Читать книгу Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography - John Fisher - Страница 13

‘I’m Anthony Hancock, comedian. I wonder if you’ve got anything.’

Hancock was catapulted out of the forces on 6 November 1946, although any immediate exhilaration must have drained away when the dreariness of the life ahead of him sank in. In retrospect the influx of new comedians onto the British show-business scene after the war appears like a tidal wave, but the process was far more gradual. At the beginning the whole glorious parade of them – Hancock, Howerd, Wisdom, Secombe, Sellers, Milligan, Bentine, Cooper and many more – had yet to be prised from an indiscriminate blur of desperate hopefuls, from which the fittest – or funniest – would survive in an eerie parallel to the struggle from which they had just emerged. Gang Show veterans like Hancock were also at a disadvantage; not released from the service until after more established ENSA members, they consequently found themselves in an already overcrowded market for entertainers.

Tony recalled that he flew through the demob centre at Wembley ‘like a typhoon’, making a grab for his £60 gratuity and the first clothes he could put his hands on whether they fitted or not. Hancock admitted, ‘I thought the battle was over when they sent me out into the world in one of those stiff, hairy suits and hard pale blue trilbies that no one would have dared to wear in public except for the sheer joy of getting out of uniform. But it had only just begun.’ For two weeks he installed himself in a room at the British Lion Club in Ebury Street, before moving to the Union Jack Club for veterans just across the way from Waterloo Station. His room resembled a cell, but provided a paradise: ‘It meant that for the first time for four years you didn’t have to be with other people if you didn’t want to. It was luxury unimagined.’ The downside was provided by the regular visits from the police, ‘who came from time to time to see if there were any deserters’. Like customs officers, they must have cast the shadow of ersatz guilt upon him. The threat of the redcaps became a recurring comic motif in the radio version of Hancock’s Half Hour almost ten years later, as Hancock the poseur made spectacular claims to a derring-do war career he never had.

At Ebury Street he was reunited with his old chum, Graham Stark. Graham recalls that they survived on a diet of coffee and doughnuts – Hancock used to joke that he ended up with a hole in his stomach – and spent much of their time together in the Nuffield Centre, the club for service personnel then situated in Coventry Street, where it embraced the restructured remains of the bombed-out Café de Paris next door. They spent their time wondering when someone was going to offer one of them a ‘walk-on’ part at the very least. Stark remembers, ‘It was almost a relief when the weekends came, the agents’ offices were closed, and nobody could give us the brush-off.’ They whiled away the time with the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle, turning the solving of it into an exhibitionist ritual designed to command attention. As Graham wielded the pencil, Tony would extemporise: ‘Oh, here’s one, right – let’s think now – C – blank – T – four-legged animal – feline – it’s not easy, is it?’ Sitting there in their demob suits, they received free coffee and sandwiches and nobody asked any questions. Crosswords never lost their allure for Hancock, and his fascination with words – the magic of holding them up to the light and teasing out their innermost meaning – was brilliantly caught by Galton and Simpson in the bedsitter episode, as he stared into the mirror and pondered his teeth: ‘I wonder which one’s the bicuspid. It’s a funny word that, isn’t it? Bicuspid. Bicuspid. Bicuspid … yes, that’s probably from the Latin. Bi meaning two, one on each side. Cus, cus meaning to swear. Pid meaning pid. Greek probably, pid. Yes, Greek for teeth. So bicuspid – two swearing teeth.’

When Stark was offered a spell in repertory in Kidderminster, Hancock took the first step in the direction of some form of self-sufficiency by moving into a one-room flat with two beds at the end of a bombed terrace at Edith Road, Barons Court, with another Gang Show pal, John Beaver. Here they shared a washbasin with no running water and a bucket underneath to catch the water when you pulled out the plug. Hancock was always forgetting to empty the water, and this played havoc with the landlady’s ceiling underneath. Here also Hancock endured the freezing winter of 1947, keeping warm by clinging to the bed covers – ‘I just gave up looking for work and took to my bed’ – and subsisting on a distinctive brand of sausage: ‘It tasted like hell, but you ate it and if you had a couple of glasses of water each day for about three days following, you felt full.’ Beaver recalled a slightly more varied menu: ‘Tony was afraid of getting scurvy and insisted on a diet of green stuffs.’ They used to go shopping for Brussels sprouts, potatoes and the infamous sausage, but because his pride did not allow him to be seen carrying a shopping bag, Hancock insisted on using an old cardboard attaché case. In those days, when it was not easy to come by new kitchen utensils, they were restricted to a single knife, fork and spoon each, a frying pan and a saucepan. Everything was cooked over a gas ring. The spirit that pervaded the ménage is shown by a mock-diploma that some friends, the actor David Lodge among them, presented to Beaver: ‘Know by all men by these presents [sic] that this Golden Spoon, to be known hereafter as the “Culinary Trophy” was presented to Johnathon Beaver, Esq., of the Beaver-Hancock household as a token of esteem and regard of the Gastronomical Triumphs over the Sausage.’ Beaver was keen to emphasise that it was all in good fun, describing his roommate as ‘somebody who was always in a good mood, in a good temper – you could always get on with him – no big-time attitude about him – he would always give and take’.

As poverty competed with the rationing culture of the day, the exigencies of the kitchen were matched by those of the wardrobe. In addition to ‘the railings’, the name Hancock gave to his pinstripe grey demob suit, he admitted to two shirts and a change of underwear. Celluloid collars came in useful. Uncomfortable as hell, they could at least be washed clean under a running tap. The Fleet Street veteran Derek Jameson recalls meeting Tony by chance at the old Lyons Corner House in Leicester Square some time around this period. As the young journalist sat there with a cup of tea and his pile of newspapers, an easy target for anyone wanting a chat, he was approached by the aspirant young comedian: ‘He wanted a gander at my Daily Mirror. What he said made little impression on me at the time. What he wore stayed in my mind forever. It was his tie. A perfectly normal, rather dull neckpiece. Only he had no shirt under it. Just a crumpled sports jacket.’ The memory would have come as no surprise to Tony’s close friend, the comedian Dick Emery, who bumped into him in a similar state of half-dress in nearby Lisle Street soon after. Tony was carrying a parcel wrapped in newspaper. When Dick asked where he was going, he confessed that he was trying to find someone to lend him the money for his laundry, namely the shirt tied up with string under his arm!

When Beaver went into pantomime at the end of 1946, John Herod, another Gang Show chum who later became prominent in Australian show business as Johnny Ladd, moved in. Elsa Page was a mutual friend with an RAF background who remembers them as a typical ‘Odd Couple’: ‘They were not compatible as roommates. John was very precise with everything very clean, in its place, and well organised. Hank (as he was still affectionately known during these times) was untidy and left pans about, so John was cross and Hank would go home to Mum.’ Hancock could not have survived thus far without the support of his mother. When she came up to town, tea at the Regent Palace Hotel was de rigueur. Often Graham Stark saw her slide a ten bob note to her son under the table to save him the embarrassment of not being able to pay. The ritual was one that family friend Mary Hobley also observed. Tony always acknowledged the encouragement his mother gave at this time: ‘For years she had every right to tell me to turn it in, but she never did.’ In another interview he went further: ‘She thought that everything I did was great. It was only when I was settling down that she started to become critical. She was clearly very successful at hiding her doubts.’

