Articles

This article was published in its original form in Circus #1. As well as revising the arse out of it, I’ve taken the opportunity to add a number of fancy sound clips. I hope you enjoy it!
 

Interviewer John Freeman, in his famous 1960 Face to Face interrogation, wasn’t the first to assume a certain comic genius’s true name was Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock. By then the real Anthony John, with all his flaws and eccentricities, had become inextricably ingrained in his fictional persona, as much as he tried to distance himself from it. He told Freeman: “It isn’t a character I play, that I put on and off like a coat. It is greatly a part of me and a part of everybody else that I see.”

Before the first radio Hancock’s Half Hour, on November 2nd 1954, Tony Hancock had become quite a regular on TV and radio, most notably as the tutor of ventriloquist’s dummy Archie Andrews in the last 26 episodes of Educating Archie, a radio comedy by Eric Sykes and Sid Colin. He was also well known from his stage appearances, in successful variety shows such as London Laughs and Talk of the Town, and in panto (which he despised). Inspired initially by the likes of Max Miller and Sid Field, he slowly developed his own distinctive style which, coupled with perfect timing and a degree of audience control and manipulation that was important to live performers, guaranteed that his audience laughed in all the right places. But, no matter how perfect the medium was for him, Hancock disliked working on the stage. He was terrified of it and was often physically sick before going on.