Tony Hancock

Just put this post about next week's Hancock episodes on a lounge thread but probably more suited here:

Interesting to see they are "resting" A Sunday Afternoon at Home on this occasion - hardly contentious to suggest this is the best radio episode, although I know one person who disagrees. The Wild Man of the Woods, which is on one of the Galton and Simpson-selected Very Best of CDs, is also featured, although it never does very much for me.

And it will be interesting to hear the LP version of The Blood Donor again, especially in the context of the radio recordings. I've read (but never checked) that the timing on the Pye version is far superior to the post-accident TV version.

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With the obvious exception of The Blood Donor (not originally radio) the episodes are among the twelve included in the three vols of The Very Best of Hancock's Half Hour as personally selected for CD by Galton and Simpson. If anyone's interested here are their remaining choices:

A SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT HOME
THE POETRY SOCIETY
SID'S MYSTERY TOURS
THE CONJUROR
THE IMPERSONATOR
THE DIARY
VISITING DAY
THE THREATENING LETTER

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Yes, and editing or not there's even a point on one of those Decca recordings which presumably couldn't be cut out where he says "Hang on, I'll get this out in a minute."

And given that those recordings were several years after the TV versions (as opposed to the Pye Blood Donor recording which was not long after the telly version), I wonder whether agreeing to them was more about money than an overwhelming desire to revisit those Galton and Simpson scripts and work again with the partner he dropped because he didn't want to be seen as a double act?

Touching that in the Sid James Heroes of Comedy TV prog the only bit of interview footage of James has him talking with enormous affection about Hancock and respect for his timing. Interesting, too, to see James not in character in that brief clip: the voice, the manner is different.

Among the lesser-known Hancock books Philip Oakes's memoir is worth seeking out; he cowrote The Punch and Judy Man.

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For me it's A Sunday Afternoon at Home: Hancock complains of "Sitting around all day, waiting for the next lot of grub to come up." Isn't that boredom (or existence itself) in a nutshell?

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I like seeing Tony and Sid in the TV shows on the point of cracking up - so much better than the self-indulgent laughter of some performers today aware they're bound for a blooper show. I often seem to hear Bill Kerr in particular laughing uproariously at Hancock's delivery in the radio shows. At least I assume it's Bill Kerr. Unlike RTH, you never seem to hear Williams's adenoidal laugh in the Hancock shows - maybe he was bitter and twisted about Hancock even then.

There's also a famous gaffe - can't remember which episode - centering around Hancock's pronunciation of "a day in lieu".

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What I meant to add was that while Wild Man of the Woods isn't my favourite episode, listening to the broadcast this morning I'd forgotten how finely tuned the performances were - we're talking concert pitch - and the "Cyril, squid" incident is fairly swiftly dealt with, assuming there were no further edits: these people are focused, at the top of their game.

I tend to favour TH in more domestic settings - so Sunday Afternoon or the Hospital one - but I'd forgotten that even if there is a cartoon element in Wild Man... it's carefully set up: genuine concern from Hattie and the others about what his latest craze will be etc. Much better, in my view, than yesterday's The Last of the McHancocks, which was much more of the "wacky" variety, despite the presence of a genuine Scot to beef things up.

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Haven't read the diaries for a while but he probably thought much of it beneath him - after all, he played the Dauphin in Saint Joan, y'know, as he never tired of mentioning.

The Carry On team seem to have acted as a sort of family for him - and even if pay (and scripts) were lousy they never kicked him out as he felt Hancock did.

Interesting that despite his intellectual pretensions / aspirations he ended up playing the broadest parts in HHH.

Not overly generous in his estimate of colleague common to both teams, Sid James: one diary entry says something like: there wasn't a single actor there apart from Sid James ... Oh, maybe that first part of the sentence is true after all.

According to David Benson a radio version of Williams's diary wasn't allowed to use clips of HHH - so the criticisms in the diary are still felt to be a "live" issue.