According to Elsa, it was Herod who bullied Hancock into pursuing work. Each day he would take the tube from Barons Court to Charing Cross Road, where the variety agents had their offices en masse. Tony had a special mantra that helped him on his way. ‘You will call on every agent in London,’ he would recite to himself over and over as the train rattled on its way. When he emerged into the daylight his resolution disintegrated and, seduced by the smell of coffee beans roasting, he would allow himself to be drawn into the womb of the Express Dairy or a rival establishment for the newspapers, then lunch, followed by the decision-making process of what film to see that afternoon. One day hunger conquered fear and he forced himself up a dingy staircase into an agent’s office: ‘Heart thumping, eyes fixed and rather glazed, I burst in and announced, “I’m Anthony Hancock, comedian. I wonder if you’ve got anything.”’ As he extended his hand in greeting, he misplaced his foot and slipped on the rug. His feet went forward as he went backwards, half out of the door. The thunderstruck look on that agent’s face stayed with him forever. According to Beaver, Tony eventually went to great lengths to have an acetate recording made of his act to tout around the agents, but his lack of confidence in himself was not helped by his own assessment of his material. He sensed – perhaps correctly – that what had worked three miles from the front line was not what was required outside the theatre of war. The fear turned out to be academic. He had not been forgotten by Ralph Reader, who in the spring of 1947 offered him an audition for a very special new theatrical venture that would provide Tony Hancock with his first genuine professional engagement. Presented by Reader on behalf of the Air Council, the show attempted to tell the ‘epic story’ of the RAF in twenty-seven scenes of pageantry, comedy and song with a cast of around 300. The majority were still serving as airmen and women attached to the RAF Theatre Pageant Unit, who were supplemented by a small core of professionals, or ‘civvies’ – for civilians – as they became known. Hancock qualified as one of the latter.

His appearance in Wings provided Lily Hancock with her proudest moment from her son’s career. Without his knowledge she travelled to Blackpool in April 1947 for the opening at the Opera House, the largest theatre in the land. As she remembered things, she had reached the interval with no obvious sign of Tony in the first half of the show, when suddenly the curtain went up again. All her anxieties were dispelled as he sidled on in his definitive ‘erk’ characterisation and sang the sentimental appeal that Reader had written especially for him:

Intelligence is not the thing I’m famed for.

I may not be a personality.

Everything that happens I get blamed for,

But on one thing all agree:

I’m just a nuisance to the Sergeant,

I don’t get any break at all,

I’m just the feller what peels the spuds,

I’m at everybody’s beck and call.

I’m just the guy who takes the can back;

They all think I’m dumb.

But I don’t care tuppence,

’Cos I know darn well I’m a hero to my mum.

As Lily emphasised, ‘It really was the biggest moment of my life.’ Fellow cast member Bryan Olive recalled how the last line would bring the house down: ‘He used to deliver it perfectly and it always brought laughter and applause.’ But it was also a moment that in later life Tony wanted to forget. Philip Oakes claimed that a production still of the act showing ‘a phenomenally lean Hancock’ with broom in hand singing robustly into the spotlight was ‘a weapon which could always be used to silence him in arguments about artistic integrity in later years’. Who does relish being reminded of one’s apprentice years? For the moment, though, the taste was sweet. He could put the bad times behind him – little realising they would return even worse – and relax into the relative security of a five-month run of the largest theatres in the land at the unheard-of salary of £10 per week.

Reader proved to be in his element as his production traced the birth, progress and achievement of the RAF with all his customary flair for the spectacular. Wherever the Gang Show had played during the war, however precarious the conditions, he had insisted upon full makeup, full costume and his trademark backcloth, a light blue curtain emblazoned with the words ‘Gang Show’. Now he was spoiled for choice. The local Blackpool press gave a rousing send-off to ‘these fine-looking lads and lasses who put all they knew into this heart-warming pageant of memory in which times, trumpets, tears and triumph are all served up in laughter and light and spiced with the wine of youth’. In truth the spectacle and ebullience had the edge over the comedy. The sketches were perceived as ‘a little long and a little futile, although the audience mostly liked them’. A scene on a troopship was described surprisingly – in the light of Reader’s standards – as ‘tiresome … with some risky “jokes” at which the young people were supposed to laugh and applaud … there is no excuse for questionable “humour” in a show as good as this’. Within a decade Hancock would go on to epitomise the humour of a new generation, and there was one single moment when the show provided a glimpse of what was in store. As he interrupted a gymnastic display set on Blackpool sands by shambling across the stage in a hopelessly ill-fitting uniform, an apoplectic Drill Sergeant yelled, ‘Where do you think you are? Just look at your trousers. Look at your jacket. You are a disgrace to the service. How long have you been in the Air Force?’ The shaking Hancock looked up, paused and, literally shrugging the words off his chest, replied resignedly, ‘All bloody day!’

The show boasted no stars as such, but semi-recognisable names in the company included John Forbes-Robertson, the grandson of the famous actor-manager; Brian Nissen, who had appeared in films for J. Arthur Rank and, like John, was still serving as an Aircraftman First Class; and Edward Evans, who would become famous as Mr Grove in the pioneer television soap opera The Grove Family. Ten motor coaches and many trucks were needed to transport cast and scenery from town to town. Among his comrades Hancock made a distinct impression. Bryan Olive, still technically a pilot within the service at the time, recalls that a vote was taken among a group of them as to who would achieve the greatest success in future life: ‘There was a first, a second and a third. He must have had a noticeable something even then, because he came first! And I’m not really certain we ever told him …’ In spite of playing to packed houses for most of the eighteen-week run, the show lost a staggering £32,000, losses met by the Air Council with the assistance of the Treasury in the cause of propaganda and the further recruitment drive for the service. The tour culminated in a special enhanced staging at the Royal Albert Hall on 14 September for a Battle of Britain remembrance show, when for one night only Richard Attenborough paid a personal tribute to those who fought the Battle of Britain, John Mills recited Tennyson’s ‘Loxley Hall’ and the evergreen George Robey with Violet Loraine reprised the tear-jerker that defined an earlier conflict, ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’.

One looks to his comrades for some insight into Hancock’s approach to his work and his aspirations during those days. His artistic integrity stood out. John and Freda Maud, who met on the show, remembered him as a ‘forthright and honest character’ who, even though he seemed to prefer the company of the amateurs to that of his fellow civvies, ‘stood out as a professional – he couldn’t perform something if it wasn’t right’. Olive noted that while not without a sense of humour, Hancock came over at times, although mainly with hindsight, as melancholy for one so young: ‘I think it was obvious that in a subtle way, even then, he had designs on becoming a big international star and also strangely I think he had a touch of snobbery in him, again in a somewhat subtle way.’ This did not prevent him coming over to one and all ‘as a friendly sort of guy’, although one who sensed his limitations. When an opportunity arose for some of the company to hold an informal concert of their own, Bryan distinctly recalled overhearing one of the lads urging Tony to do something, but he would not comply: ‘I can’t without a script.’ He could be, added Olive, ‘a bit mysterious and/or complicated’. Elsa Page might have understood: ‘There was a depth to Hank, a more serious side to our pal than just a clown … mind you, in the old Nuffield centre days, we WAAF and WREN mates had to buy him a few pints before we could get him up to dance with us!’

The pomp of the Royal Albert Hall extravaganza could only have heightened the sense of letdown that the tour was over. For a while he shared a house, or part of it, with Edward Evans in Grey Close, Hampstead Garden Suburb. It was back to straitened circumstances until a more conventional booking came his way, the part of an Ugly Sister in pantomime at the Oxford Playhouse. But before then an epiphany had occurred in his life that would have a major effect on his comedy outlook. Throughout 1947 the current comedy idol of the West End held sway in the revue Piccadilly Hayride at the Prince of Wales Theatre, right across the road from the Nuffield Centre. There was no escaping the fact that Sid Field was the man to be seen. Hancock and Stark went together, and to this day Graham can enact the experience: ‘We were kicking the seats in front of us – it was so funny – he was magic – we’d never laughed so much.’ He recounts the moment in a Shakespearian burlesque from the show in which Sid played King John and a young Terry-Thomas his cook, Simnel. Taking one look at the man-at-arms standing nearby in full suit of armour, Field commented, ‘You wanna get a fourteen pound hammer and put a crease in them.’ That was the moment a convulsed Hancock turned to his friend and whispered his allegiance: ‘He’s the one. He’s the one for me.’ The ability to give an inconsequential line comic depth was only one attribute that would in due course find an echo in Hancock’s work. It helped that Sid had also been born in Birmingham.

