by Simon Callow
Tony Hancock, too, was somewhere between comic and clown – with more than a little of the actor about him in the bargain. I wrote about John Fisher’s biography of him in 2009, in the Guardian.
John Fisher is the roving commissar of comedy, the peripatetic Professor of Pandemonium, the Ancient Mariner of the Music Hall. He knows where all the bodies are buried and where the connective tissue is; nothing escapes his eagle eye, nothing slips away from his all-retentive memory. For years, he has been writing comprehensive studies of comedians he has seen, as well as affectionate evocations of those of whom he has merely heard. Though most of his professional life has been spent producing television programmes, including such milestones as The Tommy Cooper Show, and although he has a keen sense of the practical aspects of comedy, it is essentially as a fan, a gurgling, joyously chortling fan, that he comes to his task. In Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography, he gives a touching picture of himself as a seven-year-old boy in the Gaumont Southampton, glimpsing Tony Hancock – then an up-and-coming radio star – hurling himself about the stage with hilarious precision; thereafter, he followed him through his brief but momentous career, and was numbed by his lonely, early death. But when the first book about Hancock appeared – a lurid account by his second wife, the publicist Freddie Ross – Fisher was utterly shocked by the unlovely details of his hero’s decline, and tried to protect his very respectable and loving mother and father from learning them.
Something of this innocence betrayed haunts the present book. Fisher charts the comedian’s rapid rise with jaunty brio, vividly recounting plots, analysing gestures, turns of phrase. But you sense that he is dreading the inevitable hints of trouble, tragedy’s unrelenting finger beckoning, beckoning. When it all starts to go wrong for Hancock, he gallantly finds a redeeming moment here, a nicely timed gag there, but he gazes on helpless as the man he refers to again and again as ‘the lad himself’ slips deeper into the morass of alcohol and self-laceration. The final days as described by Fisher are almost unbearable to read because the author is so upset himself, as if Hancock were a close personal friend bent on a course of doom.
He gives us a lively account of the early life in Bournemouth, where Hancock’s parents, who were intermittently in show business, bought an hotel where, like one of his heroes, Charles Laughton, he helped out. His father died; he was sent to public school and walked out at the age of fourteen. He tried to follow in his father’s footsteps as a comedian and failed at the first hurdle; there was a succession of hopeless jobs; then his first faltering successful steps on stage. The breaks and the disasters are duly recorded against the background of a vivid and deeply affectionate account of the variety theatre of the day.
Eventually, after a dreary war as a clerk in the RAF, Hancock was discovered, like so many others, by Ralph Reader of the Gang Show, and equally inevitably, found his way to the Windmill Theatre, six shows a day, six days a week, where he learned ‘to die gracefully, like a swan’. His confidence was growing; people began to sense that he had something special. He got into radio as a running character in Peter Brough’s Educating Archie. His catchphrase ‘Isn’t it sickening?’ was on everyone’s lips, soon followed by ‘Flippin’ kids!’; an innocent age indeed. The crucial event in his life as a star was when he met the writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who uncannily channelled the essence of the man Hancock into the character Hancock, boastful, aspirational, intolerant, out of place almost everywhere he finds himself, but nonetheless possessed of a certain grandeur. This character is surely one of the great inventions of twentieth-century comedy, the love child of these two writers and the actor they served. Just as surely as Archie Rice or Jimmy Porter, Hancock (as created by Galton and Simpson) expressed the age – the post-war accidie, the sense of vanished dreams, of alienation and angst, the rage against conformist greyness – but through the rumpled and familiar form of the man the writers in an inspired moment christened Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock. (In one of a million astonishing details in the book, Fisher reveals that Hancock was seriously courted to play Jimmy Porter in the film of Look Back in Anger.)
