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‘Did you write that? … Very good!’

Without warning of any kind the landscape of radio comedy changed dramatically on 9 January 1949. This had nothing to do with Tony Hancock’s début on Variety Bandbox, radio’s top Sunday evening showcase for variety talent. With a precision bordering on poignancy, it had everything to do with the colossus of the medium who shared his initials and had dominated the genre for the past decade. At 5.30 that Sunday the 310th edition of ITMA enjoyed its customary weekend repeat. At the end of the broadcast there was a pause before the reader of the six o’clock news stunned a nation into silence with these words: ‘The BBC regrets to announce the death of Mr Tommy Handley, the comedian.’ Only hours before he had been struck down with a massive cerebral haemorrhage. Although long regarded as a senior figure of the broadcasting establishment, Handley was only eight days short of fifty-seven when he died. Hancock recalled the moment: ‘We were in the middle of the recording when someone came in with the news that the most revered of radio comedians had suddenly died while bending to pick up his collar stud. The whole studio went cold with the shock of it.’ Tony failed to mention if he had completed his contribution. The show’s star Frankie Howerd, whistler Ronnie Ronalde and comedienne Avril Angers were more established artists whose professionalism would have been tested in the circumstances. Not that Hancock needed or should have expected excuses. According to Phyllis Rounce, his performance was lacklustre in the extreme: ‘Tony was petrified and the broadcast was a shambles. The producer said, “Never bring that man near me again.”’ Mercifully Rounce was able to persuade Bryan Sears to give Hancock a second break on the show eleven weeks later, and his broadcasting career gradually acquired impetus from that point. In the heat of the moment Sears would have given no second thought to his words to Phyl, but they contained an uncanny echo of those behind the acronym of the Handley show – ‘It’s That Man Again.’

No broadcaster had come to epitomise the age more tellingly than Handley. It is an indication of a performer’s stature when in the aftermath of death the media go into overdrive in an attempt to nominate that person’s successor, a futile exercise akin to making a superlative of the word ‘unique’. In his favoured medium Handley was the King. A product of concert party and revue, he had a snappy delivery with a razor’s edge timing that crackled over the airwaves, together with a warmth and homeliness that identified him as a friend to the British people without resorting to sentiment. The phrase ‘It’s That Man Again’ first connected with the public through Hitler-inspired headlines whenever the Führer called for ‘Lebensraum’; indeed Churchill himself often referred to the Nazi ogre as ‘that man’. In his tribute to Handley, Sir William Haley, the BBC’s Director General, wrote: ‘How typically English it is that an epithet at first devised for something threatening and hateful should have been transferred to one of the most welcome, most lovable of men.’ The show was a mad hatter’s tea party of eccentric voices and musical interludes, lightning puns and recurring catchphrases stopped just this side of insanity by the brisk, cheerful presence of its star. In the dark days of the war it became a weekly rallying post for civilians and service personnel alike. When peace was declared the comedian, with help from his writer Ted Kavanagh and producer Francis Worsley, cannily reinvented the concept by relocating his activities to Tomtopia, the never-never-island where he reigned as governor over an environment as outlandish as wartime Britain had ever been.

The innate surrealism of ITMA, its creative use of sound effects and its stream of preposterous characters pointed forward in the development of radio comedy to programmes like Ray’s a Laugh, Educating Archie, The Goon Show and Round the Horne. In this respect Hancock’s Half Hour was an outsider. But if Handley had a true successor as a comedian, both in the magic of his microphone skill and in the ability to project himself as the type of person we all acknowledge ourselves in our innermost hearts to be, he was there in embryo that sad Sunday evening trying his best as a nation mourned. Hancock’s moody dreamer would reveal himself to be as perfectly attuned to the Cold War era as Handley’s jack-in-the box opportunist ever was to real war and the Pyrrhic peace that followed. As his career progressed the younger comedian – in the cause of originality and his own sanity – would denounce many of the devices that Handley and his team had developed to the level of art. There is no reason to suppose that had their roles been reversed the affable Liverpudlian would not have done the same.

