Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
a Shakespearian burlesque from the show in which Sid played King John and a young Terry-Thomas his cook, Simnel. Taking one look at the man-at-arms standing nearby in full suit of armour, Field commented, ‘You wanna get a fourteen pound hammer and put a crease in them.’ That was the moment a convulsed Hancock turned to his friend and whispered his allegiance: ‘He’s the one. He’s the one for me.’ The ability to give an inconsequential line comic depth was only one attribute that would in due course find an echo in Hancock’s work. It helped that Sid had also been born in Birmingham.
Field was a revue comic who shone in situations provided by sketches as distinct from a stand-up comic with a direct line of attack to his audience. In this respect he was multi-faceted, ringing the changes on a succession of comic types that included the wide boy, the effete photographer, the apprentice golfer, the moonstruck musician and more. While Hancock, by contrast, evolved into a single-character man, the comic projection of himself, he nevertheless found a way of absorbing many aspects of Field into his central persona, although he did sidestep the camp quality of much of his idol’s work. It was osmosis born of hero-worship, rather than conscious copying. In one sketch Sid played a landscape painter pestered by the attentions of an irksome schoolgirl. One can hear Hancock delivering the response: ‘Why don’t you go and play a nice game on the railway lines – with your back to the oncoming engines?’ And then, after he has pacified her by producing a bottle of lemonade, ‘Get the bottle well down your throat.’ Throughout Hancock’s career comedy aficionados with sharp ears could detect the influence of Field in his own delivery. When Sid James attempts to correct Tony during a boxing lesson, Hancock becomes aggrieved: ‘There is no need to shout. I didn’t know. I wish I hadn’t come.’ We could be listening to Field the golfer on the first tee with his instructor, Jerry Desmonde. When Hancock gets into an altercation in the cinema, the breathy belligerence gives him away: ‘What’s the matter with you? Hold me coat. You picked a right boy here. I’ll knock him back in the three and nines. A quick left and he won’t know what’s hit him.’ It could be Field’s boisterous cockney spiv, Slasher Green, remonstrating. When the emigration officer explains that all potential immigrants must be vetted and documented, Hancock sighs, ‘What a palaver!’ It must have been difficult to resist switching it for Sid’s catchphrase. ‘What a performance!’ the older man would seethe, as his dignity was destroyed, his patience unravelled. Even the arch preening of Field’s society photographer, if not the camp sexual ambivalence, was caught in the television episode where Tony applies his hand to the camera and prepares to take Sid James’s portrait. All Sid expects is a ‘snap’; Tony, all aflutter in large floppy velvet bow tie and smoking jacket, is intent on creating a ‘symphony in emulsion’.
In his appearance on The Frost Programme in January 1967, Hancock brilliantly conjured up the magic of his hero for a whole new audience:
And Jerry Desmonde would come on and say, ‘Now ladies and gentlemen, with great pleasure I would like to introduce England’s leading exponent of the tubular bells, Mr Eustace Bollinger.’ And Sid would come on with two mallets, and a terrible wasp waistcoat and bicycle clips – which have always seemed to me to be funny anyway. He used to say to the musical director, ‘What do you think I should play?’ and he’d say, ‘Why don’t you play Beethoven’s 15th Movement of the 7th Symphony in E flat minor with the modulated key change to G flat major?’ and Sid had a good long look at him, and then he got hold of one of these mallets and said, ‘Yes, I thought you’d suggest something like that,’ and tried to belt him with this stick. Then the orchestra all rose up and tried to clout him with their violins, so nobody was in any doubt as to what the relationship was for a start! Then a voice from the box said, ‘Maestro,’ but Sid knows it’s not true. That was the beauty of it. Anybody calling him ‘Maestro’, he knew the man was a fool. And on a table by the side he’d got a Ludo set, a toy fire engine, a toy poodle – by the side of these tubular bells – and this bloke in the box says, ‘Maestro, what’s all the junk on the table?’ ‘Junk?’ ‘Yes, what is all that junk on the table?’ ‘That’s not junk,’ says Sid. ‘That’s prizes!’ That paralysed me. You could just imagine him sort of cycling up from Sidcup or somewhere, with his clips on and all this gear on his bike. Most of it is in your imagination. Like any great comic, Sid relied a great deal on the imagination and warmth of his audience.