Field was a revue comic who shone in situations provided by sketches as distinct from a stand-up comic with a direct line of attack to his audience. In this respect he was multi-faceted, ringing the changes on a succession of comic types that included the wide boy, the effete photographer, the apprentice golfer, the moonstruck musician and more. While Hancock, by contrast, evolved into a single-character man, the comic projection of himself, he nevertheless found a way of absorbing many aspects of Field into his central persona, although he did sidestep the camp quality of much of his idol’s work. It was osmosis born of hero-worship, rather than conscious copying. In one sketch Sid played a landscape painter pestered by the attentions of an irksome schoolgirl. One can hear Hancock delivering the response: ‘Why don’t you go and play a nice game on the railway lines – with your back to the oncoming engines?’ And then, after he has pacified her by producing a bottle of lemonade, ‘Get the bottle well down your throat.’ Throughout Hancock’s career comedy aficionados with sharp ears could detect the influence of Field in his own delivery. When Sid James attempts to correct Tony during a boxing lesson, Hancock becomes aggrieved: ‘There is no need to shout. I didn’t know. I wish I hadn’t come.’ We could be listening to Field the golfer on the first tee with his instructor, Jerry Desmonde. When Hancock gets into an altercation in the cinema, the breathy belligerence gives him away: ‘What’s the matter with you? Hold me coat. You picked a right boy here. I’ll knock him back in the three and nines. A quick left and he won’t know what’s hit him.’ It could be Field’s boisterous cockney spiv, Slasher Green, remonstrating. When the emigration officer explains that all potential immigrants must be vetted and documented, Hancock sighs, ‘What a palaver!’ It must have been difficult to resist switching it for Sid’s catchphrase. ‘What a performance!’ the older man would seethe, as his dignity was destroyed, his patience unravelled. Even the arch preening of Field’s society photographer, if not the camp sexual ambivalence, was caught in the television episode where Tony applies his hand to the camera and prepares to take Sid James’s portrait. All Sid expects is a ‘snap’; Tony, all aflutter in large floppy velvet bow tie and smoking jacket, is intent on creating a ‘symphony in emulsion’.

In his appearance on The Frost Programme in January 1967, Hancock brilliantly conjured up the magic of his hero for a whole new audience:

And Jerry Desmonde would come on and say, ‘Now ladies and gentlemen, with great pleasure I would like to introduce England’s leading exponent of the tubular bells, Mr Eustace Bollinger.’ And Sid would come on with two mallets, and a terrible wasp waistcoat and bicycle clips – which have always seemed to me to be funny anyway. He used to say to the musical director, ‘What do you think I should play?’ and he’d say, ‘Why don’t you play Beethoven’s 15th Movement of the 7th Symphony in E flat minor with the modulated key change to G flat major?’ and Sid had a good long look at him, and then he got hold of one of these mallets and said, ‘Yes, I thought you’d suggest something like that,’ and tried to belt him with this stick. Then the orchestra all rose up and tried to clout him with their violins, so nobody was in any doubt as to what the relationship was for a start! Then a voice from the box said, ‘Maestro,’ but Sid knows it’s not true. That was the beauty of it. Anybody calling him ‘Maestro’, he knew the man was a fool. And on a table by the side he’d got a Ludo set, a toy fire engine, a toy poodle – by the side of these tubular bells – and this bloke in the box says, ‘Maestro, what’s all the junk on the table?’ ‘Junk?’ ‘Yes, what is all that junk on the table?’ ‘That’s not junk,’ says Sid. ‘That’s prizes!’ That paralysed me. You could just imagine him sort of cycling up from Sidcup or somewhere, with his clips on and all this gear on his bike. Most of it is in your imagination. Like any great comic, Sid relied a great deal on the imagination and warmth of his audience.

In Field’s work Hancock saw the comedy of exasperation, as taught to him by George Fairweather in the magician sketch, raised to its highest level so far. Hancock’s world of ‘stone me!’ moroseness, of ‘how dare you!’ indignation was partly derived from his own character and background, partly the product of his writers’ creation; but a small corner of it – one forever Birmingham – will always remain a legacy from Sid Field. This blissful, benign comedy god died from a heart attack on 3 February 1950 at the sadly premature age of forty-five, with, as Tynan observed, alcohol and self-criticism his pall-bearers. The whole world of theatre mourned: according to Phyllis Rounce, Tony’s agent at the time, ‘It was the only time I ever saw him in tears.’ He was so besotted by him he christened his first two cars accordingly, one ‘Sid’ and the other ‘Harvey’, after the invisible rabbit of the play of the same name in which he was playing at the time of his death. Not discovered on the West End stage until March 1943 after years of provincial touring, Field had packed the cream of his achievement into seven years. The same time span reverberates in any assessment of Hancock’s own greatest success, the darker echoes of alcoholism, anxiety and self-doubt providing their own disturbing postscript to his own story.

No one can say how much of Field’s ambience rubbed off on the young Hancock as he trod the boards of the Oxford Playhouse that Christmas. Frank Shelley, the artistic director of the Playhouse, had offered him the part of the Ugly Sister after being impressed by his performance in Wings at Oxford’s New Theatre the previous August. In one scene he had to sit on his sibling’s shoulders as they lurched down a flight of stairs together. In a fit of mischief on the third night Hancock had the funnier idea of throwing his skirt over his partner’s head. Unable to see a thing, the latter staggered across the stage and then tried to steady himself above the footlights before losing all equilibrium and landing them both in the orchestra pit. From that moment Hancock decided to play things by the script, in which he was billed as the Hon. Sarah Blotto. His counterpart, the Hon. Euphrosyne Blotto, was played by the actor John Moffatt, who much later would become familiar to television viewers as Coméliau, the prickly superior judge to Michael Gambon’s Maigret in the Granada series based on the stories by Georges Simenon. What most impressed Moffatt was Hancock’s ‘great good taste – he couldn’t bear any kind of vulgarity on stage. I played the haughty, pretentious sister and Tony played the draggle-tail who was always letting me down, so he had great opportunities to be vulgar, but he never was.’ The Oxford Mail praised their clowning as ‘slapstick of a very high order’. Hancock, with a nod to the dreaming spires, joked that it was a very intellectual panto: ‘Three minutes of Latin in the wood scene – which had to go – and people chatting about Nietzsche during the ballroom scene. Lots of philosophical chat. Extremely successful for Oxford.’

To economise he bypassed the standard theatrical digs and rented a gypsy caravan for £1 a week in a field outside the city. It sounded a good idea until the first morning a herd of cows gave him their version of an alarm call when they vigorously started butting the sides. The farmer had his explanation, one it is difficult not to imagine Hancock himself delivering in that rortiest of rustic voices he reserved for the part of Joshua Merryweather in Galton and Simpson’s travesty of The Archers, The Bowmans: ‘Them cows allus go round that there ’van first thing in the morning. Allus have done. They sharpens their ’orns on it.’ The last night arrived and in best theatrical tradition the ladies in the cast were plied across the footlights with chocolates and flowers. Then, unannounced, two youths bounded out of the audience and regaled Sarah and Euphrosyne with bouquets fashioned from onions, carrots, cabbages and bottles of stout. It was not until many years later that Moffatt discovered that one of those lads was an enthusiastic young theatre buff named Ronnie Barker, whose own career received a substantial boost shortly after when he joined the Playhouse’s repertory company under Shelley.

