Hail Hancock
Mike Terry
The Sunday Times
by Paul Donovan
Rancid humour sometimes taints the airwaves. Jeremy Hardy, not content with
jovially suggesting on Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation that BNP supporters
be shot in the back - which drew an official apology from Radio 4 - went on
to describe the UK Independence party, on The News Quiz, as "fascist-lite".
Brian Sewell then announced on the first edition of Radio 2's Clive Anderson
's Chat Room that the headline he wanted to see the following week was "Bush
assassinated".
Nil desperandum. This week celebrates a different sort of radio performer,
whose jokes were not about the politicians of his day but the human foibles
of every day. Perhaps for that reason he has not dated. He reserved his
venom for private exchanges with his hapless co-stars rather than for
temporary public figures. His name was Tony Hancock, and he was the most
insecure and the most able practitioner of his craft there has ever been.
The peg, of course, is an anniversary. On Tuesday it will be 50 years to the
day since H-H-Hancock's Half Hour - as he himself always intoned it - made
its debut, propelling him to dizzy fame on both radio and, after two years,
television. That first episode is being repeated on Tuesday to launch
Hancock's Whole Evening on Radio 2, a three-hour tribute hosted by Paul
Merton, the most sympathetic and Hancockian of today's comedians and who
once played him on ITV.
One of the funniest episodes, Wild Man of the Woods, is also going out (at
8.30pm), plus a fascinating biography of Hancock called Stone Me, What a
Life! (7.41pm) and an interview (9pm) with the supremely talented writers of
Hancock's Half Hour, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who also appeared last
night in a special programme on BBC7.
Radio 4 is marking the day, too. It is transmitting a documentary, Hancock's
Helpers, in which Russell Davies looks at other members of the Hancock's
Half Hour cast. This shows Hancock as arrogant, tyrannical and resentful of
others' success. He was irritated by Sid James's increasing popularity with
audiences. He stopped Moira Lister (who initially played his girlfriend)
from going to Argentina on a festival tour.
He said Kenneth Williams's "Oooh, stop messing about" catchphrase was
"cardboard comedy not based on truth".
Hancock's deep-seated neuroses culminated in his suicide in Sydney in 1968,
the man having turned his back on his writers and on radio. He was 44.
Yet Hancock remains forever funny, as well as painful. You cannot hear a
tuba or see a homburg hat (not that you do see many these days) or read
about East Cheam or talk about blood donations ("A pint? A pint?") without
thinking about him. You know that his persona in Hancock's Half Hour was
just a more bombastic version of the real thing - restless, self-centred,
easily flattered, too fond of drink and full of unrealised ambition. I know
he is me and perhaps he is a bit of all of us. Hancock's Half Hour was the
first sitcom to put character at its heart. It is not surreal, goonish,
gag-filled or topical. It eschews both satire and sound effects. It deserves
its golden jubilee on Tuesday, and I am sure will still be making us laugh
at the diamond one and beyond.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14934-1335725,00.html
Oxymel of Squill
daily press?
"Mike Terry" <miket...@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:cmktnc$evf$1...@hercules.btinternet.com...
Bob Harris
"Oxymel of Squill" <j...@quisquis.co.uk> wrote in message
news:2v6i9aF...@uni-berlin.de...
> any chance of you giving airmiles as well as reproducing vast swathes of
> the daily press?
>
>
hahahahhaha nice one..
DR TINKLE
"Bob Harris" <whi...@ra.2.com> wrote in message
news:cmnudi$llp$1...@hermes.shef.ac.uk...
Did you whisper that?
Jim GM4DHJ ...
--
Resisting Freemasonry for 39 years .....
All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in
their own education.....
I have rarely if ever found anyone out of whom I could not extract
amusement or edification....
Halal intolerant...
Zam Zam intolerant...