Hancock's last half hour

Sometime in 1958 Tony Hancock spent a day drinking with Jeffrey Barnard. As night fell neither man was finding it easy to stand. Hancock had urinated in his trousers. Barnard, the famous habitué of Soho bars, was in slightly the better state and finally managed to find a taxi whose driver was willing to risk their presence in his cab. Inside, the comedian, who at the time was at the peak of his fame, slumped on the floor. Barnard managed to steady himself on the seat. He noticed that Hancock was fumbling ineffectually inside his pockets, eventually locating a visiting card which he passed to Barnard with the words, "If ever you need my help, just call me." "Why on earth should I want help from you?" "Because," said Hancock, "I think you might have a drinking problem."

The same story, mutatis mutandis, is told by a large proportion of recovering alcoholics. Sometimes they are the Barnard figure, horrified into the beginnings of recognition by sympathy from a person hitherto regarded as a hopeless drunk; at others, they are in Hancock's position, blind to their own situation, but more than prepared to warn others as to the error of their ways. I know an elderly Californian who tells of the occasion when he was in a bar in San José and was approached by a man known locally as Sam the Lush. Sam looked at the small beer in front of my acquaintance who explained that he was trying to cut down. "Good idea," said the town drunk. "If I put it away like you, I'd cut down."

Tony Hancock did not accept his alcoholism until the last two years of his life. He made some effort to give up drinking but his frequent spells in a variety of clinics were usually the result of emergency admission rather than any voluntary decision to undergo treatment. Of course, from much earlier in his life, there was overwhelming evidence that he had a severe problem. The incident with Barnard occurred in 1958 when Hancock's Half Hour was running and he was at the height of his powers. From the earliest days of his first marriage he had, when drunk, behaved violently towards his wife, Cicely. His second wife, Freddie, fared no better and made several serious suicide attempts, as did his mistress Joan le Mesurier. Although, for a long time, he avoided drinking when he was working, as soon as he first discovered the magic of idiot boards he lost all restraint. A minor car accident immediately before the recording of The Blood Donor resulted in concussion and a consequent inability to learn his lines. Autocues were used and Hancock hardly ever learned a line again. He was liberated to drink when he liked and thereafter few performances were unimpaired by alcohol.

Hancock was able to inspire affection and loyalty and he tested these to the extreme. He treated friends, colleagues, lovers, and wives with a cavalier attitude which often amounted to callous indifference. Any sustained application, from learning lines to fostering relationships, from enduring the rigours of a theatrical run to facing the consequences of his actions, was utterly beyond him. There was always something else to prove about himself. Like the sad inadequate from East Cheam whom he so gloriously created on the wireless and television, Hancock went out of his depth in most things he undertook. Dealing with emotions led to tragi-comedy; attempts at self-improvement quickly descended to the ludicrous. Kenneth Williams, a man of genuine intellectual interests, dismissed Hancock's obsession with a variety of fairly obvious philosophers as superficial. His fondness for aperçus from the like of Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells and his delusion that collecting sayings from the wise might somehow show him the meaning of life, indicate shallowness rather than profundity.

Hancock was far from the working class boy who was not given the chance of a good education. His grandfather was a prosperous Birmingham businessman, his father an able entertainer and reasonably successful hotelier, and his mother competent and ambitious. He was sent to a good prep school and on to a minor public school. There was no want of opportunity. His intellectual posturing was part of his alcoholic grandiosity, just as his emotional immaturity was a facet of his addictive personality. Of course, that is no more to say that he was unintelligent than the latter implies a total lack of feeling.

In Tony Hancock there was a disastrous combination of the urge to self-destruction which is a part of the make-up of so many alcoholics with the melancholy and frustration common to a lot of the greatest clowns. He often spoke about suicide. The comedian Charlie Drake records a conversation during which Hancock suggested a pact. Drake was convinced that he was perfectly serious. Suicide remained a theme with Hancock, although he often expressed a horror of people who he believed to have an aura of fatality about them. He was haunted by his father's early death from lung cancer and, it appears, encouraged in a childish fear of spirituality by his mother's addiction to spiritualism. In the last days of his life, when the will to self-destruction was strong upon him, he consulted a medium who fed him trite and inconsequential messages from beyond. He asked for bread and was given a stone.

The variety of treatments to which Hancock was subjected, whatever their value, were hampered by the denial he sustained until nearly the end. He was detoxed numerous times, consumed a wide range of drugs, including enormous quantities of Antabuse, and examined by a succession of psychiatrists. (His first brush with therapy was by proxy and richly comic: he needed a psychiatrist's opinion that he was unable to continue with the run of a particular show; the consultant would not go to Blackpool and Hancock could not get to him so Dennis Norden lay on the couch and answered the questions - "Ah! so you have three cars but cannot drive. Interesting.") There was little hope of any progress without his accepting his powerlessness and the fact of his addiction. He never found his way to Alcoholics Anonymous nor was introduced to any coherent programme. His wives and lovers, enabling and co-dependent in the classic mould, contributed to the prolongation of the problem as much as they endeavoured to solve it. Cicely was not the first wife to decide that what she drank the boozing husband could not. She became an alcoholic herself.

In the midst of all this Hancock managed to be the most successful and best loved comedian of his time. Some of his routines have passed into legend.The performances drew on his own fear and insecurity. The pomposity of the potential blood donor - "Pure British this is...with perhaps just a dash of Viking" - and the gloom of Sunday Afternoon at Home ("Oh look, over the road's going out!") came from the depths of his own being and were transformed in the act of artistic creation. They were more than just character traits; they were essential parts of a doomed personality.

There is a wonderful, heart-breaking story waiting to be told about Hancock. The Life and Death of Tony Hancock (Century) by Cliff Goodwin is not that book. It has its good points. It is detailed and apparently meticulously researches as far as factual material is concerned. Mr Goodwin clearly admires his subject. Curiously, whilst there is no doubt that he wants us to love Hancock, he leaves us thinking him rather a swine, less deserving of our sympathy than those left in the wake of his path through life. There is no doubt that a lot of people loved Tony Hancock and were prepared to tolerate monstrous behaviour because of other qualities they had experienced but simply making assertions in the face of evidence to the contrary is not good enough. An abler and subtler writer than Mr Goodwin is needed to get this across. The book conveys little of Hancock's magic. There is too much of an assumption that everyone is familiar with recordings of The Lad Himself at work. Mr Goodwin, we are told, worked as a sub-editor on numerous newspapers and magazines. Given the standards of most publishing houses these days, he should have used his presumed skills on his own manuscript. I lost count of the times he used the redundant formula "For some unknown reason..."

Mr Goodwin, who repeatedly shows himself unaware of the meaning of the word 'disinterested', must have stood out as a beacon of credulity in the newspapers where he worked. What other explanation is there for uncritically and rather breathlessly including the account of an Australian medium of her meeting with Hancock on the eve of his suicide, an account which she allegedly kept to herself for twenty years? The spectre of Hancock's father in the last hours of his life is too tempting for Mr Goodwin as a key to his self-destruction.

Whatever the demerits of the book, Hancock's is the story of thousands of other alcoholics who were never in his more noticeable circumstances. The sad horror lies in Spike Milligan's epitaph:

 "One by one he shut the door on all the people he knew; then he shut the door on himself."