In 1993 Barker dedicated his autobiography to the director, one of ‘the three wise man who directed my career; without men like these, there would be no theatre’. Hancock could not have disagreed. By the end of April he was back at the Playhouse, although Moffatt admits he cannot vouch for the story that Shelley offered him the job when he bumped into Tony picking up a penny from the pavement in Charing Cross Road, saying, ‘Well, if you’re as hard up as all that, I can use you in this large-cast play we’re doing.’ The piece was Noël Coward’s Peace in Our Time. He had three small parts and re-enacted them with relish in the years to come: ‘The first role – it said “A man” and I had to say “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck.” That’s all. I walked straight into the juvenile lead, who said to me, “Get out of my bloody way, you bastard.” Every night I used to say “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck,” “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck,” “Goodnight, Mrs Shattuck.” It all meant something. Nothing! Then I played a German civil servant with a pork pie hat on. And the producer said, “Will you keep an undercurrent of German throughout the scene.” And I had bifocals on and I couldn’t even find my drink and I was fumbling under the table to find my glass and keeping up an undercurrent of German. “Auch was ist ummm Bahnhof ummm ich habe nien ummm Düsseldorf.” Then I finally appeared as a drunken, brutal Nazi soldier. I had the lot on. The jackboots, the gun, the swastika armband. And for this character Coward had written the worst line he had ever written without any question. I said, “Bitte.” “The bitter’s off but we’ve got some old and mild,” the landlord replied. And I thought when I was playing it even then, “Jesus, what is this man doing?”’ He returned to London and the pursuit of comedy – intentional comedy, that is.

There had been a second agenda for visiting the Prince of Wales Theatre those several months ago. Another old RAF colleague, Derek Scott, was in gainful employment there as the accompanist to Terry-Thomas in his impressionist act, Technical Hitch, a remarkable display of virtuosity in which the rising star played both a frantic disc-jockey and the voices – Paul Robeson, Ezio Pinza, Richard Tauber and Hutch were a few – on the records that he had mislaid, or, if the budget of the show allowed, broken. Scott, who had a profitable career ahead of him as a musical director and consultant in commercial television, would become a life-long friend of Hancock. One night at a party Tony, against type, found himself improvising an act with Derek, on the keyboard, acting as feed. It was a great success and at Scott’s suggestion they set about polishing it with a view to offering it to Vivian Van Damm, the legendary impresario of the Windmill Theatre, the venue where, as Denis Norden has remarked, ‘young ladies were barely paraded and comedians were barely tolerated’. In later years Derek recalled one of the gags that surfaced in their efforts: ‘Shall we walk down to the pub and have a pint, or shall we take a bus and have half a pint?’ Roger Hancock remembered another, something about a stag’s head on display in a pub: ‘He must have been going at a hell of a lick to get through that wall.’ Tony, who will never be celebrated as a joke teller as such, clung to the latter until the end of his life.

More relevant was the main thrust of the routine, which owed a little to Terry-Thomas and no doubt far more to George Fairweather. The theme was an impromptu concert party with, as Hancock put it, a lot of ‘dashing on and off, and putting on funny hats and things’. It was reprised for his second radio broadcast, when he made his début on the Sunday night hit show Variety Bandbox on 9 January 1949. The script he used for the occasion survives. One has no difficulty guessing where he obtained the inspiration for the opening:

I want you to imagine that it’s cold and wet. The scene is a seaside town in the middle of summer. You’re sitting on the sand, the umbrella raised as the rain beats softly down. You’re patiently waiting for the commencement of the local concert party, probably the world’s worst concert party, complete with ancient jokes and aspiring tenor and so on. The curtain jerks slowly back and the Tatty Follies are about to begin – so on with the show.

A few lines into the opening song, we are introduced to some of the cast:

I’m Bertie Higginbottom and I’ll make you smile

And I will serenade you for a little while.

I’m the brightest young soubrette that you have ever seen,

And I’ll impersonate for you the stars of stage and screen.

A rousing burst of ‘Colonel Bogey’ then takes us straight into the comic’s act:

By gow, it’s grand to be back here at Tatty-on-Sea. I’ve got a couple of funny stories here for you. I think they’ll make you laugh. I were coming along to the theatre the other day. A fella came up to me. He says, ‘Joe.’ He says, ‘D’you know why the chicken crossed the road?’ He says, ‘Well, I’ll tell you. It’s for some foul reason.’ Aye, well, we’ll not bother with that one. I’ve got a bit of poetry for you. There was a young lady from Ryde, who ate some green apples and died. The apples fermented inside the lamented, and made cider inside ’er inside. By gow, yon were a hot ’un.

The chicken joke was vintage Max Miller; the limerick doubtless Hancock’s own; the idiom that of variety’s broad Lancastrian rapscallion Frank Randle. He goes on to introduce Sinclair Farquhar, the show’s tenor, who gives us a burst of Ivor Novello’s ‘Shine through My Dreams’ before cueing ‘Knightsbridge March’, the signature tune for In Town Tonight, the popular radio interview programme of the day. This was a device that had also been used by Terry-Thomas in a second spot on Piccadilly Hayride, also accompanied by Scott. The two comedians remained close throughout their lives, so obviously they had an amicable understanding on the matter. Even then Hancock was deliberately milking the outdatedness of his material: ‘My first impression is, I believe, entirely original. I think I am right in saying it has never been presented on any stage before, at any time, in any country. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty.’

No one ever bellowed ‘Mis-tah Chris-tian … I’ll have you hung from the highest yardarm in the Navy’ to the imaginary Clark Gable with greater disdain or to funnier effect than Hancock. This was obviously the point in the concert party routine where he could expand or contract accordingly, limited only by the scope of Fairweather’s own repertoire and anything he had the nerve to add. For the radio broadcast he fell back upon Quasimodo, with its echo of Laughton again, although the contorted freakishness of the character would have been lost on the home audience, together with a visual gag, for which Hancock needed to keep his hair at a special length, in which he discovers he cannot see the audience and then with a deft flick of his head rights the matter, often the cue for applause.

And now, ladies and gentleman, I feel that up to now we’ve had a certain amount of levity, jocularity, laughter and gaiety and I do feel that the time has come to strike a rather more serious note in the programme. So put the children under the seats, while I pull my hair over my face to get right into the character of the Hunchback of Notre Dame … where are they? … Oh, there you are. I’m terribly sorry … got the hair in my eyes and couldn’t see!

Derek would then join Tony to evoke the upper-class cadences of Kenneth and George, the Western Brothers, with words that this time around amounted to so much gibberish:

Scapa on the haybox with scanson on the skay

Forlip with the cranston on the line

Jayboy in the chipmunk and the omi on the tray

Forlip with the cranston on the line

Scarfan is the skipmark with a scarpment in the plee

Nante with the bullcut and the trampot at the gee

But scara scara scara and a flagnap on the ree

Forlip with the cranston on the line

Or something like that, before a brief burst of double talk, a reprise of the nonsense verse and a parody of a rousing chorus song to finish. ‘A Song to Forget’ may have been penned specifically for Variety Bandbox, since it was credited to two rising names, musician and scriptwriter Sid Colin and musician and broadcaster Steve Race.

Everybody shout it,

Sing a song about it,

If you ever doubt it you’ll be blue.

Oh the drums are drumming,

’Cos a great day’s coming,

And about time too.

Hancock later claimed that Derek hated uttering a single word during the whole proceedings and that when he had to open his mouth ‘he would curl up into embarrassment at the sound of his own voice’. Interestingly, a small part of the act brought back family memories: ‘He did a grand job at the piano and boosted my morale no end, as my mother once boosted my father’s, by laughing all through the act. I had no need to turn round; I could hear him spluttering away behind my back. More often than not it was because something had gone wrong – that man went delirious over disaster – but no matter. It was heartening to know that he was enjoying himself, however firmly those blocks of stone out front might sit on their hands.’