As 1951 advanced it became apparent to the puppet masters manipulating the strings within the walls of Broadcasting House and its ornate variety outpost, the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street, that Hancock was coming to the conclusion of some form of radio apprenticeship. His accumulated appearances on shows like Variety Bandbox and Workers’ Playtime represented an early stage in some form of established cursus honorum for performers of his age and experience. He would, by now, have been hoping for a regular part in a long-running series. Dismissive of the letdown of the Michael Howard project, he was suddenly offered not one, but two parts that might bring with them both temporary security and the satisfaction of another hurdle overcome. In a round-up of radio reviews on 6 August 1951 the Daily Mirror reported on the two shows side by side. Of Happy-Go-Lucky, first transmitted on the Light Programme on 2 August, it said, ‘Cuts in the recording made this lavish, hour-long Thursday night offering an uneven, ragged business. As the star, Derek Roy was lost in a mêlée of overlong and unfunny contributions from others.’ Of Educating Archie, which aired in a half-hour slot the following day at 20.45 on the same station, it stated, ‘Tony “Flippin’ kids” Hancock shoots to star billing in his first outing with the “A” team. This man is funny. A slick script and smooth production make this a winter’s winner as usual.’ The mark of a successful catchphrase was such that it could identify itself that quickly. Already Hancock was marked with the two words that would now haunt him for several years.

An intriguing sidelight to the two reviews, not deemed worthy of mention to Mirror readers, is that both shows were produced by the same man, Roy Speer. While this was ludicrously too large a burden for one individual, Speer would have been the first to concede that the established show, which had already completed one award-winning series, had something more than an ‘A’ team at its disposal, not least – in Eric Sykes – a co-writer of inspiration and – in Peter Brough – a star with class, enterprise and his own finger on the pulse of aspiring talent. Unfortunate is the ventriloquist whose name begins with ‘B’, but, when his dummy spoke, Brough was never ‘Grough’ by name, and certainly never gruff by nature. All three saw the potential of Hancock when they watched him together in a London music hall earlier in the year, but he may not have been the first choice. A press release to herald the second series at the beginning of June 1951 announced Harry Secombe as the new tutor to Archie, while an internal BBC memo ahead of the very first series also suggested Harry as a potential member of the original cast. Secombe would not get his opportunity to educate Archie until the third run of the show, when he took over from Hancock, who was anxious not to outstay his welcome and be typecast as a schoolmaster comedian, at the same time as Brough and Speer were anxious to keep the basic format refreshed with continual cast changes.

It is feasible that without Ted Kavanagh, the influential creator of ITMA, Educating Archie would not have come into being at all. He certainly provided the final piece of the jigsaw for Brough’s success. Peter was a struggling ventriloquist on the variety circuit when one night in 1942 he was advised by the music publisher and record producer Wally Ridley either to invent a new character for his doll or to get out of the business completely. In devising ‘Archie Andrews’ Brough displayed all the skills of a producer himself, accessing the best individual talents to contribute to the completed whole. Len Insull, now a legend in ventriloquial circles, crafted the puppet to coincide with Peter’s creative vision. On an unrelated business trip to Brora in the Highlands, Brough and Ridley took long walks together on the beach as the ventriloquist tried to find the voice required, until, as Peter recollected, ‘out of the empty sea, sky and shore one voice suddenly seemed to click – the thin, cheeky treble of a boy of fourteen or so!’ However, the personality was not complete until Peter revealed the doll to Kavanagh in a dressing room at Lime Grove film studios, where Ted was working with Handley on a film. A name was required and without hesitation the burly, witty writer responded, ‘His name, Peter, is Archie Andrews.’ Duly christened, in Brough’s eyes his new wooden partner became a real person from that moment, and in due course, with his elegant guardian, a variety attraction on a level with Max Miller, Tommy Trinder and Gracie Fields.

