'Strike Me Lucky!' REMEMBERING ROY RENE

ROY RENE as 'MO'
c 1946

Mo had no sense of humour. 

    He had a sense of fun and a superb sense of comedy that put him on top of the comedy pile in Australia for nearly fifty years, and on stage he was one of the funniest men in the world.  He could get a laugh by a leer, a raised eyebrow or a sideways glance, and he could do practically anything he liked with an audience.  He could make them laugh and he could make them cry.  He loved to make them cry, because that exploited his gift for pathos, of which he was so proud.  Referring to rival comics, he'd say, 'The other mugs can't do that, can they, pal?  They haven't got my lovely pathos.' 

      But his sense of humour was practically non-existent.

FRED PARSONS

A Man Called Mo (1973)

He had haunted brown eyes, a large beaked nose, thick rubbery lips and always wore a painted-on black beard.  His stage attire was that of the traditional British music hall or North American vaudeville comedian –– a checkered suit, clunky oversized boots, a battered hat and even a flouncy woman's dress if the sketch he was appearing in at the time required him to wear one.  But it was his voice that was his most characteristic feature and, many agreed, his greatest asset as a performer.  'It was high-pitched,' according to his friend, long-time scriptwriter and biographer Fred Parsons, 'with a lisp that would develop into a liquid splutter.  It was a voice that would make the most banal line sound funny.'

It was also a voice that nearly every Australian man, woman and child instantly recognized and unreservedly adored between July 1916, when the new comedy team known as 'Stiffy and Mo' made their stage debut at Sydney's Princess Theatre, and 22 November 1954 when its owner –– Roy Rene, better known as 'Mo McCackie' or just plain 'Mo' –– finally succumbed to heart disease at home in his bed in the Sydney suburb of Kensington.  For nearly forty years Rene (pronounced 'Reen' to rhyme with 'keen') had been the nation's favourite clown, an iconic figure in Australian showbusiness whose decidedly working class language and pugnacious demeanour made him the darling of those he affectionately, if not always respectfully, referred to as 'his mob.'  

 

ROY RENE, 1915

 

The great irony of Rene's success was that he was the son of a Jewish immigrant ('a New Australian' as they would patronizingly be known in the post-World War Two era), a Dutch-born cigar maker named Hyam van der Sluys whose most fervent wish was that the fourth of his seven children would one day take over the family business.  But young Harry, born in Adelaide on 15 February 1891 and legally known as 'Harry Sluice' for the rest of his life, had other ideas.  At the age of ten, without bothering to inform either of his parents that he was doing it, he entered a local singing contest and won.  (Offered the choice of ten shillings or a duck as his prize, the boy chose the duck, later selling it for twelve shillings and thus earning himself a two shilling profit.)  He turned professional shortly afterwards, performing a duet with the female star of the pantomime Sinbad the Sailor at Adelaide's Theatre Royal under the name 'Boy Roy, the Singing Soprano.'  This led to further engagements in charity concerts and, by the time he was thirteen, to another professional singing job, this time wearing blackface make-up in the then-popular (and not yet politically inappropriate) minstrel style, at the Adelaide Tivoli.  His father's decision to move the family east to Melbourne shortly afterwards did nothing to dampen the boy's enthusiasm for the world of the stage.  After working for a few weeks as an apprentice jockey –– fostering an interest in horse racing he would retain all his life courtesy of his brothers, both of whom went on to become bookmakers –– he was once again treading the boards, singing at the Bijou Theatre for Rickards Circuit manager Frank M Clark for the tidy sum (in 1904) of ₤3 per week.

It was nature, in the unpredictable form of puberty, which transformed Harry Sluice from a featured boy vocalist into a fledgling knockabout comic.  At sixteen his voice broke, ending overnight the promising if not exactly glittering career of 'The Singing Soprano.'  Having had ample opportunity to study the work of the many internationally famous and less well-known local comedians who passed through The Bijou and other Melbourne theatres each week he decided that he too could do that and set about re-inventing himself as a comic.  

