ACT TWO: HHHancock’s Half Hour
 
 

George:What were your initial impressions of the cast?
 

Ray: They were great, our only failing as writers was we couldn’t write for women. We had Geraldine McEwan who left, then we had Moira, who finally left and then we finished up with Andrée Melly who started off  French, then all of a sudden in the next series, she was English. Then, finally we got in a funny woman, Hattie Jacques.
 

George: How did it come about that Alan was in the show?
 

Alan:Well we were both in it doing crowd voices and what have you, but I played a person that Tony used to talk to, which grew.  It was initially only there to break up monologues with the occasional “Oh Really”, and just feed him, but he became a character himself.  In one episode I went over the top and said, oh really, get away”, and Tony said, “It says here interrupt, don’t dominate.”  But in the end it became a gimmick, so we got rid of him after one series.
 

George: Tony was very good at adlibbing wasn’t he ?
 

Ray: No, it was all written in, well most of it was.  He wasn’t known for his adlibbing,
 

George: How did you feel when Kenneth Williams’ diary came out?
 

Alan: The funny thing was Ken, Tony, Bill and Sid were all great laughers.  We all had a great time doing the read throughs, because if they thought the script was funny they’d all fall about and we’d sit there thinking “we did that”. It was only years later when Ken’s diary was published that we found he used to go home at night after the show and write what a load of crap it was. He’d say “I’m having to prostitute myself working with these second class actors, I’ve never liked Sid James, I’ve always thought he was over-rated and he doesn’t like me and it’s a terrible script.” Then the next week he would be back in, laughing, go home and moan about another terrible script.
 

Ray: One entry he wrote just after Tony died read “I see that Hancock is dead, in my mind a very over-rated comedian, made funny only by the brilliance of a Galton & Simpson script. Very odd.  I think he found his niche in comedy in ‘Round the Horne’.
 

George: How did you deal with writing three episodes without you’re leading man?
 

Alan: Tony was inclined to have breakdowns and disappear. To Paris usually.
 

Ray: That’s because he was also appearing in the theatre each night, a medium he wasn’t at all happy with.  He used to say the walls were coming in on him. It wasn’t anything like the breakdown that Stephen Fry had, but we had no idea where he was and the BBC weren’t going to cancel the show, so they asked Harry Secombe to do it.  We made minor adjustments to the first page to explain Harry, and it went so well that Tony  was back by about week three or four.  So we had to write a show where Tony went down to Wales to thank Harry for standing in for him.  There never was an explanation from Tony when he did come back.
 

George: When Spike Milligan was writing ‘The Goon Show’, he suffered a mental breakdown because of the pressure to write a brilliant half-hour comedy every week.  How did you deal with the pressure?
 

Ray: There is a bloke called Larry Stephens, have you heard of him?
 

George: No.
 

Ray: That’s the terrible thing, nobody has.  Larry and Spike used to write together. Spike said something quite nasty at one time, he said that Larry Stephens was the highest paid typist in the business.  But Larry wrote ‘The Goon Show’ with Spike until he died in the late fifties. He was also good friends with Hancock and wrote some of his stage act, which Hancock was performing until he died. It was only after Larry died that Spike had to do it all on his own and eventually bring other people in to help him.
 

Alan:  As far as we were concerned, doing everything together helped.  A pressure shared is a pressure halved.
 

George: Was it very hard to make the transition to television?
 

Alan: It was the natural move. When we first started, nobody went on television because it paid so badly.  Nobody could afford to give up a week’s work in The Music Halls to get the pathetic fees that television was paying.
 

Ray: There was a big headline in the papers one week when Terry Thomas became the first £100 a week television star.
 

