Tom: The Spontaneity Shop presents All British Comedy Explained with Abigoliah Schamaun and Tom Salinsky. Season two, episode five: Hancock’s Half Hour.
Abigoliah: Hello there. This is All British Comedy Explained, the podcast, where I, an American, finally learn about all the British comedy shows I’ve been missing out on. I am stand-up comedian Abigoliah Schamaun. And to guide me through this comedy labyrinth is writer Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello there. Good to be back.
Abigoliah: Hello everyone. Thank you so much for subscribing to the podcast. If you are enjoying it, we have a Patreon now where you can subscribe for just £3 a month. You get uninterrupted ad free listening to the episodes here on the main feed, and for £5 a month you get the episodes on the main feed ad free as well as special bonus mini episodes where we discuss a burning question related to this week’s show. And in this week we will be asking the question: is Tony Hancock to blame for cringe comedy? And on that note Tom, what are we watching? I think we might have given it away.
Tom: We have. We’re gonna be watching Hancock’s Half Hour.
Abigoliah: Okay, so tell me, so you mentioned last week that this is probably the OG, the original British sitcom. What year did this come out?
Tom: So it began on radio in 1954, but we will be watching the TV series, which started in 1956.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: For context, that’s the year that My Fair Lady opened on Broadway.
Abigoliah: A great musical.
Tom: Wonderful. Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco and Marilyn Monroe married Arthur Miller.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: And Britain is dealing with the Suez Crisis, which you might remember from The Crown.
Abigoliah: Oh, yes, the Suez Crisis.
Tom: So it’s a little bit of kind of end of empire stuff going on there.
Abigoliah: And among that came Hancock’s Half Hour, which by the way, I guess it came out in 55 and it came out in 56. I was not that far off.
Tom: You’re very close.
Abigoliah: I’m very proud of myself.
Tom: Anthony John Hancock came into the world in 1924.
Abigoliah: So this is kind of like Dick Van Dyke or I Love Lucy. It’s named after the guy. Yeah. Okay.
Tom: And like some of the Goons, his early comedy experience was entertaining the troops during World War Two.
Tom: And then now I mentioned this.
Abigoliah: I’m sorry, you said Tony Hancock is his name?
Tom: Anthony John Hancock is his full name. He’s known as Tony Hancock.
Abigoliah: John Hancock. Put your John Hancock there.
Tom: You know where that comes from?
Abigoliah: Yeah, I know where that comes from. Jesus Christ. And Betsy Ross sewed the first flag.
Tom: I want – if you want a real dad joke, then the other interesting thing about Tony Hancock is he’s the only comedian whose name is composed of four body parts.
Abigoliah: Tony Hancock. That’s a good one. That’s a good one.
Tom: I’m not sure it is. Now, I mentioned this in episode zero.
Abigoliah: People just unsubscribed, by the way. That’s what just happened.
Tom: Moving swiftly along, I mentioned this in episode zero. One of his early successes was as the foil to a ventriloquist’s dummy on the radio.
Abigoliah: Okay, yeah.
Tom: In a show called Educating Archie, which also gifted him the immortal catchphrase “flipping kids.”
Abigoliah: Beautiful.
Tom: I mean, catchphrases never make sense out of context.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
So at the time, most radio comedy was quite like The Goon Show. So even if there was – impenetrable, overarching – no, that was what was special about The Goon Show. But in structure, it often felt like little bits and pieces, sketches broken up by musical numbers. Even if there was supposedly some sort of overarching narrative, it never felt particularly propulsive. But there are two different kind of comedy trajectories, two different ways of approaching the business of being funny, that kind of fan out from the early 1950s. So on the one hand, you have The Goon Show, which leads to Monty Python, which leads to The Day Today, Vic and Bob, The Mighty Boosh – being surreal, being weird, being impenetrable. But Hancock’s Half Hour takes a much more realistic and character-led approach. And that leads to Steptoe and Son and Dad’s Army and Gavin and Stacey.
Abigoliah: Okay, so my guess is Tony Hancock is a dad doing his best.
Tom: Sort of not a dad. No, it’s not domestic in that way.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But so what happened was Hancock found two brilliant writers called Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.
Abigoliah: Finally, some normal Christian names.
