Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
can be recorded that Hancock’s first visit to the Windmill occurred before the war. He claimed that one afternoon on a trip to London with her son to purchase his school uniform, his mother, desperate for a respite from the pressures of shopping in the big city, suggested they pop in for an hour to a theatre advertising the convenience of non-stop entertainment that she had spotted up a side street not far from the statue of Eros. ‘When she saw the girls, she began pushing me under the seat,’ he added. The comment may have been his invention. He claimed he was seven years old at the time, but if the girls had caused an embarrassment he must have been older, since the idea of nudes had not been introduced into the Revudeville concept of continuous variety until much later in the 1930s. Whatever his age, whatever part the show played in his sexual enlightenment, the tale provides an amusing preface to his later association with the theatre.
No one became a star overnight through Windmill recognition, but its stage provided one of the key shop windows where agents and producers could spot emerging talent. Hancock and Scott were by now registered with an agent. Not much is known of Vivienne Black, outside of her early connection with Hancock, but while he was at the theatre his talents came to the attention of another representative, Phyllis Rounce, a founder of International Artistes. Hancock described her ‘as a charming thing who dropped in and said she was pleasantly surprised to hear people laughing at the Windmill and that indeed I was a funny man’, to which he responded, ‘Well, that lot only come to see Gladys starkers. It’s the hardest job in the world getting a laugh out of tired men who’ve been queuing in the rain since 10.30 with newspapers over their heads.’ ‘And that,’ explained Rounce, ‘is why I want to talk to you about a contract …’ Hancock, impressed by the fact that she was brave enough to sit, a lone female, in a front row full of men, felt flattered he had been discovered. At this time the quick route to fame lay in broadcasting. Names like Jimmy Edwards, Frankie Howerd, Derek Roy and Jon Pertwee were quickly becoming established favourites in radio comedy, while the newly reopened television service was slowly gaining a toehold. Not least with this in mind, Scott encouraged Hancock that they should enter the act in its embryonic form for a BBC audition. During the Windmill run Hancock had moved in with Derek Scott and his wife at their house in Wood Green. He remembered, ‘They had not long been married and hardly collected any furniture together. My bedroom had no curtains and the only way I could dress in the mornings was by lying flat on the floor.’ The roof over his head may have helped his decision to go along with his friend’s suggestion. When the call from the BBC came, Hancock was persevering with a week’s solitary cabaret booking at the Grand Hotel, Grange-over-Sands, overlooking Morecambe Bay. After some dithering, at the eleventh hour he accepted the invitation, and less than a month after they finished at the Windmill, on 14 September 1948, they were auditioning for BBC television at the Star Sound Studios in Rodmarton Mews, just off Baker Street.
With the express instruction that their performance should not exceed ten minutes, they registered reasonably well. The card index record made out after the event described ‘two pleasant young men in lounge suits’ providing 7¼ minutes of a ‘concert party burlesque’ that embraced ‘Yorkshire comic tenor, impressionist cameo, amateur talent competition winner, Western Brothers’. The recorded verdict was that they were ‘not untalented and perform with verve. Should prove suitable TeleVariety or Revue.’ Things moved quickly. A cryptic figure ‘8’ at the bottom of the card indicated that they would either be given a camera test or recommended direct to a producer. No record exists of a camera test. On 1 November at three in the afternoon Hancock made his television début with Scott on a programme called New to You for pioneer producer Richard Afton for a meagre 14 guineas, but not before a significant change had been made in the running of his business affairs. The venture provided the opportunity to break away from Vivienne Black, who disapproved of the audition and in doing so had revealed her distrust of the new medium, a view not uncommon among agents who still clung desperately to the old variety traditions. On 19 October 1948 Hancock signed an exclusive five-year contract with Phyllis Rounce. She was convinced his future prosperity resided in television.