Alan: But as Music Hall finished and ITV was founded, everything changed.
A lot of people had bought a set for The Coronation in 1952 and by 1955 when ITV was founded, the BBC suddenly had competition, not least because ITV were doubling all the BBC’s fees.  All of a sudden everybody wanted to work in television and Tony, ourselves and the BBC were very keen, so we did our first series live in 1956.  It was very successful, but it meant learning our trade all over again.  Around this time Hancock was under contract to Jack Hylton to do another stage review, which he didn’t want to do, so Jack said, if you do a television series for me at ITV, I will let you out of your contract.  Eric Sykes started writing it, but he was also writing his own show so he was a bit pushed, so Ray and I were asked if we would contribute to it.  We said, “Yes, of course” but we were under contact with the BBC, who said “no way”.  But then it was pointed out that it was in the BBC’s best interest that Tony had a successful series, because a flop on ITV would only harm his reputation.  So the BBC let us write the last three episodes as long as we didn’t take a credit for them.  So that’s what happened.  Hancock was free of his contract and able to return to the second series for the BBC.  The only problem was, ITV had doubled our money, so the BBC had to match it.   From then on we never looked back.
 

George: Was it around this time that Hancock started to dump cast members for fear of being out shone?
 

Alan: You have to remember that by this time we had done five series with Tony and Sid.  Ken, Bill and Hattie were never in the television series, it was just Tony and Sid and guest actors when required.  Ken did appear in one episode, “The Alpine Holiday” but we felt that his character was too cartoony for what we were trying to do on television.  We didn’t want to do a gang show, we wanted more fluidity.

After we did the sixth series we made the film, ‘The Rebel’.  Tony got it in his mind that he had to get away from the double act.  Sid did not rely on Hancock, he was doing up to ten films a year but Tony did not want it to turn into a Laurel and Hardy.   He also wanted to be big internationally, which he got a taste of by doing ‘The Rebel’, and working with George Sanders.  So when it came to doing what turned out to be the last TV series, he wanted to get as far away from the image we had built up for him as possible.  This meant getting him out of East Cheam, losing the Homburg hat and getting rid of Sid.  We also got rid of the half hour and just called it “Hancock”.  People used to say that he was never the same after Sid James left, but four of the episodes in that series were the most famous we ever did.  You ask people to name any Hancock episodes and they will usually say ‘The Blood Donor’, ‘The Lift’, ‘The Radio Ham’, ‘The Bowmans’.  All sans Sid.

Ray: It’s funny, we said, “Alright you want to be on your own, you’ll be on your bloody own.”  So we moved him to Earl’s Court in bedsit land for the first episode ‘The Bedsitter’.  A script with only him in it.  We sent it off wondering if he would realize that we were taking the piss.  But he read it and flipped! He said “this is bloody marvellous”.
 

George: I understand Hancock found it very difficult to learn lines.
 

Alan: Yeah, he needed someone else to read the other part or he’d get a tape recorder and speak all the other actors’ lines.  During ‘The Bed-sitter’ he had bits of the script all over the set, behind doors or on walls, but he didn’t rely on it in those days.  It was purely a back-up.
 

Ray: But he did come to rely on it was after he was involved in a car crash,  suffered concussion and missed two days of rehearsal for ‘The Blood Donor’. The BBC had the choice of postponing the show or doing it with idiot boards. Tony decided to do it with the idiot boards.  And it came as such a relief to him, not to learn half an hour’s script, that it stayed with him and he never learned another line after that.
 

Alan: If you watch him in ‘The Blood Donor’ it’s very obvious, but nobody noticed it at the time.  It got worse years later when he went on to do other shows on ITV.   John Le Mesurier told us on one show he wasn’t even turning up for rehearsals.  They would block it with a stand in, and he would come in for the recording.  His face would be just like a mask with no expression.  But that’s what Hancock’s performance was all about, his expression, his timing and his reactions.  He was a reaction comedian.  We did a few of the old shows for audio records towards the end.  In the studio a 28 minute show lasted 40 minutes because his timing had gone.  So we had to cut the pauses out ourselves when we came to edit it.  We were doing his timing for him.
 

George: But you were still a successful team, why did you split?
 