In Field’s work Hancock saw the comedy of exasperation, as taught to him by George Fairweather in the magician sketch, raised to its highest level so far. Hancock’s world of ‘stone me!’ moroseness, of ‘how dare you!’ indignation was partly derived from his own character and background, partly the product of his writers’ creation; but a small corner of it – one forever Birmingham – will always remain a legacy from Sid Field. This blissful, benign comedy god died from a heart attack on 3 February 1950 at the sadly premature age of forty-five, with, as Tynan observed, alcohol and self-criticism his pall-bearers. The whole world of theatre mourned: according to Phyllis Rounce, Tony’s agent at the time, ‘It was the only time I ever saw him in tears.’ He was so besotted by him he christened his first two cars accordingly, one ‘Sid’ and the other ‘Harvey’, after the invisible rabbit of the play of the same name in which he was playing at the time of his death. Not discovered on the West End stage until March 1943 after years of provincial touring, Field had packed the cream of his achievement into seven years. The same time span reverberates in any assessment of Hancock’s own greatest success, the darker echoes of alcoholism, anxiety and self-doubt providing their own disturbing postscript to his own story.
No one can say how much of Field’s ambience rubbed off on the young Hancock as he trod the boards of the Oxford Playhouse that Christmas. Frank Shelley, the artistic director of the Playhouse, had offered him the part of the Ugly Sister after being impressed by his performance in Wings at Oxford’s New Theatre the previous August. In one scene he had to sit on his sibling’s shoulders as they lurched down a flight of stairs together. In a fit of mischief on the third night Hancock had the funnier idea of throwing his skirt over his partner’s head. Unable to see a thing, the latter staggered across the stage and then tried to steady himself above the footlights before losing all equilibrium and landing them both in the orchestra pit. From that moment Hancock decided to play things by the script, in which he was billed as the Hon. Sarah Blotto. His counterpart, the Hon. Euphrosyne Blotto, was played by the actor John Moffatt, who much later would become familiar to television viewers as Coméliau, the prickly superior judge to Michael Gambon’s Maigret in the Granada series based on the stories by Georges Simenon. What most impressed Moffatt was Hancock’s ‘great good taste – he couldn’t bear any kind of vulgarity on stage. I played the haughty, pretentious sister and Tony played the draggle-tail who was always letting me down, so he had great opportunities to be vulgar, but he never was.’ The Oxford Mail praised their clowning as ‘slapstick of a very high order’. Hancock, with a nod to the dreaming spires, joked that it was a very intellectual panto: ‘Three minutes of Latin in the wood scene – which had to go – and people chatting about Nietzsche during the ballroom scene. Lots of philosophical chat. Extremely successful for Oxford.’
To economise he bypassed the standard theatrical digs and rented a gypsy caravan for £1 a week in a field outside the city. It sounded a good idea until the first morning a herd of cows gave him their version of an alarm call when they vigorously started butting the sides. The farmer had his explanation, one it is difficult not to imagine Hancock himself delivering in that rortiest of rustic voices he reserved for the part of Joshua Merryweather in Galton and Simpson’s travesty of The Archers, The Bowmans: ‘Them cows allus go round that there ’van first thing in the morning. Allus have done. They sharpens their ’orns on it.’ The last night arrived and in best theatrical tradition the ladies in the cast were plied across the footlights with chocolates and flowers. Then, unannounced, two youths bounded out of the audience and regaled Sarah and Euphrosyne with bouquets fashioned from onions, carrots, cabbages and bottles of stout. It was not until many years later that Moffatt discovered that one of those lads was an enthusiastic young theatre buff named Ronnie Barker, whose own career received a substantial boost shortly after when he joined the Playhouse’s repertory company under Shelley.
In 1993 Barker dedicated his autobiography to the director, one of ‘the three wise man who directed my career; without men like