In 1910 he came to the attention of Melbourne impresario James Brennan, who liked his act enough to book him for his National Amphitheatre in Sydney as 'Roy Rene,' his newly-chosen stage name.  (Rene was the name of a famous French clown whose act he'd seen and admired as a boy.)  He had no trouble finding steady work with the National and other variety circuits –– this was the pre-television, pre-radio, pre-cinema era, when every town in every Australian city was home to at least one theatre providing live entertainment twice a day with ticket prices starting at an affordable sixpence –– and was soon performing regularly in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide throughout 1911 and 1912, diversifying by occasionally accepting minor roles in legitimate or 'straight' plays.  In 1912 he came to the attention of Benjamin and John Fuller, owners of the Fuller Circuit of theatres, due to his popular (and allegedly unplanned) impersonation of famed North American 'Hebrew comedian' Julian Rose.  The Fullers liked him enough to send him 'across the pond' to New Zealand, where he worked in that nation's four major cities for most of that year.  After returning to Australia he finally succeeded in meeting influential booker Harry Clay, for whom he worked in various parts of the country, both urban and rural, until the end of 1914 when the Fullers re-hired him for a touring company being formed by brother and sister musical comedians Albert and Maud Bletsoe. 

Back in Sydney after appearing with the Bletsoe troupe in Brisbane, and working again at the Fuller-owned National Theatre on Castlereagh Street, Rene suddenly found himself in the employ of a new manager named Nat Phillips –– a writer, director, singer, acrobat and fellow clown who had been summoned east from Adelaide by the Fullers to take over the Bletsoe 'revusical' (a combination of revue and musical) after Albert and Maud departed in order to 'pursue new opportunities' (a polite way of disguising the fact that they'd been fired).  Phillips immediately formed a new troupe composed almost entirely of performers who were already under contract to the Fuller brothers, retaining only two from the now-disbanded Bletsoe troupe.  

One of these retained performers was the twenty-five year old Roy Rene.  It was Philips –– ten years his senior and, unlike him, a performer who had found success both in Britain and on the Continent –– who decided that he and Roy should team up to form a double act.  Dissatisfied with the name 'Phillips and Rene,' they were still struggling to find a better alternative when the doorman of the Sydney Tivoli suggested that they might like to give 'Stiffy and Mo' a try.  They performed together as these characters in what was billed as 'Nat Phillips' Tabloid Musical Comedy Company,' a name that soon changed to 'Nat Phillips' Stiffy and Mo Revue Company' and then simply to 'Stiffy and Mo.' 

   

Theatre poster, 1921

 

 

Phillips and Rene were a sensation and their success as a team was instantaneous.  As historian Clay Djubal noted in his 2006 PhD dissertation:  'Much of the popularity accorded Stiffy and Mo was due not only to the comic situations they found themselves embroiled in but also because audiences recognized in them the traits of an Australian character type that both typified and celebrated the nationalistic ideals being infused into the wartime Australian identity –– namely mateship, loyalty, egalitarianism, larrikin attitudes (including practical jokes on mates) and an outright refusal to bow to authority figures.  As the first truly urban Australian characters to be developed on the variety stage Stiffy and Mo not only captured the Australian popular culture's imagination but also played a significant role in boosting the popularity of the new Australian revusical genre which had begun to emerge around 1914/1915.  Much of the duo's success, too, can be put down to the rapport which allowed them to work off each other in both written and improvised scenes.'  The outbreak of World War One also played a crucial role in consolidating the team's popularity, with Australians looking more and more to homegrown talent to fill the void created by the enforced absence of imported British and North American artists.

But the partnership, successful though it was, was not without its tensions.  Phillips was more or less the brains behind the operation, writing its sketches and developing, in the character of Stiffy, what was the first recognizably Australian comic figure to appear on an Australian stage.  (He wore a South Sydney football jersey as part of his costume, an addition which no doubt endeared him to his urban working class audience, many of whom lived in this socially-deprived area and supported the mighty Rabbitohs.)  Unusually for the time, he and Rene did not work as 'straight man' and 'comic,' but as equals, provoking and sharing the laughter between them.  Although they remained partners until 1928 –– with a two year hiatus between 1925-1927 caused by what was purported to be a misunderstanding about money which saw Rene resume his solo career and even accept a legitimate acting role as a factory foreman in the play Give and Take, a role he by all accounts excelled in –– it was his performance as the obviously Jewish and linguistically-challenged Mo which began to attract the lion's share of attention from audiences and critics.  His final split with Phillips, when it came in 1928, was less the result of personal acrimony than their mutual belief that the partnership had begun to grow stale and the time had come to split up the act.  Although plans were later made for the pair to reunite for one last tour, these were abruptly curtailed by Phillips's death in June 1932.