The Variety Bandbox broadcast was still in the future when Scott and Hancock, billed as ‘Derek Scott and Hank’, played the Windmill Theatre for six weeks from 12 July 1948. It was the most encouraging sign yet to the young comedian that his career was on track, although why he had reverted to using his wartime Gang Show appellation is a mystery. To audiences on the Wings tour and in Oxford he had used his birth name, and there would appear to have been no rival ‘Tony’ in the new cast. The additional comedy support on a bill dominated by musical sequences and the so-called ‘scenas’ that featured bare expanses of the statuesque female form for which the theatre was famous was provided by a comedy ventriloquist with a dithering style who would one day drop his dummy, figuratively speaking, and a rather rough conventional double act. Van Damn really could afford only two of the three acts, but took them all on trial on the understanding that he could let one of the double acts go at the end of the first week. Harry Worth was safe, and Morecambe and Wise – they had recently changed their billing from their actual names, Bartholomew and Wiseman – fell by the wayside. No one needs telling that their talent and resilience were such that it did not matter. One wonders if Hancock, with or without his partner, would have bounced back from such early rejection.

What may well have been Hancock’s first mention in the national press appeared in a review in the Daily Herald the day after the Windmill opening, stating how ‘young comedian makes a hit’ performing his ‘brilliant thumbnail impressions of a “dud” concert party among the nimble youthful feminine pulchritude’ of what was the 214th edition of Revudeville, the revue in miniature with its coy intimation of nudity in its title, at the theatrical institution that could proudly boast of its wartime record, ‘We never closed,’ only for some wag to echo, ‘We never clothed!’ At a much later date Barry Cryer recalled his surprise at discovering that between shows, which were otherwise more or less continuous, a voice would boom over a loudspeaker with a request that patrons not climb over the seats to get nearer to the front for the next show, an announcement that was usually drowned out by the very sound of men clambering over the seats to get nearer to the first row. Jimmy Edwards, one of the most successful comedians to make his initial impact there, christened the ritual ‘The Grand National’. Every morning the theatre handyman had to tighten the bolts to ensure the seats were secure. The initial slogan, incidentally, referred specifically to the period between 16 September and 12 October 1940 at the height of the Blitz when the Windmill was the only theatre to remain open in London, and not the two weeks at the outbreak of war when all such venues were closed by Act of Parliament.

Later Hancock remarked that his season at the theatre just around the corner from Piccadilly Circus coincided with the London Olympics, and that the front six rows of the stalls were full of Mongolian discus-throwers and non-English-speaking Ethiopians. He was a little less flippant when John Freeman asked him about the experience: ‘It’s a marvellous place to run in an act. We did six shows a day, six days a week, and you learnt to die like a swan, you know, gracefully. The show used to start at 12.15. I used to go on at 12.19 to three rows of gentlemen reading newspapers, and nothing, you see, absolutely nothing, but you’d learn to die with a smile on your face and walk off. Then you came back again at two o’clock to see the same people, and you died again. But it was a great experience. I didn’t enjoy it at the time, but it’s been a great benefit afterwards … but I’ll tell you what was the best thing. The drunks used to come in about twenty past three, when the pubs were closed, and they were quite lively, so it made the day go.’ On a later radio interview, he added, ‘Windmill? Call it the Treadmill … either you’re a comedian after that or you’re out.’ Hancock boasted of arriving at the theatre with four minutes to spare before his first entrance, a situation helped by the decision, forced upon him by necessity, to wear his street clothes, the hardy pinstripe demob suit. ‘I wanted to appear casual,’ he would explain by way of excuse.

For all the pressure to succeed, these were obviously happy times with a close-knit family atmosphere backstage. Phyllis Rounce remembered how the girls would fall about with laughter backstage, unable to go on properly, as Tony mimicked the way they walked, his own penguin gait not entirely conducive to their elegant high-heeled demeanour. What he could never bring himself to do was to refer to Van Damm as V.D. in the way everyone else did. From the beginning he settled for ‘Sir’ or as he once admitted, ‘Mr – er – um – V – er – um – Mr Van – Damm’. His reticence had no effect on the success of his audition and continued until the end of their association. Also on the bill was a magician, Francis Watts, with whom Hancock shared a dressing room: ‘He had just time between shows to grab a cup of tea, then start putting the strings up his sleeves, folding the trick silk flags, putting the rabbits back in the hat … and he was on! Just time to get on stage. Perpetual motion.’ On one occasion the schedule did not go to plan. Someone knocked over a tray of drinks that were an integral part of the act. Hancock and Scott gallantly came to his aid, helping to load the various accoutrements into his bulging dress suit. Unfortunately not everything went into the right place, leaving the conjuror on stage more bewildered than his audience and Hancock helpless with laughter again at the side of the stage. Derek recalled that the big finish to the act was a paper-tearing trick that revealed a torn-out representation of a clock showing the time of the moment accompanied by the grand pronouncement, ‘As the time is now … whatever it was … I shall say good afternoon,’ or whatever was appropriate. The pressure of six shows a day, six days a week eventually got the better of Watts, and Tony would lose control as the magician found himself saying, ‘As the time is now nine thirty …’ when the paper clock told the world it was not yet teatime. As Derek added, the real tragedy was that no one noticed, which made the situation all the more appealing to Hancock. With their U-boat Commander binoculars around their necks, those out front had not come for miracles, let alone laughter, only for the nudes, or as Tony, perhaps ungraciously, once referred to them, ‘these little scrubbers with small tits like dartboards’.

They were paid £30 a week. Hancock worked this out as the equivalent of about 4s. an hour. ‘At these rates,’ he added, ‘no wonder they never closed!’ It was, however, a small venue with a limited capacity of just over 300 and, at the time Hancock played there, entertainment tax to pay of £50,000 a year. But it was never just about the money. There was curiously the glory as well, or what would one day be perceived as such. It may be a myth that Van Damm had the skill of Nostradamus when it came to spotting comedy talent. The law of averages dictated that most of the acts that passed the Windmill audition were forgotten, while among those who failed Van Damm’s scrutiny were Spike Milligan, Benny Hill and Roy Castle. But ahead of Hancock, as the roll call of honour installed in the front of the theatre would show, were Jimmy Edwards, Harry Secombe, Alfred Marks, Michael Bentine, Peter Sellers, Arthur English and, noticeably, Bill Kerr. There became a sense of almost military pride in which those who survived the six-week campaign could vaunt their achievement. Galton and Simpson picked up on this in the radio episode where Hancock contemplated his old school reunion. Sid points out that the rest of his contemporaries may well be big-business tycoons and cabinet ministers by now, but Tony reminds him that he too has made his mark in his chosen profession. ‘You got your name up on the board outside the Windmill,’ Sid replies cynically. ‘What weight’s that gonna carry?’ Hancock is not impressed.

It can be recorded that Hancock’s first visit to the Windmill occurred before the war. He claimed that one afternoon on a trip to London with her son to purchase his school uniform, his mother, desperate for a respite from the pressures of shopping in the big city, suggested they pop in for an hour to a theatre advertising the convenience of non-stop entertainment that she had spotted up a side street not far from the statue of Eros. ‘When she saw the girls, she began pushing me under the seat,’ he added. The comment may have been his invention. He claimed he was seven years old at the time, but if the girls had caused an embarrassment he must have been older, since the idea of nudes had not been introduced into the Revudeville concept of continuous variety until much later in the 1930s. Whatever his age, whatever part the show played in his sexual enlightenment, the tale provides an amusing preface to his later association with the theatre.