As a boy I was besotted with Hancock, especially after his transition to television, for which medium his infinitely expressive, melted-down features were made. Indeed, I identified with him, recognising in him a middle-aged child not so very unlike the middle-aged child I felt myself to be. There is so often a child at the heart of any great comic creation, and Hancock was gorgeously, outrageously infantile. The part was bespoke: the scripts follow the contours of Hancock’s natural melody so perfectly that to read them on the page is to hear them. Fisher is exceptionally good on the odd interpenetration of character and man, and shrewdly observes that it was this that began to gnaw at him. As Fisher puts it, there were times ‘when he felt cheated of his real identity’. He began to feel that the character was merely him, and that therefore he wasn’t proving himself; he started to become increasingly introspective about his work. Like someone picking a scab, he felt compelled to worry at it till he bled, pulling a thread in a cardigan till the whole thing came apart. Like the lad himself, he had des idées au-dessus de sa gare: he started to think of himself as an Artist, which, of course, he was, but a deeply instinctive one – to the extent that he never used to read the radio scripts until the morning of the transmission, and then gave flawlessly timed and inhabited performances. The blitheness of radio – where scripts don’t have to be learned, props don’t have to be mastered and the actors have an easy camaraderie across the microphones – left him blissfully unselfconscious. Television, where everything had to happen for real, started the process of endless self-analysis which, his brother noted, killed him.
He was invited to appear on the notorious Face to Face series in which a quietly unrelenting John Freeman, shrouded in shadow, interrogated him as the camera dwelt on his face. It was a form of public confession – without absolution – which did him irreparable damage, tipping him over into a sort of anguished contemplation of his own limitations and an insatiable determination to innovate. He was determined to become a Chaplin or a Keaton, a universal and international figure. This meant the immediate dismantlement of Hancock as we knew him, the departure from East Cheam, the abandonment of his co-stars (Sid James the first to go), and, catastrophically, the dismissal of his writers. From then on – despite occasional successes like his film The Rebel – it was a slow and increasingly excruciating professional suicide. His consumption of alcohol while on the job, which had begun when he was playing in variety theatres, began to destroy his talent: he could no longer remember lines, and, most poignantly, as his physical condition got worse, that uniquely expressive mug became as rigid as Mount Rushmore. In life, he and his wives and mistresses plunged headlong into a sea of booze; at one point he chained himself to the railings of Primrose Hill. Often things turned violent. One wife happened to be a judo expert, so he rarely inflicted any damage on her; the other protected herself by frequently (and with diminishing impact) attempting to kill herself.
In Australia to shoot a television series, he gave a dazzling read-through of the first episode, then retired to his dressing room to tank himself up on vodka and pills, and after that ‘he didn’t know who or what he was’. Finally, he did sober up, but one day he went down to get something from his neighbour, who was also his producer, only to find him out. That sudden reminder of his aloneness was enough, it seems, to have tipped him over the edge. ‘Things seem to have gone wrong just too many times,’ he wrote, and then administered a lethal dose of the vodka and pills that had been his constant companions for so many years. He had often talked of suicide; as early as 1957 he had suggested a mutual suicide pact to Charlie Drake, who declined, observing that ‘Hancock wanted out of the game, even then. He was totally lonely, even with people.’
The roots of this epic loneliness are hard to deduce from Fisher’s pages. In them you will find a brilliant and much-needed account of Hancock’s extensive theatre work and its originality, jus
t as he celebrates the audacity of the television work, with its formal inventiveness and its constantly Pirandellian playing with the frame, and a kind of voyage round the comedian’s mind and the nature of his comic enterprise. But he fails to probe his crucial relationships, especially with his mother, Lily, to whom he was immensely close. She supported him financially in his early years in the business; she was the go-between when his marriages broke down; she was the last person in his mind when he killed himself. Fisher lets slip the astonishing fact that two weeks after he finally did for himself, Lily took a pleasure cruise to Turkey. There’s something very very complex in that relationship which remains for future Hancock biographers to probe. Meanwhile, Fisher has written an indispensable book about what he rightly calls ‘the most expansively idiosyncratic of recent British comic heroes’.
I never met Hancock or Tommy Cooper, but I did encounter one of my comic heroes, which proved to be a little alarming, as I reported in the Guardian in 2004, in a review of Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic by Graham McCann.
