Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
the job when he bumped into Tony picking up a penny from the pavement in Charing Cross Road, saying, ‘Well, if you’re as hard up as all that, I can use you in this large-cast play we’re doing.’ The piece was Noël Coward’s Peace in Our Time. He had three small parts and re-enacted them with relish in the years to come: ‘The first role – it said “A man” and I had to say “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck.” That’s all. I walked straight into the juvenile lead, who said to me, “Get out of my bloody way, you bastard.” Every night I used to say “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck,” “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck,” “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck.” It all meant something. Nothing! Then I played a German civil servant with a pork pie hat on. And the producer said, “Will you keep an undercurrent of German throughout the scene.” And I had bifocals on and I couldn’t even find my drink and I was fumbling under the table to find my glass and keeping up an undercurrent of German. “Auch was ist ummm Bahnhof ummm ich habe nien ummm Düsseldorf.” Then I finally appeared as a drunken, brutal Nazi soldier. I had the lot on. The jackboots, the gun, the swastika armband. And for this character Coward had written the worst line he had ever written without any question. I said, “Bitte.” “The bitter’s off but we’ve got some old and mild,” the landlord replied. And I thought when I was playing it even then, “Jesus, what is this man doing?”’ He returned to London and the pursuit of comedy – intentional comedy, that is.
There had been a second agenda for visiting the Prince of Wales Theatre those several months ago. Another old RAF colleague, Derek Scott, was in gainful employment there as the accompanist to Terry-Thomas in his impressionist act, Technical Hitch, a remarkable display of virtuosity in which the rising star played both a frantic disc-jockey and the voices – Paul Robeson, Ezio Pinza, Richard Tauber and Hutch were a few – on the records that he had mislaid, or, if the budget of the show allowed, broken. Scott, who had a profitable career ahead of him as a musical director and consultant in commercial television, would become a life-long friend of Hancock. One night at a party Tony, against type, found himself improvising an act with Derek, on the keyboard, acting as feed. It was a great success and at Scott’s suggestion they set about polishing it with a view to offering it to Vivian Van Damm, the legendary impresario of the Windmill Theatre, the venue where, as Denis Norden has remarked, ‘young ladies were barely paraded and comedians were barely tolerated’. In later years Derek recalled one of the gags that surfaced in their efforts: ‘Shall we walk down to the pub and have a pint, or shall we take a bus and have half a pint?’ Roger Hancock remembered another, something about a stag’s head on display in a pub: ‘He must have been going at a hell of a lick to get through that wall.’ Tony, who will never be celebrated as a joke teller as such, clung to the latter until the end of his life.
More relevant was the main thrust of the routine, which owed a little to Terry-Thomas and no doubt far more to George Fairweather. The theme was an impromptu concert party with, as Hancock put it, a lot of ‘dashing on and off, and putting on funny hats and things’. It was reprised for his second radio broadcast, when he made his début on the Sunday night hit show Variety Bandbox on 9 January 1949. The script he used for the occasion survives. One has no difficulty guessing where he obtained the inspiration for the opening:
I want you to imagine that it’s cold and wet. The scene is a seaside town in the middle of summer. You’re sitting on the sand, the umbrella raised as the rain beats softly down. You’re patiently waiting for the commencement of the local concert party, probably the world’s worst concert party, complete with ancient jokes and aspiring tenor and so on. The curtain jerks slowly back and the Tatty Follies are about to begin – so on with the show.
A few lines into the opening song, we are introduced to some of the cast:
I’m Bertie Higginbottom and I’ll make you smile
And I will serenade you for a little while.
I’m the brightest young soubrette that you have ever seen,
And I’ll impersonate for you the stars of stage and screen.
A rousing burst of ‘Colonel Bogey’ then takes us straight into the comic’s act:
By gow, it’s grand to be back here at Tatty-on-Sea. I’ve got a couple of funny stories here for you. I think they’ll make you laugh. I were coming along to the theatre the other day. A fella came up to me. He says, ‘Joe.’ He says, ‘D’you know why the chicken crossed the road?’ He says, ‘Well, I’ll tell you. It’s for some foul reason.’ Aye, well, we’ll not bother with that one. I’ve got a bit of poetry for you. There was a young lady from Ryde, who ate some green apples and died. The apples fermented inside the lamented, and made cider inside ’er inside. By gow, yon were a hot ’un.
The chicken joke was vintage Max Miller; the limerick doubtless Hancock’s own; the idiom that of variety’s broad Lancastrian rapscallion Frank Randle. He goes on to introduce Sinclair Farquhar, the show’s tenor, who gives us a burst of Ivor Novello’s ‘Shine through My Dreams’ before cueing ‘Knightsbridge March’, the signature tune for In Town Tonight, the popular radio interview programme of the day. This was a device that had also been used by Terry-Thomas in a second spot on Piccadilly Hayride, also accompanied by Scott. The two comedians remained close throughout their lives, so obviously they had an amicable understanding on the matter. Even then Hancock was deliberately milking the outdatedness of his material: ‘My first impression is, I believe, entirely original. I think I am right in saying it has never been presented on any stage before, at any time, in any country. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty.’
No one ever bellowed ‘Mis-tah Chris-tian … I’ll have you hung from the highest yardarm in the Navy’ to the imaginary Clark Gable with greater disdain or to funnier effect than Hancock. This was obviously the point in the concert party routine where he could expand or contract accordingly, limited only by the scope of Fairweather’s own repertoire and anything he had the nerve to add. For the radio broadcast he fell back upon Quasimodo, with its echo of Laughton again, although the contorted freakishness of the character would have been lost on the home audience, together with a visual gag, for which Hancock needed to keep his hair at a special length, in which he discovers he cannot see the audience and then with a deft flick of his head rights the matter, often the cue for applause.
And now, ladies and gentleman, I feel that up to now we’ve had a certain amount of levity, jocularity, laughter and gaiety and I do feel that the time has come to strike a rather more serious note in the programme. So put the children under the seats, while I pull my hair over my face to get right into the character of the Hunchback of Notre Dame … where are they? … Oh, there you are. I’m terribly sorry … got the hair in my eyes and couldn’t see!
Derek would then join Tony to evoke the upper-class cadences of Kenneth and George, the Western Brothers, with words that this time around amounted to so much gibberish:
Scapa on the haybox with scanson on the skay
Forlip with the cranston on the line
Jayboy in the chipmunk and the omi on the tray
Forlip with the cranston on the line
Scarfan is the skipmark with a scarpment in the plee
Nante with the bullcut and the trampot at the gee
But scara scara scara and a flagnap on the ree
Forlip with the cranston on the line
Or something like that, before a brief burst of double talk, a reprise of the nonsense verse and a parody of a rousing chorus song to finish. ‘A Song to Forget’ may have been penned specifically for Variety Bandbox, since it was credited