Tom: Two of them met each other in the late 40s, and they got a big break supplying gags for a now entirely forgotten radio comedian called Derek Roy. Okay, nobody listening has ever heard of Derek Roy unless they are currently doing a PhD on early British radio comedy, I promise you. Okay, now wait for all the angry Derek Roy fans to write in. Hancock had been a guest on one of the Derek Roy shows. He liked what he saw, and he asked Galton and Simpson to come and write a show for him. Okay, so what is a bit odd about this? To modernize – and indeed is, because we’re still on the radio version. You could call it a sitcom. There was a regular cast who played the same characters or variations on the same characters, but there wasn’t a fixed situation.
Abigoliah: So I like that. That’s what you think is odd about this. What I think is odd is – and maybe this just says where I am in my own career – that a comedian just like, looked at two writers and went, write me a sitcom. Not the network, not a production company, but a comedian went, write this for me.
Tom: Well, you have to remember that the BBC in those days was basically like a club.
Abigoliah: Yeah, that is true.
Tom: If you were in the club, you could kind of do whatever you wanted.
Abigoliah: So back up real quick. Tony Hancock. So he’s having these writers, but he started off performing for the troops. Yes. Is he a song and dance man like Morecambe and Wise? Is he a gag man? What was he doing in live performance?
Tom: I think he was doing something we’d recognise as stand-up.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So he actually specialised in really obscure impressions. He busted some of them out in some of the television shows. And sort of the joke is he’s doing this brilliant impression of somebody that three quarters will have no idea what they actually look and sound like.
Abigoliah: He’s a ventriloquist on the radio.
Tom: And he does impressions of people.
Abigoliah: People don’t know.
Tom: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, in these early Hancock radio shows, there’s one unbroken story for the whole episode, and that itself was fairly unusual. There aren’t musical interludes, but it isn’t like The Good Life where you set the situation up, and every week you come back to see a different variation on that theme. So often, Hancock would play a kind of less successful version of himself.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: A struggling comedian living in the London suburb of East Sheen, and this character was called Anthony John Aloysius Hancock, just to differentiate him from the real Anthony John Hancock.
Abigoliah: This sounds like all of those shows and independent films that came out in the early 2000s. Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk with Me. There was another one with Chris Gethard about – this is in America, of course – about auditioning for SNL.
Tom: Yes. Yes, yes.
Abigoliah: Crashing – like all these comedians, being like, I know what the people want. They want me to talk about comedy.
Tom: But sometimes his career is going better, or sometimes he has a different profession altogether. It’s like, what can we do with this star performer that will be interesting and funny this week?
Abigoliah: Okay, so it – I mean, to be honest, that just sounds like a comedian to me. Sometimes you’re a stand-up comedian, sometimes you work in a bookshop.
Tom: Yes. Now, have you ever heard of an actor called Sid James?
Abigoliah: No, I don’t think so.
Tom: So he was a mainstay of British television and film comedy. He is one of the leading lights of the Carry On troupe.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: He was a Cockney, and he very often played Hancock’s best friend, sometimes his flatmate. And then other members of the repertory company were Kenneth Williams, who we’ve mentioned a few times now, who played generally annoying characters. And then Hattie Jacques as Hancock’s secretary, and an Australian actor called Bill Kerr, who played Hancock’s lodger. And that character kind of became more and more dim as the series progressed.
Abigoliah: Okay, so is this gonna be like the sitcoms we saw in the 70s where everyone speaks with a really posh British accent bar the one Cockney guy.
Tom: A little bit. Yes.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Okay. Some of the old British character actors in these shows will sound alarmingly posh, even posher than Tom and Barbara.
Abigoliah: Does the Cockney actor, like, play it up even more to like, an offensive Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins level? Is he like –
Abigoliah: Hello, guv’nor, I’m a chimney sweep, I am. I don’t understand why I don’t get hired for more voice work in this country.
Tom: It’s not at all clear.
Abigoliah: My accents are perfect.
Tom: What happens over the course of the radio show is what they discover is: the less it feels like a collection of crazy sketches, and the more it focuses on the truth of Hancock’s rather neurotic, self-undermining persona, the more popular it becomes.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So it moves to television while it’s still on the radio. They overlap for a while.
Abigoliah: Oh, weird. And it was a club, and you could do anything if you were in it.
Tom: And the TV version leant even more heavily on the Sidney James–Tony Hancock relationship.
Abigoliah: And in the TV show, is he a comedian just down on his –
Tom: Often, but not always. There’s an episode in which he’s a flight attendant. There’s an episode in which he’s a barrister.