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To mention once again the book The Laughtermakers by David Nathan (no, I'm not related and don't have shares in the publishing company, but it is a good read if you can get hold of it), Eric Sykes said something interesting in it re army-induced boredom - namely that having nothing to do in the evenings, no distractions/diversions, forces the violinist to practise his violin, the writer to write etc. So he wasn't speaking about Sunday per se but things like wartime experience or National Service both which, whatever the humiliations or trials heaped on the hapless individual during the day, incidentally created great vacuums of time to fill as the lights came on. Of course, the nothingness EurekaBlitz refers to is pretty inviting too ...

And with regard to Hancock, its two writers had years of time to fill in the sanatorium. Maybe Sunday Afternoon at Home is such a classic because those two individuals are peculiarly well informed about yawning emptiness: they're writing about a common phenomenon and their own experience at the same time.

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Interesting that Father Ted has been one of the few modern sitcoms praised by G & S - isn't that a series about men with far too much time on their hands on an island where every day is Sunday?

I'm personally very fond of the TV sitcom Nightingales by Paul Makin (now on DVD) which is really about security guards with nothing to do (but, as with Father Ted, it slides into surrealism). One particular episode even had (I suspect) a nod to Sunday Afternoon at Home when the two main characters Carter and Bell struggle to fill the time.

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For Ted and Dougal every day's a holiday ... of Obligation. (RC joke. Sorry.)

And you could say that Father Ted is more closely related to the radio Hancock than the striving-for-naturalism TV one.

Someone called Red Dwarf "student flatshare in space" and most sitcoms centre around a family or quasi-family (work colleagues, fellow prisoners or recruits etc). The sense of being in some way trapped increases the pathos and is also handy economically: no changes of location.

And as I type I remember that in Radio Times Clement and La Frenais talking about the obvious trapped element in Porridge talk about the Lift episode of TV Hancock as the perfect example of this in miniature, even though it's rather shorter than a prison sentence or most jobs. You could create a series based on those characters - it would just be a case of finding some other means of forcing them into regular close proximity. The sit of sitcom is almost immaterial: it's just the vessel to hold them. Not sitcom but charactercom, as writer/tutor John Brennan once said. If the characters don't work then nothing else will. (Of course if your lead dies there's a limit to what you can do, as in It Sticks Out Half a Mile.)

I suppose homburg era Hancock is (or was) trapped in Railway Cuttings through the gap between his dreams and his abilities (and Sid's help too, of course - remind you of any rag-and-bone pair?). And Father Ted is of course trapped with the family from Hell because of that little "resting in my account" business ...

And I suppose, finally, that sitcoms offer us reassurance because they're saying we're all variously trapped but hey, we'll all get through - sort of.

In yet another book - a media studies-related one about TV comedy this time - Barry Took, I think, distinguished between Till Death... and Steptoe. (My apologies if I've got this wrong; it may have been Dennis Norden or Frank Muir.) For him, the Alf Garnett show was a howl of rage and pain whereas Steptoe was offering a more gentle lesson. Not blander or emptier but more positive, along the lines of: it's alright, this difficulty, this failure to communicate, we're all in the same boat. Sitcoms, at their best, do what all good drama does, one way or another: reaffirm our common humanity and so give us hope (though I'm happy to settle for a little diversion). A quote I can confidently attribute to Dennis Norden as he's said it in several interviews including that recent Godfather of Comedy interview on 7 is that Steptoe ought to be studied for GCSE (or O Level, as I think he still calls it). There actually was a schools edition of some of the best early scripts worth seeking out as it doesn't overlap with the more commonly available book of seventies scripts. If only they'd used them for the SATS instead of Shakespeare, there wouldn't be all this kerfuffle today. Possibly.

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EurekaBlitz, Re US/UK, Alfred Marks once said Americans love the whipper, the aggressor, and English love the whippee - his explanation for why Hancock (essentially a victim for all his bluster) couldn't have worked in America - though the Hancock character in Heathcote Williams's play Hancock's Last Half Hour (far more interesting than that recent Curse of Comedy effort) blames the retitling of The Rebel in the states: Call Me Genius - which certainly can't have predisposed a new audience to take him to their hearts.

Not sure how far Marks's simple distinction will take us in comparing American and British sitcoms but it's a thought. Wasn't there an attempt by Bil Cosby to do One Foot in the Grave and wasn't it watered down? I'd like to know more about that. And were those changes down to Cosby or the network?

