The great Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock went to the great 23 Railway Cuttings in the sky 50 years ago this week. Your favourite moments please… and no “misselanious rubbish”.
Stone me, what a life
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“See what you’ve done now – his creative aura’s gone for a burton. It can be very nasty, can that”
Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?
That brave Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and close the boozers at half past ten?
Is all this to be forgotten?
They showed The Rebel on TV when I was quite young. I loved it. I hadn’t seen the TV shows yet. His hideous Aphrodite at the Waterhole sculpture is, I hope, on display somewhere.
Hic, haec, hoc. (If you can’t be pedantic about Latin in comedy it’s a very poor show.)
Love his boasting about his wartime experiences in The Reunion Party. He and his friends descending via just the one parachute between them. “So we dropped about 3000 feet, clinging on to each other’s ankles […] we were dropping like stones and a jeep came past us on six parachutes, so we jumped in, started the engine and as soon as we hit the ground we were off. *pause* Well, the Germans just threw down their rifles and applauded…”
Ace Rimmer must have been a fan…
And here Sid James says… “Shaddap and put your trousers on”
“I thought my Mum’s gravy was bad but at least hers used to move about a bit.”
Never really “got” him.
What I have heard is not that funny for me and of its time.
A bit like Arthur Askey and that northern bloke singing about cleaning windows.
This bit, from The Rebel
… washing my feet in a glass of beer
I used to regularly visit his blue placqued old house in Hall Green (B’ham), it temporarily having become a small old folks home. An virtually anyone over 80, should I take blood, can reference the Blood Donor. Luckily I can too, as my Dad had the record.
Over 80? Steady!
The Nurse: Have you had any of these diseases?
Tony: (Reads the list and looks insulted.) No, I have not and especially not that one!
Je ne veux pas pisser sur tes frites, Moose (sounds better in French, doesn’t it?), but it’s notable that all the flashes of wit quoted here are actually by Galton and Simpson. If you look for things that Hancock himself said, you very quickly come to the conclusion that he was a miserable neurotic.
Doesn’t mean I remember the miserable, neurotic lad from Cheam with any less affection, mind you.
Very poor interviewee.. that Face to Face programme with him is dreadful, you can see him almost falling apart before your eyes.
With G and S there was a perfect match between the medium and the message… they were working with what was there though – his vanity, his neuroses. Even Steptoe wasn’t that bleak because at least they had each other.
The Bedsitter is almost the best thing they ever did together, and it’s just him on his own in one room.
Mr Thep makes a very valuable point here. Like other much-loved comedians (eg ie Morcambe and Wise), Hancock was only as good as his material, and Galton and Simpson provided the best in the business. Hancock himself was not at all a funny man, and I’m ambivalent about his appeal. I sometimes think, wait a minute, what am I actually laughing at here? I mean, it’s brilliant, much of it, but … it mines that very dark vein of UK humour.
Yes … let’s have a big Afterword Hurrah for the great Eddie Braben, who wrote almost all of Morecambe and Wise’s celebrated BBC material.
Bi-cus-pid!
I saw Galton and Simpson talking about Hancock once and they said what most impressed them from the start was his timing. He could read a script out for the first time, without having seen it before, and get it exactly right – the pauses, intonation and emphasis that made their work funnier. There were some remakes of Galton and Simpson scripts in the nineties starring Paul Merton, including Hancock episodes, which showed, unintentionally, what they meant. I remember them being quite funny, but Paul Merton’s performances didn’t have the extra edge which Hancock seemed to bring effortlessly.
It reminds me of Porridge. Probably the best thing Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais wrote, but with perfect casting all round, particularly Ronnie Barker, who knew how to get the most of the characters and lines. I never found Ronnie Barker, for all his talent, as funny in anything else. He never had such good material to work from again.
You’ve hit the nail on a nutshell with this. Hancock was an actor, playing a serious part, written for laughs. He never played it for laughs (he was probably incapable of simple, spontaneous laughter), never milked the script or connived with the audience. It was his deadly seriousness that Galton & Simpson recognised and wrote for. I saw the Paul Merton versions and thought they were embarrassingly bad – real hubris on Merton’s part. Merton is a one-trick pony of a comedian who’s never written or inspired good material.
