Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
he did work’,” and that’s why Parnell gave him the break.’ So far Hancock had been a supporting act to the comedians Dave and Joe O’Gorman and radio name Carroll Levis with his Discoveries, solid but unspectacular attractions that enabled variety to hang in there with fortitude during its last dying years. But there were not too many stars of Cole’s international stature who were prepared to slog their way around the British hinterland, and Tony was soon back adding his weight to bills topped by staunch veterans like the comedy band Dr Crock and his Crackpots, Murray the Escapologist and the close-harmony singing brothers from Ted Ray’s radio show, Bob and Alf Pearson.
1951 was also the year when television began to show a more constructive interest in his talents. Breaking up the dreary grind of provincial weeks was a run of five appearances between May and June in a fortnightly series called Kaleidoscope, an entertainment magazine in which Hancock played a character called George Knight, ‘a would-be rescuer of damsels in distress’, in a segment entitled ‘Fools Rush In’ written by Godfrey Harrison, who later achieved fame with the delightful A Life of Bliss in both radio and television. The short sketches represent Hancock’s first foray into situation comedy. Roger Wilmut describes one in which ‘he rashly takes over the job of a hotel receptionist so that she can go and meet her boyfriend, and gets himself into a state of total confusion with the telephone switchboard, an irate colonel and a confused foreigner’. On 1 August 1951 he was also featured in the first episode of another Harrison television project, The Lighter Side – a humorous slant on current affairs. The subject of the first programme was food, and Hancock was cast as a civil servant, the bureaucratic bête noire against whom before long he would himself have some of his most memorable encounters in the medium.
That August represented a mensis mirabilis. It should not be forgotten that sound broadcasting was still the dominant entertainment medium in the country. What might have been construed as a potential setback to Hancock’s radio career had occurred in June 1951 when the decision was taken at the pilot stage of a new comedy series entitled Dear Me, written by Ted Kavanagh for the laconic Michael Howard, to drop him from a supporting role in the project. Hancock and the producer, Jacques Brown, appear to have been in accord that there was a similarity between the vocal intonation of the star and his own. He seemed far from perturbed. He may already have been aware of other irons in the fire. Over 2 and 3 August his career in radio would take two enormous leaps with his first resident appearances in two series featuring other established wireless stars. One would make him a household name; the other, while less successful, brought him into proper working contact with the man who never lost faith in him, Dennis Main Wilson, and in the process effect the meeting with the two men who would take his comedy to heights of hilarity and credibility that have arguably never been attained in the broadcasting medium since.
‘Did you write that? … Very good!’
Without warning of any kind the landscape of radio comedy changed dramatically on 9 January 1949. This had nothing to do with Tony Hancock’s début on Variety Bandbox, radio’s top Sunday evening showcase for variety talent. With a precision bordering on poignancy, it had everything to do with the colossus of the medium who shared his initials and had dominated the genre for the past decade. At 5.30 that Sunday the 310th edition of ITMA enjoyed its customary weekend repeat. At the end of the broadcast there was a pause before the reader of the six o’clock news stunned a nation into silence with these words: ‘The BBC regrets to announce the death of Mr Tommy Handley, the comedian.’ Only hours before he had been struck down with a massive cerebral haemorrhage. Although long regarded as a senior figure of the broadcasting establishment, Handley was only eight days short of fifty-seven when he died. Hancock recalled the moment: ‘We were in the middle of the recording when someone came in with the news that the most revered of radio comedians had suddenly died while bending to pick up his collar stud. The whole studio went cold with the shock of it.’ Tony failed to mention if he had completed his contribution. The show’s star Frankie Howerd, whistler Ronnie Ronalde and comedienne Avril Angers were more established artists whose professionalism would have been tested in the circumstances. Not that Hancock needed or should have expected excuses. According to Phyllis Rounce, his performance was lacklustre in the extreme: ‘Tony was petrified and the broadcast was a shambles. The producer said, “Never bring that man near me again.”’ Mercifully Rounce was able to persuade Bryan Sears to give Hancock a second break on the show eleven weeks later, and his broadcasting career gradually acquired impetus from that point. In the heat of the moment Sears would have given no second thought to his words to Phyl, but they contained an uncanny echo of those behind the acronym of the Handley show – ‘It’s That Man Again.’
No broadcaster had come to epitomise the age more tellingly than Handley. It is an indication of a performer’s stature when in the aftermath of death the media go into overdrive in an attempt to nominate that person’s successor, a futile exercise akin to making a superlative of the word ‘unique’. In his favoured medium Handley was the King. A product of concert party and revue, he had a snappy delivery with a razor’s edge timing that crackled over the airwaves, together with a warmth and homeliness that identified him as a friend to the British people without resorting to sentiment. The phrase ‘It’s That Man Again’ first connected with the public through Hitler-inspired headlines whenever the Führer called for ‘Lebensraum’; indeed Churchill himself often referred to the Nazi ogre as ‘that man’. In his tribute to Handley, Sir William Haley, the BBC’s Director General, wrote: ‘How typically English it is that an epithet at first devised for something threatening and hateful should have been transferred to one of the most welcome, most lovable of men.’ The show was a mad hatter’s tea party of eccentric voices and musical interludes, lightning puns and recurring catchphrases stopped just this side of insanity by the brisk, cheerful presence of its star. In the dark days of the war it became a weekly rallying post for civilians and service personnel alike. When peace was declared the comedian, with help from his writer Ted Kavanagh and producer Francis Worsley, cannily reinvented the concept by relocating his activities to Tomtopia, the never-never-island where he reigned as governor over an environment as outlandish as wartime Britain had ever been.
The innate surrealism of ITMA, its creative use of sound effects and its stream of preposterous characters pointed forward in the development of radio comedy to programmes like Ray’s a Laugh, Educating Archie, The Goon Show and Round the Horne. In this respect Hancock’s Half Hour was an outsider. But if Handley had a true successor as a comedian, both in the magic of his microphone skill and in the ability to project himself as the type of person we all acknowledge ourselves in our innermost hearts to be, he was there in embryo that sad Sunday evening trying his best as a nation mourned. Hancock’s moody dreamer would reveal himself to be as perfectly attuned to the Cold War era as Handley’s jack-in-the box opportunist ever was to real war and the Pyrrhic peace that followed. As his career progressed the younger comedian – in the cause of originality and his own sanity – would denounce many of the devices that Handley and his team had developed to the level of art. There is no reason to suppose that had their roles been reversed the affable Liverpudlian would not have done the same.
As 1951 advanced it became apparent to the puppet masters manipulating the strings within the walls of Broadcasting House and its ornate variety outpost, the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street, that Hancock was coming to the conclusion of some form of radio apprenticeship. His accumulated appearances on shows like Variety Bandbox and Workers’ Playtime represented an early stage in some form of established cursus honorum for performers of his age and experience. He would, by now, have been hoping for a regular part in a long-running series. Dismissive of the letdown of the Michael Howard project, he was suddenly offered not one, but two parts that might bring with them both temporary security and the satisfaction of another hurdle overcome. In a round-up of radio reviews on 6 August 1951 the Daily Mirror reported on