Abigoliah: Okay, you don’t go from barrister to comedian to flight attendant in real life. And they just never acknowledged the change. There’s never like, oh, I thought I’d give this a try. Nope.
Tom: So to that extent, the episodes feel a little bit sealed off, a little bit self-contained.
Abigoliah: Yeah, they feel like mini plays.
Tom: It’s the personalities that remain the same. So one of the things they got particularly good at is contrasting Sid James’s very easy, relaxed, working class charm with Hancock’s frantic aspirations and social climbing.
Abigoliah: Okay, so is this another one where we’re going to deal with class?
Tom: Very much so, yes, very much about class. And it was all a huge success. And Hancock became a huge star.
Abigoliah: And so Hancock then. So you have his Cockney friend who’s like, more laid back. Is Hancock an uber posho?
Tom: Not an uber posho. He is a social climber. Okay, so he is sort of –
Abigoliah: A Basil Fawlty type.
Tom: Well, a little bit less middle class than Basil Fawlty, but with real aspirations, like desperately wanting to better himself. His nickname was “the lad himself.” So he is –
Abigoliah: It’s not a nickname if you give it to yourself.
Tom: He is working class with aspirations, and Sid James is working class and happy where he is. Okay, that’s the fundamental difference.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: The longer the series went on, the more the real Hancock fretted about becoming half of a double act.
Abigoliah: Oh, he wanted to be the star.
Tom: When they moved from radio to TV, he got rid of all those other supporting players. He got rid of Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams and Bill Kerr. And it was just him and Sid. And after about five or six series, he insisted on doing the next series without Sid James either, on TV.
Abigoliah: On TV? It went for five or six years on TV, okay.
Tom: So the seventh series, which was just called Hancock instead of Hancock’s Half Hour, includes some of the most celebrated episodes. In The Bowmans, Hancock is a radio actor who’s fired from what’s clearly supposed to be The Archers. In The Lift, he’s stuck in an elevator with a cross-section of British society. In The Bedsitter, the only actor is Hancock himself, and he never leaves his own front room.
Abigoliah: It’s a cheap way to make television.
Tom: But the writers were like, you don’t want Sid James. What if we don’t give you any supporting cast?
Abigoliah: Oh, they were – were they trying to actually fuck him?
Tom: So we’re going to watch a show from the fifth series, because very little of the first and second series survive. A lot of it went out live. And then from the third series onwards, there are scattered episodes. And then from the fourth and fifth, they’re not doing it live anymore. And it was therefore easier to keep archive copies. You can see actually in some of those early ones, people fluff sometimes. Hancock acknowledges the fluff. There’s an incredibly funny bit where –
Abigoliah: Kind of like Pete and Dud. Yeah, yeah.
Tom: In – I think it’s called – There’s an Airfield at the Bottom of My Garden. That’s an episode in which Sid James plays an estate agent. And Hancock buys a house off him, which he wants to have fancy dinner parties in, but the reason he got it so cheap is because there’s an airfield at the bottom of the garden. Okay, so every time planes land, the entire house shakes and everything falls to pieces. And a table that had been rigged to collapse collapses early and it’s going out live. So the actors just have to try and hang on to this table and hold it together and abandon all the rehearsed blocking. But I thought that would be too distracting, so I’m not going to watch that. We’ll watch a pre-recorded one from the fifth series, and then we’ll watch what is undoubtedly the most famous episode of Hancock’s Half Hour – even though by this stage it was just called Hancock – The Blood Donor. And that will be our second episode.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And then I will tell you what happened next.
Abigoliah: All right. So I think I’m going to see Hancock in a hospital donating blood.
Tom: That is what happens in The Blood Donor. Yes.
Abigoliah: I think there’s going to be an archetype of either a very angry, matronly nurse or a sexy nurse, depending on which way we want to cast women in 1956 in a male-led sitcom. If he sometimes is an actor, is there going to be anything where he has the opportunity to tackle a meaty Shakespearean role and we get to see him prepare?
Tom: Yes. Kind of. Yeah. That is the kind of thing that happens.
Abigoliah: Are we going to see it in one of these episodes? Okay. And I’m picturing – oh, and I think he’s going to do a lot of funny voices because you mentioned he did obscure voices.
Tom: Well, not funny voices.
Abigoliah: No, I think he’s going to do – I think he’s going to do voices.
