John Fisher - Tony Hancock - The Definitive Biography

Even later when he discarded the Homburg and fur collar the inner man somehow remained constant. Simpson uses the attitude to food and France to show how the character could paradoxically live within his own contradictions: ‘One week he would say, “I can’t stand that foreign muck. I want sausage, egg and chips.” And the next week he’d be haute cuisine : “I don’t eat that rubbish. Bring on the sea bass.” If he met an intellectual he might try to keep up with him or dismiss him with “what a load of old rubbish!” Never throw away a good joke – it all relies on what you think of.’ The approach gave them full rein to present Hancock as Everyman for the twentieth century. In time he was acclaimed ‘a massive caricature of mid-century man’. According to Philip Oakes, the comedian rather fancied the title. Every possible foible, every potential flaw was refracted though the persona. No comic has succeeded more admirably in making us laugh at our own fears, failures and insecurities. While Bob Hope majored on cowardice, Jack Benny on meanness and vanity, John Cleese on a manic paranoia, Tony Hancock was all our sins personified. Long ago Galton and Simpson described the character as ‘a shrewd, cunning, high-powered mug’. Roger Wilmut was more comprehensive in his cataloguing: ‘pretentious, gullible, bombastic, occasionally kindly, superstitious, avaricious, petulant, over-imaginative, semi-educated, gourmandising, incompetent, cunning, obstinate, self-opinionated, impolite, pompous, lecherous, lonely and likeable fall-guy’. Only a few redeeming qualities there, but then the funniest traits will always be the weaknesses.

That said, Hancock wasn’t just likeable – he was loved. His neuroses, grumbles and hang-ups were endemic in the larger proportion of his potential audience. As Philip Oakes has said, ‘He was truly representative and so he could be excused,’ right down, it would appear, to the murderer that lurks in us all. When he needs the cash to match a bet that he cannot go one better than Phineas Fogg and travel around the world in less than eighty days, he shows his shady resolve: ‘I’ll get the money. I’ve just remembered I’ve got a great grandfather up in Leeds – of a very nervous disposition. I think a good strong paper bag popped behind him should see me all right.’ He isn’t joking. On one occasion his attitude to Bill Kerr, humbled into carrying out some repair work underneath Hancock’s motor car, is positively sadistic: ‘I’ve a good mind to jump on his ankles. I’d love to see him spring up and hit his head on the big end.’ His disposition to petty larceny pales by comparison: when Richard Wattis checks his card at a hotel reception desk he soon discovers an outstanding issue from last time, ‘a little matter of four towels, a tea service and an ashtray’. The cleverness of the casting and character of Sid James as the great swindler rampant in Hancock’s life was that Tony himself was just as questionable in the honesty stakes. It was totally in character that he should be less successful at iniquity, although in one episode, The Scandal Magazine , he is revealed as being more corrupt than Sid. James is the editor who has the Chief Constable and the Director of Public Prosecutions in his pocket. After Hancock clears his name and wins a king’s ransom in damages, it soon emerges that the initial exposé on his sordid dalliance with a cigarette girl was not without foundation.

That may have been an extreme case. As Dennis Main Wilson explained, ‘The beauty of it was that you could identify him not with yourself, but with your Uncle Fred or your next-door neighbour. Johnny Speight gave the objectionable characteristics to Alf Garnett, but much more harshly, much more cruelly, in a much later, crueller world. We did the Hancock shows in a much happier world.’ At least they appeared to become happier as the new prosperity took hold. The analogy with Alf Garnett, as immortalised by actor Warren Mitchell, is significant, reminding one that much about Hancock would now be considered sexist, racist and politically incorrect. Much of his sexist disgruntlement was directed at the buxom and bounteous Hattie Jacques, in her radio role as the mountainous secretary Miss Griselda Pugh. When she is too busy to take a letter because she is knitting herself a jumper, Hancock acknowledges the fact: ‘Of course. I saw the lorry bringing the wool in this morning.’ When she is conscripted into service as a teacher at the school Sid has coaxed him into opening, she suggests adding ‘Cantab’ after her name, to which Tony responds, ‘No. I think Oxon would be better for you.’ In the music-hall era his comments would have been labelled ‘fat’ jokes. Here they serve the comedy of characterisation and produce some of his biggest laughs. When the similarly endowed Peggy Ann Clifford boards a crowded bus, he refuses to offer her his seat: ‘You wanted emancipation. You got it. Stand there and enjoy it.’ In the last television show Galton and Simpson wrote for him, he curtly dismisses one of the candidates for his hand in matrimony: ‘I can’t imagine her staying at home all day mangling.’

When Tony wishes to show solidarity with Sid he slaps him on the back with a triumphant, ‘Sid, you’re a White Man. When they made you, they threw away the mould.’ In the blood donor clinic the question of his nationality brings out a primitive nationalism: ‘Ah, you’ve got nothing to worry about there … British. Undiluted for twelve generations. One hundred per cent Anglo-Saxon with perhaps a dash of Viking, but nothing else has crept in … You want to watch who you’re giving it to. It’s like motor oil. It doesn’t mix, if you get my meaning …’ As Ray and Alan have observed, in those days no one batted an eyelid at material that would today be considered squirm-inducing: there were other things to worry about, not least ‘the threat of annihilation by a nuclear holocaust’. It was also a time when ordinary decent people were unconsciously fed the prejudices that emanated simply from feeling different from what they were not. And who is to say that the expression of such a difference could not then be channelled in the direction of comedy?

Hancock, as a gauge for the human condition and the worst excesses of its folly and aspirations, remains timeless. However, now – or in a hundred years’ time – it is conceivable that anyone from another time or place wanting an inkling of what it was like to live in the Britain of the 1950s could do worse than listen to Hancock’s Half Hour . It is certainly significant that as the man for his day he should reflect the three key prime ministers of the decade as colourfully as he did. We have already seen he was capable of a sly impression of Churchill when the mood took him. The bulldog image fitted all his own delusions of political grandeur, although these were not given full rein until May 1955 when in one episode Galton and Simpson exchanged No. 23 for No. 10, at least in Hancock’s dreams, by which time another Anthony, namely Eden, had been in office for two months. His espousal of the Homburg as his favourite headgear first reached television screens in July 1956, the month that Eden, with whom the style had long been associated, was confounded by Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company. Hancock later claimed, ‘Homburg hats have always struck me as the acme of self-importance.’ Most significantly Hancock’s peak period coincided with the period of office of the politician dubbed by Enoch Powell as the last of the old actor-managers, Harold Macmillan. If Galton and Simpson have a fondness for one facet of the Hancock characterisation, it is for the faded thespian reduced to dragging his threadbare cultural offerings to the far reaches of the kingdom. That tedious train journey to the Giggleswick Shakespeare Festival readily comes to mind. Later when Hancock finds himself reduced to appearing in a commercial for pilchards he sighs for the past: ‘Oh for the days of the actor-manager, me own theatre and that [the thumb goes to the nose] to all of them.’