No one became a star overnight through Windmill recognition, but its stage provided one of the key shop windows where agents and producers could spot emerging talent. Hancock and Scott were by now registered with an agent. Not much is known of Vivienne Black, outside of her early connection with Hancock, but while he was at the theatre his talents came to the attention of another representative, Phyllis Rounce, a founder of International Artistes. Hancock described her ‘as a charming thing who dropped in and said she was pleasantly surprised to hear people laughing at the Windmill and that indeed I was a funny man’, to which he responded, ‘Well, that lot only come to see Gladys starkers. It’s the hardest job in the world getting a laugh out of tired men who’ve been queuing in the rain since 10.30 with newspapers over their heads.’ ‘And that,’ explained Rounce, ‘is why I want to talk to you about a contract …’ Hancock, impressed by the fact that she was brave enough to sit, a lone female, in a front row full of men, felt flattered he had been discovered. At this time the quick route to fame lay in broadcasting. Names like Jimmy Edwards, Frankie Howerd, Derek Roy and Jon Pertwee were quickly becoming established favourites in radio comedy, while the newly reopened television service was slowly gaining a toehold. Not least with this in mind, Scott encouraged Hancock that they should enter the act in its embryonic form for a BBC audition. During the Windmill run Hancock had moved in with Derek Scott and his wife at their house in Wood Green. He remembered, ‘They had not long been married and hardly collected any furniture together. My bedroom had no curtains and the only way I could dress in the mornings was by lying flat on the floor.’ The roof over his head may have helped his decision to go along with his friend’s suggestion. When the call from the BBC came, Hancock was persevering with a week’s solitary cabaret booking at the Grand Hotel, Grange-over-Sands, overlooking Morecambe Bay. After some dithering, at the eleventh hour he accepted the invitation, and less than a month after they finished at the Windmill, on 14 September 1948, they were auditioning for BBC television at the Star Sound Studios in Rodmarton Mews, just off Baker Street.

With the express instruction that their performance should not exceed ten minutes, they registered reasonably well. The card index record made out after the event described ‘two pleasant young men in lounge suits’ providing 7¼ minutes of a ‘concert party burlesque’ that embraced ‘Yorkshire comic tenor, impressionist cameo, amateur talent competition winner, Western Brothers’. The recorded verdict was that they were ‘not untalented and perform with verve. Should prove suitable TeleVariety or Revue.’ Things moved quickly. A cryptic figure ‘8’ at the bottom of the card indicated that they would either be given a camera test or recommended direct to a producer. No record exists of a camera test. On 1 November at three in the afternoon Hancock made his television début with Scott on a programme called New to You for pioneer producer Richard Afton for a meagre 14 guineas, but not before a significant change had been made in the running of his business affairs. The venture provided the opportunity to break away from Vivienne Black, who disapproved of the audition and in doing so had revealed her distrust of the new medium, a view not uncommon among agents who still clung desperately to the old variety traditions. On 19 October 1948 Hancock signed an exclusive five-year contract with Phyllis Rounce. She was convinced his future prosperity resided in television.

Rounce, a one-time BBC secretary, had a background in Army Welfare Services – Entertainment, another area of forces show business. Resembling a more robust version of the actress Peggy Ashcroft, when peace was declared she went into partnership with her War Office boss, Colonel Bill Alexander, to form the grandly titled International Artistes Representation, not only on the premise that they already knew most of the acts that had entertained the troops, but also to manage young performers emerging from the war as fully fledged entertainers looking for the chance to break into professional show business. From beginnings in a bomb-shattered office – described by her as ‘a converted tarts’ parlour’ – in the remains of a brothel in Irving Street off Leicester Square, she would in time, with the Colonel, steer the careers of, most notably, Terry-Thomas, slapstick star Charlie Drake, television hocus-pocus man David Nixon and the Australian jack-of-all-talents Rolf Harris. For the first, born Terry Thomas Hoar-Stevens, she suggested the snappier name and inserted the hyphen: ‘I thought of it after looking at the gap between his two front teeth.’ As testimony to their success, International Artistes continues to flourish today, responsible for comedic talents as diverse as Paul Merton, Joe Pasquale and Alan Davies under the astute but genial stewardship of Alexander and Rounce’s protégé, Laurie Mansfield.

There would be no further call on Hancock’s services by television until February 1950 when he appeared in a variation of Fairweather’s old conjuror routine in Flotsam’s Follies. The new service was extremely limited, with only one channel on air for only a few hours a day. More crucial to his career at this stage was a second BBC audition, this time specifically for Bryan Sears, the producer of the successful radio show Variety Bandbox, in December 1948. The audition took the form of an actual warm-up for the show, in which Hancock and Scott resorted to their Western Brothers parody, ‘without’, as Tony liked to boast, ‘an intelligible word being spoken’. On 9 January he made his début on the show billed as ‘Tony Hancock’, but accompanied by Scott with, as we have seen, a reworking of the concert party sketch. It would be the first of fourteen appearances on the programme, alongside ten outings on other traditional variety offerings like First House – Look Who’s Here, Workers’ Playtime and Variety Ahoy, over a period of three years. The last two series, broadcast on behalf of national morale from factory canteens and naval bases throughout Britain, saw him performing from the Sterling Metals works in Coventry, HMS Woolwich off Harwich, HMS Indefatigable off Portland, the Royal Naval Hospital at Gosport, and within one week in 1951 three factories distributed through County Antrim and County Down. One imagines that his new agent had to coax her client gently into the seeming drudgery of such bookings, but as long as she was prepared to battle on his behalf he could hardly refuse.

According to Roger Hancock, his brother couldn’t stand Colonel Alexander, joking that the only commission he ever secured was from his artists. Phyllis was a different matter. If she impressed Tony with her vision, he also admired her pluck. In the wake of his growing success on Variety Bandbox, she wrote in November 1950 to Pat Newman, the BBC Variety Booking Manager, to draw his attention to the anomaly that while her client was now receiving 12 guineas a show, on his last outing his script had cost him 10 guineas – by special arrangement with the writer who usually charged more – and his band parts had amounted to 4. Declaring this to be an uneconomic proposition, she requested an increase to 18 guineas for his next broadcast, to which Newman agreed. The economics still seem a little shaky, but Hancock was the first to acknowledge the value of the exposure as well as the need to keep material fresh. It had not taken him long to discover the insatiable appetite of broadcasting for new material. In his interview for The Laughtermakers in 1956 he observed: ‘I wrote a lot of the material myself, and very bad it was. The audience reaction was often terrific, but from the radio point of view it was a waste of time. The trouble was that I liked doing visual work and it was very, very hard to adapt myself to the other thing … I gradually got the feel of the medium, [but] I was never very happy about the single act. At the back of my mind I knew I could do better with the sketch, the comic situation.’ However, any aspirations he had to become the new Sid Field – who never made an impact in radio – did not prevent him from becoming a semi-resident on the programme. But Hancock was philosophical: ‘I welcomed that because I realised that before I could do the thing I wanted to do, I should have to make some sort of a name even if my heart wasn’t in the means I had to employ.’

To 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, just off the Strand, the forces club had become an unofficial testing ground where aspiring performers with a service background could get up and entertain 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 to his partner Fay Hillier: ‘There was just a sink, a gas cooker, and a loo down a gloomy passage. There wasn’t even a mirror. He shaved in front of a polished copper geyser.’ When Dick asked Tony where he slept, he pointed to a pile of newspapers in the corner, explaining: ‘Fresh sheets every day, matey! And I put a coat over myself for warmth.’ What little food he could afford he would eat standing up at the mantelpiece.