Re being trapped, I do think it applies to sitcoms internationally. Frasier is the family trap: guilt forces Frasier to allow infirm dad to live with him. And what is Larry Sanders but a workplace comedy? You could even say that Seinfeld is a family trap comedy - Jerry and George were schoolfriends so they're lumbered with each other now. Kramer all but lives with Jerry (steals his cereals - now that's family/flatshare in action).

There has to be the trapped thing because characters need to spark badly against each other and if they weren't compelled by the need to earn a living or emotional ties or patriotism or whatever then the obvious question distracting the audience would be: well, why don't you just walk away?

Perhaps (haven't really subjected this to too much scrutiny so may not be that effective as a generalisation) the crucial difference between US and UK is the American characters are allowed some "winner" elements: Frasier has a prestigious job and a genuine ability to help others but cannot help himself and is unable to sustain a relationship outside of family/work.

Regarding which, there's a priceless moment in one Frasier episode which suggests that the emtional hold his family have on him is as deadly as that of Albert on Harold. Having been in a bit of a date "drought", Frasier is frustrated that his dad and Niles don't believe he has finally got a new girlfriend, and circumstances mean that his family never get to see her - by chance she's always left the flat when they happen to return.

Frasier becomes increasingly enraged when they start humouring him, cooing of course they believe in this woman whom they clearly think is a product of his imagination. Eventually Frasier is impelled to take a photograph of her when she is sleeping. The flash wakes her up; she is livid and storms out the flat, past Niles and Martin. Her angry outburst makes clear what to them what Frasier has just done. He turns to them and says: "Well - what do you think of me now?"

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Yes, I did notice the laugh - and did you notice that a scripted reference to KW's acting limitations immediately followed? Maybe that was the start of all the bitterness.

One other pleasing detail today: in the script Sid has a German accent and sings a snatch of Wunderbar from Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate. Was this a jokey reference by G & S to the fact that James, fresh from South Africa, was actually in the London cast of Kiss Me Kate? I've heard an original cast recording in which he's one of the Brush Up Your Shakespeare singers.

Oh, and erudite - isn't that a kind of adhesive? (copyright Weekending and with renewed apologetic noises to Derek Jameson)

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EurekaBlitz,

"My thoughts, are that although the trapping element appears in American sitcom, it seldom seems to be the predominant aspect, as it can with the British version"

Not sure; you may be right, though perhaps it depends on how you broadly interpret "trapped" - I suppose I basically mean the reason why incompatible characters don't just walk away from each other and it can be as simple as the need to earn a living. Doesn't mean they have to hate each other or be miserable but that there is a tie which binds them to that group of people and forces them to attempt to achieve their aims within the group rather than walking away and finding a nicer group to belong to. Which is handy for continuity of casting.

In my view the Frasier/Martin relationship is the foundation of that show - and that was the way the pilot was set up - but certainly in individual episodes Frasier's vanity, sibling rivalry etc can be to the fore. It's not that Frasier's life has been ruined by Martin but that Martin's advice, wanted or unwanted, is there all the time; and Frasier can't walk away because a) the old man has set up house in his flat and b) Frasier needs his father's approval.

Think the winner / loser thing is a more interesting distinction in US/UK comedies: are American audiences perhaps less willing to accept central characters whose lives are bleak unless those characters have some "winner" elements to soften the effect?

I apologise that this is moving away from strictly BBC 7 matters. Perhaps I should also add that I have never watched an episode of Friends.

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I agree about Fools ... not really working post Peckham but I think in sitcom character and setting are bound up together: yes, they were trapped in a crummy place but they were also trapped with each other and you can't separate the two things.

You say "even though there was at times, a thought of Delboy holding Rodney back, I think the situation to escape from, was their living conditions" but it was the living conditions which brought out (especially in the darker first series) Del's real character, namely the full extent to which he'd be willing to dump on Rodney to save his own neck.

Now that may have come about because poverty made him desperate but it's still who he is: character, as the writing manuals never tire of telling you, is decision under pressure.

So maybe as a general rule we can say that whatever the "trapped" element is it has to be something which sufficiently pressures the characters to reveal themselves.