 

Listen to The Sailors, the one and only gramophone recording made by STIFFY AND MO in 1927, from the online collection of THE NATIONAL FILM AND SOUND ARCHIVE.

 

Rene found himself leading his own company by the middle of 1928, appearing in a show called Mo's Merry Monarch's at the same Fuller Circuit theatre on Castlereagh Street in which Stiffy and Mo had first captured the hearts of Sydney audiences more than a decade earlier.  One of the featured vocalists in the show was a '…sloe-eyed, dainty brunette' named Sadie Gale who, like him, had been performing professionally since childhood.  Their paths had originally crossed in 1913, but it wasn't until Ms Gale was hired to join the touring company of the 1927 Stiffy and Mo 'comeback' tour that Rene found himself falling in love with her.  The problem, according to Fred Parsons, was that '…she couldn't stand a bar of him… How he managed to change her mind has never been clearly explained, except that he enlisted the support of her mother –– 'Mumma' to him.'

 

  

SADIE GALE and ROY RENE, 1929

 

 

Naturally, Rene wanted to marry his darling Sadie, but there was a hitch –– he already had a wife, an actress named Dot Davis whom he'd impulsively wed in March 1917 and had been working with in the Stiffy and Mo revue ever since.  Once a well-publicized divorce had been obtained from Ms Davis, he was free to make Sadie the second Mrs Harry Sluice, which he did on 3 July 1929 in a ceremony held in her flat at 11pm, immediately after the curtain had fallen on that day's final show.  Theirs was to be a happy marriage which, in a few years, would produce a son named Sam and a daughter named Mylo.  Sadie also became her husband's preferred if infrequent performing partner, appearing with him in many of the 'vulgar' sketches for which he was now becoming increasingly famous all over the country.  Their happiness threatened to be short-lived, however, when Rene became seriously ill with peritonitis while he and Sadie were touring in northern Queensland, forcing him to undergo an emergency operation in Melbourne three months after they opened there in a new play titled Clowns in Clover.  While the operation saved his life, it also kept him off the stage for six months and left him with a badly scarred stomach that forced him, from then on, to wear a specially-designed medical corset.  'He was inordinately proud of this scarified stomach,' Parsons remembered, 'and would show it to anyone interested at the drop of a corset.'

But dropping corsets was not the primary topic of discussion for anyone in Australia or, indeed, in the rest of the world in 1930.  Along with every other Australian industry, the entertainment business found itself severely affected by the Depression, with audience numbers diminishing to the point where it became impossible for Rene's comeback show –– a revue called Pot Luck which again opened in Melbourne in June –– to earn enough for its producers to recoup their investment.  Financial necessity saw Rene and Sadie undertake a tour of Hoyts' suburban picture theatres (a big comedown for two such seasoned stage performers, with 'the movies' definitely viewed as an inferior and, as most of them believed at the time, faddish form of entertainment) and a brief tour of New Zealand in order to keep themselves employed.  By 1931 they were back in Sydney, opening in a new show at that city's New Haymarket Theatre which aimed to attract audiences by keeping ticket prices low and changing its program daily instead of weekly.  

The gamble worked, with the show's manager Mike Connors soon taking over the nearby Sydney Opera House (not the iconic building on the harbour constructed in the 1970s, but the original theatre on George Street built in the nineteenth century) and renaming it the Sydney Tivoli.  Rene performed here and then returned to Melbourne to appear in yet another revue called Brighter Days at his old stamping ground The Bijou.  'To those who could afford to see it,' Fred Parsons recalled, 'it offered two-and-a-half hours of comedy, music and pretty girls.  It –– and similar shows –– played their part in making the unemployed forget how miserable they were.  On the stage, they saw a seedy character called Mo who was obviously as broke as they were.  They saw him apply for a job, and then lose it because he back-chatted the boss.  They saw him order drinks that he had no hope of paying for, and they laughed when he suffered the consequences… And in those times a good laugh could help you forget that you had no job to go to the next morning.'

