The Fall and Rise of Tony Hancock

Robert Ross examines the continuing legacy of the lad himself

- Robert Ross

It's almost impossible to believe that Tony Hancock has been gone longer than he was here.

On 24 June it is exactly 55 years since Hancock, having recorded three episodes of a new television series in Australia, took his final pill and swallowed his final swig of alcohol. He was 44. The scribbled note he left behind read simply: "Things just seemed to go too wrong too many times."

In terms of Hancock's professional career, it has long been seen by cultural historians as a slow, lingering death. The end was a far cry from those halcyon days of BBC radio and television half hours that were so popular in the late 1950s that they could empty pubs.

However, in those last eight years of desperately trying and for the most part - succeeding in making people laugh, Tony Hancock had many more hits than misses. The 1960s were far from a depressing decade of decline for this most precise, microscopic satirist of the British way of life.

Hancock had tried to reinvent himself; tried to discover the nugget of truth at the heart of every joke; tried to separate out that single, humorous grain that made him so uniquely funny. Fatal, in retrospect, but laudable none the less.

In the process, Hancock whittled away his core, classic radio repertory company of Bill Kerr, Hattie Jacques, and Kenneth Williams; moved on from the perceived double act with Sid James; and ultimately distanced himself from those Midas touch scriptwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.

Still, by the time of his death, Hancock had reluctantly returned to the diluted essence of the situation comedy grouch that had made his name, basking in reflected glory of repeats of his greatest shows on Australian television, and endeavouring to make some new ones. Very much in the same style.