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EurekaBlitz,

Re Frasier and dad, "You never really see a true struggle - a vigorous striving to escape whatever form of shackle that happens to be in place" - it's there in the pilot (a classic of its kind) but yes, it's considerably softened later. There isn't the viciousness which Steptoe and Son does as standard, and that may be about US/UK sensibilities.

But there's still a struggle going on. Both men want something the other cannot provide: Martin will never get the sports-playing son he can boast about to his cronies at Duke's; Frasier will never have the father who will really appreciate and understand his work and interests. And yet they are bound together. It is a sort of marriage, like Steptoe and Son. (In one episode of Steptoe girlfriend sadly tells Harold, to his great bafflement, that it wouldn't work - he's already married.)

There was one episode where Frasier and Martin, seeing how a girlfriend of Frasier's could excoriate her mother and then be all tears and hugging and feeling better in five minutes, try this out for themselves. To their surprise, the vicious words which come out don't resolve themselves into a hug; all they feel is immense pain at what they've normally kept bottled up being let out. So the suggestion is that those feelings are still there, as they were in the pilot, but damped down.

Incidentally, one of my fave Frasier-dad scenes is when Martin's relationship with the cheerful vulgarian, banjo-playin' Sherry, ends. Frasier meets his dad in a bar and seems to want to reassure him, tell him he'd find someone else. But both men know that at Martin's age that's unlikely (ie next bride: Death) - and eventually, rather than insult his dad with platitudes Frasier does the only thing he can : he pretends to take an interest in watching the sports on TV with his dad. It's a beautiful scene because, for all their differences, they are offering each other something simply in spending time together. And that takes me back to the healing aspect of sitcom.

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Saw an old 60s episode of Steptoe in which Harold was tensely awaiting the arrival of a girlfriend at the house. Albert had put the clock forward an hour so when she arrived an hour late, as Harold thought, he slammed the door on her. Incredible cruelty by Albert but also an old man terrified of being alone.

There's a great line used by one brother to another in the play Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill: "I love your guts." With its suggestion of the more obvious phrase "hate your guts" it seems to sum up that contradictory emotions family members can arouse in each other with particular ease - and not just in sitcoms.

The quasi-family can work just as well if we sense there's a similar amount at stake. Did you see the last ever episode of Larry Sanders? It clearly brought out that the bond between Larry, Artie and that fragile monster, Hank was as intense and filled with loathing and need as any family.

But going back to Steptoe there's a love there too. In, I think the early episode where Albert goes back to Flanders(?) Harold has lots of fun mocking his uniform and rifle but then there's a passage where he talks with sympathy and understanding about his father's experiences returning to Britain from the war.

The well-known secret to what drives Porridge - the idea that if Fletch can score a tiny victory over the system each day then he's "won", even though he's still banged up - is sort of linked to Steptoe. The sarcasm Harold inventively and gleefully heaps on his dad's head is an attempt to claw back some status to make life tolerable when the brute fact is he's still without a partner or any prospects and under his father's thumb.

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I'm beginning to flag, myself. But before I lie down in a darkened room for a bit, maybe I could throw into the mix Drunken Bakers - okay, more a comic strip in Viz magazine than a radio or TV sitcom per se, and I doubt whether any adaptation in either medium could stretch it out to half an hour, but a work of comic genius nonetheless. And quite definitely British: no softening of any "loser" aspects in that series.

Right, egg and chips, mug of cocoa and straight up to bed.

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I love Mice and Men (as does Harold Pinter, incidentally, according to Michael Billington's biog). Yes, Harold and Albert have become dependent on each other - Harold doesn't have the education to break free (=comic delusion; very handy for sitcom) but it's Albert's fault, as he points out on occasion, keeping him off school to go totting. And now it's too late. Like Beckett without the laughs.

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EurekaBlitz,

In Mice and Men, George's constant complaint that he could "live so easy" if it wasn't for Lennie is, you could argue, his equivalent of Harold's sarcasm, ie a momentary seizing of status which ignores the bigger picture - that friendship with this lumbering giant of a man fulfils all his emotional needs. Interesting too that Lennie has a kind of wiliness (wilyness?) and at one point seizes the moral high ground over the matter of having sauce with his beans. If it wasn't for that unfortunate incident at the end which rather kills the chances of a second series you could say Steinbeck had written a sitcom. George, to deflect strangers' curiosity, has even invented a sort family connection with the big guy.

