The Man Who Invented the Daleks (11 page)

The Rebel
was in fact the last collaboration between Hancock and the scriptwriters who had worked with him for nearly a decade. Having conquered Britain so completely, Hancock was becoming restless for international acclaim and, particularly, for acceptance in America. The failure of
The Rebel
(unwisely and hubristically retitled
Call Me Genius
for the US market) to achieve that elusive goal led him to believe that he needed to break from his existing persona, to find what he thought of as a more universal comedy, even though – as plenty were prepared to warn him – he ran the extreme risk of losing his own identity in the process. In October 1961, seemingly on the brink of even greater achievements, he bluntly informed Galton and Simpson that the partnership was over: ‘I have decided that I don’t want to do any more programmes with you.’ With all parties recognising that it would be difficult for Hancock to continue to be represented by his existing agent Beryl Vertue, since she also represented the two writers, he became at the same time the client of his younger brother, Roger Hancock, who was an agent and also part of ALS. The break came after six months of trying to develop a film project and was a complete shock. ‘We were staggered,’ remembered Vertue. ‘It was the first time I personally had seen his ruthless quality. He had given no warning and made no apology.’ (A decade later, after the sense of betrayal and hurt had diminished, Galton was to reflect that perhaps it wasn’t personal: ‘all comics loathe their writers’.)

The first project after the split with Galton and Simpson was a movie,
The Punch and Judy Man
, which Hancock co-wrote with Philip Oakes, and which was an artistic, if not a box-office, triumph. When he was then offered a television series by ATV, one of the ITV franchise-holders, he asked Oakes to be the script consultant. But that relationship, like so many others around this time, collapsed under the weight of Hancock’s increasingly erratic and autocratic behaviour; he was alcoholic by this stage and his marriage was coming to a difficult and sometimes violent end. ‘Without any discussion,’ wrote Oakes, ‘he commissioned writers and scripts which I thought were below par.’ Oakes walked out and, seeking a new writer with whom to work, Hancock alighted on Terry Nation, whom he had encountered in the ALS offices. (These had now moved to ‘a more salubrious address in Cumberland House, Kensington High Street’, and were soon to move again, even further upmarket, to Orme Court in Bayswater, though Nation did not have an office at this final location.)

The interview process for the new position, conducted at Hancock’s house in Surrey, was far from conventional. ‘To my amazement all he wanted to do was talk about the universe and what part we played in the cosmic scheme of things,’ Nation remembered. ‘I had always been interested in science fiction, but Tony’s thinking was far more involved, far more philosophical.’ Evidently, however, Nation made the grade and, the issue of intellectual compatibility having been established, the two men set to work on a Friday night. They were still going the following Monday morning, when Nation had to return home for a change of clothing, having not slept and having combated the soporific effects of alcohol with uppers taken from Hancock’s copious supply of pills. The relationship seemed to work on both sides. ‘He was a wonderful audience,’ Nation said. ‘I would try a joke on him and he would fall off his chair, he thought it was so funny.’ The only problem came with trying to pin Hancock down to anything definite: ‘When Tony first acted out an idea, we would collapse in giggles. When it was on the page in black and white, he went cold. It was as if the act of writing anything down sparked a huge and lingering doubt, first in the material and then in himself to deliver it.’

In October 1962 Nation accompanied the comedian on a series of week-long theatrical engagements in Southsea, Liverpool and Brighton. Officially his role was that of writer, but Hancock’s extreme nervousness about using new material, exacerbated by his dislike of live performances (he woke on the first morning ‘visibly shaking and covered in sweat’, according to Nation), meant that very little of the work actually appeared in the show. Instead Hancock reverted to the music hall tradition of repeating the old favourites from his repertoire, and Nation ended up in an unexpected role as companion and nursemaid: ‘I had finished the writing and he could have got rid of me at any time. But he was paying me £100 a week virtually to baby-sit with him.’

Nation described his job as properly starting when they got back to the hotel. ‘They would leave cold food for us, and some booze, and we’d sit up until about two in the morning. Then we’d go to bed, and he insisted we share a room, so we could go on talking. And we would talk about the meaning of it all, what was it all about, all these things. And I would finally fall asleep, and the next thing it’s eight in the morning and he’s called for hard-boiled eggs and champagne. That’s how the day started and we were off again.’ Those all-night discussions would range from ideas for sketches that never materialised right through to the current international situation, at a time when the Cuban missile crisis was causing many, including Hancock, to believe that the third world war was about to break out; like Nation’s other comedy mentor, Spike Milligan, he was much troubled by the spectre of nuclear conflict.