It was the 1930s that saw Rene come into his own as both a comedian and an unofficial national treasure, perfecting a broad style of irreverent working-class comedy which mischievously thumbed its nose at everything that was polite, authoritarian and 'posh' and seemed tailor-made for those enduring the worst effects of the Depression.  (The wowsers deemed Rene's act to be 'vulgar' and even 'dirty' on occasion, earning him an undeserved reputation as a purveyor of smut that proved virtually impossible to shake off in later years as fact increasingly gave way to hearsay and unsubstantiated rumour.)  Unlike many of his contemporaries, Rene worked steadily throughout the Depression, appearing in one show after another as either its principal comedian or as an ever-popular 'featured act.'  In 1934 he also starred in Strike Me Lucky! –– the title was one of his most frequently quoted catchphrases –– his first and only film made by pioneering Australian director Ken G Hall.  He was persuaded to grow a real beard for his Cinesound debut but the film, while entertaining and occasionally threatening to become a little more than that, failed to capture the essence of what made him such a gifted and memorable vaudevillian (although it did provide him with a few Chaplinesque scenes in which he was given free rein to display what he called his 'lovely pathos').  Film was not his medium.  His comedy was fed by the reaction of his 'mob' and without them much of what made him so funny and so beloved by his audience was lost.

Film poster, 1934

 

Watch three short clips from Strike Me Lucky, the 1934 film starring ROY RENE and directed by pioneering Australian filmmaker KEN G HALL, featured in the online collection of AUSTRALIAN SCREEN.)

 

By 1936 he was back at the Tivoli, working for the great Wallace Parnell, a recent English import (and brother of Val Parnell, world-famous manager of the London Palladium) who would, over the next eight years, prove to be its most successful manager.  Joining the Tivoli company was a major turning point in Rene's career if not the making of it in many ways.  The Tivoli Circuit was the most prestigious variety circuit in Australia at the time, featuring both the best local performers and many of the top music hall and vaudeville acts imported directly (and exclusively) from Britain and North America.  It was a style of show –– fast-paced, sketch-based, filled with pretty ballet girls and fully orchestrated musical interludes –– that suited both his temperament and his indecorous style of comedy, although he hit a snag in the fact that Parnell's boss, an ex-comedian named Frank Neil, bore him a longstanding grudge.  (This may have been inspired by jealousy, as Neil's own career as a comedian had never taken off.)  Neil refused to re-sign Rene when his contact expired in 1939 and Parnell, as the manager rather than the booker of the show, was powerless to stop the Tivoli's top star from slipping through his fingers.  The good news, at least for Rene, was that he had plenty of other offers waiting and was immediately re-signed by Parnell following Neil's unfortunate death in a car accident.  Rene remained at the Tivoli until 1945, helping to fill the almost insatiable demand for entertainment created by the outbreak of World War Two and the arrival of thousands of cashed-up, diversion seeking GIs on Australian shores.  

The end of World War Two also saw the end of what is now considered to be the Golden Age of Australian variety.  With the Pacific now free of Japanese ships and foreign talent once again available and easy to import, the Tivoli's new manager David N Martin reinstated its pre-1939 policy of hiring big-name acts from overseas to headline its shows.  This meant that there was less incentive to hire the local acts which had kept audiences laughing throughout the war years.  (Nor did it help matters that there was no one there to champion their cause following the resignation of Wallace Parnell in 1944.)  Unbelievably, one of the first casualties of Martin's anti-Australian hiring policy was Roy Rene, whose Tivoli contract was not renewed when it expired at the end of 1945.  

