Apparently Gold will be showing a doc narrated by – I think – Paul Merton followed by newly cleaned up versions of the two “best” Hancock episodes – The Blood Donor and 12 Angry Men. Not my idea of his best, I’d personally choose the Missing Page (“Come out, Sarto, we know you’re in there!”) and either the Radio Ham or Hancock Alone.
The gimmick is that the two episodes have been colorized to make them more appealing to a younger audience.
As B/W cinematography is normally a huge part of 40s movies and early TV shows such as Twilight Zone or 40s movies, I normally view solorisation as a form of cultural vandalism.
Saw a couple of minutes of the newly updated shows on Newsnight last night and they looked none too bad.
Ultimately, it’s great to see a bit of the lad himself pop up on 21st Century terrestrial TV.
Any other fans of Anthony Alosius St John amongst the AW massive?
Railway Cottages, at the back of our village, is replete with Hancock devotees.
What’s the episode called where Sid James peels the wallpaper back to reveal some lost poem scribbles, ‘Onward, onward, rode the six hundred…’ etc?
Lord Byron lived here.as for Galton and Simpson the steptoe episodes divided we stand and the desperate hours is sitcom at its best
Thanks! I can still visualise the scene where the scraper is being enthusiastically applied to the scrawled ‘rubbish’ as the titles begin to roll.
“The gimmick is that the two episodes have been colorized to make them more appealing to a younger audience.”
They would have more appeal by humourizing them.
There’s a famous fans programme on Hancock on Gold tonight https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/jan/14/tv-tonight-eddie-izzard-diane-morgan-and-pete-doherty-celebrate-their-comedy-hero
Sadly, It looks klike it’s going to be one of those awful snoozefests where they show the rentacelebs telegraphing and talking over the jokes
I would go with The Bedsitter as the best episode. Love most of them though. Recently got the ATV series on DVD but haven’t watched it yet
Bedsitter is indeed the best. I think you have to have been an unattractive poverty-stricken pseudointellectual man who’s lived on his own to appreciate how accurate it is…. ahem.
Hello.
I’ve just joined the site.
I’ve been unable ever since I discovered that the ATV Series was released to find one to buy. Even the THAS were, incredibly, not forthcoming in offering to loan a copy to me; and I was a Member, once, too !
I’ve got to ask you if you’d be willing to let me view your own dvd of the shows. If you’d rather not, I’d just accept it; I promise not to keep asking.
Thanks very much.
Well you’d need to @dai to have any chance of a reply..
Hello.
Thanks.
I used this site to reply to him, below
Well if you come to Ottawa maybe you could take a look! I actually had 2 sets for a while but gave one to a friend.
Check out YouTube, at least one of the episodes are on there, maybe more.
Oh ! I see.
Yes, of course, I assumed you were in the UK.
Still, never mind; at least I now have a standing-invitation for (free) 5-star accommodation in Ottawa waiting for me, should I ever go out somewhere, here, via Canada: which is more than the now sadly-changed manner of the THAS was imaginative enough to offer me.
I have the ones, thanks, advertised on ebay and Etsy, which were ” Leaked “, so I’ve read, online. It’s the other six for which I’m looking.
Thanks very much for replying.
🙂 I could burn you some copies if you pay for shipping but I haven’t done that in years
Actually I am in England right now, but didn’t bring them with me!
Hello.
That’s very kind of you to offer, but no thanks.
For now, I’ll keep looking for one online, occasionally.
You’ve set the example to the THAS, though, so well done.
Thanks very much.
As somebody who knew him best from The Blood Donor and a few other bits and pieces (The Rebel film, etc.), I took a punt on a box set of the TV series, and I’m glad I did.
Yes, some of the references and cultural touchstones have either dated badly or lost their significance, but funny is funny, and the lad himself was definitely that. Like Jaygee, my favorite is The Missing Page (I vote for Kiss The Blood Off My Hands as the best ever title of a book, real or fictional), but a lot of the others still stand up today.
And Hancock the character is a real one-off: a bitter curmudgeon who could be quite selfish, but you can’t help but warm to him and want him to succeed. Ably supported by Sid James – and I know SJ basically played the same part in everything he did, but did he ever play it better than against Hancock?
The level of observation in Galton and Simpson’s BBC radio and TV work for TH and later Steptoe and Son was so timeless, you could make a good case for saying that there’d be no Capt Mainwaring, Rigsby, Basil Fawlty or Alan Partridge without them.
It apparently always used to rile TH that when asked to name their favourite H script, people would almost always cite episodes where there was no Sid J, Hattie J, Bill K or Kenneth W.