As Archie’s tutor, Hancock came on board the second series of Educating Archie in the role played initially by his ex-colleague from the Gang Show, the daffy Robert Moreton. The premise was that Archie – a magnet for trouble when not instigating it himself – could only be taught at home: no school would take him. Tony joined an established cast that included Max Bygraves as the cheery odd-job man, youthful ITMA stalwart Hattie Jacques as Miss Dinglebody – ‘Call me, Agatha’ – who has eyes for Tony, and Julie Andrews as Archie’s girlfriend. Hancock’s duties in the show extended beyond the tutorial role. The opening cross-talk segment between the ventriloquist and his dummy defined the relationship of Brough as the moralistic father figure and Archie as the cheekily nonchalant Pinocchio within his care, before segueing into an encounter with an unnamed Hancock in whatever job happened to fit the situation, whether dentist, car salesman, zoo keeper, estate agent, train driver or gym instructor. Whatever the occupation, a seedy obsequiousness was his calling card, waiting to be worn dog-eared by the precocious schoolboy. In their very first encounter Brough takes Archie to the barber.

TONY: Just kneel on the chair, will you, sonny? There we are then! Now where are my scissors? Scissors, scissors …

ARCHIE: These what you’re looking for?

TONY: Ah yes, thanks – ahahaha. That was a jolly good idea, dipping the handles into the brilliantine, wasn’t it?

ARCHIE: I thought it wasn’t bad.

PETER: Archie, you shouldn’t have done that.

TONY: That’s all right, sir. All in good fun. I love children. Especially boys and girls. Now let’s get started … where’s he gone to?

ARCHIE: I’m over here.

TONY: Ah yes there … what are you doing with that razor?

ARCHIE: Just sharpening my pencil.

TONY: Just sharpening … give me that! Now kneel up on the chair, laddie. Ahahaha. Flippin’ kids!

No matter what job Hancock held down, Archie would be there to plague him. Only following a musical interlude did Hancock don mortarboard and gown for the middle section of the show that began by focusing on Archie’s schoolroom activities. As far as the listener at home was concerned, Brough had now left the scene and the emphasis was set securely upon teacher and pupil:

ARCHIE: Good morning, Dr Hancock, sir.

TONY: Good morning, Andrews. I fervently hope – admitted with a certain amount of trepidation – that our relationship will be fruitful and none the less amiable, for the fact that I may impose a discipline you may not have encountered hitherto? Do you follow me?

ARCHIE: Well, I got as far as ‘Good morning, Andrews.’

Much of the humour was schoolboy-howler based, with Archie always one step ahead of his mentor:

TONY: Why did Boadicea build the Suez Canal? Steady, Andrews. It’s a catch question.

ARCHIE: Well the catch answer is ‘Boadicea did not build the Suez Canal.’

TONY: Exactly – the catch being that you don’t build canals – you dig them – simple, isn’t it?

ARCHIE: Not half as simple as you are.

TONY: Ahahaha – saucy scholar …

The sketch would then expand to include Hattie, Max and the occasional guest star who was allowed to wander in and out of the format. After Julie Andrews’s song the third segment spiralled off into a fantasy dimension not unworthy of The Goon Show, with Archie often identifying himself in his imagination with an iconic figure from history, literature or legend, abetted by Hancock, Max and Hattie in appropriate roles. In Hancock’s time, Alexander Graham Bell, Hannibal, King Arthur and Christian of the Bounty all received the Archie treatment. Because of these constant shifts of focus, the show never became boring. Once Peter, figuratively speaking, had left the microphone to leave Archie centre stage, the role of comic foil zigzagged back and forth between the schoolboy hero and the eccentric members of Brough’s household.