Tom: A little bit like Reginald Perrin. Actually, a lot of this is going to turn on how you feel towards Anthony John Hancock, the actor, and Anthony John Aloysius Hancock, the character.
Abigoliah: All right.
Tom: Because neither of them, as you’ve been sort of hinting at, neither of them is particularly happy. And that’s sort of what makes the character so funny. Yeah. Also maybe not particularly likable.
Abigoliah: Well, we’ve discussed this. I’m in a place in my life right now where I need happy things because I am miserable and scared all the time. And that is why I need to only watch things be joyful.
Tom: All right, well, let’s give this a go.
Abigoliah: I think I’m gonna hate it. All right.
Speaker4: Let’s do it.
Abigoliah: No. I come to it with an open mind. I swear to God, I do.
* * * * *
Tom: Abigoliah, what did you think of Hancock’s Half Hour?
Abigoliah: I really enjoyed it.
Tom: Oh, good.
Abigoliah: And I really like the way you set this up. I was like, I’m gonna hate it. A couple things. One, after seeing the first episode where it is him and Sidney James, I can’t imagine why he thought he would be considered a double act, because he’s very much the star of the show, even though Sidney James brings so much to it. Secondly, I really did like the second episode, but as I kept saying, it’s like, is he reading cue cards? Is he spiking the camera? Which leads me to wonder – which I didn’t bring up the first part, but you mentioned how he basically got Sidney thrown off the show because he didn’t want to be a double act. Then he kept like getting rid of other characters, so much so that the writers basically wrote him in, like, to just be by himself. Yeah. The first episode we watched, I didn’t notice him reading any cue cards. The second one I did. I liked Hancock’s Half Hour. Is Tony Hancock an asshole like the actor?
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Well, is he a bit of a diva?
Tom: I mean, do you want that story now?
Abigoliah: Is this the – you were gonna say for what happens next? Yeah. I mean, yeah.
Tom: I’ll give it to you now, and then we can go back and talk about it. Yeah, yeah. So you know how sometimes this part of the episode is a little bit depressing?
Abigoliah: Oh, no.
Tom: Buckle up, buttercup. Okay, this is gonna be rough. So after recording The Bowmans, which was in the middle of that seventh series, Hancock was involved in a car accident.
Abigoliah: Oh, no.
Tom: And was suffering from concussion. He’d never found learning lines particularly easy. But now he found it impossible. And the only solution was to put all his lines up on cue cards and teleprompters. And that episode, The Blood Donor, was the first episode for which that was the case. Because they were on this weekly schedule, they couldn’t get off it. But Hancock ended up using the same method for the remaining episodes of the series, and essentially the rest of his career. Oh, and I have to learn lines anymore, so I won’t. As it turned out, that 1961 series was the last. Earlier that year, he tried to break America. He made a feature film called The Rebel, directed by Robert Day, with a script once again by Galton and Simpson. He did all right in the UK, but it flopped in the States. No one was interested, and that sent him into depression. So having got rid of Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques and Bill Kerr from the radio show, having got rid of Sid James for the television show, now he announced he wouldn’t be working with Galton and Simpson any longer, and fired his agent in the same meeting.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: He’d also had a really bruising encounter on a BBC talk show called Face to Face.
Abigoliah: Back up for a second. The concussion? Yes. Because I feel bad being like, he’s using cue cards, he is a diva. Was it – did the concussion wear off and he just chose not to learn his lines? Or did he, like, suffer long term damage?
Tom: I don’t have evidence of long term damage, but he discovered that he could give a brilliant performance without having to learn the lines, in which case, why bother? So remember, these are rehearsed like little mini plays over the course of a week, shot in front of the audience, straight through or as near as they can, because editing is in its infancy at this stage. And if he didn’t have to learn the lines, why would he go to all that time and trouble?
Abigoliah: Because it looks like he’s looking right down the camera.
Tom: I genuinely didn’t know if you were going to notice that or not.
Abigoliah: Oh, how could you not? Straight away.
Tom: Most people who are much less television literate than us, watching in 1961, had no idea.
Abigoliah: Of course. I at one point I was like, am I watching like a PSA to give blood? Like a funny way to be like, donate, kids, because it kept being like – it was so clear to me. Anyways, sorry. Go on. So he fired his writers. He fired his agents.