 

 

FRED PARSONS and ROY RENE, c 1942

 

 

Thankfully, Rene had already tested the waters in what, as the decade wore on, became its most popular and important entertainment medium –– radio.  He recorded sixty short comedy spots for an independent producer during the war years which, while not particularly funny by his lofty standards, had been appealing enough to prompt the Australian Broadcasting Commission to commission two thirteen episode serials starring the Mo character.  Like his previous radio work, both The Misadventures of Mo and Sherlock Mo were written by his regular stage writer Fred Parsons, who was under no illusions as to their quality or their ability to capture the true essence of Rene's comedic genius.  Rene, unfazed by this, went back to performing two live shows a day, putting the radio experience out of his mind until 1946 when his flirtation with the increasingly popular medium suddenly assumed a new significance.  Without a regular Tivoli contract to sustain him, he was faced with the choice of either going out on tour again –– something he hadn't been obliged to do since the late 1920s –– or accepting an offer from radio producer Ron Beck to join the cast of two radio variety programs titled, respectively, Colgate Cavalcade and Calling The Stars. 

In March 1946 the Sydney newspaper The Telegraph reported that audiences would not be able to see Mo on stage '…for at least a year.  He has signed a contract,' the story revealed, 'to appear exclusively for the Colgate-Palmolive Radio Unit.'  With material once again written for him exclusively by Parsons, it didn't take Rene long to find his feet as a radio performer –– a transition aided by the fact that, unlike his previous radio work, both Colgate Cavalcade and Calling The Stars were broadcast live in front of a studio audience.  The enthusiastic response to his appearances on these programs gave Parsons the idea to write a regular weekly ten minute sketch for him that he decided to call McCackie Mansion.   

Debuting on Tuesday 8 July 1947, McCackie Mansion soon became the most talked-about segment of Calling The Stars and, within a few months, the most popular comedy program, bar none, on Australian radio –– a short, sometimes surreal excursion to 'Number Thirteen Coffin Street' where Mo lived with his cheeky son Young Harry (Harry Griffiths) and was regularly visited by his greedy brother-in-law 'Orrible 'Erbie (Jack Burgess), his annoying neighbour Lasho (Don Lashwood) and a pseudo-refined, frail-voiced 'gent' known as Spencer the Garbageman (Harry Avondale).  There were no female characters in the cast and the humour was outrageously camp for its time, with Mo finding what many thought to be his perfect comic foil in the delicate, sometimes pretentious Spencer (whose surname was eventually revealed to be Smellie).  The program became so popular that it allowed Rene to make a brief return to the stage in 1949, headlining in a new revue titled McCackie Mo-ments at the King's Theatre in Melbourne.  But it was radio that made 'Mo McCackie' a household name to millions of Australians and introduced Rene to a new generation of fans, many of whom had not been born when he'd been packing them in at the Tivoli twice a day.  McCackie Mansion ran every Tuesday night until 1951 –– when Colgate-Palmolive stopped sponsoring variety programs in favour of sponsoring the game shows most housewives now seemed to prefer –– and introduced many distinctive expressions to the Australian vocabulary, including the still widely-used 'Pull your head in!' and 'Cop this!'.  Other favourites included the perennial 'Strike me lucky!', 'You dirty, filthy beast!' and 'Fair suck of the saveloy!'.  But there was a social message lurking beneath the flamboyant surface of Rene's comedy, best captured in this statement made by poet (and his soon-to-be ghostwriter) Max Harris:  'There he would be, leering, spitting, expostulating, and celebrating every ugly vulgarity to be found in a society rich only in inhibitions, self-delusions and respectable hypocrisies.  You can laugh at the grotesque in front of you, he seemed to be saying, laugh at the sub-human stage Jew, but he is you.  And I’m going to prove it.  And he did.  He and his audience laughed at the worst in themselves.' 

 




McCACKIE MANSION ROY RENE (Mo); HARRY GRIFFITHS (Young Harry) DON LASHWOOD (Lasho); JACK BURGESS ('Orrible 'Erbie) HARRY AVONDALE (Spencer the Garbageman) Radio Program –– Performed & recorded live c 1948    

 