Conversation with Frankie Howerd was peculiarly disorientating. There he stood, in his usual stage uniform of brown suit and crumpled shirt, his toupee (as Barry Cryer memorably remarked) going up and down like a pedal bin, his eyebrows soaring up to join it, the face getting longer, the eyes looking wildly askance in horror or disbelief, the vowels extending and distending – being, in fact, in every particular, the Frankie Howerd we all knew and loved. Except that he was not at all, not even remotely, for a single second, funny. What he was saying was almost identical to what he had said on stage the night before and the night before that to such side-splitting effect – a list of complaints, paranoias and resentments – but for some reason, while on stage it was the acme of hilarity, off it the laughter froze on your lips.
We had a little bit of an histoire, Frankie and I. One night, after the Olivier Awards, where he had made his traditional superb speech – ‘This afternoon I spoke to my agent, who thinks I’m dead,’ it had begun – I was chatting to someone in the foyer and suddenly there he was, gloomily alone, half-listening to us. He said: ‘Are you going to this party?’ and of course I laughed, because to hear him was to laugh. He didn’t laugh back, so I quickly said that I was, with my partner Aziz. He said, ‘D’you want a lift?’ I said that would be lovely, and off we went. He sensed we were a couple. ‘Do you love each other?’ he asked, without preamble. ‘Yes, sir,’ said Aziz. ‘Very much,’ said I. ‘That must be nice,’ he said sourly. ‘Give me your hands.’ In the dark of the back of his car he peered at our respective palms and rattled off some somewhat sobering – and not entirely inaccurate – observations about our personalities and what we had to offer each other. By now we were at the party, which consisted predominantly of playwrights. Having downed most of a bottle of vodka in about ten minutes, he announced: ‘Why don’t any of you lot write something for me?’ Out of the babel of writers’ voices offering their services, one dominated, that of Peter Nichols. ‘But I have, Frankie. You turned it down.’ ‘What play was that, then?’ ‘The National Health.’ ‘Oh, that. That was an awful play, a terrible play. It was all about death. You don’t make fun of death. Write me a proper play, a funny play.’
Soon afterwards he said: ‘Let’s get out of here. I’ll give you a lift. Where do you live?’ When we arrived, he said: ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ I was thrilled, of course, at the idea of having Frankie Howerd on my sofa. The same thought had obviously occurred to him, but in a slightly more literal sense, because after a few minutes of rather strained chat, he said: ‘Why don’t we have an orgy? Just the three of us.’ I laughed, but it was terribly, terribly clear that he wasn’t joking. ‘Well?’ he said, implacably. ‘I don’t think so, Frankie,’ I said, ‘I mean, it’d be so embarrassing afterwards.’ ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘We’re so tired. It’d be hopeless.’ ‘I’m not fussy.’ ‘No, Frankie, no, really, I have an early call tomorrow.’ ‘All right, all right, I get the message.’ He headed crossly for the door, then paused for a moment. ‘Not a word about this to anyone,’ he said. ‘There’s a Person Back Home who would be very upset.’
The Person Back Home was Dennis Heymer, who now, in Graham McCann’s fine new study, emerges from the shadows – but only just. Heymer is described as the love of his life, whom Howerd met when he was beginning to despair about his career and his physical attractiveness. Heymer had unshakable faith in Howerd’s talent, and spent his life extending his support in every way imaginable, most importantly by providing a domestic framework that reproduced the cosy and nurturing environment of his childhood home. Beyond these bare facts, however, we learn nothing of him. In fact, we learn little about Howerd, the man, either.
There are occasional tantalising glimpses of his friendships (with, for example, Rebecca West), but for all McCann’s memorably ghastly anecdotes about him descending on chums such as Cilla Black and Barry Took with his sister and a bag of supermarket food, demanding that his reluctant hosts cook it for them while the visitors watched television, the sense of what he was actually like remains elusive. In a chapter entitled ‘The Closeted Life’, McCann gamely attempts to sketch the broad outlines of Howerd’s sex life, but beyond giving examples of the unattractive impatience of the sexual late-starter – Frankie bellowing ‘You don’t know what you’re missing!’ at the rapidly escaping object of his unwanted advances – he refuses to add to what he considers to be the prurient and unfounded speculations of the tabloid press; sensibly, he regards Howerd’s homosexuality as extrinsic to his comic persona, which, camp though it was, was no more gay than that of his deeply heterosexual and equally effete hero, Jack Benny.