Yes, I agree with what you say about the uneasy balance of love and hate. When it tips too far on the hate side then you've got yourself a tragedy; sitcoms acknowledge the potential for that to happen but sidestep it - just as in real life most of us are able to refrain from acting on those momentarily murderous feelings about the intensely irritating habits of those closest to us.

Status is also an important factor generally in sitcom, by which I mean who comes off best after each exchange. Reading the 70s Steptoe scripts a while back my strongest impression was how often the baton of status actually passed back and forward between the pair over even just a couple of pages, and it goes back to what I've said, possibly in another thread, about the dreamer vs. practical one in most sitcom pairings. The bickering can go on almost endlessly because each side has some vestige of right on his side: Harold is right to dream; Albert is right to want to protect his gullible and sensitive son.

And the trapped bit gives the writers a great freedom: because we as an audience know what Albert is capable of, we're willing to accept the most extravagantly hurtful, virulent stuff pouring out of Harold's mouth because we also know he's a little boy who only has this as his outlet; he can't walk away - he tried and failed in the pilot - or (until that final stage incarnation) kill the source of his misery.

Related to this, I know that Galton and Simpson said later Hancock writers (hey, back on topic!) missed the basic point that you had to surround him with pompous jobsworths or whoever - ie people deserving of his barbs - otherwise he'd simply come over as a buffoon.

Looked at through the prism of tragedy, the situations in Steptoe etc are bleak, but there's something about comedy which makes us - not deny the bleakness but hold it in check, somehow, accept the contradictions, not deny them but not worry about them overmuch and focus on the life-affirming elements. I've always avoided reading too much Samuel Beckett as it seems like Hard Work but I'm vaguely aware that plays like Endgame are the darker side of the same thing. Frank Muir suggests, in the David Nathan book I keep quoting from on this board, that G & S, through seeking laughs, unearthed a lot more because inevitably their work is going to reflect who they are and their concerns, but he goes on to say that it may not have come about had they been writing straight plays (hasn't one or other of them said that they wrote some unreadable socially conscious plays early on?).

So you could see comedy as a kind of gel, or a kind of inert frogspawn, that holds the tadpoles of darker thoughts and actions safely there, suspended, never to burst into frogs of despair.

Frogs of despair... dear oh dear. Goodnight.

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Sorry about my regurgitation there folks ... but I do have a Cliff Richard joke or riddle of sorts to lighten the mood.

Please imagine, for comedic purposes, that Cliff and his band had a roadie named Andrew More. His main job was to ensure that Cliff had time to wind down, alone, after a gig, to which end he would get Hank, Jet and the gang off the premises fairly smartly after the curtain came down after the final encore. (Did I mention it was the fifties?) It was also about their safety: they would be whisked off by Andrew More before the fans came out, then he would wind his way back through the traffic and pick up Cliff, by which time the fans would have dispersed, and chauffeur the star to his hotel. But as I say, his chief task was the speedy spiriting away of Cliff's backing band.

Now my question is this: this roadie-cum-chauffeur was nicknamed, by Cliff and the boys, "Love." Why?

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That's just what I wanted conion to think! You were nearer, Eurekablitz but there may have to be a steward's inquiry - if they have those at Wimbledon.

No, Cliff's roadie got his nickname because after every gig ...

# Love walked right in and drove the Shadows away ... #

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Maybe toads not frogs. Do toads emerge from frogspawn or are they mammals or something? Must be more careful with these amphibious metaphors in future.

And in the case of all those sitcoms (inc Steinbeck's!) those pairings are about need, aren't they? Whether or not the relationships are healthy over the years they have come to depend on each other. They complete each other so they can't let go; neither is a full person without the other. Yes, dreamer and doer - together they make up a more-or-less-functional person, however unhappy on a regular basis that association makes them. I saw a play about the Everly Brothers' split and reunion where they ruefully accepted they were shackled together: the combination of their voices created something bigger and finer than either separately.

