Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
me how it should be delivered.” From then on we were lifelong friends.’ They became so close that when Eric got married in early 1952 Tony and Cicely arranged for him and his bride, Edith, to hold their wedding reception in the apartment that belonged to Cicely’s parents. Hancock also made secret arrangements for a brass band – in effect, the brass section of the BBC Variety Orchestra – to play them off from the tarmac as they flew to Jersey on their honeymoon, only to have to cancel the plans when the day coincided with the funeral of King George VI. Eric concedes that the farewell strains of ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’ would have been in very bad taste.
The part played by Sykes in helping to formulate the essential Hancock persona can never be underestimated. He had cut his teeth writing for Frankie Howerd, attracted by the scope the comedian’s hesitations and interjections gave for defining his character. In a similar way he latched onto something in Hancock’s inner psyche and from it developed the seedy grandiloquence and supercilious air that spelled out what his later audience would have taken for granted, that being teacher to a doll was beneath him. Eric insists, ‘In real life he was a very likeable man, but there was a great dignity about Tony. When you talked to him you realised this man was not a bank manager, he was not someone in the City, he was not in the Civil Service, and he didn’t sweep the roads. You had this man who looked like an actor-manager when he was young enough to play juvenile leads.’ The rough, crude prototype of what Galton and Simpson would go on to polish soon fell into place. Lee Conway, writing mid-series in the New Musical Express, acknowledged, ‘He is always the essence of outraged dignity. The rich fruity voice, the cultured speech with the aspirants omitted are his stock in trade, not the gag book. Give Hancock a situation and instantly you have him creating belly laughs.’ Dennis Main Wilson noted that Sykes had given him more than this, namely ‘an attitude to performing’.
Who first coined the ‘Flippin’ kids!’ catchphrase that contributed to Hancock’s early fame has always been a matter of conjecture. Although Eric Sykes surely deserves some credit for placing it in a comedy context, Tony’s mother traced its origins to Durlston Court Hotel days: ‘He remembered the saying from an old porter we used to have at the hotel. In the summertime when all the children used to come in from the beach, there used to be sand everywhere. So all summer you would hear the old man say, “Those flippin’ kids!”’ Her friend Mary Hobley recalled that ‘flippin’!’ was a constant epithet in Tony’s vocabulary when a young man. It is hard to believe now that more than fifty years later ‘kids’ is sometimes considered politically incorrect, while, according to the lexicographer Nigel Rees ‘flipping’, its shared cue for laughter in this family-oriented show, has been the most common euphemism for a stronger participle beginning with the same letter since the 1920s. Significantly the catchphrase was used during the first of Hancock’s three appearances, sometimes as much as three times, and not in the main scholastic sketch. In the latter he was referred to by name as Dr Hancock. He did little if anything to vary his voice between the two characters, which only added to the surrealism of the whole affair. It might be difficult for an outsider to connect the softer, lower register – more akin to his natural delivery – which matured into being with Hancock’s Half Hour with the strangulated, high-pitched tones that characterised Hancock during the early 1950s. It may be summed up as highfalutin with ignorant undertones, with a touch of Cyril Fletcher’s haughtiness alongside a dash of Sid Field’s preciousness. Scrutiny of the scripts suggests that Sykes tried at times to inject an additional pattern into the tutor’s speech. For some passages of nervous exasperation Hancock’s words are peppered with mms. That is according to the script; when heard the interjection presents a transcription challenge, with Hancock managing to pronounce it ñah. Eric may have had the oohs, aahs and ers of Frankie Howerd in mind, all originally scripted by himself. The effect is of Hancock chewing his words:
TONY: Now Andrews A. … mm … er in a few weeks’ time … mm … it will be … mm … end of term … ahahaha … before you put a match to your desk … listen.
ARCHIE: All right then, I’ll hold my fire.
TONY: Before … mm … end of term, there will be the examinations … mm … dealing with … mm … lessons contained in parts II and III … mm … of the school curriculum … mm … come in ‘A’ for Archie.
At times it sounds like a voice destined for advertising allergy cures, on the threshold of a sneeze that never comes. It never caught on.
Hancock never forgot his introduction to Brough’s co-star. No sooner had Peter ushered him into the dressing-room and picked up the little fellow than Archie was away: ‘It’s good to meet you. I want to welcome you to the show. I hope you’ll be happy working with us.’ One imagines Tony was lost for words. Something within him was never entirely comfortable with the idea of working with an inanimate object, however great Brough’s skill as a puppeteer in bringing it to life. Ten years later he wrote:
It was uncanny working with a dummy like Archie. He became so human to us that we would ask, ‘Is Archie going to rehearse today?’ as if he could think and feel and talk like a real person. The public obviously shared this conviction. Over the air he became a lovable human being to millions of children and I have known them cry bitterly when they discovered he was only a dummy and not a real boy. This made it all the more macabre to see him hanging unceremoniously from a hook or sitting in a chair with his head lolling over the side.
Hancock, ever susceptible to maleficent forces, could not bring himself to walk in alone for fear of Archie’s accusing slack-jawed gaze following him around the room. He claimed it gave him nightmares. For all of Archie’s pert charm, it is not difficult to comprehend his feelings. The sinister undertones exerted by a ventriloquial doppelgänger had sent a collective shiver down the spine of the nation in Cavalcanti’s 1945 film, Dead of Night, as a dummy took over the mind and personality of actor Michael Redgrave playing the ventriloquist. Maybe Hancock was aware that Peter’s father, Arthur Brough, a pro from the music halls, had acted as technical consultant to the movie and provided the doll. To those suggestible enough, the frozen eyes and grotesque features of the standard dummy, with their mockery of childhood and mad insight into the relationship with the manipulator upon whose reality it depends, must prove as unnerving as the Day-Glo tackiness, the sadistic schadenfreude of the circus clown to a sensitive child. Brough ensured that Archie was an aristocrat among dolls, but there was always part of Tony that never grew up, distrusted wood and wires over flesh and bone. And then there was the uneasy truth hinted at in Roger Caldwell’s poem, ‘The Dummy Speaks’.
I speak through him – he does not speak through me.
He’s my automaton, invention, and his life
is not worth living that’s not also mine.
Check-suited fool, death’s entertainer,
does he think, when he’s alone, I am no better
than the wire-pulled god he made in his own image?
Hancock tried to qualify his disdain: ‘I really hated that dummy – only during the shows, I mean – but you’ve got to get the mood … I had to hate Archie, and I did, and so it was funny.’ Peter noted jokingly that Tony’s hatred did surface at times outside of the act: ‘He used to growl, “Your grandfather was a gate-legged table,” and as Archie I would have to reply, “And your grandfather drank his way under my grandfather.”’ Whatever his feelings, they did not stand in the way of his performance. His demand for naturalism led Hancock to insist that Brough work with the doll at rehearsals and not merely for the studio broadcast. ‘I cannot make the script live unless he’s here,’ he would plead to Peter. The ventriloquist understood the need, while resenting the sacrifice of having to stand like a stork for longer than necessary. At the time Brough was agonising over varicose veins, but the comedian would insist, ‘I can’t make it work unless I work to him … now come on, let’s do it properly.’ Tony himself admitted that Archie seemed to bring out the best in everyone. ‘I’m not going to let a wooden doll get away with