All the while Rounce wore her fingers to the bone attempting to fill the long gaps that yawned in her client’s calendar between the occasional broadcasts and the seasonal shows. In this regard pantomime proved a godsend, even if her client regarded the format with the nausea of a spoilt child being forced to swallow its medicine. No sooner had Phyl taken over his career than Hancock was reprising his role as an Ugly Sister in Frank Shelley’s version of Cinderella at the Dolphin Theatre, Brighton, for the Christmas of 1948. The season ran for a mere two weeks. At the same time Sid Field was playing in his out-of-town tour of Harvey at the resort’s more prestigious Theatre Royal. He might have drawn some consolation from the fact that from an early stage Field too had hated the festive genre, the perfectionist within him complaining that he was constantly distracted by the hum and murmur of the children in the audience. In 1962 Tony noted that the nearest he came to meeting his hero was when he found himself sitting near him one day in the pub behind the Theatre Royal, Brighton: ‘But even if my name had meant anything to him I wouldn’t have had the heart to introduce myself. He looked too miserable. I remember he wore a jockey cap, a ghastly black and white affair. I can’t think why unless he needed something to cheer him up. He was just breaking in “Harvey” and the strain of wondering whether the public would accept the transition after those years on the halls was written all over his face.’

At the end of 1949 Cinderella beckoned again, but this time in a new production with Hancock as the comedy lead, Buttons, at the Royal Artillery Theatre, Woolwich. He would never don skirts, which he abhorred, for the Christmas institution again. The review in the Stage was impressive: ‘Tony Hancock shows himself the master of subtly differing styles of humour and his affection for Cinderella carries a conviction comparatively rare in pantomime.’ The words must have settled on his stomach like cold Christmas pudding. Dennis Main Wilson, fast becoming a friend Hancock could trust, mustered together a bunch of mates to provide him with moral support. Actress Miriam Karlin and comedian Leslie Randall were two who dragged themselves along with him to the eastern extremities of the capital to cheer Tony on his way. The nadir for Hancock came when he had to coax an audience of children into singing from a song-sheet ‘Chick-chick-chick-chick-chicken, lay a little egg for me.’ At this performance, the voice of his friends drowned out the juvenile chorus. By the end of the exercise, Main Wilson and his cohorts had been asked to leave the theatre.

The following Christmas he was able to venture into other areas of the story book, cast as Jolly Jenkins, the silly-billy, well-meaning page to the Baron in the tale of Red Riding Hood, with a young Julie Andrews in the title role at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham. This engagement showed a considerable advance in status within the profession, the venue being one of the country’s prime provincial dates. The show also carried the prestige of being a Tom Arnold production: Arnold had arguably the foremost reputation as a producer of spectacular entertainment for the provinces at this time. Tony owed everything to the power of the radio exposure Rounce had been building for him, principally through his bookings on Variety Bandbox. The run of the panto extended from 23 December until 10 March 1951 and must have seemed like a prison sentence. Hancock endured personal degradation every time he had to sing ‘Every little piggy has a curly tail …’. He recalled, ‘There followed five minutes of mutual dislike. Every night I felt like walking up to the footlights and having it out with them: “You don’t like it and neither do I, believe me. It’s too long anyway. Why don’t we call it off and go home?”’ Dame Julie recalls, ‘I knew him a little and liked him … In his hilarious sketches life was always tough and he would stand, gazing out at the audience with thick-fingered, “wet fish” hands at his side, trying to understand the trials and tribulations that befell him.’

Hancock would play pantomime only once more, when he returned to Nottingham for Tom Arnold as Buttons for Christmas 1953. By this time he was a recognisable name with full-blown star billing. During the run he received a letter from Pat Newman from the BBC, who with tongue in cheek drew to Tony’s attention a criticism from an acquaintance who lived there, namely that he was acting in the manner that a Nottingham panto was beneath him. Newman quickly removed the sting by adding that he would almost certainly prefer his performance if this were the case. Tony replied, ‘Regarding the remarks from the young lady from Nottingham, I found them a little hard to take after casting fourteen stone of exhausted Hancock twice a day to the ground solely for the pleasure of the children … best wishes, head down, left arm stiff, foot pointing to the sky, Tony.’ Hancock was not necessarily speaking metaphorically. He made his entrance in the ballroom scene by sliding down a flight of stairs from the wings to the centre of the stage on his heels, pausing at an intermediate landing, and then sliding down another flight to arrive at the front of the stage. Main Wilson paid him a visit during the season and was immediately impressed by the feat, whereupon Hancock promised to take the flights at a single run the following night. On the first part of his descent, however, he slipped, fell the rest of the way and brought the house down, together – literally – with part of the scenery and two chandeliers. ‘The incident provoked gales of laughter from the audience,’ said Dennis, ‘but Tony worried about it.’ During this visit Main Wilson had his realisation that Hancock could raise laughs merely with a look confirmed. George Bolton, a raucous variety comic of the old school, played the Baroness. One night, when Dennis was in the wings, he overheard Bolton say to Hancock just before the kitchen scene, ‘We’ll do the teapots.’ He was referring to an old piece of pantomime business of which the uninitiated Hancock had never heard. But there was no time to learn now and for the next few minutes Bolton was forced to go through a solo version of the routine, while Buttons stood by with a look of bewilderment and resignation that gained most of the laughs.

A sense of Hancock in pantomime can be gained from a radio episode where Galton and Simpson, prompted no doubt by their star’s anguished memories of his experiences, decided to parody Cinderella. This time Tony himself, prevented by Bill and Sid from attending the National Film Board Ball, is forced to stay behind in the kitchen coping with the drudgery of housework: ‘Here I am, a pathetic-looking figure – huddled round an empty grate – no friends – no one to care for me – miserable and lonely – the sort of thing Norman Wisdom dreams about!’ At other times the nostalgia is more specific. As he is driven around Moravia in an open-top car in a not dissimilar pastiche of The Student Prince, he rhapsodises, ‘Ah, this is the life – I never got treated like this when I played Buttons at Woolwich.’ On a television episode, possibly with the Stage review for Woolwich in mind, he chides Sid for not taking his talents seriously: ‘You never did see me in pantomime, did you? My rendition of Buttons had a depth of meaning that astounded everybody who saw it … the whole performance in the best tradition of the Russian theatre and Stanislavski.’ When Sid suggests he didn’t get any giggles, Hancock adds, ‘I didn’t try to get any giggles. I saw the part as a tragedy.’ He was able to get his own back on what he saw as the whole demeaning tradition when towards the end of 1957 he was invited to participate in Pantomania, a Christmas Night television spectacular with a high ‘works outing’ element attached, as the likes of Eamonn Andrews, Huw Wheldon, Cliff Michelmore and Sylvia Peters stepped out of their presenting roles to let their hair down in a burlesque romp loosely based on Babes in the Wood. All goes well until Hancock as Aladdin wanders into Sherwood Forest and the deconstruction – helped by Sid as a disobliging genie – begins.

Returning to his earlier career, one finds Hancock’s slow climb to the top characterised by sporadic dates that came to bear the doomed hallmark of his emerging comic persona. There was the cabaret booking at the Victoria Hotel, Sidmouth, in November 1949, when he arrived a full week early. With two pennies and a halfpenny in his pocket – enough for a life-saving cup of tea at Micheldever Station and no more – he returned to London on the slow train, only to have to go back a week later: ‘I think I made a net loss of about five quid on the deal.’ There was the cabaret for the Election Night Ball at Claridge’s on 23 February the following year. As Hancock proceeded with his act, the toastmaster, who had not endeared himself by introducing him as ‘Mr Hitchcock’, would hold up his hand for Tony to freeze mid-impression while the next result was announced. Only after each seat was declared was he allowed to continue stop-start fashion until the act was through. Tucked away in a corner of the room as he was, he felt he needn’t have bothered. It was a Tory function and he always claimed that at that point he became a committed socialist. The summer of 1950 saw him spend three months at Clacton as principal comedian for impresario Richard Stone – later to mastermind the career of Benny Hill – in the Ocean Revue, initially at the Jolly Roger Theatre on the Pier, and then at the Ocean Theatre at the pier entrance. He neither forgot nor forgave the fierce competition he encountered from the scenic railway known as ‘Steel Stella’: ‘It always seemed as though she reserved her loudest clang and her passengers’ loudest screams for the moment I came to the end of a joke. Every performance it was always a running fight between her, them and me.’ He then added, ‘While I was playing at Clacton I got married.’