The conventional opening dialogue between Brough and Archie originated from the pen of Sid Colin; when the action opened up to include the others, Eric Sykes took over the writing reins for the lion’s share of the half hour. According to Eric, not only did Tony’s presence lift the show considerably, they also shared an instant rapport. In one of the closing sketches Hancock found himself showing a miscreant Archie around Hell, where he is working as a guard. ‘It was at the time the Russians were vetoing everything,’ recalls Sykes, ‘and there was this sound of marching feet and the cry of “Niet, niet, niet, niet” as they trudged past, and as they went by Tony had to say, “They’re from Russia.” And he said to me, “How would you say this, Eric?” And I said, “When you are saying it, imagine that you have a cigarette in your hand and you are tapping the ash of it.” He said, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” And he did it and it got a marvellous laugh. And he said to me afterwards, “What impressed me all the more was that you didn’t tell me how to say it, you showed me how it should be delivered.” From then on we were lifelong friends.’ They became so close that when Eric got married in early 1952 Tony and Cicely arranged for him and his bride, Edith, to hold their wedding reception in the apartment that belonged to Cicely’s parents. Hancock also made secret arrangements for a brass band – in effect, the brass section of the BBC Variety Orchestra – to play them off from the tarmac as they flew to Jersey on their honeymoon, only to have to cancel the plans when the day coincided with the funeral of King George VI. Eric concedes that the farewell strains of ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’ would have been in very bad taste.

The part played by Sykes in helping to formulate the essential Hancock persona can never be underestimated. He had cut his teeth writing for Frankie Howerd, attracted by the scope the comedian’s hesitations and interjections gave for defining his character. In a similar way he latched onto something in Hancock’s inner psyche and from it developed the seedy grandiloquence and supercilious air that spelled out what his later audience would have taken for granted, that being teacher to a doll was beneath him. Eric insists, ‘In real life he was a very likeable man, but there was a great dignity about Tony. When you talked to him you realised this man was not a bank manager, he was not someone in the City, he was not in the Civil Service, and he didn’t sweep the roads. You had this man who looked like an actor-manager when he was young enough to play juvenile leads.’ The rough, crude prototype of what Galton and Simpson would go on to polish soon fell into place. Lee Conway, writing mid-series in the New Musical Express, acknowledged, ‘He is always the essence of outraged dignity. The rich fruity voice, the cultured speech with the aspirants omitted are his stock in trade, not the gag book. Give Hancock a situation and instantly you have him creating belly laughs.’ Dennis Main Wilson noted that Sykes had given him more than this, namely ‘an attitude to performing’.

Who first coined the ‘Flippin’ kids!’ catchphrase that contributed to Hancock’s early fame has always been a matter of conjecture. Although Eric Sykes surely deserves some credit for placing it in a comedy context, Tony’s mother traced its origins to Durlston Court Hotel days: ‘He remembered the saying from an old porter we used to have at the hotel. In the summertime when all the children used to come in from the beach, there used to be sand everywhere. So all summer you would hear the old man say, “Those flippin’ kids!”’ Her friend Mary Hobley recalled that ‘flippin’!’ was a constant epithet in Tony’s vocabulary when a young man. It is hard to believe now that more than fifty years later ‘kids’ is sometimes considered politically incorrect, while, according to the lexicographer Nigel Rees ‘flipping’, its shared cue for laughter in this family-oriented show, has been the most common euphemism for a stronger participle beginning with the same letter since the 1920s. Significantly the catchphrase was used during the first of Hancock’s three appearances, sometimes as much as three times, and not in the main scholastic sketch. In the latter he was referred to by name as Dr Hancock. He did little if anything to vary his voice between the two characters, which only added to the surrealism of the whole affair. It might be difficult for an outsider to connect the softer, lower register – more akin to his natural delivery – which matured into being with Hancock’s Half Hour with the strangulated, high-pitched tones that characterised Hancock during the early 1950s. It may be summed up as highfalutin with ignorant undertones, with a touch of Cyril Fletcher’s haughtiness alongside a dash of Sid Field’s preciousness. Scrutiny of the scripts suggests that Sykes tried at times to inject an additional pattern into the tutor’s speech. For some passages of nervous exasperation Hancock’s words are peppered with mms. That is according to the script; when heard the interjection presents a transcription challenge, with Hancock managing to pronounce it ñah. Eric may have had the oohs, aahs and ers of Frankie Howerd in mind, all originally scripted by himself. The effect is of Hancock chewing his words:

TONY: Now Andrews A. … mm … er in a few weeks’ time … mm … it will be … mm … end of term … ahahaha … before you put a match to your desk … listen.

