PROLOGUE

This being CulTV we try to make the interviews as simple as possible, with no techno babble or journalistic self-gratification. We can never be accused of being the sort of folk that like the sound of our own keyboard. But before I start our formulaic Q & A, I thought it might be of interest to give our readers some background of what has gone before.

Unlike many of the kids today, I did not have my own TV to watch what I wanted as a young boy. I realize this is a pretentious thing to say given that my mother's generation got excited about a couple of pieces of fruit for Christmas. But the point is you look for other sources of entertainment. Mine was a small tape recorder where I would play old Hancock radio shows that I had hired from the library. I must have been one of very few 8 year olds in the early eighties who knew who Hancock was, let alone listened to his 50's radio show (Or at least what still exists of it) on a regular basis. So when the BBC offered me the chance to meet what I consider to be the greatest comedy writing partnership in history, I was needless to say excited.

I had so many questions that I wanted answers to, like why did they stop writing? What was Hancock really like? And can all those documentaries about what dark lives the cast of Hancock and Steptoe had really be true? As I approached Ray Galton's house I received a phone call from the BBC telling me that another journalist was scheduled to see them after me, so I had a time limit for my numerous questions. Being keen, I arrived at Ray's spectacular residence extremely early. Alan was running late and as they both later explained, thought I was Mark Lamarr pulling a prank on my first appearance. (I was wearing my glasses with my hair slicked back at the time)

It would be easy to assume that I was about to meet a writer of certain years who remembered ‘The good old days' But this was a far cry from the gentleman chatting to me about the latest movie blockbusters and telling me how he recently injured himself chopping logs. Oh, and by the way, would I mind stoking the fire while he dressed? Alan arrived as he does every Monday when his cleaning lady chucks him out and not having a clue who I am at first, talks to me about filming in Apsley. (Which is near my house) We get on to talking about their work, my acting, and whether I'm sure that I'm not Mark Lamarr. Finally we speak about how production companies have silly names these days. Then, I throw in a preconceived question.
 
 

ACT ONE: How it all began…
 

George: How did the two of you meet?
 

Ray: Well we are both from South London, Alan's from Mitcham and I'm from Morden. (Surrey)
 

Alan: We were both born in London funnily enough, I was born in Brixton and moved out when I was about three or four and Ray was born in Paddington and moved out when he was about six months old.
 

Ray: Which was a long walk, but I was a sturdy baby. But we met in Milford Sanatorium for TB. I went in there at 16, and I was about 17 and a half when Alan appeared with a few lads from the holding place in Mitcham.

Up until that time there were only older men who were straight out of the armed forces, so all of a sudden, there were people of my age, and eventually Alan and I were put in the same 4 bedded cubical.
 

George: What were your first writing jobs?
 

Ray: While we were in the sanatorium, we used to listen to all the radio that was going, which wasn't a lot in those days because the sanatorium only had one line, which we got through the ear phones. But I was in with a young guy earlier, who was an engineer, and he had an RAF eleven fifty five radio out of a Lancaster. On that we could pick up all the American Forces Network programmes from Germany.  Eventually this guy and another fellow made a kind of studio out of a linen cupboard.  They used to do copies of BBC type programmes, commentaries and record requests. Then Alan and I thought “Why not do a comedy?” We put it to the radio committee, and they said “Why not?” “Why not?” was very big that year.

The object of the exercise was to write and perform six quarter of an hour shows. We managed to write four and dried up, and that's how we started.
 

Alan: Around that time we wrote a letter to Frank Muir and Dennis Norden who were our heroes. They were the top writers at that time. We asked, A) How do you become  comedy writers? and B) Can we work in your office to see how it is done? They wrote a very nice letter back to us putting us off because, as we subsequently found out, there is no way that you want two spotty faced herberts looking over your shoulder while you're working. But they said “If you have any ideas send them to the BBC script editor Gale Pedrick who is avid for new writers”.

Anyway, a year later we came out of the sanatorium. I used to be a member of a real old amateur church hall concert party in my early teens, and one day they asked me if I had any ideas. So I got in touch with Ray. We hadn't written anything for about a year by this time, but he came over to my mother's place and we wrote some sketches. Having started writing again we took up Muir and Norden's suggestion and wrote a sketch based on the last segment of  ‘Take It From Here'. The show starred Dick Bentley, Jimmy Edwards and Joy Nicholls and was written by Frank Muir and Dennis Norden. We loved it because they didn't treat the listeners like a bunch of morons. They would often do a spoof of a film or a book, so if they were doing it today, they would probably do a spoof of The Gangs of New York and call it The Gangs of East Cheam High Street. We wrote a ten minute sketch and sent it in to Gale Pedrick.   He replied “Don't read more than appears on the surface of this letter but we read your script and were highly amused, make an appointment with my secretary and maybe I can point you in the right direction.”  I was so excited that I ran down Ray's street waving this piece of paper around like Chamberlain getting off the plane coming back from Munich. If nothing else had happened, we would still be showing that bit of paper to people saying, “Look, we nearly made it.”

