Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
backwards, half out of the door. The thunderstruck look on that agent’s face stayed with him forever. According to Beaver, Tony eventually went to great lengths to have an acetate recording made of his act to tout around the agents, but his lack of confidence in himself was not helped by his own assessment of his material. He sensed – perhaps correctly – that what had worked three miles from the front line was not what was required outside the theatre of war. The fear turned out to be academic. He had not been forgotten by Ralph Reader, who in the spring of 1947 offered him an audition for a very special new theatrical venture that would provide Tony Hancock with his first genuine professional engagement. Presented by Reader on behalf of the Air Council, the show attempted to tell the ‘epic story’ of the RAF in twenty-seven scenes of pageantry, comedy and song with a cast of around 300. The majority were still serving as airmen and women attached to the RAF Theatre Pageant Unit, who were supplemented by a small core of professionals, or ‘civvies’ – for civilians – as they became known. Hancock qualified as one of the latter.
His appearance in Wings provided Lily Hancock with her proudest moment from her son’s career. Without his knowledge she travelled to Blackpool in April 1947 for the opening at the Opera House, the largest theatre in the land. As she remembered things, she had reached the interval with no obvious sign of Tony in the first half of the show, when suddenly the curtain went up again. All her anxieties were dispelled as he sidled on in his definitive ‘erk’ characterisation and sang the sentimental appeal that Reader had written especially for him:
Intelligence is not the thing I’m famed for.
I may not be a personality.
Everything that happens I get blamed for,
But on one thing all agree:
I’m just a nuisance to the Sergeant,
I don’t get any break at all,
I’m just the feller what peels the spuds,
I’m at everybody’s beck and call.
I’m just the guy who takes the can back;
They all think I’m dumb.
But I don’t care tuppence,
’Cos I know darn well I’m a hero to my mum.
As Lily emphasised, ‘It really was the biggest moment of my life.’ Fellow cast member Bryan Olive recalled how the last line would bring the house down: ‘He used to deliver it perfectly and it always brought laughter and applause.’ But it was also a moment that in later life Tony wanted to forget. Philip Oakes claimed that a production still of the act showing ‘a phenomenally lean Hancock’ with broom in hand singing robustly into the spotlight was ‘a weapon which could always be used to silence him in arguments about artistic integrity in later years’. Who does relish being reminded of one’s apprentice years? For the moment, though, the taste was sweet. He could put the bad times behind him – little realising they would return even worse – and relax into the relative security of a five-month run of the largest theatres in the land at the unheard-of salary of £10 per week.
Reader proved to be in his element as his production traced the birth, progress and achievement of the RAF with all his customary flair for the spectacular. Wherever the Gang Show had played during the war, however precarious the conditions, he had insisted upon full makeup, full costume and his trademark backcloth, a light blue curtain emblazoned with the words ‘Gang Show’. Now he was spoiled for choice. The local Blackpool press gave a rousing send-off to ‘these fine-looking lads and lasses who put all they knew into this heart-warming pageant of memory in which times, trumpets, tears and triumph are all served up in laughter and light and spiced with the wine of youth’. In truth the spectacle and ebullience had the edge over the comedy. The sketches were perceived as ‘a little long and a little futile, although the audience mostly liked them’. A scene on a troopship was described surprisingly – in the light of Reader’s standards – as ‘tiresome … with some risky “jokes” at which the young people were supposed to laugh and applaud … there is no excuse for questionable “humour” in a show as good as this’. Within a decade Hancock would go on to epitomise the humour of a new generation, and there was one single moment when the show provided a glimpse of what was in store. As he interrupted a gymnastic display set on Blackpool sands by shambling across the stage in a hopelessly ill-fitting uniform, an apoplectic Drill Sergeant yelled, ‘Where do you think you are? Just look at your trousers. Look at your jacket. You are a disgrace to the service. How long have you been in the Air Force?’ The shaking Hancock looked up, paused and, literally shrugging the words off his chest, replied resignedly, ‘All bloody day!’
The show boasted no stars as such, but semi-recognisable names in the company included John Forbes-Robertson, the grandson of the famous actor-manager; Brian Nissen, who had appeared in films for J. Arthur Rank and, like John, was still serving as an Aircraftman First Class; and Edward Evans, who would become famous as Mr Grove in the pioneer television soap opera The Grove Family. Ten motor coaches and many trucks were needed to transport cast and scenery from town to town. Among his comrades Hancock made a distinct impression. Bryan Olive, still technically a pilot within the service at the time, recalls that a vote was taken among a group of them as to who would achieve the greatest success in future life: ‘There was a first, a second and a third. He must have had a noticeable something even then, because he came first! And I’m not really certain we ever told him …’ In spite of playing to packed houses for most of the eighteen-week run, the show lost a staggering £32,000, losses met by the Air Council with the assistance of the Treasury in the cause of propaganda and the further recruitment drive for the service. The tour culminated in a special enhanced staging at the Royal Albert Hall on 14 September for a Battle of Britain remembrance show, when for one night only Richard Attenborough paid a personal tribute to those who fought the Battle of Britain, John Mills recited Tennyson’s ‘Loxley Hall’ and the evergreen George Robey with Violet Loraine reprised the tear-jerker that defined an earlier conflict, ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’.
One looks to his comrades for some insight into Hancock’s approach to his work and his aspirations during those days. His artistic integrity stood out. John and Freda Maud, who met on the show, remembered him as a ‘forthright and honest character’ who, even though he seemed to prefer the company of the amateurs to that of his fellow civvies, ‘stood out as a professional – he couldn’t perform something if it wasn’t right’. Olive noted that while not without a sense of humour, Hancock came over at times, although mainly with hindsight, as melancholy for one so young: ‘I think it was obvious that in a subtle way, even then, he had designs on becoming a big international star and also strangely I think he had a touch of snobbery in him, again in a somewhat subtle way.’ This did not prevent him coming over to one and all ‘as a friendly sort of guy’, although one who sensed his limitations. When an opportunity arose for some of the company to hold an informal concert of their own, Bryan distinctly recalled overhearing one of the lads urging Tony to do something, but he would not comply: ‘I can’t without a script.’ He could be, added Olive, ‘a bit mysterious and/or complicated’. Elsa Page might have understood: ‘There was a depth to Hank, a more serious side to our pal than just a clown … mind you, in the old Nuffield centre days, we WAAF and WREN mates had to buy him a few pints before we could get him up to dance with us!’
The pomp of the Royal Albert Hall extravaganza could only have heightened the sense of letdown that the tour was over. For a while he shared a house, or part of it, with Edward Evans in Grey Close, Hampstead Garden Suburb. It was back to straitened circumstances until a more conventional booking came his way, the part of an Ugly Sister in pantomime at the Oxford Playhouse. But before then an epiphany had occurred in his life that would have a major effect on his comedy outlook. Throughout 1947 the current comedy idol of the West End held sway in the revue Piccadilly Hayride at the Prince of Wales Theatre, right across the road from the Nuffield Centre. There was no escaping the fact that Sid Field was the man