He had supposedly been engaged before. While he was appearing in Cinderella at Brighton for the 1948 Christmas season, the local press carried a news story heralding the forthcoming marriage between the Ugly Sister and Prince Charming, played by the actress Joan Allum. The article announced that they had met at rehearsals only a fortnight before and had become engaged on Christmas Eve. It went on to give a boost for Tony’s début on Variety Bandbox the following Sunday, and added bizarrely that at midnight, during the New Year’s Eve Ball attended by the Duke of Edinburgh at Earl’s Court, Allum had been chosen as ‘Miss 1949’. It would be flippant to dismiss the whirlwind fairytale romance as a publicist’s ploy, since the pantomime had only days to run. But although the wedding was mooted for March, Miss Allum does not appear to have featured again in Hancock’s life. There had been an earlier pantomime romance with another actress, Celia Helder, in Oxford the previous year. She had played the unexplained part of Lady Llanfachlfechlfychl. On Hancock’s death she looked back on their liaison: ‘Tony had great, big haunted eyes, but he was as slender as a reed and an extremely attractive person. He was very sweet and gentle, the kind of boy of whom any girl would say, “He’s a dependable chap.”’

He had been introduced to Cicely Romanis by Larry Stephens, whose girlfriend, Diana Forster, worked with her as a model. The occasion was a skating party held by Cicely to celebrate her twentieth birthday at the Bayswater ice rink on 3 April 1950. According to Phyllis Rounce, on the day after the party he wandered into her office and announced, ‘I’ve just met the woman I want to marry.’ The Hancock–Stephens ménage had relocated to Covent Garden by now. Forster had become inured to the shabby, Spartan conditions in which they lived just around the corner from the noisy fruit and vegetable market, a fact that may have eased the way for Cicely’s own acceptance. It was long before My Fair Lady would romanticise the environment; Pygmalion never quite had. For a long period of their courtship his fiancée found herself commuting between Clacton, where Tony had moved out of digs and into a one-bedroom flat to set up home with her, and wherever the fashion world demanded her presence. In the more strait-laced moral climate of the day, the arrangement would have caused some consternation with her parents.

Cicely was born Cicely Janet Elizabeth to William Hugh Cowie and Dorothy Romanis at home at 120 Harley Street on 3 April 1930. Her father was a senior surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital, who in the late 1920s had written with Philip H. Mitchener The Science and Practice of Surgery, a book that remains one of the definitive handbooks on surgical procedure. With her Dinah Sheridan looks, she was already successful in her profession as a mannequin, being one of the first British models to tread the catwalk for Lanvin in Paris. She had stunning auburn hair and a zest for life to match. With an athletic background and nothing if not strong-willed, by the time she met Hancock she had taken a course in judo to protect herself from unwelcome suitors, an occupational hazard of her profession, and revealed an aptitude for motoring at the wheel of a sports car of which her future husband would become envious. Both activities would affect their life together in what – in those early, innocent days – were unexpected ways. They presented an incongruous couple, the elegant fashion plate and the slumped shaggy figure of a man enveloped in the duffel coat he wore for all seasons. His secretary Lyn Took, however, takes pains to insist that she was never ostentatious: ‘She always looked groomed, always wore lipstick, and had a penchant for straight, close-fitting trousers and simple tops when they were the fashion.’ It is said that Fred gave Ginger class, while Ginger gave Fred sex appeal. Cicely had the class already. Whatever frisson connected Tony and Cicely, the attraction between them was not diminished by the fact that she laughed at most of what he said.

They were married at Christ Church, Kensington, on 18 September 1950. Hancock had fun recalling the honeymoon: ‘I had to dash to Clacton for the show. She had a fashion parade. She arrived at Clacton at 6.45. I was onstage at seven. And she had to leave at six the next morning for another engagement.’ It scarcely needs adding that he only just made the church in time and had to rely on his best man for sartorial help: ‘In my rush to catch the train to London I just dived into the wardrobe and snatched together what I mistook for a complete suit. It turned out in the unpacking to be the jacket of one striped suit and the trousers of another. So there I was gaping at myself in the mirror in a ridiculous ensemble of blue above the waist and grey below. Larry lent me a pair of trousers to match the jacket. I felt it would be churlish to complain about the cigarette burn just below the knee and so I covered it up as best I could!’ It appears that at the last moment the Clacton season had been extended by a week, a situation that would explain the raggedness of the arrangements. Cicely’s elder sister, Doreen Harland, recalls the unpredictability that surrounded the occasion, notably the moment ahead of the service when the best man dropped the gold wedding ring down a grating in the church floor. Expediency demanded that he borrow Doreen’s platinum ring ‘temporarily’. No one was more surprised than Cicely when later her betrothed put the differently coloured ring on her finger. It would be six months before Tony brought her another and Doreen had her ring returned. The original was never recovered from the grating.

Two days later the Hancocks were both back in London to officiate as witnesses at Stephens’s marriage to Diana. For a few months they kept on the Clacton flat, an arrangement of greater inconvenience to the bride than the groom, with her frenetic modelling schedule and the metropolitan life style that accompanied it. However, it is significant that while Hancock gave his own profession as ‘actor’ on the marriage certificate, Cicely left that space blank. After the first of his Nottingham pantomimes, heartened by her faith in him – she admitted later, ‘I knew he was going to be a big star’ – she essentially gave up her career to look after her husband. In time, they moved in with Cicely’s parents, now relocated to Cornwall Gardens, Kensington, before acquiring their own apartment at 20 Queen’s Gate Place in Knightsbridge during the summer of 1952. It happened to be on the fifth floor of a Victorian mansion block without a lift. ‘We knew who our friends were in those days,’ Hancock would joke. ‘They had to be friends to climb up all those stairs.’ The climb kept Cicely’s figure in even finer trim, while Hancock was often known to be breathless upon arrival at his own front door.

Meanwhile any pretence at domestic routine would be disrupted by the growing demand for Tony’s services in provincial variety. In February and March 1950 he achieved four weeks at mainly minor syndicate halls; by October he was booked into a four-week run of the mighty Moss Empires. With his increasing radio popularity, 1951 saw fourteen weeks of varied work on the halls between pantomime and the end of the year. Initially he was billed in succession as ‘The Modern Clown’, ‘The New-Style Humorist’, and then with a semi-catchphrase that had been surfacing in his radio work, ‘Isn’t it sickening?’ For Phyllis Rounce a kind of breakthrough came when he was invited to support Nat King Cole for a couple of dates – Birmingham and Liverpool – on his 1950 British tour. Even today Graham Stark relives the excitement: ‘There he was at one of the lowly London halls – first house on the Thursday night – dying like a dog – he always tried to do a clever act, but nothing …! The next day he received the call from his agent to tell him he was going out with Nat King Cole, which was like saying you’d won a million pounds. Cole was a great star and whoever went out with him got to play only the best dates. Tony couldn’t believe it. He said, “What happened?” “Well,” explained Phyl, “Val Parnell – the Moss Empires chief – happened to be in on Thursday first house and saw your work.” But Tony said, “I died the death.” “Ah,” she said, “he realised that and the audience were terrible, but he said to me, ‘I’ve never seen a comic work so hard to try to get an audience as he did. He didn’t get them, but that isn’t the point – 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.