ARCHIE: All right then, I’ll hold my fire.

TONY: Before … mm … end of term, there will be the examinations … mm … dealing with … mm … lessons contained in parts II and III … mm … of the school curriculum … mm … come in ‘A’ for Archie.

At times it sounds like a voice destined for advertising allergy cures, on the threshold of a sneeze that never comes. It never caught on.

Hancock never forgot his introduction to Brough’s co-star. No sooner had Peter ushered him into the dressing-room and picked up the little fellow than Archie was away: ‘It’s good to meet you. I want to welcome you to the show. I hope you’ll be happy working with us.’ One imagines Tony was lost for words. Something within him was never entirely comfortable with the idea of working with an inanimate object, however great Brough’s skill as a puppeteer in bringing it to life. Ten years later he wrote:

It was uncanny working with a dummy like Archie. He became so human to us that we would ask, ‘Is Archie going to rehearse today?’ as if he could think and feel and talk like a real person. The public obviously shared this conviction. Over the air he became a lovable human being to millions of children and I have known them cry bitterly when they discovered he was only a dummy and not a real boy. This made it all the more macabre to see him hanging unceremoniously from a hook or sitting in a chair with his head lolling over the side.

Hancock, ever susceptible to maleficent forces, could not bring himself to walk in alone for fear of Archie’s accusing slack-jawed gaze following him around the room. He claimed it gave him nightmares. For all of Archie’s pert charm, it is not difficult to comprehend his feelings. The sinister undertones exerted by a ventriloquial doppelgänger had sent a collective shiver down the spine of the nation in Cavalcanti’s 1945 film, Dead of Night, as a dummy took over the mind and personality of actor Michael Redgrave playing the ventriloquist. Maybe Hancock was aware that Peter’s father, Arthur Brough, a pro from the music halls, had acted as technical consultant to the movie and provided the doll. To those suggestible enough, the frozen eyes and grotesque features of the standard dummy, with their mockery of childhood and mad insight into the relationship with the manipulator upon whose reality it depends, must prove as unnerving as the Day-Glo tackiness, the sadistic schadenfreude of the circus clown to a sensitive child. Brough ensured that Archie was an aristocrat among dolls, but there was always part of Tony that never grew up, distrusted wood and wires over flesh and bone. And then there was the uneasy truth hinted at in Roger Caldwell’s poem, ‘The Dummy Speaks’.

I speak through him – he does not speak through me.

He’s my automaton, invention, and his life

is not worth living that’s not also mine.

Check-suited fool, death’s entertainer,

does he think, when he’s alone, I am no better

than the wire-pulled god he made in his own image?

Hancock tried to qualify his disdain: ‘I really hated that dummy – only during the shows, I mean – but you’ve got to get the mood … I had to hate Archie, and I did, and so it was funny.’ Peter noted jokingly that Tony’s hatred did surface at times outside of the act: ‘He used to growl, “Your grandfather was a gate-legged table,” and as Archie I would have to reply, “And your grandfather drank his way under my grandfather.”’ Whatever his feelings, they did not stand in the way of his performance. His demand for naturalism led Hancock to insist that Brough work with the doll at rehearsals and not merely for the studio broadcast. ‘I cannot make the script live unless he’s here,’ he would plead to Peter. The ventriloquist understood the need, while resenting the sacrifice of having to stand like a stork for longer than necessary. At the time Brough was agonising over varicose veins, but the comedian would insist, ‘I can’t make it work unless I work to him … now come on, let’s do it properly.’ Tony himself admitted that Archie seemed to bring out the best in everyone. ‘I’m not going to let a wooden doll get away with this scene’ summed up the pervading attitude. And at last he had a regular opportunity to flex his muscles in the comedy of situation, even if it was not tagged ‘situation comedy’ at that stage.

