THE LAD HIMSELF

“Here’s one for the teenagers...”

He died 43 years ago today, when I was a month short of my 4th birthday, at an age slightly younger than I am now, alone in a basement room on the opposite side of the world. So why the relatively short and tragic life of Tony Hancock has always been a source of fascination for me is sometimes unclear. Maybe it’s because he shared both his year of birth and his initials (kind of) with my dad, but that’s a bit of a reach to be honest. All I know is that it is biographies of this particular life that I have most read, and sometimes it is his melancholy that most strikes a chord with me during my own darker moments.

Luckily for me, my own demons don’t drive me to drink, and equally lucky for me, I’ve not got his kind of talent, because I suspect that I have the kind of personality which means that it might eat me up and destroy me much as his seems to have him. Tony Hancock was pretty much the most successful television performer of his time. He was one of a number of comics who came out of the forces at the end of the Second World War having done a certain amount of years in Forces Entertainment and then ended up in London trying to forge some kind of career for themselves as the unstoppable rise of television began its slow erosion of the world of music hall.

Somehow he managed to break into radio and had a very successful stint as the “flippin’ kids” muttering headmaster in “Educating Archie”, that rather bizarre seeming quirk of audio entertainment, a radio show based around the visual conceit of a ventriloquist act. Shortly after this he was given his own radio show “Hancock’s Half Hour” which, in the very capable hands of the writing duo of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, grew, alongside “The Goon Show” to become one of those broadcasting rarities, a “phenomenon”.

Alongside Sidney James, Hattie Jacques, Bill Kerr, Kenneth Williams and many others, the slightly pompous, slightly nervous “everyman” character of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock – possibly most effectively seen in the famous “Sunday Afternoon at Home” episode - grew to become one of the most popular radio characters of the age, and, very naturally, made the leap to television in the middle of the 1950s, and a number of successful series, in both mediums followed, with the TV series continuing, with the occasional slight change of format, into the early 1960s. Episodes such as “The Blood Donor” and “The Radio Ham” from his final BBC series “Hancock” have become part of the bedrock of our national shared comedy culture, much as Basil Fawlty, Edmund Blackadder and Father Ted Crilly have to later generations.

Sadly, however, somewhere along the way, in his private life, a monster was created, and it is this monster that tends to feed the most sensational accounts of his brief life. It is difficult for fans of any popular performer to come to terms with understanding any of the monstrous behaviour they might get up to in their private lives and contrasting it with the simple pleasure of their performances in their public life. So many of our top comedians of those times - Peter Sellars and Frankie Howerd are two other names that spring immediately to mind - seem to have had such tragic personal lives away from the limelight. Tony Hancock seems to have struggled more than most, and despite the obvious glamour that the lifestyle has, he seems to have been crippled by appalling self-doubt, and an ability to permanently close the door on his friends and colleagues (and ultimately himself) without so much as a backwards glance. Not only that but he was a monstrous alcoholic to an almost legendary degree, which is quite possibly what actually led to his ruin.

The first book of the books about his life that I read was by his second wife Freddie, and I read it whilst I was at college and at about the time that a number of the surviving television episodes were being rerun on Sunday nights on BBC1. Tony Hancock was obviously having a bit of a cultural revival at that time and, like with a lot of things, I was drawn right in alongside everybody else. I remember an interview on Breakfast TV some time in the years when Selina Scott and the strangely unglamorous Frank Bough presented it, during which the book got mentioned and, having a vague recollection of the name of Tony Hancock I sought it out and bought it. It was fascinating stuff, and, despite the obvious horrors that were exposed, I became fascinated by the man’s career and tried to find out more, and the intervening years, listening to and watching some of his astonishing performances have been a joy and a delight.

Tony Hancock’s career went into something of a tail-spin after his final BBC series and never really seemed to recover, and the harder he tried to regain his lost glories, the worse his life seemed to get, and yet his audience still seemed to adore him despite all of that. Eventually he took his own life in that lonely basement flat in Australia on the 24th of June 1968 having decided, it seems, that things just seemed to go wrong too many times.

After he’d been cremated, the task of carrying his ashes back to England was given to the actor Willie Rushton who took them onto the plane in a travel bag, however, the aircrew of that flight insisted that “Mr Hancock” should be allowed to travel first class, with the urn apparently getting a seat to itself. That is always a story that moves me, no matter how many times I read it.

This is a man who was loved, even if he seemed to hate himself.

It’s too easy to dwell on the dark side of the life of one of the country’s all-time favourite comedy performers. Instead, I do prefer to think of the joy that his performances brought to the world when he was at the height of his success, because it is the laughter which those shows brought to so many that should be what we remember, and, with that in mind, I’ll leave you with just a few of my favourite Hancock moments, none of which he wrote himself of course, but all of which he brought an indelible life to, and, whilst he himself would have disliked the prospect intensely, seeing that kind of thing as the basest kind of humour, became the catchphrases for a generation.

“Did Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?”; “Are you insinuating that I’m portly?”; and, of course, the immortal “A pint? That’s very nearly an armful!”