24-02-2025
Tony Hancock's guide to the trials – and errors – of being a household comic
This article is published as part of The Telegraph's Greatest Interviews series, which revisits the most significant, informative and entertaining conversations with notable figures over our 170 year history. The below interview is introduced by Christopher Howse. It appears as it was originally published.
The Sunday Telegraph was still in its first year of publication when Philip Purser interviewed Tony Hancock. Hancock, meanwhile, was at a turning point in his career. In 1961 he was a highly paid, popular and critically admired television comedian. His despondent bloodhound face looked older than his years.
His radio series Hancock's Half Hour, broadcast from 1954 to 1961, was scripted by the celebrated team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who afterwards wrote Steptoe and Son. From 1956, the radio series alternated with a television series with the same title.
The plans outlined in this interview did not prosper. For the new television series from May 1961 he dropped his popular foil, Sid James. The series was to be his last. Yet, while he still had Galton and Simpson, episodes such as The Blood Donor and The Radio Ham proved classics.
The two films in which he starred, The Rebel (1961) and The Punch and Judy Man (1962), were disappointing. Privately Hancock was aggressive and he had been drinking heavily since 1952. In 1968, in Australia, he committed suicide. As the humorist Arthur Marshall observed when he was a Sunday Telegraph columnist: 'Seldom has such a dazzling career disintegrated so quickly.'
Philip Purser (1925-2022) stayed at The Sunday Telegraph as its valued television critic for another 26 years, until sacked by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. – Christopher Howse
I think I was about five when I decided I wanted to be a comic. My father kept a pub in Bournemouth where theatre people like Elsie and Doris Waters and Stainless Stephen used to stay. They took me backstage and I became interested. My father was a semi-professional comedian himself – a dude entertainer – top-hat and monocle. He did semi-professional concerts, club suppers – things like that.
I used to listen to them all in the bar, and listen to the radio comics – Claude Dampier, Clapham and Dwyer – and go to the pictures. Will Hay was my favourite. A double feature, and half a bar of Palm toffee and 3½ hours in the dark, that was my idea of fun.
Out of school
My father died when I was 11. He'd always encouraged me enormously to do what I wanted, my mother, too. The only alternative aim I ever had was one time when I thought I might be a journalist. I was sent away to school – Bradfield – but I left there after a year. I removed myself because – well I don't know really. It was to try and get into the theatre.
I started off fairly easily, because I started in troop shows. The large audiences in Ack-Ack were prepared to see anybody and anything. In those days anybody who could entertain was accepted. That was my Tommy Trinder period, with the brown and white shoes and turned up hat. I was 16 or 17.
I used to go into the pubs and listen to the jokes, and if I heard one that got a laugh I used it. I ended up with the filthiest act. I didn't understand it until I was about 25. It was diabolical.
I cleared a church hall in Bournemouth once. They walked out slowly row by row. It was very embarrassing, and it was then I decided I would not go on with the blue stuff.
Like most people I have gained by being in the Forces, because for anyone who could get up and do anything – even imitate Popeye or something – it was such splendid opportunity.
Acting sergeant
From about 1944 to 1946, I was in the RAF Gang Show. We had a marvellous trip. Italy, North Africa, Sicily, Greece. We played under all sorts of conditions, on lorries, in tents, and all over the place. Peter Sellers and I were in charge of the wardrobe as acting sergeants, paid. We were near-professionals when we came out.
After the war there was a very special atmosphere among the young comics and actors. We all seemed to know each other. We worked the Nuffield Centre and hung around the Windmill. Anyone who was working helped the others, paid for their laundry even.
Things weren't always easy, I had a long period of doing nothing, slowly getting through the gratuity. In the hard winter of 1947 I spent most of my time in bed keeping warm.
I got my turn at the Windmill during the 1948 Olympic Games, which was charming. It's difficult to get a laugh there anyway – they come to see the girls, not you – but when you get the Chinese pole-vaulting team in the front row it makes it seem even more difficult.
But there was a change in comedy fashions about now which began to help me – a reaction to the patter style of people like Max Miller and Tommy Trinder. It was a return to a more subtle and more visual humour, I'd never been very hot on the patter stuff and my act was ready completely visual already.
To TV with a sigh
As a matter of fact when I tried radio I found it very difficult; I still feel a visual comic. The first broadcast got a laugh but it was a series of noises and silences as far as the audience at home was concerned. When I finally got into radio properly I really had to work harder than in any other medium. When we changed to television it was a sigh of relief.
With the first series, which was on ITV, we had a lot of script difficulties. Nobody's fault really. We didn't understand how much preparation has to be done before you start. A tremendous amount of the work takes place before you get on the air. The first sketch (I suggested it myself) was about a coffee bar – plants gradually strangling all the guests, the espresso machine sinking through the floor. It is pretty difficult to get plants to strangle people. It needs about six months' preparation, really.
I went back in the BBC and, for the first time, we did real situation comedy, with one episode going right through the half-hour. This could go wrong, too. There was one about trying to sell a house at the end of an airport runway that was a disaster.