Whatever his superstitions, the exposure, which extended over a run of twenty-six weeks, caused Tony no setback. Indeed, the various repeats helped him to achieve his largest audience to date, often in excess of 20 million listeners in those heady radio days, a pre-Muppet phenomenon on a Commonwealth scale. The show with its resignedly bouncy signature tune

We’ll be educating Archie;

Oh what a job for anyone!

He’s no good at spelling – he hasn’t a clue;

He tells us three sevens still make twenty-two.

It’s a problem you can see

To be educating Archie.

acquired the reputation of a lucky talisman for those who appeared on it, the majority either achieving breakthrough fame or consolidating what may until then have been only passing success. In addition to the names already mentioned, they included Dick Emery, Beryl Reid, Ronald Shiner, Graham Stark, Benny Hill, Bernard Miles, James Robertson Justice, Ken Platt, Bernard Bresslaw, Gladys Morgan, Warren Mitchell and Bruce Forsyth. When the programme reached its last series in 1959 Sid James became Archie’s final tutor, but not before one last attempt has been made to see if Hancock wants his old job back. Brough and his ward make the pilgrimage to East Cheam, only for Sid to answer the door. Hancock is not at home, and Sid, with the sniff of money in his nostrils, senses an employment opportunity. Archie is sceptical, but James rises to the occasion: ‘No, look – Hancock was your tutor, wasn’t he? – Well, who do you think tutored Hancock? Me! I was your tutor’s tutor and you can’t do better than a tutor’s tutor.’ The series was running down, but James gave a special fillip to the last few episodes, not least with the vicarious presence of Hancock that he somehow evoked.

Hancock’s tenure with the radio programme amounted to one of the busiest periods of his life. No sooner was he established as a regular member of its cast than he was attached by Brough as principal comedian to the stage show that took Archie to all the top variety theatres in the land. Hancock remembered, ‘The show packed them in wherever it went. If we saw two vacant places in the standing room, we wondered what had gone wrong.’ This kept him occupied most weeks between October 1951 and March 1952, with a four-week sabbatical at Christmas at the Prince of Wales Theatre in the West End where Archie Andrews’s Christmas Party occupied the venue with sell-out matinées during the mornings and afternoons. The Daily Express made the analogy of ‘a Children’s Crazy Gang show’ while Peter Brough, in his autobiography, singled out the running feud between Archie and his long-suffering ‘Sir’ as the principal attraction for the parents: ‘As insult fell upon insult, and Tony writhed from sweet reason to acid invective, the audience roared the more. Maybe we’re all repressed infants deep down and reap most joy from the sight of a schoolmaster being put through the hoop.’ Val Parnell, running the show with Brough, also booked Hancock for the self-contained revue, Peep Show, playing twice-nightly at the same theatre. This amounted to four weeks of four performances in one day in two shows on one stage. Sundays were reserved for recording the radio show. Maybe it came easy after the Windmill. ‘Do you know any good nightclub that wants a good cabaret act?’ he joked wearily to Brough one day. ‘And I could do with a few Sunday concerts as well. I’m wasting my time, you know – I actually have some moments when I’ve nothing to do but sleep!’ One extra performance was squeezed in when Peter Brough, who for many years organised and starred in the entertainment for the Royal Household Christmas Party at Windsor Castle, added Tony to a company that included Peter Sellers, Kitty Bluett and Hattie Jacques. Brough recalled later that Hancock was unquestionably the success of the night: ‘He made Princess Margaret laugh so much that she was in danger of ruining her make-up.’ One wonders which engagement made him more nervous, his first performance before the royal family or the four-week run on the stage which Sid Field had colonised as his own for the last seven years of his life.