Tom: So there was this show called Face to Face, hosted by John Freeman. And the idea was, we get a famous figure and we sit them down and we really kind of drill into, like, who they are. What do they believe? What are their secret fears? And the kind of searching questions that he was asked in this interview – and it’s all shot with these, like, terrifying close-ups – really kind of shook him. And exacerbated existing tendencies towards self-doubt and morbid introspection.
Abigoliah: Oh, no.
Tom: Now, Galton and Simpson, the writers, by the way, didn’t much mind that they’d been fired, because they were working for a diva. But also they were immediately offered a new series by the BBC called Comedy Playhouse, which was a series of one-off pilots. So they got to write – I think it’s eight different ideas for sitcoms. One of those was turned into the show Steptoe and Son, which ran for eight seasons over 12 years.
Abigoliah: Amazing.
Tom: And then Comedy Playhouse kept going with other writers, and that gave birth to, among others, Till Death Us Do Part, Up Pompeii, Are You Being Served?, Last of the Summer Wine.
Abigoliah: Okay. Wow.
Abigoliah: So they went on to, like, flourish.
Tom: Exactly. Hancock found himself a new writer, Philip Oakes. They worked together on another feature film called The Punch and Judy Man, which was much less broad, much more of a comedy drama, and drew very heavily on Hancock’s own childhood. And this time he was going to break America.
Abigoliah: And he did.
Tom: He did not.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So he returns to television. He made 13 episodes for ITV with various different writers contributing scripts. It was not a success, and despite Hancock’s star power, the show was never repeated. So ITV had poached this huge BBC star.
Abigoliah: And it didn’t work.
Tom: It didn’t work. So now he has no trusted collaborators and he turns to drink. He had divorced his first wife to marry his publicist, Freddie Ross, in 1965. This didn’t seem to make either of them particularly happy, and Freddie Ross attempted suicide the following year.
Abigoliah: Oh wow.
Tom: Hancock is also alleged to have had an affair with the wife of his best friend, actor John Le Mesurier, who we’ll be meeting when we watch Dad’s Army. And Hancock took his own life in 1968.
Abigoliah: I had a feeling this was going to end –
Tom: At the age of 44.
Abigoliah: Jesus Christ.
Tom: Writing in his suicide note: “Things just seem to go wrong too many times.”
Abigoliah: I feel bad being like, is he – I think he’s an asshole, which clearly I think he was, an incredibly – are you crying right now?
Tom: A little bit.
Abigoliah: I don’t blame you. I feel choked up, but I don’t think I’m gonna cry. But then again, I didn’t have to say it all out loud. So if you need a moment, by all means. I’m just gonna make a really compelling reel.
Tom: Enjoy the pain! No, it’s a very, very sad story. He was such a brilliant man. One of the things that always strikes me when I watch these TV episodes is his face is so expressive. And even on that grainy – it’s a film copy of a 405-line television recording – you can see every little muscle twitch revealing so much. And he started out on radio. He was a huge radio star, which seems impossible. Watching those couple of feature films he made, you get enormous benefit from seeing him in 35mm and beautifully restored, now on Blu-rays. And he was in a few other British comedy films around the same time as well. But he is – he’s such a star. He so holds the camera. Yeah, but he’s not a matinee idol by any means.
Abigoliah: I mean, it sounds to me like he was a difficult person to work with, and that difficulty was 100% fuelled by complete insecurities, because, of course, I mean, if you think about people who have been great collaborators with their co-stars and or writers, those people constantly lift each other up. And even if one of them becomes famous and one of them is like, you know, the sidekick character – like they know that they don’t have to fire one of them. Yeah. You know.
Tom: I mean, you hear about Martin and Lewis, come to mind.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Where they’re a very odd pair because they’re very different kinds of performers. Yeah. And they had, I think, quite a big falling out when Jerry Lewis wanted to go his own way.
Abigoliah: And I was just thinking like, he didn’t want to be a double act. But as we just watched Absolutely Fabulous, like Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French were a double act that then went on to have incredible careers separate from each other because they were such strong comedians. So why is it so bad to work with someone you work well with?
Tom: And like I said, Sid James is a mainstay of the Carry On films, had been in television sitcoms in his own right, both before this and after this. So yeah, it was paranoia. It was a kind of weird combination of perfectionism on the one hand, and chronic self-doubt on the other.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Wow. I really thought I’d – as you started to explain it, I felt like death by suicide might be in the back of this, but you kept talking, so I was like, maybe not. But 44. First of all, how old is he when we’re watching him? He said 35 or 36.