On a more personal level, there was the unfortunate incident after the final performance in Liverpool. The party were returning to London on the overnight sleeper train, somewhat the worse for drink, when Nation was awoken by a disturbance in the adjoining compartment occupied by the singer Matt Monro, who had been opening the shows. ‘When I got to Matt’s compartment, Hancock was naked and cowering in the corner,’ recalled Nation, describing the episode as ‘more shocking than surprising’. Monro was threatening not only to quit the tour but also to prosecute for sexual assault, and Nation was obliged to calm the situation down. ‘I had to work very hard to get him to change his mind. In the end we agreed never to mention the incident again.’ Hancock appeared to have no memory of what had transpired, though he was full of his usual apologetic concern the next morning: ‘I didn’t offend anyone last night, did I?’ Nonetheless the story evidently did the rounds of showbiz gossip, for a decade later Kenneth Williams was to record in his diary a conversation with Sid James in which the latter related the anecdote: ‘Matt Monro told him he’d woken up one night to find Hancock going down on him for the fellatio, and that Matt had “given him a right-hander”.’

The live appearances were supposed to be part of Hancock’s preparation for his return to television, some eighteen months after the screening of
Hancock
, his final, triumphant series for the BBC, which had contained such classic episodes as ‘The Bowmans’, ‘The Radio Ham’ and ‘The Blood Donor’. Nation ended up writing four scripts for the new ITV show, also confusingly titled
Hancock
, and acting in an unofficial script-editing capacity. It was an irresistible opportunity for an ambitious writer – a huge step forward from providing scripts for Ted Ray and Jimmy Logan – but, as everyone recognised, taking on the country’s best and best-loved comic was a poisoned chalice.

Quite apart from dealing with Hancock’s insatiable pursuit of perfection and his consumption of alcohol and drugs, there was the weight of expectation that came with the job. Even Philip Oakes, who could justifiably point to
The Punch and Judy Man
as one of Hancock’s most impressive pieces of work, referred to Galton and Simpson as his best-ever scriptwriters’, and Nation could only agree: ‘I was never, ever as good as Galton and Simpson. They
were
Tony Hancock. He was wrong, in a way, to abandon them.’ They cast a very long shadow, out of which no one was ever truly to emerge. As Ray Galton said of those who followed: ‘They were on a hiding to nothing. The greatest writer in the world would have a job coming in and assuming someone else’s character that had taken nine years to develop.’ Nation, of course, was not the greatest comedy writer in the world, but he did rise to the challenge and there were moments on
Hancock
that were of a higher standard than anything he had previously produced.

The series opened on 3 January 1963, and Hancock was in confident mood in that morning’s papers. ‘I don’t want to be quite so common as in East Cheam,’ he explained, distancing himself from his earlier incarnation. ‘In this series I’m a little more posh. I live on a small allowance from my aunt. But I’m still the same, mate.’ The newspapers were also able to report the unfortunate coincidence whereby the second series of Galton and Simpson’s new show,
Steptoe and Son
, started on the same night.
IT’S HANCOCK V. STEPTOE IN THE BIG FIGHT FOR LAUGHS
, read the headline in the
Daily Mail
, though it was not actually a direct clash:
Steptoe
finished at 8.25 p.m., allowing viewers just enough time to make a cup of tea before
Hancock
started at half past eight.

The first episode was ‘The Assistant’, credited as having a script by Terry Nation with ‘original story by Ray Whyberd’ (this pseudonym concealing the identity of Ray Alan, better known as the ventriloquist who worked with Lord Charles). Perhaps it was the mixed parentage, but the plot didn’t make a great deal of sense. Hancock complains about the rudeness of a shop assistant in a department store and the manager, trying to explain how hard it is for staff to maintain their manners, challenges him to work there for a week without losing his temper; if he is successful, then the long-standing arrears on his account with the store will be cleared. It’s a transparent device to put Hancock into a new situation – or rather a sequence of situations, for he goes on to work in three different departments – and even allowing for his desire to change his style, the implausibility of the premise sat ill with everything an audience expected of him. Galton and Simpson had taken great care to ensure that their plots, at least in the latter years, were rigorously logical, rooted in reality; here the business of the wager is so weak that, having kick-started the plot, it isn’t referred to again, and the episode ends without reference to who has won the bet. In short, it’s a story with a beginning, several middles and no end. Being more charitable, one might view it as a series of sketches rather than a sitcom, though nothing in the rest of the series suggests that this was intentional.

