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| TONY HANCOCK and friend, 1962 |
Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock was a comic fiction who lived in an imaginary place called East Cheam and had total reality for millions of people. Anthony John Hancock (12 May 1924 –– 24 June 1968), clown, was not content with this and searched for more reality, and more truth until he finally lost himself in a fantasy world.
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| Arrow Books/Random House, 2000 |
When The Wind Changed: The Life and Death of Tony Hancock (2000) by CLIFF GOODWIN
Books about dead celebrities tend to fall into two categories –– warts and all exposés which focus exclusively on the more salacious aspects of their subjects' lives or highly respectful 'authorized biographies' written with the full cooperation (and sometimes under the strict supervision) of their subjects' relatives and legal executors. The truth, as it does with most things, probably falls somewhere between these two extremes and, in the case of Cliff Goodwin's When The Wind Changed: The Life and Death of Tony Hancock, can make for illuminating if occasionally confronting reading.
The author is obviously an admirer of Hancock's work but never allows that admiration to cloud his judgement when it comes to revealing what drove and tormented the comedian prior to his 1968 suicide in Australia, where he had gone in a last-ditch effort to salvage what was left of his alcohol and drug ravaged career. It's a balanced biography, neither condemning nor condoning Hancock's erratic and often irrational behaviour, which traces his life year by year to reveal how his performing persona developed and the influence, largely negative, that success had on him both in and out of the spotlight. The comedian's life was a charmed one in many ways but one which began to unravel and then spiral out of control as his alcoholism worsened and his habit of disassociating himself from those who had been instrumental to his success –– his writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, his comedic foil Sid James, his agent Phyllis Rounce –– took its understandable toll on these friendships and, in time, on his ability to make effective use of his gifts as a performer.
Goodwin's plain journalistic style of writing –– which occasionally assumes a needlessly melodramatic tone in an effort to heighten the drama of events which were dramatic enough without requiring further embellishment –– enables the reader to get a real feel for the showbusiness world of 1950s and 1960s England, its variety theatres, radio and TV studios and locally staffed film sets (an unthinkable proposition in the very different, predominantly outsourced film industry of the twenty-first century). Hancock knew and was friendly with most of the great names of the golden era of British radio, film and television comedy –– Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, John Le Mesurier and Jimmy Edwards to name just a few –– and Goodwin's many references to them, and to his co-stars Sid James, Bill Kerr, Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques, helps to place Hancock's story firmly in the context of his times, shedding valuable light on how his idiosyncratic and largely inimitable style of comedy was born and laboriously perfected.
If you only want to read one book about Hancock's short but troubled life, then this is probably the book to choose. It's thoroughly researched, contains a full chronology, extensive notes and complete cast lists, and also includes a transcription of the comedian's 1960 Face to Face interview with BBC journalist John Freeman –– a probing analysis of his personality which exposes the banal, pre-rehearsed 'celebrity interviews' of today as the crass, self-indulgent time fillers they so often are. It was Freeman's interview, many of Hancock's friends believed, that provoked the endless questioning of his talent which, as the years went by, warped, eroded and eventually destroyed it.
The photograph chosen for the cover of this book, taken by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, is also one of the best I've seen of Hancock, capturing in one unguarded moment much of the inner anguish and confusion he hid so well from the public during his time as Britain's best loved comedian.
When The Wind Changed: The Life and Death of Tony Hancock is no longer in print.
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| Ariel Books/BBC, 1986 |
Hancock (1986) by FREDDIE HANCOCK and DAVID NATHAN
Freda 'Freddie' Hancock (née Ross) met a rising star named Tony Hancock while he was performing in the English resort town of Bournemouth in 1954 and became first his press agent, then his mistress and finally, in December 1965, his second wife. (His first wife, a former Lanvin model named Cicely Romanis whom he'd married in 1950, also became an alcoholic and followed him to an early grave in 1969 at the age of thirty-eight.) The marriage officially lasted one year, his alcohol-fuelled self-destructiveness effectively crushing a relationship which had been, in some respects, the most stable and rewarding of his life. But Freddie realised, as so many others associated with Hancock came to realise prior to his death, that hers was a choice between trying to keep him alive and sober or attempting to save her own threatened sanity. 'I loved Tony,' she told her co-author David Nathan while they were originally preparing this short but lovingly written biography, 'and I never ceased to love him. But loving him and living with him were vastly different propositions.'