When we went up to see Gale Pedrick, he put us in touch with a few people and sent our scipt to a few producers. One of them was Roy Speer. The script was left on his desk while he was producing a show called ‘Happy Go Lucky' starring Derek Roy, who in 1951 was the biggest star in radio along with Frankie Howerd. Derek happened to be in Roy Speer's office one day and picked up our script and started reading. He said “Who wrote this because there is some good stuff here?” So we met with Derek, and he said he would like to get us to write jokes for him. He said he would pay us 5 shillings for each one accepted.

So we used to go round to my mum's place in the evenings and we would write about three pages of Bob Hope type one liners, you know the sort of thing, “I wouldn't say my wife was fat, but….” And then we would take them round to Derek's flat. He would go through them one by one and say, Yes, Yes, No, Yes, No, No, then call his secretary in and say “Seven”. Out would come the cash box and we would get paid 35 bob. He'd say see you next week. Then Ray and I would walk down to the bus stop and I would hand Ray 17.6d (87.5p).  We were professionals!

Ray and I used to go to the recordings. The show was dying on its feet. One day, Roy Speer had a nervous breakdown, and he was carted off to a nursing home.  The head of the BBC came down and said we all had to carry on and brought in a new producer, Dennis Main Wilson. Well, the first thing he did was sack all the writers. He came up to us and said, “You two tall blokes, are you writers?” And we said “Yes”, so he said “alright, you write the show.” We said yes even though we didn't think we could do it, because we knew if we had said no, we would have been finished. Our only saving grace was that the show was so bad that it couldn't have been any worse, so we were in a win win situation. Somehow we managed to get through it, and the show was better. Not a great deal better, but better. This brought us to the attention of the powers that be and about six months later a similar situation occurred with a show called ‘Calling All Forces'. For some reason, still unbeknown to us, after writing 90 weekly shows, Bob Monkhouse and Dennis Goodwin decided to go on holiday and not finish the last six shows. We were asked if we would like to write them, by which time we had learnt a bit more about the business and were improving,

Ray: ‘Calling All Forces' was the biggest Radio show on the air. Tony Hancock was playing second banana to Charlie Chester. Anyway after the six finished the BBC decided to continue it under a few different names, firstly ‘Forces All-Star Bill' and then ‘All-Star Bill' and finally ‘Star Bill'. It had a different guest comedian every week, and Tony was now the star. It ran for another two or three years, by which time we had written for every comic in the country. And being paid to learn how to do it.  We were still in our early 20's at this time, but we were getting known within the business. So much so that Spike Milligan asked us to form a company called ‘Associated London Scripts' with him and Eric Sykes.

Dennis Main Wilson who had produced ‘The Goon Show' was in charge of  ‘Star Bill'.  We asked him if we could do a half hour show with Tony rather than the sketch show. We wanted to do a story line all the way through that was character based. We were adamant we wanted no jokes or silly voices. And unlike ‘The Goon Show' and so many others of the time, we wanted no musical breaks. Dennis persuaded the BBC, and they said have a go, which is how it worked in those days. No focus groups or any of the rubbish that you would get today.
 

George: So, you had your lead man and your concept, how did you go about creating ‘Hancock's Half Hour'?
 

Alan: We had a pretty obvious set up, we gave him a best friend, a girlfriend, and then we decided that we wanted a crook. We were quite friendly with Bill Kerr after Graham Stark introduced us in The Buxton Club. We thought he would be good as Tony's mate. We already had a girl in Moira Lister, because she was doing the same role in the hour long ‘Star Bill' show, so all we needed was the crooked type character that was going to get him involved in all these dodgy schemes.

We'd seen Sid James in ‘The Lavender Hill Mob' and liked him, so we got in touch.  But he he'd hadn't done radio before and was very worried that he couldn't do it.  We never found out why he was so nervous.  After all, radio is easy, making films is hard.  In radio all you have to do is read the script.  But he was persuaded to do it.  At the beginning however, he used to have his hat pulled down so the audience couldn't see his face.  After about three or four weeks he realized it was a doddle, and from then on he was as nonchalant as any professional would be.
 

George: How did you get Kenneth Williams involved?
 

Alan: Dennis Main Wilson came up to us one day and said “I have a great person for the show.”  At the time Kenneth was playing in Bernard Shaw's ‘St. Joan'.  We liked him and gave him the part of ‘The Snide' in the first show.  Ken did his now famous “Good Evening” and the place erupted.  So much for no catchphrases or silly voices!
 
 

To be continued in June.....

“When I get back from Australia, me, you and Ray are going to get together and do a show, and it's going to knock their eyes out”