Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
in a free-and-easy atmosphere on Tuesday and Friday evenings. There was no pay, just the compensation of copious coffee and sandwiches afterwards. It soon became a favourite haunt of agents and producers. Hancock had needed persuasion from Phyl to go on at all, but looking back on those days he pinpointed the difference between the Nuffield Centre, ‘where the audience laughs at anything’, and the Windmill, ‘where nobody laughs at anything, because they haven’t come to laugh’.
A copy of Rounce’s letter, with its recommendation that here was ‘an ideal intimate act for television as there is a lot of excellent facial expression and miming’, was forwarded to the desk of radio’s unofficial head of auditions. Dennis Main Wilson – he inserted the ‘Main’ to avoid confusion with the musician of the same name – was a recently demobbed Armoured Cavalry officer who after the war, while still in uniform, had ended up ‘liberating’ the German radio station in Hamburg, replacing Nazi-style broadcasting with his own brand of humour under the remit of the Control Commission for Germany. At the age of twenty-three he had subsequently joined the staff of the BBC radio variety department, where his first assignment was to find new talent. He was never less than conscientious, and it is unlikely he would have needed prompting to have been there on any evening newcomers were scheduled to do their stuff. He was already a familiar face to the likes of Bentine, Hill, Secombe, Monkhouse and all the other comics who had appeared at the venue. ‘I was the only one on a regular salary,’ he recalled. ‘Guess who bought the drinks?’ In the notes he made for an autobiography Hancock recalled his first encounter with the man: ‘Not that anyone would ever have taken him for a BBC producer at sight. He could not have looked less like the part. He was dressed very formally with a bowler hat and rolled umbrella, but he was only a junior producer at the time. He has got over that phase since then. He was always a man of wild enthusiasm. He never stayed still for a moment and would sit up all night thrashing out an idea for a show. Nothing was impossible to him.’
That Friday night was important for both of them, not least for Dennis, whose eventual production of Hancock’s Half Hour on radio more than five years later provided this eager, bespectacled man with a credit that would one day stand alongside shows for both radio and television that included The Goon Show, Till Death Us Do Part, Citizen Smith, Marty, The Rag Trade, Barry Humphries’ Scandals and many more. His enthusiasm and nervous energy were prodigious, while his instinct and insight as a talent-spotter were capable of seeing the potential of a performer several leagues down the line from the moment of discovery. If you were a member of ex-service personnel it was not difficult to obtain a BBC audition at this time, and during one six-month period it was estimated that in excess of 6,000 hopefuls were put to the test. Many of these would have come under Main Wilson’s appraisal. He recollected that the quality left a lot to be desired: ‘Most were no better than village hall turns. You were as kind as you could be and told them to go home.’ When it came to comedy, Dennis was probably at his most ruthless. As he said, ‘You can pretend to be serious, but you can’t pretend to be funny.’ At the Nuffield Hancock delivered a variation of his concert party act. Dennis was not too impressed by the material, but noted that ‘the characterisations were fabulous … he did the stand-up comedian, the juvenile lead in a ham play, the tenor, the impressionist … you sensed there was a tremendous latent talent there’. In that respect he considered he stood out from all the other ex-service comedy types. He also noted that ‘he had no body language from the shoulders down. He would slouch on stage. His entire comedy was from his face and his facial expressions.’ Perhaps at that early stage even Main Wilson would have expected Hancock to have made his major impact on the small screen.
By the end of 1949 writer Larry Stephens had replaced accompanist Derek Scott as Hancock’s best male chum and working partner. Stephens is recollected by Graham Stark as a red-complexioned ex-commando captain who was ‘possibly too genteel for this profession’. When Rounce referred to the accommodating scriptwriter in her 1950 letter to the BBC, she almost certainly meant Larry, whom she had introduced to Tony in the autumn of 1949. Larry wrote much of the material that would continue to complement Fairweather’s original routine and the concert party take-off in Hancock’s stage act until the end of his days. He would be best remembered for his collaboration with Spike Milligan in the early period of The Goon Show and subsequently for his contributions to the The Army Game, commercial television’s early standout comedy success from Granada, prior to his premature death at the age of thirty-five from a cerebral haemorrhage in 1959. Spike’s affinity with them both became a fait accompli from the moment he eavesdropped on the pair improvising a fictional family seat for Hancock’s ancestors: ‘In 1883 they built a west wing, the following year they added an east wing, and the year afterwards … it flew away!’