There are some wonderful episodes …. The Americans Hit Town, Hancock’s War, The Reunion Party, Sid’s Mystery Tours …. my favourite is Fred’s Pie Stall, the one where Fred had been told by the Council to move his stall from the Town Square because it lowers the tone of the district.
How topical is that!
Hancock … “It’s a bitter blow for us gourmets.”
Fred … “I’m pretty choked about it, myself.”
Fred’s Pie Stall is great. I do also like the rather surreal episode where he buys a TV set in kit form which ends up taking over his entire house.
Lest we forget the immortal Lady Don’t Fall Backwards…
From The Radio Ham:
“Mayday! Mayday!”
“Mayday? What’s he talking about? It’s the middle of June!”
and of course Hancock rhapsodising about the romance of the sea :
“Boatloads of sailors stricken down with yellow jack. Limp legs hanging out of bunks.”
I recently acquired the remaining episodes from his ATV TV series which I hadn’t realised actually preceded the BBC television series. Have watched a couple and while not up to the standard of the Galton and Simpson episodes they are certainly worth seeing. He is, of course, playing the same character.
The ATV series has its moments, but it certainly didn’t precede the BBC TV series. It came after his two feature films.
A word here for The Punch and Judy Man, which is very different from what you expect, much more subtle. The ice-cream parlour scene is a masterclass.
The Punch puppet gave him nightmares. Hardly surprising.
From appreciation society web site.
“Interestingly Hancock’s first TV series proper was not Hancock’s Half Hour and was not even on the BBC! The first series commenced in April 1956 on ATV and was written by Eric Sykes with Larry Stephens also collaborating on some of the episodes.”
However I am not sure that this is the series I downloaded er … discovered recently.
Apologies to Dai for the crossed wires. I immediately thought of the later series when you mentioned ATV – clips and full episodes of that are acquirable in the usual places.
The 1956 ITV show was, strictly speaking, from Associated Rediffusion. It was generally a sketch format with the odd musical interlude.
If you’ve a couple of hours to kill, the always great Alfred Molina does a very good portrayal of the lad himself…
There was a quite fantastically bleak play on Radio 3 called Hancock’s Last Half Hour. Richard Briers played him… very well. Have you ever heard Tom Good say “fuck”? I have.
And there was a play last year (?) on Radio 4 about Willy Rushton bringing Hancock’s ashes back from Australia.
I think the story goes that when the Air Stewardess was told who was in the urn next to Rushton she upgraded the two of them to First Class.
Swipe me, how glitterin’!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ZrOhVDc5g
Spike M is arguably indirectly responsible for Hancock’s Australian misadventure – he pioneered the now well-established tradition of British comedians going out there and doing well. He would have probably done better doing what Spike did and going back to radio.
And of course not jettisoning G and S.
Of course, Spike’s coming here wasn’t so much for professional as personal reasons – his family had moved here and he was just dropping in on them. And if someone offered him work, well….
When you start getting Doctor Down Under and Father Dear Father Down Under, though, you know it’s possible to go too far…
Doctor Down Under.. a sitcom about a proctologist.
That thing of the Hancock character being a ‘lad’. Was that irony? The character is a grumpy middle aged man surely? (Bear with me: I like him but just never sussed this)
Lad has changed its meaning a bit. In those days it was often used affectionately for men of absolutely any age from a relatively humble background – “The Lancashire Lad” and so on.
And Hancock doesn’t show any interests in lager,football, silicon babes or facile guitar bands.
“Waheyyy what a life! Get innnn, Sid !”
Good explanation. Makes sense now, as the Hancock character was anything but humble.
Somebody should do the lagered-up Sid and Tony, it would work if it was still in East Cheam too.
Men Behaving Badly nearly repeated that dynamic – just with more nob and tit gags
Not only a lad, but, in AWland, quite a young one at that. And what is this grumpy of which you speak?
Oo, he does look young.
Boring!
MY EYES HURT.