Tony Hancock rose rapidly through the ranks in the Fifties to become one of the first TV superstars. He died in 1968 in a dark and desperate act of suicide, but for fans he remains a comedy legend.
This summer his genius will be brought back to life in The Missing Hancocks, an Edinburgh show that recreates four comedies he recorded for BBC Radio in 1955 and 1956. The tapes were wiped but the scripts survived, and thanks to actor Neil Pearson they can now be enjoyed live again. Pearson is directing, with Kevin McNally — who plays Jack Sparrow’s first mate, Gibbs, in Pirates of the Caribbean — in the title role.
Hancock is one of Pearson’s comedy heroes, admired most for his radio (and later TV) show, Hancock’s Half Hour, which was written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, the groundbreaking jokesmiths who went on to create the Steptoe and Son. “With Hancock’s Half Hour they are credited with inventing the modern sitcom,” says Pearson. “In other comedies back then there were antiquated attitudes about race and women but there’s not a bit of that here. It is as fresh now as it was when it was first written.”
It is every bit as timelessly funny as Dad’s Army but, Pearson notes, needs a bit more “hunting out”. The radio version often airs on Radio 4 Extra but the black-and-white TV version doesn’t get rerun.
Pearson is both amused and horrified that 20 radio episodes were thoughtlessly wiped. Tape was expensive and nobody realised the artistic value so they were simply recorded over. “It almost seems as though it was standard practice to wipe stuff dependent on the height of the person who went into the storage room to get a tape off the shelf,” he says.
Without Hancock’s Half Hour we would not have had Fawlty Towers, Dad’s Army or The Office. The fictional character of Anthony Aloysius Hancock was every bit as deluded as Basil Fawlty, Captain Mainwaring and David Brent, living alone in a bedsit but convinced he was better than everyone.
The radio incarnation was the first real modern character-based sitcom, argues Pearson. “Before then a comedy would have a break for a musical number. Galton and Simpson dropped this to create an uninterrupted show about a small man shaking his fist at a world that doesn’t care.”
Hancock in real life was also the template for the troubled modern comedian, with a fragile ego and a nagging need for validation. As he became successful he ditched his writers and colleagues Sid James and Kenneth Williams (played in Edinburgh by Simon Greenall and Robin Sebastian). But his career went into a downward spiral, ending in his suicide in Australia in June 1968, aged 44, leaving a note that said: “Things just seemed to go too wrong too many times.”
The Missing Hancocks is a proven success. Pearson recorded five different episodes from the original scripts for Radio 4 last year and is recording another five next month.
Interview continues here.