Tom: He’s around that. Yeah, he’s –
Abigoliah: People age differently, man.
Tom: Yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: I also – I thought the scene in the lunchroom was hysterical, and I also felt myself feeling really sorry for him that he wasn’t eating, even though, like, I feel like in that scene, he’s, like, pinching his pennies, but it’s because he went on a big trip and he’s – he is a BBC darling, like, as a character in the show. They’re like, oh, you can’t, you can’t go eat at a place like this if you’re having meetings with people. And even though he’s like high status and he’s at a lunch counter, I was just like, poor man, just can’t get his food.
Tom: And like I say, the backstory in terms of how successful and affluent he is would vary. The premise would change episode to episode depending on what the needs of that particular story, but generally he was seen as a rather less successful version of himself. Yeah, because he was one of the most highly paid comedians on British television, if not the highest.
Abigoliah: I did like the fact that they come in, and of course they realise the milk was never – the milk delivery was never told not to come. All of his mail delivery, the lights are on this. And then the TV turns on, which made me be like, oh yeah, TV wasn’t 24/7, because if you left the TV on –
Tom: It’s very primitive. And that’s both in terms of how it looks and in terms of how it’s constructed. I mean, that first one we watch is what, five scenes over half an hour, something like that. A bit like Absolutely Fabulous. The characters are strong enough that it can just play out like that. Yeah. But the difference is that that was how television had to be shot. Because there are no pre-filmed sequences. There are no cutaways. Occasionally they would cut to little bits of B-roll or something, but that was about all you could do. Television production was so limited, so you have to just focus in on getting absolutely everything out of this one situation because you aren’t going to have – you aren’t going to have an elephant.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: You can’t even do those editing tricks that they’re doing in Reginald Perrin, let alone all the crazy camera angles that you get in even the earliest episodes of Absolutely Fabulous.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, the one cutaway we got was in the second episode where they have the ambulance coming down, which was quite jarring when it happened, because it was such an interesting cut scene. Because once he got home, I was like, where do we go from here? And he has a conversation on the phone, and then he starts to – and it was like, cut to the bread. But we don’t see a reaction to the injury. No, I don’t know. I – there’s just so much comedy gold in the idea of, you cut your hand.
Tom: And again, that’s partly – you have to imagine how this is being shot.
Abigoliah: They didn’t have the special effects to do it.
Tom: And even if they had, there would be no opportunity to rig it. So it is very likely – I’m not 100% certain of this, because it is possible that there was a recording break – but it’s quite likely that in the time it took for that bit of ambulance film to play, Hancock, the actor, had to slip that cast onto his arm, walk across the studio to the other set, get into bed, and be waiting when that piece of film finished so the camera could pick him up again. Like doing a play.
Abigoliah: Yeah. By the way, so in the second show, about the blood giving – his friend who he makes in recovery, who’s like, just kind of like whimsically sitting –
Tom: There is, by the way, part of a little kind of Hancock rep company of actors. He’s called Hugh Lloyd. And once again, he’s in like pretty much every comedy show being made on British television around this time.
Abigoliah: When they first start talking, it feels like such a British conversation because it’s so surface level. But the more they talk, and the way he was just like sitting there, leaning on his arm, like so, so lackadaisical, I was like, I think he wants to – Hancock is just two sweet men in a bed having a sweet conversation. I was getting vibes. I thought he was into him, I don’t know.
Tom: I love the way that the conversation descends into clichés. Yeah, more clichés they recite, the more impressed with each other they are. Exactly. It’s delightful.
Abigoliah: It felt like flirting, though, to me, because they’re like –
Tom: Whereas, for example, Eddy in Absolutely Fabulous has pretensions which are about wealth and fame and being the centre of attention. A lot of Hancock’s pretensions are intellectual. Yeah, he believes himself to be a great thinker, and he absolutely is not.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Tom: But that again, that mismatch between the way he sees himself and the reality is at the core of so many of these British sitcom characters. Again, you see it in Fawlty. You see it in David Brent as played by Ricky Gervais. That gap between how I see myself and how the rest of the world sees me. Yeah, but this is so early. Like, there are a handful of other shows that are sort of saying, well, am I not a British television sitcom? But none of them are quite right either. Like, they feel more like variety, or they feel more like comedy drama, or there’s no studio audience. But Hancock is clearly recognisable as a British television sitcom, and it’s almost certainly the first.
