Hancock was born in Hall Green, Birmingham, England, but from the age of three was brought up in Bournemouth where his father, John Hancock, who ran the Railway Hotel in Holdenhurst Road, worked as a comedian and entertainer.
After his father's death in 1934, Tony and his brothers lived with their mother and stepfather at a small hotel then known as The Durlston Court (now renamed The Quality Hotel). He was educated at Durlston Court Preparatory School, a boarding school at Durlston in Swanage and Bradfield College in Reading, but left school at the age of fifteen.
In 1942, during World War II, Hancock joined the RAF Regiment. Following a failed audition for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), he ended up on The Ralph Reader Gang Show. After the war, he returned to the stage and eventually worked as resident comedian at the Windmill, home to many comedians and actors of the period and worked on radio shows such as Workers' Playtime and Variety Bandbox.
In 1951, Hancock gained a part in Educating Archie, where he played the tutor and foil to the nominal star, a ventriloquist's dummy. This brought him wider recognition and a catchphrase used frequently in the show: 'flippin' kids'. The same year, he made regular appearances on BBC Television's popular light entertainment show Kaleidoscope. In 1954, he was given his own BBC radio show, Hancock's Half Hour.
Working with scripts from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, Hancock's Half Hour lasted for five years and over a hundred episodes in its radio form. The show starred Hancock as Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, a more expansive version of Hancock himself, and usually portrayed as an out-of-work comedian living in the shabby "Railway Cuttings" in East Cheam.
The show featured Sid James, Bill Kerr, Kenneth Williams and over the years Moira Lister, Andrée Melly and Hattie Jacques. The series rejected the variety format then dominant in British radio comedy and instead pioneered a style drawn more from everyday life; the situation comedy, with the humour coming from the characters and the situations they found themselves in. The show transferred to television in 1956. The television and radio versions then ran alternately until 1959. Hancock also made an ITV series The Tony Hancock Show during this period, which ran for two series in 1956–57.
During the run of his BBC radio and television series, Hancock became an enormous star in Britain. Like few others, he was able to clear the streets while families gathered together to listen to the eagerly awaited episodes. His character changed slightly over the series but even in the earliest episodes the key facets of 'the lad himself' were evident. Later episodes were regarded as classics, even in their time. "A Sunday Afternoon At Home" and "Wild Man Of The Woods" were top rating shows and were later released as an LP. The former is not only considered to be among the very best of the Hancock ensemble pieces, but also a near perfect evocation of a dreary 1950s afternoon.
As an actor with considerable experience in films, Sid James became increasingly important to the show as it transferred from radio to television. The regular cast was reduced to just Hancock and James, allowing the humour to come from the interaction between the two men. James was the realist of the two, with a down to earth approach that would puncture Hancock's pretensions. His character would often be dishonest and exploit Hancock's apparent gullibility during the radio series, but in the television version there appeared to be a more genuine friendship between the two .
Hancock was to become anxious that his work with James was turning them into a double act, and the last BBC series in 1961 was without James. Despite the contemporary criticism of this, many now consider this final series to contain some of the best of Hancock's television work. Two episodes are among his best-remembered work:
The Blood Donor, in which he goes to a clinic to give blood, contains famous lines such as, 'A pint? Why, that's very nearly an armful!' (The doctor's response: 'You won't have an empty arm... or an empty anything!')
Another well-known episode is The Radio Ham, in which Hancock plays an amateur radio enthusiast who receives a mayday call from a yachtsman in distress, but his incompetence prevents him from taking its position. Both of these episodes were later re-recorded for a commercial 1961 LP in the style of radio episodes, and these versions have been continuously available ever since.
Returning home with his wife from recording "The Bowmans" episode, a parody of The Archers, Hancock was involved in a minor car accident. He was not badly hurt, despite going through the car windscreen, but he did suffer concussion and he was unable to learn his lines for "The Blood Donor", the next episode to be recorded.
The result was that Hancock had to perform by reading from teleprompters (TV monitors displaying the relevant sections of script). Viewers of the programme may notice that he is not always looking at the other actors, but in another direction entirely. Hancock came to rely on teleprompters instead of learning scripts whenever he had career difficulties.
Hancock had two notable milestones in comedy. The first was the way he and his writers changed the way that comedy was made; the second, that he was the first TV artist of any genre to be paid more than £1000 for a single half-hour programme.
Up until Hancock’s TV series, every British comedy show was performed live. Temperamentally, Hancock's highly strung personality made the demands of live broadcasts a constant worry, with the result that the Hancock programmes came to be pre-recorded, initially as telerecordings and later recorded on 2" video tape.
The cost of this horrified the executives at the BBC, but they agreed to give it a try, no doubt influenced by the success of American sitcoms such as I Love Lucy or The Phil Silvers Show ('Sergeant Bilko'), which had been pre-filming their material for several years. The result was that making a British sitcom became more like making a film.
At this time, it was usually only practical to shoot individual scenes; any serious problems would only necessitate returning to the beginning of a scene. The difference this made to the flow and continuity of a show was immediately apparent. Within a few years, it became standard practice to work in this way |