Rounce, a one-time BBC secretary, had a background in Army Welfare Services – Entertainment, another area of forces show business. Resembling a more robust version of the actress Peggy Ashcroft, when peace was declared she went into partnership with her War Office boss, Colonel Bill Alexander, to form the grandly titled International Artistes Representation, not only on the premise that they already knew most of the acts that had entertained the troops, but also to manage young performers emerging from the war as fully fledged entertainers looking for the chance to break into professional show business. From beginnings in a bomb-shattered office – described by her as ‘a converted tarts’ parlour’ – in the remains of a brothel in Irving Street off Leicester Square, she would in time, with the Colonel, steer the careers of, most notably, Terry-Thomas, slapstick star Charlie Drake, television hocus-pocus man David Nixon and the Australian jack-of-all-talents Rolf Harris. For the first, born Terry Thomas Hoar-Stevens, she suggested the snappier name and inserted the hyphen: ‘I thought of it after looking at the gap between his two front teeth.’ As testimony to their success, International Artistes continues to flourish today, responsible for comedic talents as diverse as Paul Merton, Joe Pasquale and Alan Davies under the astute but genial stewardship of Alexander and Rounce’s protégé, Laurie Mansfield.
There would be no further call on Hancock’s services by television until February 1950 when he appeared in a variation of Fairweather’s old conjuror routine in Flotsam’s Follies. The new service was extremely limited, with only one channel on air for only a few hours a day. More crucial to his career at this stage was a second BBC audition, this time specifically for Bryan Sears, the producer of the successful radio show Variety Bandbox, in December 1948. The audition took the form of an actual warm-up for the show, in which Hancock and Scott resorted to their Western Brothers parody, ‘without’, as Tony liked to boast, ‘an intelligible word being spoken’. On 9 January he made his début on the show billed as ‘Tony Hancock’, but accompanied by Scott with, as we have seen, a reworking of the concert party sketch. It would be the first of fourteen appearances on the programme, alongside ten outings on other traditional variety offerings like First House – Look Who’s Here, Workers’ Playtime and Variety Ahoy, over a period of three years. The last two series, broadcast on behalf of national morale from factory canteens and naval bases throughout Britain, saw him performing from the Sterling Metals works in Coventry, HMS Woolwich off Harwich, HMS Indefatigable off Portland, the Royal Naval Hospital at Gosport, and within one week in 1951 three factories distributed through County Antrim and County Down. One imagines that his new agent had to coax her client gently into the seeming drudgery of such bookings, but as long as she was prepared to battle on his behalf he could hardly refuse.
According to Roger Hancock, his brother couldn’t stand Colonel Alexander, joking that the only commission he ever secured was from his artists. Phyllis was a different matter. If she impressed Tony with her vision, he also admired her pluck. In the wake of his growing success on Variety Bandbox, she wrote in November 1950 to Pat Newman, the BBC Variety Booking Manager, to draw his attention to the anomaly that while her client was now receiving 12 guineas a show, on his last outing his script had cost him 10 guineas – by special arrangement with the writer who usually charged more – and his band parts had amounted to 4. Declaring this to be an uneconomic proposition, she requested an increase to 18 guineas for his next broadcast, to which Newman agreed. The economics still seem a little shaky, but Hancock was the first to acknowledge the value of the exposure as well as the need to keep material fresh. It had not taken him long to discover the insatiable appetite of broadcasting for new material. In his interview for The Laughtermakers in 1956 he observed: ‘I wrote a lot of the material myself, and very bad it was. The audience reaction was often terrific, but from the radio point of view it was a waste of time. The trouble was that I liked doing visual work and it was very, very hard to adapt myself to the other thing … I gradually got the feel of the medium, [but] I was never very happy about the single act. At the back of my mind I knew I could do better with the sketch, the comic situation.’ However, any aspirations he had to become the new Sid Field – who never made an impact in radio – did not prevent him from becoming a semi-resident on the programme. But Hancock was philosophical: ‘I welcomed that because I realised that before