Filth was, of course, at the heart of his comedy, part of the same great British tradition as the Carry On series, which enabled him occasionally to join the team. But unlike Sid and Ken and Babs and co., he was a great comic innovator, and it is in describing the evolution of young Frank Howard from Eltham into ‘Frankie Howerd’ that McCann comes into his own, guided by his subject, whose brilliantly titled autobiography, On the Way I Lost It, reveals an exceptionally acute and articulate self-awareness. This is partially the result of his many encounters with psychiatrists and analysts – including one who used LSD extensively – in his continuing struggle to find meaning in his life. McCann describes his agonisingly slow start (he was twenty-nine before he got his first professional job), followed by his commensurately quick rise, which made him a national star within ten weeks of that first job. ‘A completely new art form,’ his first producer told him after his successful audition for radio’s Variety Bandbox. Thanks largely to his performances, the show had a radio audience of nearly half of the total adult population. This was achieved not without enormous effort, accompanied by tension, rows and dread.
His initially successful style of ‘anti-patter’ had soon begun to stagnate; thinking hard, he realised that he was giving a stage and not a radio performance. He taught himself mastery of the microphone, painstakingly acquiring his characteristically wide vocal range, squeezing hilarious nuance out of a vast array of intonations. He discovered in Eric Sykes the first of many fine writers, commissioning from him the scripts which, building on his persona, invented the ‘one-man situational comedy’ (‘I’ve had a shocking day’) that stood him in such good stead for the rest of his career. He thought about every detail of his act, even changing the spelling of his name to make people look twice, thinking it must be a misprint.
Ordinariness was the key. He eschewed the flashiness of Max Miller or Tommy Cooper’s exotic troglodytism, creating the impression that ‘I wasn’t one of the cast, but had just wandered in from the street…’ He had turned his perceived disadvantages as a performer – the unconventional appearance, the stammering, the forgetfulness – into comedic triumph, the stand-up comic as a paradigm of the oppressed little man. ‘I played against the show,’ Howerd wrote, ‘as though its faults were all part of a deliberate conspiracy against me: I was being sabotaged by them – the cast, sc
riptwriters, management – and was striving to rise above it all.’ Michael Billington, writing in this paper, was moved to describe him as ‘arguably the most Brechtian actor in Britain’, though Pirandello would surely have been equally delighted by the act.
His restless intellect (Aristotle and Aquinas were bedtime reading), and a profound conviction that the public could never be satisfied for long with what he was giving them, drew him to explore new forms and even new métiers, resulting in extreme vicissitudes in his popularity. Audiences were no longer sure who or what he was; for a while he was convinced that his real destiny was as an actor, a view shared by neither critics nor public.
Peter Cook rescued him when he persuaded him to appear at the Establishment club, which resulted in appearances on That Was the Week That Was, and a wholly unexpected new reputation as a satirist. The last few years were a sort of golden summer, in which he was finally reassured of the public’s love. ‘Can you believe I’ve been doing the same old rubbish for years?’ he cheerfully asked Barbara Windsor during his last tour.
He was not easy to work with, and he seems only rarely to have experienced what most of us would call happiness, except when performing. McCann records Howerd’s own (otherwise unsubstantiated) conviction that he was physically and sexually abused by his father, which would certainly be consistent with his eternal sense of self-rejection. The book’s extensive transcripts from the act, with every um, yes, ah, liss-en, you see and no missus! in place, instantly evoke his unique comic creation, making one laugh out loud. However unloved Frank Howard may have felt, Frankie Howerd, this book clearly demonstrates, remains for ever ensconced in British hearts, a quintessential part of us, in the presence of whom it remains impossible to be titterless.