Did you see the Warm Champagne episode of One Foot... where Margaret turns down the chance of an affair? She tells the Lothario that Victor is the most sensitive man she knows, which is why she loves him - and why she wants to smash his face in (or words to that effect). And Dorothy, in Men Behaving Badly, ignores a hint Gary may have slept with someone else; she tells Gary "I'm only choosing to believe you because I don't have the time to find a proper boyfriend," which sounds to me like 'Arold's status-boosting sarcasm bit.

Frasier's an interesting case because of Niles (a late addition to the concept suggested by the close resemblance of the actor to a young Kelsey Grammer). It seems to me that in places he acts as the dad, offering advice when it would be implausible to have Martin doing so; at other times he's the dreamer, to be brought back to reality by a combination of Frasier and Martin.

I still think, however, that Frasier and his dad are the central pairing because the contrast between the two of them is more extreme than that between the two brothers. In fact, I've read that Niles is really Frasier mk.1 - ie the super-neurotic shrink in Cheers. The new sitcom's creators realised if Frasier was to be at the centre he'd have to be more three-dimensional than his earlier persona allowed. So you could say it's just another aspect of the same character: "If you ask one, you get the other" - as the brothers are mortified to overhear a partygiver drawl.

It's almost time for the noon repeat of The Blood Donor (on topic again!) but some further thoughts on making-each-other-complete pairings: Likely Lads - Terry's self pity and moaning for the past vs. the possibility that Bob has indeed lost something vital in embracing middle class values. It's a lovely moment at the end of Series One of Whatever Happened to... when it seems in his best man's speech that Terry is graciously renouncing Bob, unselfishly handing him over to a future with Thelma ... lovely for all of ten seconds when it becomes clear it'll be business as usual after the honeymoon.

Right. I'm off.

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Yes, remarkably well slotted in as though part of an actual dialogue. So at a guess - NOT Adrian Juste.

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To quote from today's Hancock (on message yet again!) Well, you can always learn from other people. Let the shipwrecks of others be your seamarks! etc.

But don't the Goons preach against the evils of bunchy spawn?

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Yes, "subcharacter" is a good way of putting it: someone who basically makes life much easier technically for the writers.

He's often the voice of F's conscience, as in the episode where Frasier is almost seduced by daytime TV stardom. I love the ending where Niles indulgently waves him off to what he's promised will be his final broadcast in full Mexican gear atop a donkey: "Vaya con Dios." Frasier even spells out Niles's function: "Thanks, Brother, for keeping me grounded." (Suppose it had to be Niles in that episode because Martin would have thought: "My son's a TV star. What's not to like?")

When Niles needs help himself with Maris's latest excesses or whatever so then he's more of a rounded character, you could say - although the decision not to show Maris onscreen was maybe about realising that Niles had to have a strictly limited function in the programme, serving the Frasier character, not supplanting him, which could be why the Daphne marriage bit was just so wrong - see this website for more on this and other sitcoms deemed to have passed their sell-by dates:

www.jumptheshark.com...

But the main thing with Niles is you've got a character on hand to allow our hero, F, to articulate whatever is on his mind without having to resort to speaking to Eddie or soliloquising: a Horatio to his Hamlet, and a way of getting round the fact that Frasier and his dad don't really speak the same language; the neurotic tics borrowed from Frasier Mk. 1 are funny in themselves but they are also a cunning way of disguising the character's partly functional nature.

Yes, Whatever Happened to ... is definitely about a specific time of social aspiration and that context led to some great comedy. Steptoe too, although I recall reading somewhere that when it came back in the seventies and G & S were asked whether it would be any different they said social changes would have probably passed Harold and Albert by. Haven't watched them enough to answer this question myself but do the 60s episodes feel more rooted in a specific time and place and, if so, are they better?

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Ivor, don't really know Dibley well so can't say for sure. Dawn French's verger sidekick might be the obvious dreamer to the Vicar's practicality but I don't know how big a part she plays week by week. Could it be the whole village sort of constitutes the dreamer for this sitcom ... or could it even be that this theory doesn't fit?

Can anyone help out?

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"Reigns" or "free reign" is a remarkably popular mistake - I blame those spellchecks. As everyone knows, there's no such thing as a free reign.