Two people thrown together by circumstance trying to break free but find (a) they can’t, and (b) they don’t actually want to.
Galton and Simpson basically created the sitcom template
Also that uniquely British comic grotesque – the little man whose pretensions so outweigh his limited abilities – the aforementioned Harold S, Capt M, Leonard R, Basil F, Alan P and
Indeed any AWer concited enough to use a word like “aforementioned”
Arf! I totally agree with your suggestion that G&S are basically the mother lode for the majority of quality TV comedy from Britain since the sixties.
Gilbert & Sullivan?
Excuse me – I’m off to polish my D’Oyly Cartes…
You’ll be getting a punch up the Hinge and Bracket if you’re not careful
I’ve always been a huge fan and Hancock was very much part of my growing up. My personal favourite is possibly the Reunion Party, or 12 Angry Men…or The Lift….so many! I still use some of the lines, e.g. ‘I’m not a man of my age, I’m more a man of his age…’. Genius.
So many great lines in TRP. Off the top of my head…
There’s more water out there than there is in your beer!
Even the Germans dropped their rifles and applauded
Not like we were, Sid
Chickety snitch!
The condition of my feet in those days was quite different from what they are today. Chasing the Hun across Europe, that’s what flattened these, mate.
The other wonderful thing about TH is the uniquely staccato rhythm with which he delivered the brilliant lines Galton and Simpson had written for him.
Try saying the above as the lad himself and you’ll see what I mean
Staccato is right. He always seems to have a slight sense of disgust behind everything he says. It’s yer actual weltschmerz…
(Oh swipe me, he paints with light!)
Swipe me, how glitterin’…
PS said everything I have to say about The Lad Himself here.
So have other people, but they’re obviously less interesting.
“Shaddap, and put your trousers on!”
“It is are not raining here also.”
I knew Alan Simpson a tiny bit, as he was President of my local football club for many years. Very nice chap, very unassuming and kept himself to himself most of the time but apparently insisted on a bottle of high quality red wine for board meetings.
Brought drinks all round for those of us left in the bar one late night when we’d won promotion that day, and I was very content to sit and listen to a few probably well worn showbiz stories. Good times.
Am I alone in finding episodes of Hancock a very hard watch?
That’s not to denigrate them in the slightest, the writing is brilliant & it’s excellently delivered by the cast.
But there’s something about knowing how things concluded for TH that means I find much of the material unbearably sad. It seems to foreshadow the tragedy to come to the extent that I find the radio episodes or ‘The Rebel’ is as much as I can digest.
I don’t know of any other comedy show that has the same effect.
I know what you mean. Slightly too young to have experienced him during his lifetime, I was introduced to Tony Hancock’s work by an elder brother who was a massive fan. I feel the pathos of his humour has been forever underscored by the sadness of his actual life, and while he remains as funny as he ever was, there is always now the perception that his comedic miserablism was genuine.
The Radio programs are far, far better than the tv programs……just saying.
The radio programs are, mostly, exceptionally good. The TV programs are, mostly, very good with a few exceptional ones. He became famous because of the radio series, and that remains his pinnacle for me, but his TV series are certainly not significantly worse. His facial expressions were funny as well, and those are something you don’t get from the radio.
@daff
Despite the lower budgets, doing radio is a lot more fun and spontaneous than TV as there is less hanging around waiting for set ups. With access to a decent SFX library, the only limits as to what you can do in radio are your imagination
I find the radio series difficult, too many characters and lots of what seems to be in-jokes. I think they knew with the TV show they were catering for a different audience (maybe bigger, not sure) and the relative restraint helped it
Sorry going to add that like @Slug I agree about how great his facial expressions were, he was a natural for TV. You can see him deteriating on the TV series though, once you realise he is reading every line in The Blood Donor from props it devalues it somewhat, so that one may be better on radio, or vinyl! Have spotted it in a few charity shows even in Canada, so I guess he was popular here too
I found the two hours were far too much talking heads and too little of the lad himself. Some of the artifacts discovered by his great niece were interesting, and it was impressive how much he is revered by today’s comics, but his radio work was largely ignored, and many classic TV episodes went unremarked.
I watched the colourised Blood Donor and enjoyed it, but 12 Angry Men will have be watched another day – a leak discovered under the sink late on Saturday evening rather interrupted proceedings….swipe me.
I didn’t bother with this because I knew it would be like that, like the Heroes of Comedy series about twenty years ago TV producers get so pathetic about something old, it has be sanctioned and sanitised by proximity to modern celebs who by definition have nothing interesting to say but are given endless screen-time to say it.
