ‘Black Dominoes’ concert party. The timing was propitious. In the autumn Fairweather would enter the army and it was convenient for George, as well as a natural progression for Tony, now a veteran of the Dorchester–Wareham–Blandford–Ringwood troop circuit for him to take over as head of the Bournemouth War Services Organisation. He was paid £2 a week for chartering buses and organising the tour rota in addition to his own activities as a performer. He once stood for over thirty minutes in driving rain at the head of a battalion of tired and patient entertainers waiting for the charabanc that would take them home from Dorchester, until it occurred that he had forgotten to book it. The experience would have resonated in his mind many years later in an exchange of radio dialogue when together with Sid James and Bill Kerr he finds himself soaked to the skin waiting for the last bus home. Bill notes that the rain has stopped, only to be corrected by Tony: ‘No it hasn’t. The wind’s blowing so hard it can’t land, that’s all.’
It is no surprise that he did not remain in the job for long. It is surprising to find that he was still persisting with the ‘Confidential Comic’ approach, although Fairweather’s absence may explain this. At one camp by default he did secure a bona fide belly laugh. As he crouched forward over the edge of the temporary stage with all the complicity of Max Miller at his intimate best, he trod on a loose plank and fell over the footlights into the lap of the Commanding Officer seated in the front row. He later explained, ‘This piece of unrehearsed knockabout, followed by my struggle to clamber back on stage over the feet of the top brass sitting in the front row, bang up against the rails, proved more hilarious than any of my carefully rehearsed gags.’ Once when he was acting as compère for the ‘Black Dominoes’ at the Boscombe Hippodrome, his entrance was greeted with zero applause and his nerve failed him so completely that he retreated to the wings and continued to announce all the acts from an off-stage microphone. In 1967 Hancock attempted to summarise the experience of his early comedy apprenticeship for David Frost: ‘It took me ten years to go on a stage without a hat on! It was some sort of protection. Like a clown’s mask. You know, when you’ve got the mask on, then you can have the funnel down the trousers and the water poured down, and it’s not you. While I had this hat on, it wasn’t really me doing it. Then gradually as you go along, you shed these things until you are confident enough to be yourself.’
In handing over the reins to his friend, George deputed more to the young Hancock than responsibility. Perhaps not realising that a duodenal ulcer would be responsible for invaliding him out of the army in a very short while, he also around this time entrusted to him much comic business from his own repertoire, items that had already reduced Tony himself to fits of laughter. One routine focused on a comic with catarrh and a predilection for taking snuff. It is almost impossible to transcribe as George described it, but for the record went something like this, with the sniffing and snuffling best left to the imagination: ‘This fellow was walking along the street the other day and – sneeze – excuse me – and a fellow came up to him and said, “Do you know where so and so’s place is?” – sneeze – “No, it’s just across the road, I think” – sneeze – “Ask the taxi driver.” “Yes, I will” – sneeze – …’ The sequence builds in crescendo fashion until the inconsequential finish of the biggest sneeze you could ever expect. To understand how funny this would have been as performed by Hancock, one has only to recall the