Ray: Well, it was over the second film, the one that became ‘The Punch and Judy Man’.  He quite liked the first film ‘The Rebel’, it was a big success in Britain, but didn’t work in America.  They changed the title to  ‘Call Me Genius’ which didn’t help. The second film was going to be the make or break for him.  He had this idea for ‘The Punch and Judy Man’.  We said, “It’s hardly international Tony, set in a wet winter in Bognor”.  We started a few scripts on different subjects all of which he turned down because they weren’t international enough.  So we said “we can’t go on like this, we have a living to earn”, so he said, “well you go and write some television and I will work on ‘The Punch And Judy’ idea with Philip Oakes.

A year or two later we wrote the book for a musical based on the play ‘Noah’ by Andre Obey with music by Leslie Bricusse.  We planned to do it with Harry Secombe.  Leslie said, “You know who you’ve written this for, this is Hancock.” And we said, “You must be joking, Hancock can’t sing or dance, his health is a bit suspect and you just can’t get him on a stage.”  But he showed him the script and Hancock flipped, he said he was going to start taking singing lessons and everything like that.  He also organized a big reconciliation press event but he didn’t turn up until after it was finished, pissed.  By this time only ‘The Mail’ was still there.  Leslie Bricusse had decided to rewrite the music to suit Tony  but then Leslie went to Hollywood to write ‘Dr Doolittle’, ‘Noah’ was shelved and never resuscitated.   And thus ended our relationship.
 

George: How did you hear about Tony’s death?
 

Ray: In the newspapers.
 

Alan: I had a call from Hancock early one morning.  He had an offer to do a show in Australia, and he was calling from Heathrow airport.  He was virtually incomprehensible, but he said, “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”.  But he was rambling.  A few weeks later I had a phone call at two o’clock in the morning from Bill Kerr saying (Australian Accent) “He’s fucking killed himself”.
 

George:  How true to life was the Alfred Molina drama?
 

Alan: As far as we were concerned it wasn’t.
 

Ray: That was a travesty.  Humble, the guy who wrote it came down and spent a day talking to us about it.  But when we saw the show we were appalled.  He put Alan and myself into situations that we were never in.  For example when Tony booked The Festival Hall to do a one man show, we had refused to go.  But Humble put us in the audience.  Apparently it got so bad that he started doing ‘The Blood Donor’ on stage, then you get a shot of Alan and I looking at each other while Hancock was dying a death, sneering and saying, “He thinks he’s God”.  It was a complete fabrication. One of the actors playing us was even Australian.  The other one was Scotsman.   The only thing they got right was that we are both tall.
 
 
 

To be concluded in August...
 
 

New Merchandise

Hancock's Half Hour Season Six (Radio)
The long awaited Sixth Series is the only one to have all it's episodes still exciting in The BBC's archives, and what episodes they are.... Some of the all time Hancock greats are included here, like 'Sid's Mystery Tours' where Hancock invests in a dubious walking tour of East Cheam. 'Fred's Pie Stall' Where the gang try to save old Fred from losing his livelihood and 'The Childhood Sweetheart' in which Hancock meets the girl of his dreams when he was seven. Also included are four episodes recorded for the BBC Transcription Service, a 1958 Christmas special, and the recently rediscovered Series 4 episode 'The Stolen Petrol'. If you are viewing this page, this is a must have.

Season Six is available in all good music stores and at  www.bbcshop.co.uk
 

Steptoe & Son - By Ray Galton & Alan Simpson with Robert Ross
Fully authorized by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, the book chronicles the life of the programme in a biography format, based around exclusive interviews with the show’s creators, as well as surviving members of the cast and crew, and illustrated with never-before-published photos from the BBC archive. Behind-the-scenes secrets, unearthed from official BBC correspondence, reveal how Wilfrid Brambell’s old man Steptoe was almost killed off after the first series, and how a swinging Sixties icon was almost drafted in as a hip new ‘son’ for the programme.

Sreptoe and Son - The Book  is available in all good music stores and at www.bbcshop.co.uk

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