Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
Hancock, Rounce proved more than an agent. ‘Nursemaid’ is one word that comes to mind. Grooming him was a constant challenge. Shortly before her death at the age of 89 in 2001 she reminisced: ‘It was an absolute nightmare to get him kitted out in anything. He’d say, “I’m not going to put that on,” and you’d say, “Well, it’s an audience out there, darling. You can’t go out in that ghastly, filthy suit. Take the thing off!” It was all that all the time, but it kept me on my toes … I was forever having to haul him out of wherever he was and drag him along. And the moment he was in the studio he was magic. But it was very tiring as well. I’m surprised I’m still alive to tell the tale!’ Shoes presented a special challenge. Well aware of the comic importance of his feet, he became paranoid that the laughs would not come when an old pair wore out: ‘He was awful, absolute hell, because we had to get him new ones and get somebody else to run them in before he would put them on. I’d put them there for him in the dressing room and he’d hide the new ones – on the ledge outside the window, in the toilet cistern – and put on his old ones and then the management would come to me.’ Matters came to a head when he began to play the prestigious Moss Empire circuit. Cissie Williams, who booked the chain, was a disciplinarian who did everything by the book. She argued, ‘If he comes in those shoes, Miss Rounce, he will not be allowed on the stage.’ ‘Coming from her,’ said Phyl, ‘that meant that he would not be allowed on the stage.’ Eventually, halfway through the week, when Rounce made the point that the shoes were integral to his character, Williams conceded, as long as he polished them. Rounce also knew in her innermost heart that they represented his security blanket too: ‘Without those old shoes he was a dead duck. He fumbled and mumbled and nearly blew the whole thing. It was quite extraordinary.’
In her unpredictable life it was nothing for his agent to receive a phone call at four o’clock in the morning begging her to come round on her bicycle to see him. There was no sexual agenda; he just needed someone with whom he could share his anxieties, be they professional, psychological or philosophical. Rounce became used to him invading her office at all hours of the day, sinking himself into her largest armchair in his ‘grey bear coat’ while she carried on with the business of running a talent agency. Sometimes no words would pass between them at all. Several hours later he would suddenly shock himself out of this haven and announce, ‘Well, I suppose I had better be going then.’ On less frequent occasions he could be bright, talkative and playful, reminding her of a chatty sea lion. Phyl was never less than understanding: ‘I think most people on the edge of being a genius are like that … he never got a big head because he was so frightened and that’s what made audiences adore him … he was marvellous, impossible, lovable and hurtful – all rolled into one.’
Shortly after Tony’s début on Variety Bandbox, Hancock and Scott went their separate professional ways, Derek’s family ties keeping him in London while his partner remained on call to the last gasp of the variety tradition that could spirit him away to any part of the country at a moment’s notice. Rounce secured for her client what appears to have been his first conventional variety booking for the week commencing 11 April 1949 at Feldman’s Theatre, later the Queen’s, in Blackpool. Also in a lowly ‘wines and spirits’ spot on a bill topped by the magician, Raoul, was another soul mate, Harry Secombe. The roly-poly Goon, who would one day deputise for his friend in the most bizarre fashion on his radio series, never forgot celebrating with Hancock the birth that week of his first daughter with fish and chips and Tizer – the pubs had shut by the time they left the stage door. Afterwards these two young clowns, high on sentiment and bursting with ambition, strolled down to the promenade together. Harry remained nostalgic for the moment they leaned against the railings and discussed their futures together peering out across the Irish Sea: ‘We had the same kind of feeling about things. We were both ex-servicemen, tadpoles in a big pond hoping to become frogs … we shared the same dreams of success and we argued about what we would do with the world now that we had fought to save it, looking into the dark sea and seeing only brightness.’ In those days Harry found his chum ‘gentle and self-mocking’. Hancock was, in fact, not scoring particularly well, and Robina Hinton, who was on the same bill appearing with her husband as ‘The Hintonis’ in their hand-balancing act, has described the struggle endured by Hancock – no longer cocooned by the solidarity and propaganda of the Wings tour – in order to adapt to the Blackpool crowd. Noisy and restless, one night the audience even resorted to throwing things on the stage: ‘He was in a painful state and in tears at one point. My husband, who had started his act in the twenties and had survived far worse, spent a long time with Tony, trying to give him some confidence.’ Hancock, of course, knew better than most that a seaside resort out of season can be dull and dispiriting. It might have cheered him to know that within a couple of months he had a conventional summer season ahead of him much nearer to home. On 13 June 1949 he opened in Flotsam’s Follies at the Esplanade Concert Hall, Bognor Regis, for £27 10s. a week.
Flotsam, alias B. C. Hilliam, had been one half of the famous ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’ songs-at-the-piano double act that had registered in radio as early as 1926. Hilliam was the high-voiced one: ‘The songs sung by Jetsam are written by Flotsam.’ Malcolm McEachern was the one with low voice: ‘I sing the low notes – you’d wonder how he gets ’em.’ Their most famous number conjured up the magic and romance of the early days of wireless:
Little Miss Bouncer loves her announcer
Down at the BBC.
She doesn’t know his name,
But how she rejoices,
When she hears that voice of voices.
Following his partner’s death in 1945, Hilliam, the droll, piano-playing half of the team, found considerable success with his own radio show under the Flotsam’s Follies banner for several years, a ‘weekly musical, lyrical and topical half-hour’ produced by Tom Ronald, who would, come 1958, be responsible for the radio production of Hancock’s Half Hour. The Bognor season was presented by another notable name in the history of radio comedy, Ted Kavanagh, the legendary script-writer of Tommy Handley’s long-running radio success, ITMA, unquestionably the top show of the time.
Hancock always gave full credit to Hilliam for helping to turn him into a really professional act. In doing so Flotsam complemented the work already done by Fairweather and Reader, and had at his disposal the device of the traditional seaside summer show – ironically guyed for so long by Hancock – before it became superficially slicker, ‘streamlined’ by impresarios like Bernard Delfont and Harold Fielding into lavish resident revues with no changes of programme during the season. Hilliam expected his young comedian to provide five separate acts to ring the changes required from June through late September. Tony provided four and Flotsam let him off the fifth. To complement the concert party parody and the comedy impressions he found himself drawn towards visual and prop comedy. He later joked, ‘I found that to get an act on stage I needed fifteen flying ballet dancers, seventy-eight trumpeting elephants and anything else a scrounging stage manager could lay his hands on.’ The Stage reported that ‘a new and original comedian, Tony Hancock, has registered strongly and his travesties of human life are a feature of every programme’. At the end of the season he combined what he considered the highlights of the four different spots into a single act, and this served as the foundation of his immediate stage work. More importantly the show enabled him to appear in sketches, provided by the production, with other members of the cast.
Meanwhile Rounce refused to take her foot off the pedal when it came to driving along Hancock’s broadcasting ambitions. On 11 August the Bognor season delivered one bonus in the form of a radio transmission of an extract from the show, in which Tony was featured. As has been noted, Flotsam gave him a second break on television early the following year. It is tempting to suppose that the person who would exert the greatest influence on his radio career made several forays to the South Coast to watch him during the summer. On 22 February 1949 Rounce had written to BBC television at Alexandra Palace requesting they take note of a performance her client was due to give at the Nuffield Centre the following Friday evening. Now relocated to premises within the old Gatti’s restaurant in Adelaide Street in the back of St Martin-in-the Fields,