And colourisation to get down with da yoof? Yeah because anyone under fifty goes anywhere near Gold, ever. Once again…. pathetic.
The repeating of all the radio shows on a loop on BBC 4 Extra (a great thing, the BBC is brilliant) has revealed that the episodes picked to go on those LPs and cassettes were probably the best ones.
The only one I’ve heard that wasn’t one of the 20 or so selected that probably should have been was The Last Bus Home.
Fave episode: Fred’s Pie Stall.
No offence, actually loads of offence, the “younger generation” can really go shag itself, as soon as you start second guessing them you’ve no hope.
I won’t be watching colourised versions of anything, not in a million years.
Same with Round the Horne. The first six eps the BBC released on LP and cassette in the 70s were the best ones.
Ditto the Goon Shows – the first four shows put on Parlaphone LPs with the musical breaks edited out by some dude called George Martin.
The Goon Show Parlaphone LPs were re-recordings, I think.
Generally, the BBC wouldn’t allow their originals to be used by others in those days. Assuming they’d even kept them, that is. A lot of the original shows in the current archive are courtesy of fans who taped them from their radios. Or from transcription discs that were sent out to the BBC’s foreign outposts.
The Parlaphone albums were not rerecordings, they were just edited down from the original shows because of the copyright issues with whatever song Max Geldray was murdering that week. There are other edits too, topical references and so on.
There was at least one rather bizarre attempt by EMI to “stereoise” two shows, resulting in that strange “bathroom” effect. Also they rerecorded loads of the shows for the soundtrack of the Telegoons. And performed a couple of them much later for reunions on Secombe’s ITV show (shudder).
It’s all in Roger Wilmut’s book. Dude was the Lewisohn of Goondom.
The restoration of the original shows to their current state has taken decades – if you listen to the Compendium CDs you can often hear where a long-considered-missing line or two has been spliced in from a fan tape.
Tell us more about the strange bathroom effect, Moose…
To start with, you need a strange bathroom. Like one designed by HR Giger.
Oof!
Whither the Moose of yesteryear?
Enjoy 4 Extra while you can, it is set to close in two or three years.
I wonder if that is still going to happen now that the DG of the BBC doesn’t have to say “Look Ms Dorries, we’re dumbing down! Just like you want!”
This is more to do with Auntie balancing the books, rather than GoNad’s attempt to strangle C4 News’ ability to ask her tosspot boss any difficult questions.
It costs quite a lot to broadcast DAB nationally to “only” 1.7 Million listeners. Especially when that bandwidth could be sold off to Heart 2010s, or whatever.
Any news on the future of FM transmissions, @fentonsteve? Still slated for shutdown?
Presumably the rise of internet radio has quelled the argument about erratic DAB coverage…
FM to be reviewed in 2026, with no switch off before 2030.
4 Extra to move online via BBC Sounds.
A friend who collects BBC radio comedy recordings reacted similarly unfavourably when I mentioned the colourised TV versions. But then he added that, if at the same time as colourising they’ve also tweaked the poor washed-out-looking resolution of the originals, they might be worth a watch.
They apparently digitally tarted them up as much as they possibly could before/during colourisation.
Oldsters/BW purists like me have the option to scale back the colour settings on our TVs if we’d rather see the two eps in monochrome.
Have got the akk remaining Eps DVD collection from a few years back at an absurdly low price. Will dig out and do a comparison if I can find the time
Slightly off-topic, but I was genuinely astonished by the two formerly-lost Morecambe & Wise 60s TV shows they recovered a few years ago, from film reels which had melted together in their canisters. There was an accompanying documentary showing how they used borderline sci-fi technology to laser scan the programmes from the reels frame-by-frame without having to unwind (and therefore destroy) the celluloid… they also tarted them up and colourised them while they were at it, and the finished articles were very watchable.
I’m not sure why resolution is such a big deal. It’s Hancock, not bloody Avatar.
For those scenes when he flies over the streets of East Cheam with a bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand, obviously.
I’m sure the radio shows are forever being broadcast on Radio 4 Extra. Also extremely funny.
I suspect it has now expired on BBC Sounds, but before Christmas Radio 4 broadcast a fascinating half hour by Paul Merton on a Norwegian version of Hancock, which I think was titled Flexnes, which became a cultural touchstone up there.
I just stumbled across this excellent, very perceptive article on Hancock by Simon Callow.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/dec/27/biography-tony-hancock
While I’m sure you’ve probably read them already, Simon C has has also written several excellent books about Orson Welles at various stages of his life.