Rene was too beloved an entertainer to remain absent from the nation's airwaves for long.  Although a proposed series for the ABC, provisionally titled McCackie Manor, failed to get the green light he was back on-air by March 1952, performing every Saturday night in The New Atlantic Show alongside actress Patricia Shay and compére Pat Hodgins.  Unfortunately, his failing health soon forced him to quit the show and, following a May 1953 cardiac arrest which left him re-confined to the bed he had been so eager to leave just twelve months earlier, retire from showbusiness altogether.  He performed one last time on radio, returning to the Macquarie Auditorium in Sydney from which so many episodes of McCackie Mansion had been broadcast, to make a farewell cameo appearance on his old program.  Ironically, he appeared not as Mo but as himself, giving a brief speech in honour of a newly-established charitable foundation known as the Elizabethan Theatre Trust.  It was '…one for the mugs' and failed to earn him a single laugh –– a fact which struck Fred Parsons, who also attended the broadcast, as being more than a little sad.  'I knew that Alan Clive [an impressionist] signed off by saying "All the voices you heard tonight were supplied by me… all except the dog."  Roy was at the side, waiting,' Parsons remembered in 1973.  'As Alan said, "All except the dog," Roy shuffled on stage and said, "That was me."  The audience yelled, and I'm glad that they did, because it was the very last laugh that Roy ever got.'

 

 

Theatre poster, 1978

 

 

The passing of Roy Rene on 22 November 1954 closed the book on what had arguably been the most innovative era of Australian comedy until its university/television-inspired resurgence in the early 1980s.  Unfortunately, Rene is an increasingly obscure figure these days despite the fact that the nation's most prestigious (if least publicized) live performance award was named 'the Mo Award' in his honour in 1976.  Only fragments of his film and radio work survive and what little does survive remains commercially unavailable –– a situation sadly indicative of Australia's reluctance to preserve, celebrate or even acknowledge the contribution made to our cultural heritage by men like him and his fellow 'star' comedians (and closest rivals) George Wallace and Jim Gerald.  Few people below the age of seventy realize who these performers were or how crucial their work was to the formation of what's now considered to be the distinctive Australian sense of humour.  Rene's influence, while far from being a visible or pervasive one, can nevertheless still be detected in the irreverent comedy of performers as different from him (and from each other) as Barry Humphries, Graham Kennedy, Paul Hogan, Wendy Harmer, Judith Lucy and Paul Fenech.  But perhaps the finest tribute of all came from actor Garry McDonald –– best known for his hilarious Norman Gunston character and for his work in the prize-winning 1980s sitcom Mother and Son –– who impersonated him (with fellow actor John Gaden playing the role of Stiffy) in a brilliant theatre piece titled Mo which premiered at Sydney's Nimrod Theatre in 1978.  A bronze statue of Rene was recently unveiled in Adelaide, the city of the comedian's birth, but it's another irony that it was perhaps the one city in the country where his popularity never reached the heights it did in the nation's eastern capitals.

It's tempting to speculate what might have happened to Rene had he taken the advice of many of those he worked with and tried his luck on the North American vaudeville circuit or in the British music halls.  He certainly had his fans in these countries, with US comic legend Jack Benny and notable English actress Dame Sybil Thorndike both declaring, after seeing his act at the Tivoli in the 1940s, that he was among the very greatest stage comedians they had ever seen.  Benny went so far as to state that, in his opinion, Roy Rene belonged in the same class as Chaplin –– the only one of his fellow clowns, incidentally, that the famously egotistical Rene was ever heard to praise.  According to Fred Parsons, he was never eager to try his luck overseas.  When one of his sisters, who lived in North America and reminded him how much a successful comedian could earn there, pressed him to take the plunge and book himself a ticket to Los Angeles Rene allegedly shook his head and said, 'Turn it up, love.  Look what happened to Les Darcy and Phar Lap.  They might make it a treble.'  He died, of course, two years before television reached Australia, but it's not hard to agree with Parsons' statement that '…television wasn't made for Roy, nor he for it… In a way I'm glad he didn't live to try it.  He knew very few failures, and the majority of these were in his days as a battler.  He was fortunate that he went when still a big name, still an idol… Luckily for Roy, no one ever referred to him as a has-been.  I don't think he could have stood that.'   The shameful thing is that he's now in danger of becoming exactly that –– someone remembered, if he is at all, as a minor relic of a bygone era rather than as the incredibly gifted performer who stretched the boundaries of Australian comedy even as he was creating and defining it.

 

 

As stated, very little of the work of ROY RENE has been preserved and what has been preserved remains, for the most part, commercially unavailable.

