Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
tagged ‘situation comedy’ at that stage.
Whatever his superstitions, the exposure, which extended over a run of twenty-six weeks, caused Tony no setback. Indeed, the various repeats helped him to achieve his largest audience to date, often in excess of 20 million listeners in those heady radio days, a pre-Muppet phenomenon on a Commonwealth scale. The show with its resignedly bouncy signature tune
We’ll be educating Archie;
Oh what a job for anyone!
He’s no good at spelling – he hasn’t a clue;
He tells us three sevens still make twenty-two.
It’s a problem you can see
To be educating Archie.
acquired the reputation of a lucky talisman for those who appeared on it, the majority either achieving breakthrough fame or consolidating what may until then have been only passing success. In addition to the names already mentioned, they included Dick Emery, Beryl Reid, Ronald Shiner, Graham Stark, Benny Hill, Bernard Miles, James Robertson Justice, Ken Platt, Bernard Bresslaw, Gladys Morgan, Warren Mitchell and Bruce Forsyth. When the programme reached its last series in 1959 Sid James became Archie’s final tutor, but not before one last attempt has been made to see if Hancock wants his old job back. Brough and his ward make the pilgrimage to East Cheam, only for Sid to answer the door. Hancock is not at home, and Sid, with the sniff of money in his nostrils, senses an employment opportunity. Archie is sceptical, but James rises to the occasion: ‘No, look – Hancock was your tutor, wasn’t he? – Well, who do you think tutored Hancock? Me! I was your tutor’s tutor and you can’t do better than a tutor’s tutor.’ The series was running down, but James gave a special fillip to the last few episodes, not least with the vicarious presence of Hancock that he somehow evoked.
Hancock’s tenure with the radio programme amounted to one of the busiest periods of his life. No sooner was he established as a regular member of its cast than he was attached by Brough as principal comedian to the stage show that took Archie to all the top variety theatres in the land. Hancock remembered, ‘The show packed them in wherever it went. If we saw two vacant places in the standing room, we wondered what had gone wrong.’ This kept him occupied most weeks between October 1951 and March 1952, with a four-week sabbatical at Christmas at the Prince of Wales Theatre in the West End where Archie Andrews’s Christmas Party occupied the venue with sell-out matinées during the mornings and afternoons. The Daily Express made the analogy of ‘a Children’s Crazy Gang show’ while Peter Brough, in his autobiography, singled out the running feud between Archie and his long-suffering ‘Sir’ as the principal attraction for the parents: ‘As insult fell upon insult, and Tony writhed from sweet reason to acid invective, the audience roared the more. Maybe we’re all repressed infants deep down and reap most joy from the sight of a schoolmaster being put through the hoop.’ Val Parnell, running the show with Brough, also booked Hancock for the self-contained revue, Peep Show, playing twice-nightly at the same theatre. This amounted to four weeks of four performances in one day in two shows on one stage. Sundays were reserved for recording the radio show. Maybe it came easy after the Windmill. ‘Do you know any good nightclub that wants a good cabaret act?’ he joked wearily to Brough one day. ‘And I could do with a few Sunday concerts as well. I’m wasting my time, you know – I actually have some moments when I’ve nothing to do but sleep!’ One extra performance was squeezed in when Peter Brough, who for many years organised and starred in the entertainment for the Royal Household Christmas Party at Windsor Castle, added Tony to a company that included Peter Sellers, Kitty Bluett and Hattie Jacques. Brough recalled later that Hancock was unquestionably the success of the night: ‘He made Princess Margaret laugh so much that she was in danger of ruining her make-up.’ One wonders which engagement made him more nervous, his first performance before the royal family or the four-week run on the stage which Sid Field had colonised as his own for the last seven years of his life.
One aspect of Educating Archie that must have appealed to Hancock was the association it gave him by proxy with another of his idols, W.C. Fields. Peter Brough never hid the fact that his big break with the BBC came about through the original success on American radio achieved by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his principal dummy, Charlie McCarthy, in the 1930s. Fields also had cause to be grateful to Bergen. When his career sunk into a trough of ill-health, despair and alcoholism, it was the Bergen radio show, initially christened The Chase and Sanborn Hour in deference to its sponsor, that provided him with a new lease of professional life, the series developing a feud between the comedian and McCarthy that was extended to the cinema screen with You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man in 1939. Hancock shared with Fields that intense vulnerability that managed to put the shutters up on pathos. Otherwise all human weakness was there, and although a hatred for children as abrasive as that practised by Fields was never allowed to develop in Hancock, of all the comedians who braved the enemy fire of ink pellets in front of Archie’s blackboard he was the one who came closest to the spirit of the American. While Moreton, Secombe, Shiner, Forsyth and the others projected something approaching friendship in the role, the frequency with which Archie gained the upper hand over his wheedling superior and the indignation he showed in return cast Hancock snugly in the Fields mould. He could not have failed to notice the parallel. Philip Oakes recalled Hancock’s relish at the story of Fields lacing the orange juice of his real-life child co-star Baby LeRoy with over-proof gin. ‘Calls himself a trouper!’ rasped the curmudgeon as the child passed out. ‘Marvellous!’ said Hancock. ‘What a man!’
In later years Hancock admitted to the importance of Archie Andrews in his career and, at the risk of incurring further nightmares, went out of his way to refer to him in his act. In his soul-searching solo performance alone in his bedsitter, Galton and Simpson allowed time for their star to turn back the years. Clenching his teeth before the mirror he ponders his own ventriloquial ability: ‘“Hello Brough.” “Hello Archie.” “You’re going gack in the gox,” “I’m not going gack in the gox.”’ Swivelling his head back and forth, he might have had Brough’s arm up his back as he rattled through the alphabet in time-honoured fashion. Only the glass of water is missing. It is a touching moment in a moving show, but, with deference to Fields, never pathetic in the sense of evoking pathos.
Pathetic in a different way had been Happy-Go-Lucky, the series that débuted the day before Educating Archie returned with Hancock for its second series. It was the sort of show – pushed through by someone high up in the BBC chain of command, who had dreamt up the title and should have known better – that according to Dennis Main Wilson should never have gone on air: ‘You know that the moment you call a show “happy” it’s going to go down the drain … also there was a rule that anything that came down from above was doomed. It was far better if ideas came from the floor up.’ Derek Roy, its main star, came with a large following brought from Variety Bandbox, where he had struck up an effective feud with Frankie Howerd – for a time they alternated weekly as the show’s resident star comedian. In retrospect, Roy appears a sad cipher against the much-loved maestro of Up Pompeii and so much more besides. Howerd was arguably Max Miller’s true heir in the originality he brought to the basic approach of the stand-up comedian, cajoling or chiding the theatre audience into submission as he traded gossip over the footlights like a fishwife in the bread queue. Roy’s lasting claim to immortality may reside in the classic words he used to open what was only the second programme to air on commercial television, when it was launched in this country in 1955: ‘Hello deserters.’ For a while he billed himself on the halls as ‘The Fun Doctor’, but not even his medicine bag could effect the cure required to save this ailing show. He was, according to Bob Monkhouse, a kind man, punctilious to the point of embarrassment in paying a writer for every joke used every time it was used, but his career tailed off into relative obscurity as the 1950s progressed.
Happy-Go-Lucky was constructed to a magazine format that included early reality radio – each week a couple celebrating a wedding anniversary became involved with Roy at the microphone – as well as musical interludes and a resident comedy sketch centred around the activities of a boy scout