Hancock is as much the story of a relationship as it is the story of a doomed comic genius whose weekly half hour radio and television broadcasts literally brought the entire British nation to a standstill every Friday night for seven successful years. Freddie's attempts to make her client and lover see what he was doing to himself –– which included leaving him on numerous occasions and once tipping an entire bottle of brandy over his head when he was supposed to be abstaining from alcohol and had thoughtlessly asked her to pour him a drink –– fell on deaf ears, resulting in five failed suicide attempts on her part before she finally found the courage (and the sense) to walk out on him for good in July 1966. Despite this, and the frequent beatings Hancock subjected her to after she attempted to wrench vodka bottles from his hand, she never ceased to hope that he would one day conquer his demons and begin to appreciate, as she and so many of his contemporaries in the British entertainment industry did, what a rare and exceptional talent he possessed. Nor was she alone in finding this portly, round-shouldered man (the result of contracting rickets as a child) with 'funny feet' ('look like two kippers strapped to my ankles, they do' was how Hancock himself described them) and a remarkably expressive face irresistibly attractive. Freddie was only one of many people, female and male, who fell in love with Hancock and drove themselves to the brink of madness in the quest to relieve his largely self-inflicted suffering.
It's a tribute to Freddie's generosity of spirit that she chose not to make her biography the muckraking tell-all exposé it could have so easily become in unkinder, less affectionate hands. While it can by no means be described as an exhaustive biography, it remains a useful and enlightening one for any admirer of the comedian, revealing him as a deeply flawed man with chronic emotional problems and not, as some would have it, a humorless monster obsessed with becoming an international superstar in the style of his more successful friend and rival Peter Sellers (another inspired comedian who was no stranger to addiction, psychiatry and prolonged episodes of masochistic self-destruction). Freddie admits that she was naïve, that she ignored the advice of her family and that of Hancock's friends who tried to make her see she had to leave him, but nowhere does she state that she ever regretted having him in her life. 'He was an exciting personality,' she recalls. 'He did not smile all that often, but when he did it was worthwhile. His eyes smiled a lot. He had a lasting effect on me from that moment.' This book is a testament to the love she felt for him, tragically misguided and spurned though it ultimately was.
Hancock was last reprinted in 1996. Lady Don't Fall Backwards, a similar 1988 memoir by JOAN LE MESURIER, his mistress and the wife of the comedian's friend and occasional Hancock's Half Hour guest star JOHN LE MESURIER, may also be available.
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| Methuen Publishing Limited, 1999 |
Hancock's Last Stand: The Series That Never Was (1999) by EDWARD JOFFE
Edward Joffe was a South African-born, Scottish-based television director who was given the unenviable task of directing Hancock's last ever television series, provisionally titled Hancock Down Under, which had been commissioned by Australia's ATN7 network and featured brand new, tailormade scripts authored by Melbourne-based writer Hugh Stuckey. The program, which was filmed entirely in the Seven network's Sydney studios and featured Hancock as a newly arrived immigrant trying to come to grips with his new home and the Australian way of life, was considered by the comedian's agent and virtually everyone who knew him to be his last chance to recapture and perhaps replicate the success of his BBC years, when Hancock's Half Hour, in both its radio and television formats, had regularly been enjoyed by audiences numbering in the millions. Hancock himself apparently knew this was his last chance to salvage what was left of a career all but ruined by his addictions to alcohol and prescription medications and approached the project with a newfound sense of purpose and, at least initially, with the intention of remaining sober and drug-free throughout the long and, for him, tedious months of filming.
He flew to Australia in March and, after spending some time in hotels, eventually moved into a house on Birriga Road in the upscale eastern Sydney suburb of Bellevue Hill with Joffe, his wife Myrtle and their three children. The Joffes occupied the upper two floors of the house, while Hancock lived alone in a small, self-contained flat on the ground floor overlooking the garden. It was an arrangement the producers of the show had encouraged, believing that having his director so close would in turn encourage Hancock to curb his drug and alcohol intake, both of which once again became prodigious within a few weeks of his arrival in Australia. It was in this Birriga Road flat that Hancock was found, dead in his underwear with a cigarette clamped between his badly scorched fingers, by Joffe on the morning of 24 June 1968.
This was, of course, a dismal end to what had been a sad and wasted life and it's a tale that might have been more poignantly told by a writer other than Joffe, whose style has a tendency to become annoyingly glib at times. The book's one saving grace is that it reveals Hancock trying to understand and confront his own self-destructiveness and its consequences, fighting to regain control of a career which had hit rock bottom following his separation from Freddie Ross and the failure of his one man show –– which saw him turned down flat by his former writers Galton and Simpson after begging them to provide him with new material –– to wow audiences at London's Festival Hall and other 'safer' venues in Aden, the Isle of Man and Australia.
These were dark days for Hancock and this is, at times, a very disturbing book. Nor is what was actually filmed of Hancock Down Under –– a program plagued by disaster from day one that was only screened in edited form following the comedian's death –– a fitting memorial to a performer who had previously been able to make audiences laugh simply by raising his eyebrow or impatiently muttering the phrase 'Stone me!' to himself. While the program does offer a few brief glimpses of the old, mobile-faced, incredibly subtle clown of the Hancock's Half Hour days, there are too many moments when the old magic simply isn't there, when it becomes tragically obvious that you're watching a sick and scared man trying to regain public favour by sheer force of will. The show, like Joffe's book, is not a must-own item for any but the most obsessive of Hancock fans, who will most likely be disconcerted or at the very least disappointed to read of the pitiable conclusion to what had been, before the comedian was destroyed by his own insecurities, a sparkling career.