 

 

THE NATIONAL FILM AND SOUND ARCHIVE was for many years the only available source for his work, but some short audio clips were posted on YouTube by a company called The Orchard Enterprises in late 2015.

 

 

Use the link below to access these ROY RENE/MO McCACKIE audio clips on YouTube:

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-qyiHFeAtE

 

 

 

 

William Heinemann Australia Pty Ltd, 1973

 

 

 

The life of ROY RENE has been documented twice.  Mo's Memoirs –– an allegedly self-penned illustrated autobiography 'edited' by poets MAX HARRIS and ELISABETH LAMBERT –– was published by the Melbourne firm of Reed & Harris in 1945.  (Most historians now believe that LAMBERT and HARRIS, who earned a different sort of notoriety as the principal victim of the infamous 'Ern Malley' hoax which shook the world of Australian literature to its core in that same year, ghostwrote the book for him.)  

 

 

This memoir remained the sole source of biographical information about RENE until the publication of FRED PARSONS' A Man Called Mo by William Heinemann Australia Pty Ltd in 1973.  While neither book can be considered 'definitively reliable' in terms of the information it provides or its historical accuracy, each offers an entertaining glimpse into what is a long-vanished, never-to-be-repeated era of Australian showbusiness and, for that reason alone, remain valuable cultural documents in their own right.

 

 

The best source of information about the early career of ROY RENE, including a well-researched examination of his 'Stiffy and Mo' partnership with NAT PHILLIPS, can be found at THE AUSTRALIAN VARIETY THEATRE ARCHIVE. 

 

 

 

Another useful source of corroborating (if sometimes conflicting) biographical information is the ROY RENE page at the AustLit website. 

 

The 'MO' Award, 2010

 

 

 

The MO AWARDS continue to be presented each May in recognition of outstanding achievement in Australian live performance.  There are currently twenty-four categories, including a 'Mo Comedy Act of the Year,' and winners are presented with a statuette modelled after the ceremony's namesake.  

 

 

FRED PARSONS went on to have a highly successful career in television throughout the 1960s and 1970s, writing many episodes of the popular crime dramas Homicide and Division 4 in addition to serving as principal gag writer for Australian comedy legend GRAHAM KENNEDY during that comedian's long tenure as host of the controversial (and sometimes scandalous) late night variety show In Melbourne Tonight.  (KENNEDY repaid him by contributing a short but heartfelt foreword to A Man Called Mo.)  Every year the AUSTRALIAN WRITERS' GUILD presents a special prize known as THE FRED PARSONS AWARD to an Australian screen or television writer deemed to have made an 'Outstanding Contribution to Australian Comedy.'  The recipient of the 2014 Award was ANDREW DENTON.

 

I would be delighted to hear from anyone who has any additional information about the life and career of ROY RENE (and especially from anyone with copies of McCackie Mansion and Strike Me Lucky they may be willing to share).  I would also be grateful to hear from anyone with information to provide about the life and career of GEORGE WALLACE and the other forgotten stars of Australian variety and pre-1970s cinema.  Please click on the 'View my complete profile' link located in the top right hand corner of the screen to find my email address.

'Don't be such an nwarp.'

'An nwarp?  What's that?'

'That's a prawn spelled backwards!'

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 
Some Books About... TONY HANCOCK

 

 
Some Books About... BUSTER KEATON

 

 
Some Books About… ANTHONY BURGESS

 

 

 

Last updated 17 May 2023 § 

 

 

Some Books About… TONY HANCOCK

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.

DAVID NATHAN

 

Those unfamiliar with the work of Tony Hancock, the great English radio, television and variety comedian, may like to watch this 2 minute clip from season seven of his hit BBC TV series Hancock's Half Hour, which originally aired on 23 June 1961.  It's a comedic masterpiece titled The Blood Donor which captures everything that made him such a beloved figure in every part of the British Commonwealth prior to his death, while shooting a new television series in Australia, in June 1968. 

 

 

The Blood Donor 19612 minute clip

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. 

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. 

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. 

   

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. 

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.

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 
Some Books About... BUSTER KEATON

 
Some Books About... MODS!

 
Some Books About… BOOKS

 

 

Last updated 14 July 2023 §