Reading over this and the current Goon thread it strikes me that a lot of readers might be interested in, and not necessarily know about, the book Spike and Co. Written by Graham McCann, it's about the formation of Associated London Scripts so is about Galton and Simpson, Eric Sykes, Johnny Speight and others as well as Milligan. A very handy one-stop shop for a lot of information about the writers and their creations, and he has a knack for choosing script extracts - like the Steptoe show where Harold dreams of holding a literary soiree with Bertrand Russell would "bustin' a gut to get in."

Like his Morecambe and Wise book, he has a lot of existing published material to draw on, but he still does a good job of it - in fact Eddie Braben used McCann's book as a reference for his own autobiography.

This link will take you to Roger Wilmut's website - he has written about the Goons and Hancock. The site also has running orders for ISIRTA.

home.clara.net/rfwil...

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Hmm - I may have created a rod for my own back with the dreamer/doer thing here ... too late to recant?

Again, Reggie is not one I'm wildly familiar with but poss another case of lead character vs the world? I don't know how prominently wife or secretary or CJ feature. But Reggie must certainly be the Dreamer.

Important, though, to stress that dreamer/doer roles can be fluid: practicality / earthy common sense can shade into dull convention; dreaming can range from ditzy (ditsy?) to visionary. (In the same programme, I mean; your sympathies can shift.)

I'm tempted to wriggle out of it now by wondering whether most, but not, all sitcoms have this pairing at the centre, but poss the "character vs the world" definition covers the rest. That would cover later TV Hancock (on topic yet again!) as well as Reggie.

Some possible pairings: Mainwaring & Wilson; Rigsby & Philip (?); Basil & Sybil; Larry (Sanders) & Artie, with Hank in the Niles role - ie Larry's insecurities given, er, free rein; Jerry (Seinfeld) and George ...

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Blimey, this is getting complicated ... Re the fluidity thing I wasn't speaking of Reggie Perrin in particular. If that series has a definite arc (I know it was based on a novel) maybe that's harder to shoehorn into this generalisation. Maybe if anyone who knows it well enough can help out ...

What I was trying to say actually applied to sitcoms in general, namely that our attitude to either of those dreamer/doer characters can shift during the course of an episode. And a sense of proportion - which we have and the characters lack - is, I think, the key to understanding those changing sympathies.

Take Basil Fawlty. His wish to improve his hotel/clientele is laudable. But his reckless pursuit of his goals combined with an inability to recognise that his own behaviour compounds the problem (punishing the car, not himself) allows us to stand back from him and laugh - but only some of the time. As with Hancock the people around him can be unreasonable: even if Sybil has some half-formed notion of how to interact appropriately with others she is also a shrewish bore.

And the beauty of Whatever Happened to ... is that roles can even be reversed. There's an episode where Terry is doing his son of the soil bit and insulting Bob and Thelma's guests at a dinner party only for Bob and Thelma to take his side at the end: even the upwardly mobile Thelma realised there was something wrong about their guests' vehement denial of their roots.

And wasn't there a Steptoe episode where Albert thinks he's going to get married, not realising it's an old girlfriend of Harold's? So he's the naive one there.

Hmmm ... the more I think about this the more complicated it gets. The sitcom Shelley has just been issued on DVD. Shelley's partner Fran is, I suppose, the practical one, but Shelley's major interactions are with jobsworths etc - the whole unreasonable and unyielding world out there (not unlike late Hancock). Fran is undoubtedly more practical but is hers really the Horatio role a listener and a nodder rather than an equal? In later series Shelley had a buddie (eg David Ryall) but there wasn't a Fran replacement as such. But then again think of the force of Dandy Nichols's interjections in Till Death ... she knew just when and how to deflate Alf.

This post could go on and on so I'm off to do something less demanding ... like watching a sitcom.

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As a footnote to some of the things we discussed earlier on in this thread about US vs UK comedy, I was struck by this comment in today's Guardian by Jeff Garlin, who plays Larry David's agent in Curb Your Enthusiasm:

"'To me, in a way,' he says, 'Curb's a very English show. We think of Fawlty Towers a lot - having a lead character not being inherently likable, that was one of the first shows to embrace that. Britain's the one place where it's been successful, that hasn't surprised me at all.'"

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If it's the police force "day in lieu" one (see message 25) then I definitely heard it on a BBC tape.