Abigoliah: So we – excuse me, we listened to The Goon Show in season one because it is a game changer. It is a landmark. Hancock’s Half Hour was at the same time. Would you consider it a landmark as well? If I mention Hancock’s Half Hour to other British people, are they going to remember it?
Tom: Yeah. And again, it was repeated a lot when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. Those shows, particularly The Blood Donor. Oh, by the way, just before we come back to that. Any lines stand out particularly from The Blood Donor?
Abigoliah: I didn’t write many notes, so there isn’t a specific line or anything that sticks out.
Tom: So just as with Eric Morecambe saying “I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.” There’s a line from The Blood Donor, which is the line everybody thinks of when they think about Tony Hancock, and it’s in this pantheon of incredibly famous lines from British television comedy. And it’s: “A pint? That’s very nearly an armful.”
Abigoliah: Oh, yes. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I get – I get that. I can understand why that was a good line. By the way, when in the first episode we watched, when him and Sid are sitting there and he’s rolling a cigarette and he’s like, he’s like, it’s cheaper this way. Every comedian I knew who smoked rollies – I think everyone’s quit now – but it was just like, you see, it’s cheaper.
Tom: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: I liked it. It’s one of those things that I think I would watch if it was on, which, of course, it’s never going to be just on, because no one surfs channels anymore. At least I don’t. If there was like a Gold show that showed it – I don’t know if I’m going to search it out. I mean, is it on iPlayer or anything like that?
Tom: Two random episodes are on iPlayer at the time of recording. I don’t know why those two. And I told you that a lot of the premises of episodes are a bit unpredictable, and we did have a little chat about this before we watched them. Any other predictions of things that you think future episodes might include?
Abigoliah: I mean, okay, so the first one, he’s a bit of a broke performer. The second one, he is giving blood, and I feel like it’s a bit of like, look at me suffer slash, look at me be better than you sort of thing. So is there an episode where he like volunteers, or is like collecting for charity or like – like a clothing draw.
Tom: That I remember. It does sound like the kind of thing he might do.
Abigoliah: I’m like, am I totally off base here?
Tom: Or that sort of self-aggrandisement – that, yeah, look at the sacrifices I’m making. It’s very in character. But no, I don’t remember one with that particular premise. As I said, some episodes are missing, and there have been various attempts to recreate them, both on stage and on TV and on radio. Kevin McNally has played Hancock, and so has Paul Merton, who is a big fan of Tony Hancock.
Abigoliah: Yeah. What are some other premises, then?
Tom: So in one episode – one early episode, the earliest surviving one – is just about him going on holiday on a skiing holiday and then finding he has to share a hotel room with two other people.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And not getting on well with them. And I think I mentioned one where he mysteriously has a job as a barrister and he’s hopeless at it and makes a big, impassioned speech about what a terrible crook is on the stand and sits down and needs to be told he’s supposed to be acting for the defence. That kind of thing.
Abigoliah: Amazing.
Tom: So yeah, it’s kind of – there’s one where he and Sid – Sid ropes him into making a feature film, but turns out barely has any budget for all the big battle scenes. So it’s all been done on a shoestring.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Yeah, it gets – even after it goes to TV, you can see this progression to more and more character stuff. The second one, The Blood Donor, is really just about how he feels about being a blood donor. Yeah, he doesn’t even need the premise of they’ve forgotten to cancel the milk and the bread in order to make something funny happen.
Abigoliah: I mean, it is like Absolutely Fabulous – it’s like a character study with, like, a vague idea that stitches it together as a situation. But the situation – it could be anything. You just want to see Hancock in it.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: I really liked it. I want to put it on the shelf of fame, but it’s like, what do you take off?
Tom: Yes, a tricky one, isn’t it?
Abigoliah: Because I like everything that’s on here. And –
Tom: I mean, for a start, anything that goes on would inevitably push Morecambe and Wise off the bottom, unless you also move Morecambe and Wise at the same time as you do this, which you’re entirely welcome to do.
Abigoliah: Here’s the thing. At the end of the day, I think this might be a little bit out of order.