One aspect of Educating Archie that must have appealed to Hancock was the association it gave him by proxy with another of his idols, W.C. Fields. Peter Brough never hid the fact that his big break with the BBC came about through the original success on American radio achieved by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his principal dummy, Charlie McCarthy, in the 1930s. Fields also had cause to be grateful to Bergen. When his career sunk into a trough of ill-health, despair and alcoholism, it was the Bergen radio show, initially christened The Chase and Sanborn Hour in deference to its sponsor, that provided him with a new lease of professional life, the series developing a feud between the comedian and McCarthy that was extended to the cinema screen with You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man in 1939. Hancock shared with Fields that intense vulnerability that managed to put the shutters up on pathos. Otherwise all human weakness was there, and although a hatred for children as abrasive as that practised by Fields was never allowed to develop in Hancock, of all the comedians who braved the enemy fire of ink pellets in front of Archie’s blackboard he was the one who came closest to the spirit of the American. While Moreton, Secombe, Shiner, Forsyth and the others projected something approaching friendship in the role, the frequency with which Archie gained the upper hand over his wheedling superior and the indignation he showed in return cast Hancock snugly in the Fields mould. He could not have failed to notice the parallel. Philip Oakes recalled Hancock’s relish at the story of Fields lacing the orange juice of his real-life child co-star Baby LeRoy with over-proof gin. ‘Calls himself a trouper!’ rasped the curmudgeon as the child passed out. ‘Marvellous!’ said Hancock. ‘What a man!’

In later years Hancock admitted to the importance of Archie Andrews in his career and, at the risk of incurring further nightmares, went out of his way to refer to him in his act. In his soul-searching solo performance alone in his bedsitter, Galton and Simpson allowed time for their star to turn back the years. Clenching his teeth before the mirror he ponders his own ventriloquial ability: ‘“Hello Brough.” “Hello Archie.” “You’re going gack in the gox,” “I’m not going gack in the gox.”’ Swivelling his head back and forth, he might have had Brough’s arm up his back as he rattled through the alphabet in time-honoured fashion. Only the glass of water is missing. It is a touching moment in a moving show, but, with deference to Fields, never pathetic in the sense of evoking pathos.

Pathetic in a different way had been Happy-Go-Lucky, the series that débuted the day before Educating Archie returned with Hancock for its second series. It was the sort of show – pushed through by someone high up in the BBC chain of command, who had dreamt up the title and should have known better – that according to Dennis Main Wilson should never have gone on air: ‘You know that the moment you call a show “happy” it’s going to go down the drain … also there was a rule that anything that came down from above was doomed. It was far better if ideas came from the floor up.’ Derek Roy, its main star, came with a large following brought from Variety Bandbox, where he had struck up an effective feud with Frankie Howerd – for a time they alternated weekly as the show’s resident star comedian. In retrospect, Roy appears a sad cipher against the much-loved maestro of Up Pompeii and so much more besides. Howerd was arguably Max Miller’s true heir in the originality he brought to the basic approach of the stand-up comedian, cajoling or chiding the theatre audience into submission as he traded gossip over the footlights like a fishwife in the bread queue. Roy’s lasting claim to immortality may reside in the classic words he used to open what was only the second programme to air on commercial television, when it was launched in this country in 1955: ‘Hello deserters.’ For a while he billed himself on the halls as ‘The Fun Doctor’, but not even his medicine bag could effect the cure required to save this ailing show. He was, according to Bob Monkhouse, a kind man, punctilious to the point of embarrassment in paying a writer for every joke used every time it was used, but his career tailed off into relative obscurity as the 1950s progressed.