Hancock's Last Stand has not been reprinted since it was originally published in 1999.
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| Arrow Books/Random House UK, 2004 |
50 Years of Hancock's Half Hour (2004) by RICHARD WEBBER
'One thing,' author Richard Webber writes in his introduction to this fine and indispensable book, 'needs clarifying from the beginning: this is not another Tony Hancock biography. The tragic life story of one of the nation's finest comedy actors has already been meticulously detailed by other authors… this book is a biography of a radio and television series, a celebration of a show which, even now, fifty years later, provides pleasure to the millions who continue to listen to or watch Hancock's Half Hour.'
Mr Webber is clearly a man of his word. His book is an affectionate, lovingly detailed celebration of a program which, amazingly, has remained popular with audiences for over half a century –– an audience which includes people, like myself, who were not yet born when it originally aired and have only discovered Hancock thanks to the canniness of the BBC marketing department which wisely chose to repackage, re-release and re-promote what most of the world's other major entertainment conglomerates would have thrown away or left to ignominiously rot in their rarely opened vaults.
The continuing popularity of Hancock's Half Hour is a testimony to its star's ability to simultaneously personify and lampoon what may be termed a quintessentially English personality and a quintessentially English view of life. Hancock was appealing because he behaved no better and no worse than anybody in his audience behaved, was unafraid to portray himself as a deluded buffoon whose pretensions were as numerous as they were ludicrous, a clown whose antics nevertheless revealed, in the beautifully chosen words of novelist and playwright JB Priestley whose two part 1968 novel The Image Men features a character based on Hancock, '…a suggestion of depth… somebody close to "mass man" of today, coming out of the faceless crowd, hopeful, near to glory for some minutes, before the lid comes on again, before he shrugs his way back into the dark.' That shrug, it could be argued, was the key to what made 'the lad himself' so popular –– a willingness to get on with it and not linger over his latest defeat that became, in time, the endearing hallmark of the flawed, all too human 'Everyman' he so effectively portrayed.
This book doesn't dwell on the alcoholism, the drug abuse, the affairs or the two failed marriages, the long slow fall from grace that led to what had probably been the comedian's always inevitable decision to take his own life. Instead, it turns the spotlight on what should always be the first and last consideration when we speak of Tony Hancock –– his ongoing ability to make people laugh. That somebody so beloved, who had, in the words of his friend Spike Milligan '…no enemy but himself' should die such a lonely premature death only makes a book like this that much more valuable as a celebration of what, in anybody's terms, must rank as a unique and precious legacy. Containing full episode guides to all his BBC radio and television programs, a complete unaired script penned by Galton and Simpson (who also provide a short and rather silly introduction), full rundowns of cast and crew details plus a complete bibliography and (nowadays all but irrelevant) list of LP, cassette and video releases, it's a book that deserves a place in the collection of any Tony Hancock fan.
50 Years of Hancock's Half Hour is still in print and may be obtainable from your local bookstore or preferred online retailer.
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| Macdonald Queen Anne Press UK, 1987 |
The Illustrated Hancock (1987) by ROGER WILMUT
Like Richard Webber's book, Roger Wilmut's The Illustrated Hancock is a celebration of a body of work rather than a lament for a sadly squandered talent. What makes the book worth owning, as should be obvious from its title, is the assortment of stunning black and white photographs it contains, covering all aspects of the phenomenon that was Tony Hancock from his early days as a variety performer through his radio and television years and his work as both a star in the films The Rebel (1960) and the unfairly scorned The Punch and Judy Man (1962) and as a supporting actor in big budget extravaganzas including Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines (1965) and The Wrong Box (1966). Each section is preceded by a short introduction which provides a context for the images and includes quotes from many of those who knew, loved and worked with him. The book is a brief but fitting tribute to a comedian who almost singlehandedly raised the bar of British comedy, paving the way for later and equally gifted generations of 'comedy of embarrassment' performers including John Cleese, Harry Enfield, Kathy Burke, Jennifer Saunders, Catherine Tate, Steve Coogan and Ricky Gervais.
The Illustrated Hancock has not been reprinted since it was originally published in 1987. ROGER WILMUT was also the author of Tony Hancock: Artiste, a 1978 biography that was fully revised and expanded in 1983.
Special thanks to the person who posted this clip from The Blood Donor on YouTube. Your efforts are appreciated by comedy fans everywhere.
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Last updated 14 July 2023 §
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