It may have been through Hancock that Spike met Stephens. As the less gifted members of the post-war comic surge drifted away to more mundane roles, so a camaraderie – strengthened by their combined ambition – built up among the survivors, often centred on the pub in Archer Street opposite the Windmill or, more especially, the Grafton Arms, the tavern run by Jimmy Grafton at Strutton Ground, Victoria, where the plans for The Goon Show appear to have been hatched with all the complicity of a second Gunpowder Plot. Grafton, an ex-major, would ostensibly go on to manage Secombe’s career and become himself a serviceable scriptwriter; in truth he acted as champion, catalyst, confessor in varying degrees not only to the Goons, but to Eric Sykes, Max Bygraves, Tommy Cooper, Jimmy Edwards, Alfred Marks, Benny Hill, Stephens and Hancock. For those few post-war years when pennies were scarce, work constituted a luxury and dreaming was everything, his hostelry represented arguably the most exciting enclave in the history of British comedy. Among this select breed, an unofficial cooperative system good-naturedly fell into place. Hancock never lost his affection for those days: ‘There was a very special atmosphere. We all seemed to know each other. Anyone who was working helped the others.’ Dick Emery was a member of the club. He once visited Hancock backstage at the Windmill. He was nearly destitute and Tony insisted on tucking a note into his top pocket. When Dick protested, his benefactor insisted, ‘It’s only money.’ A few months later, when Dick was doing well at the same theatre and Hancock – wandering around with that laundry under his arm – was out of work, Dick came to the rescue. ‘It’s only money,’ Emery shouted as his friend went on his way back down Lisle Street.
For a while Hancock and Milligan were particularly close. For extended spells Spike would sleep under Jimmy Grafton’s grand piano, feeding Hancock’s theory that the Milligan comic genius derived from the brain damage he suffered by constantly knocking his head on the bottom of the instrument when he woke up. Tony struck Milligan as ‘always generous to people worse off than himself’. Spike recalled the occasion he had been in a psychiatric ward: ‘He sent me a letter through Larry saying that he wanted a script as they seemed to have dried up. I wrote what I thought was a very funny one about Father Christmas and Tony paid me a fiver for it. Later I asked him if he ever used it and he said “no”.’ He never needed it in the first place. Spike was also struck by the bond between Larry and Tony: ‘They were like brothers … they seemed to have come from nowhere. They both liked to laugh at the human race and they’d have hysterical laughing bouts. Sometimes they didn’t go to bed at night and I’d come in in the morning as I was writing a script with Larry and there would be this hysterical laughter and it was hurting their heads to laugh.’
At the end of 1949 Hancock and Stephens were sharing a flat in a derelict book and magazine warehouse in St Martin’s Court, the theatre alley off Charing Cross Road. It was the first of several residences scattered across London where they could be found during the next six months, all the way from Bayswater via Primrose Hill to Covent Garden. In order to keep abreast of his debts, Hancock turned his attention to making some pin money bookmaking. This was illegal and dangerous and, as Spike Milligan confided to David Nathan, resulted in him having to change address ‘very quickly – and very quietly’. Nevertheless, it was the flat at St Martin’s Court that acquired the greatest mystique. To gain access you had to pass down a long, narrow corridor that was still the worse for war damage and then lower yourself precariously through a trap door. Phyllis Rounce was never allowed past that point and remembered having to get down on her hands and knees in order to have a conversation through the opened flap. Dick Emery did succeed in penetrating the inner sanctum to discover no furniture whatsoever. As he explained