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On the vinyl front, there is a 70s BBC Enterprises LP called Unique Hancock which features some very well-chosen extracts from the radio shows (not rerecordings or owt). CDs have perhaps made this redundant but the careful selection does remind you of how well written the best of the individual shows are. Can't remember all the shows they came from but includes the Hospital one.

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Haven't read before about Sid James rejecting him after the Decca recording but it would make perfect sense: I've seen footage, possibly on John Fisher's excellent Heroes of Comedy series, of James praising Hancock's timing to the skies; to see that timing thrown away must have been especially painful.

On a related note, can't remember which Hancock biog this comes from - possibly the Freddie Hancock/David Nathan one - but there is a story about Hancock, in later, post G&S years, being given what he recognised as a good script and determined to make the most of it. He stayed on the wagon during rehearsals but was annoyed to find when the show was being recorded that the director was shooting him in longshot. Hancock insisted on a closeup, but watching a playback he was suddenly presented with painful and irrefutable evidence of how immobile that once expressive face had become through drink. After a long silence, he simply said: "I look like a ----ing frog," and went back to drinking after that show. This moment was used in the William Humble screenplay with Alfred Molina as Hancock.

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I have just seen (hadn't read anything about it or knew it had been in progress) a new biography of Hancock by ... John Fisher. This should be a good 'un. A very good 'un.

He was behind the excellent Heroes of Comedy series, wrote a very good biog of Tommy Cooper (he worked with him and has had many years of experience in television) and some years ago wrote a book called Funny Way to Be a Hero, looking at Sid Field and many others, writing seriously but not portentously, about the craft.

It's in the shops already - I saw a copy in a major London bookshop which I can't name but it rhymes (in the way that pop composers rhyme these days) with "hors d'oeuvres" and I didn't even want to skim it. I know it will be good.

I'm really glad it's John Fisher and not Graham McCann who has been give or taken this task upon himself. Although McCann's Morecambe and Wise biog is good, and used by Eddie Braben as a reference for his own autobiography, there was so much info published already I felt it rounded up that material but didn't necessarily add huge extra insights. Similarly, with all the Hancock material already around someone who can really make his subject live (as he did Tommy Cooper) is needed. I'd be interest to know whether anyone has read it yet or seen reviews.

Re other books, Philip Oakes's memoir of Hancock is well worth checking out if you can find it (it centres around the making of The Punch and Judy Man which Oakes cowrote with Hancock). All sorts of details, like Hancock's electric razor suddenly bursting forth with a bristle-storm; he hadn't realised you were meant to empty it.

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"All the familiar, depressing stories are there, but seem, in JFs book to be handled more sensitively and with sympathy" - that sounds like recommendation enough for me, and in keeping with Fisher's other writing.

He dealt very well with Tommy Cooper's death in the Cooper biog, and in painted a convincing picture of a man whose real joy was in pottering about in magic shops, excited by the latest tricks, regardless of their usefulness to the act. The occasionally fraught relationship between TC and his wife also seemed to be placed in perspective rather than simply a series of anecdotes.

I really hated the Joan Le Mesurier autobiography and subsequent Curse of Comedy programme (I know it was only part of the source material) because it seemed such a limited version of the truth. What's the point in focusing on the time when someone is in freefall?

Incidentally, I once had occasion to chat briefly with Jimmy Gilbert at Thames in the eighties and was surprised by his dismissal of Hancock: "A mess playing a mess."

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He appears to be alive, according to Wikipedia (not a copper-bottomed guarantee, I know).

I saw the Face to Face interview on the big screen at the National Film Theatre in, I think, the 90s as part of a Hancock season. Seeing the sensitivity and fluidity of that face in such close-up, the range of emotions evidently passing over it even in profile and with the limitations of the television picture when recorded, was extraordinary. And course it makes the "frog" incident more painful to think about.

As part of that same NFT season they screened his appearance in The Government Inspector. Don't know how I'd feel now, but I remember at the time being distinctly underwhelmed: it wasn't a bad performance but there was the sense he'd reined himself in too much to avoid accusations of mugging.

I've found a review of the biog by Russell Davies, editor of Kenneth Williams's Diaries (and well known to Radio 7 & 2 listeners for much else).

entertainment.timeso...