There is also the problem that it is never entirely clear what Hancock’s character is. As in the BBC series, he is by turn pompous, boastful, childish, grudging and naive, but rather disturbingly he’s also deliberately and unpleasantly rude to the shop assistant in a way that he never used to be. Insulting Hattie Jacques’s character Griselda Pugh in the radio shows never came across as particularly cruel humour, since she was more than prepared to fight back and there was always an implied element if not of friendship, then at least of shared misery. The note struck here, however, is less of banter than of bullying. When the assistant delivers a long litany of sufferings and misfortunes (admittedly in an appalling whine of a voice), he responds not with a joke, or even a putdown, but rather with a blunt and unfunny ‘Ah, shut up.’ It was an element that made Alan Simpson wince: ‘Tony was being unnecessarily nasty. You can’t be nasty without a reason and be funny,’ he insisted.

Despite the flaws, the show is not a disaster, and there are some decent jokes that work well, capturing the characteristic Hancock phrasing. ‘A gentleman never loses his temper. It’s a question of good breeding, and you cannot whack good breeding,’ he declares, before going on to boast of his pedigree: ‘I can go back to Hancock the Red.’ ‘Who was he?’ asks the manager, and Hancock is deflated in the customary manner: ‘Well, he was my father actually.’ But he swiftly recovers: ‘An early communist, you know. Yes, the pater was a great friend of Lenin …’ And he’s off again into fantasy reminiscences.

There’s also some fine use of language; Hancock clearly relishes using words like ‘deshabille’ and ‘hoyden’ and making reference to a bloater-paste sandwich. Then there’s Kenneth Griffith’s magnetic appearance as ‘Owen Bowen.’ ‘I’m from the Rhondda Valley, boyo, where the best coal in the world comes from,’ he tells Hancock. ‘But you wouldn’t know where that is, would you? You English, you never know nothing. Sitting in comfort and never a thought for those noble lads sweating away in the bowels of the earth, clawing the coal from the naked rock, risking their lives, working in filth and dirt. Thousands of brave Welsh boys digging coal just to keep you warm.’ ‘Thousands of them?’ retorts Hancock. ‘I only use a shovelful a night!’

Later shows by Nation were structurally simpler, with a conventionally circular sitcom narrative, and also contained some nice lines. ‘How do you know when a woman is married?’ Hancock ponders to himself, answering with perfect logic: ‘Her husband comes around and punches you.’ (He had not yet embarked on his affair with Joan Le Mesurier, wife of John Le Mesurier, his co-star in
The Punch and Judy Man.)
Indeed some of it could have been vintage Hancock, as when he’s browsing through the wine list in a pub: ‘Ah, you’ve got some! Chateau Latour, what a magnificent wine! Some of us bibbers consider it to be the finest claret in the world. Yes, you’ve got to hand it to these Italians – they do know how to turn out a little bit of plonk. It’s something to do with the feet, I suppose.’ He asks to see the bottle, lavishes praise on it, and then orders a small brown ale.

That routine had a personal edge to it, drawing on Hancock’s own character, for as Philip Oakes pointed out: ‘Hancock fancied himself as a wine expert, a role in which he could, at times, become wearisome.’ Nation, on the other hand, was an eager student, and was later to admit that in due course he too ‘became a wine snob’. Even more personal was the episode ‘The Night Out’, which opens in a hotel’s penthouse suite strewn with the debris of what was clearly a hard-drinking party, as Hancock wakes up with an enormous hangover to deliver lines that Nation had often heard him utter, particularly on the morning after that train journey from Liverpool. ‘I didn’t insult anybody?’ he repeats again and again, seeking reassurance from the entourage he has accumulated in his pub crawl the night before. ‘I didn’t offend anybody, did I? I mean, I was all right?’ The best variation on the theme is a lovely piece of nervous jocularity: ‘I do know I can be a bit of a wag when I’m on the milk stout.’ Hancock’s response on first reading the script, remembered Nation, was a grinning acknowledgement of the truth of the piece: ‘You bastard.’