Tom: So if you were going to assign these 11 shows now to ten slots, or to 11 slots, frankly, what order would they go in? Would Hancock’s Half Hour be the 11th, or would it be higher up the list? I –
Abigoliah: I think – let me look at this because the bottom – I think it’s the bottom half that I’ve just been like throwing stuff in whatever. I think Victoria Wood is definitely number one. The Day Today is definitely number two. Not Only But Also is three for sure. Ab Fab – we’re going to keep it. Fawlty Towers I put at five, but why didn’t I put I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue at five? We’re gonna switch. Listen, we are rebuilding the house, guys. So we’re going to switch Clue and Fawlty Towers. Morecambe and Wise is going to go after Fawlty Towers, which means it’s at number seven, which means The Office is at number eight. What did I like more? The Young Ones or The Good Life? I think The Young Ones are at number nine and then The Good Life is at ten. So if we’re going to shift something off to put Hancock on, we’d shift off The Good Life, which makes me feel cooler. But The Good Life does make me feel better. And now that I know how sad Hancock’s story is – but I feel like he should be up there. What would you do if you were me?
Tom: That’s not how this game works at all.
Abigoliah: No no no no. All right. We are going to shift The Good Life off. This has been completely a mess. The Good Life is now off the shelf of fame. We’re going to put Tony Hancock on the shelf of fame. And I, as always, reserve the right to move stuff around.
Tom: And then just to complete the thought from earlier. I think that I wouldn’t call Tony Hancock a landmark in the same way, because I think what you see with Hancock’s Half Hour is an evolution. So shows like The Office, shows like The Young Ones, are so completely different from anything that’s gone before. You know instantly that somebody is doing something wildly original. And Tony Hancock is just like, still developing that persona that he built up on the radio and had been doing for ten years already. So it doesn’t feel ice-water fresh in the same way.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But with hindsight, we can see, oh, that’s when all the pieces of the British television sitcom jigsaw were finally assembled. So it looks like a landmark in hindsight, but it didn’t feel like it was tearing up the rule book at the time.
Abigoliah: Okay, I’ve changed my mind. Hancock’s Half Hour is off the shelf of fame, and we’re keeping The Good Life up. Because the more I think about it, the more I think that watching Hancock’s Half Hour is just gonna make me sad.
Tom: I’m sorry about that. I wish there was a way of doing this podcast which didn’t involve telling you all these awful stories, but sadly, if it’s my podcast, there just isn’t.
Abigoliah: It’s one – not your fault. Two – thank you for sharing it. But also, there’s something about Hancock’s Half Hour that, again, makes me feel melancholy. Like even that – I’m like, do I want to watch this? And does it make me feel melancholy because it’s a troubled person? Or is it because I really do worry about idiots trying to stand in line to get food at a cafeteria. And on that note, listeners, just after this Tom and I will be recording our Patreon special this week. A mini episode: was Hancock’s Half Hour where cringe comedy started? You can check that out at the £5 tier on Patreon. And of course, we have a £3 tier where you get all of the episodes we record, but they will be ad-free listening.
Tom: Now next time, no such worries because the next show we’re going to watch is pure joy.
Abigoliah: Thank you.
Tom: It’s kind of a throwback to The Good Life in some ways. It’s Dawn French as The Vicar of Dibley.
Abigoliah: I – this – this – record, listeners at home, we do two of these at a time. This has been a beautiful day in London, which I have not gotten to go outside, and we have just watched some interesting introspective, dark stuff. I feel like light stuff, but dark stuff. Okay. Vicar of Dibley, I can’t wait.
Tom: We’ll start with series one, episode two, which is just – we’ll skip the premise pilot, we’ll get straight into the first proper episode, and then this was a show – and we’ll obviously hear more about this next time – which ended up doing occasional specials rather than a long series. So there’s actually quite a big gap between series one and series four. But we’ll also do series four, episode one, which I think is the show absolutely operating at its peak.
Abigoliah: I cannot wait. Guys, thank you for listening to the podcast. As always, thank you for your support. If you’d like to support the podcast a little further, go to your Podcatcher app, leave us a review, or tell a friend about the podcast. Word of mouth is the best way to spread the news. And if you’d like to help us out with a little bit of money, as I mentioned before, we have a Patreon.
Tom: And get in touch with us. Let us know what you think. You can drop us an email. You can leave comments on our YouTube or our social media. And we also have a Substack where there’ll be a little essay to accompany this week’s episode.
Abigoliah: Yes, please check out the Substack. It’s something that Tom is working very hard on. And until next time, I’m Abigoliah –
Tom: And I’m Tom. Cheerio.
Abigoliah: Bye bye.