In the 25th minute the place was supposed to disintegrate, when the surveyor came in. After two minutes the table fell down, the mantelpiece just after, and the place fell apart generally. The surveyor, played by Dick Emery, came in glassy-eyed and we looked at each other and there was nothing to do. As I stood up my braces broke. That was another little novelty. That was the time when I decided that as soon as it was possible we would not do any more live television.
We started pre-recording the shows, though still in one take, just as if they were on the air. In half an hour we may have five takes, sometimes only two or three, just to give us a chance to use different cameras in the studio, or eliminate quick costume changes. It is not very comfortable doing anything with one shoe half on.
The writers. Alan Simpson and Ray Galton and myself, after six years together are very close, both professionally and in every other way. We think the same about humour, we think the same about things we want to achieve. It. does not absolutely bind us for ever, but we think in the same terms.
We are going to do another four or five films with ABC. with whom we did The Rebel. That will be over four years. Then we hope to be able to put our own money into half-hour TV films, or, eventually, bigger films of which we can own the negative. We feel that so much stuff we've done has gone into thin air. We still have the scripts but none of the finished products.
We haven't got the story for the next film yet, but as with the television series, we're moving away from plot – at least from plots that bind you down too much. We intend to have a story out of which emerge high spots of comedy, maybe for four or five minutes, to get them really rocking in the cinemas,
Chaplin's City Lights, which I think is the finest full length comedy I have seen, has wonderful moments of comedy which come naturally out of the action. A lot of the older school of comics, Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin, stand up wonderfully well today. Among present-day comics I am most influenced by Jacques Tati. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday had some of the most inventive business comedy I have seen since Chaplin. I think I saw it about eight times, and each time I found something new to laugh at, and look at and enjoy. Mon Oncle was an advance in a way but not as hilarious by any means.
Comedy's essence
It seems to me that the essence of comedy is to be funny in itself. I mean it is not enough to stand and point and say 'Look at this, it is funny' or, worse still 'Look at me, I'm funny'. It puts the bloke who says that in a ludicrous position. You must be an essential part of it, and it a part of you.
You take what you think is ludicrous both about yourself and other people. Any comedy that I do is based on attitudes and moods as against characterisation, really means you can be pompous one minute, and then the opposite. You take on a mood.
People coming out with things, and doing things, that in everyday life they would restrain is a great source of comedy, of course. Natural antagonism. Like the Marx Brothers, all doing things that would be unacceptable. One realises why Groucho is so great.
The idea of the 'little man' in comedy is mostly mistaken. Chaplin is always referred to as a little man. Sometimes he is extremely aggressive. Remember the scene in City Lights when he is in a Rolls-Royce and he gets out of the car, kicks a tramp in the stomach, picks up a cigar butt and drives off? Nowadays you would probably be advised not to do it. Only the great could get away with it.
In the theatre
I've done comparatively little in the theatre – two years, twice a night, in Talk of the Town at the Adelphi was enough for me.
There is a strange difference between post-war and pre-war comics. We were put in the position of doing fresh material every week on radio, or whatever it was, and now it becomes necessary. There is no excitement in repetition. Admittedly, when you are in the theatre and have the audience really going it is a wonderful snowball of reaction, and very exciting, and it takes you out, of yourself
It is difficult to avoid sounding pompous. but I do believe comedy is terribly important in the world today, and can really help when people say that you really have made them laugh, and they say it honestly, it is not a thing to throw away, and say it doesn't matter. It is a compliment. It is the real thing.
I read a lot; mainly to put partly right an education that finished at 15. Mostly history. No particular period. I'm trying to do the lot, get a progression. You get some sort of evolutionary pattern which is highly connected with humour – the change-over from wearing things to keep warm to wearing things to look humorous. The evolution of the bowler hat.
I've turned a wall of my study into a sort of chart I'm plotting it all on. Just now I am interested in the Stone Age. They seemed to settle in communities and keep up with the Ogs next door, become conventional, like today.
I don't deliberately study people or make notes. That goes on automatically, I think. I do use a tape recorder a lot. You record everybody else's dialogue, and leave space for your own. (We've got a parrot that does a wonderful impression of me working away on the tape recorder upstairs, a sort of low-pitched grumble.)
Status symbol
Cicely, my wife, has been an enormous help – when I am working I am not particularly rewarding as a husband, because I do not stop – but, on the other hand, between high pressure spells we always have a good break when we can enjoy ourselves with each other. We spend quite a lot of time at home, and enjoy driving in the car. It's a 300 SL and I suppose it's our only real status symbol.
Otherwise, except for the obvious fact that I don't want to go back to eating sausages in Baron's Court, I don't value money for any other purpose than to give me freedom to do the work I want to do.
I am 37 and it is only the last two or three years that I have managed to put my finger on which way I would like to go. At one time I wouldn't go on to the stage without wearing a hat. This was a top hat and it made you feel someone. You start to work properly when you discard affectations and try and be what you are.