Happy-Go-Lucky was constructed to a magazine format that included early reality radio – each week a couple celebrating a wedding anniversary became involved with Roy at the microphone – as well as musical interludes and a resident comedy sketch centred around the activities of a boy scout patrol called the ‘Eager Beavers’. Hancock was contracted to play Mr Ponsonby, the head of the recalcitrant troop, that also included Graham Stark as Bottrell, Peter Butterworth as Creep, and, for the first four shows only, Bill Kerr as Dilberry. Indeed, it is a mark of Hancock’s early influence on Roy Speer that he recommended Stark for the job. Graham recollects Tony visiting him in a sorry state of health and sustenance in a damp-infested basement flat in Holland Park and leaving with the words, ‘Christ, I’ve got to get you out of here – you’ll die in this bloody room.’ A few weeks later Tony returned: ‘I want you to ring up a fellow called Roy Speer.’ ‘That started my whole career in radio,’ says Stark gratefully. The scripts were transparently bad. Years later Kerr was gracious enough to comment that the only one of them to shine through the morass was Hancock. The most that might be said of the writing was that it allowed him to display a sub-Will Hay kind of desperation. The scoutmaster motif had been worked much more funnily on radio in the 1930s by John Tilley, a comedian of the old school and coincidentally an old boy of Durlston Court at Swanage. There is, too, a limit to the humour that can be derived from woggles, ‘Be prepared’ and outdoor activities of a restricted nature. On the thirteenth and penultimate episode the end-of-pier banality of it all depressed Hancock and Stark so much that they begged for their sketch to be dropped that week. The show was running over by six minutes and the producer did not need persuading. Memos circulated within the BBC that the artists were still to be paid accordingly, in Hancock’s case his 18 guineas fee, as distinct from the 20 guineas basic – that is, separate from repeats – which he commanded for Educating Archie. It was not the last time he and the producer would work harmoniously together, but that producer was no longer Roy Speer.

During the recording of the eleventh show, Speer collapsed with a nervous breakdown or, in Ray Galton’s words, ‘a diplomatic illness’. In time he was allowed to concentrate on Educating Archie, while the baton of Happy-Go-Lucky was handed to Dennis Main Wilson. Dennis described his predecessor as a true English gentleman. That may be a euphemism for his lack of resilience when confronted by the kind of fiasco into which the Derek Roy show had degenerated. Main Wilson, a ‘fun doctor’ if ever there was one, had no qualms about what medicine was required. With the ruthlessness of Genghis Khan he sacked all the writers at a stroke, although this had no effect on Hancock’s contribution: the scout sketches had been bought up front from a pair of Australians named Ralph Peterson and E.K. Smith, and presumably contractual and budgetary constraints meant they had to be used. Many years later Dennis confessed that he deliberately caused the penultimate show to overrun by six minutes so that something would have to be cut from the show. That week the ‘Eager Beavers’ sketch had degenerated into a tasteless tirade on the subject of seasickness with lines like, ‘I’ve just thought of a little something I should have brought up a long time ago,’ and ‘If I don’t keep this down, I’ll never live it down.’ The sketch was happily consigned overboard.

Fortuitously around this time two young men who had met in a TB sanatorium at Milford in Surrey, where they whiled away their time by writing comedy scripts for the in-house hospital radio service, had made an impression on the BBC script editor Gale Pedrick. This had led to an informal arrangement between themselves and Derek Roy whereby they found themselves writing jokes for him at 5s. a time. They never forgot the first one he used on air: ‘Jane Russell pontoon? It’s the same as ordinary pontoon, but you need thirty-eight to bust.’ Originally they were beholden only to Roy, not to the BBC. Their names were Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The former was once described as ‘a cross between Svengali and a polar explorer’; the latter had to make do with ‘clean shaven, dark and chubby’, although intermittently he has been known to sport a beard too. Ray has also been given as ‘a bit of a worrier’, with Alan as ‘confident and expansive’, two phrases conveniently indicative of the yin and the yang of the Hancock persona.