More Half-Hours With Hancock

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 922, 12 April 1957, Page 8

More Half-Hours With Hancock

MANY listeners will be welcoming back an old friend on Sunday,: April 12, when a new series of Hancock’s Half Hour will start from 1XH, 2ZA and 4ZA. On May 5 it will start from the ZBs. The lad ‘imself has acquired a girl friend, Andrée Melly, a sensible girl with a delightful accent, who does her best to keep Tony’s enthusiasm for his projects within reasonable bounds. Bill Kerr, the boy from Wagga, is still boarding with Hancock, and these two, even without outside assistance, are quite capable of making a shambles of

suburban life. What develops could only happen to one of Master Hancock’s innocence and optimism. He is easy game for Sidney James, once more the wide boy with the persuasive line of sales talk. And he is also -plagued by a supreme example of the next-door busy-body-a slightly larger-than-life version of a common enough suburban problem. Tony, of course, is still the ordinary man Facing up to Life. But there’s nothing Glum about him. His approach is cocksure but naive, and his reactions have a child-like candour.

This brand of comedy, which has won him a place among the top funny men of radio and television, is’ a far cry from his early ambition, which was to be the sort of comedian who "wore a white hat on the back of his head, rested one foot on the footlights, and told a series of smart, quick-fire funny stories." In Hancock’s Half Hour Tony’s attempts at smartness invariably trip him up. This routine is almost congenital with him. On his first stage appearance he literally tripped and fell flat on his face-and got his first laugh. Later, at another theatre he tripped

the footlights and took an unpremeditated dive into the orchestra pit; and on the way to one of the many wartime shows in which he took part, he fell, in the black-out, into a static water tank. Since hard knocks seemed to be his lot, Tony made the most of them, and an exaggerated clumsiness became an essential part of his comedy. Tony started out entertaining the troops, but he had already had wide experience in show business (including a season at London’s famous Windmill Theatre), before he apSe >

peared in BBC Variety Bandbox in 1949. The public immediately responded to the appeal of the little man who, with the best intentions, can only progress from disaster to disaster. He was soon broadcasting in other variety programmes, and his popularity was firmly established with radio audiences in Britain and overseas-in Calling All Forces in 1952, and Educating Archie in 1953. The first Hancock’s Half Hour series was broadcast in 1954. Last year it took another step forward-on to BBC television. He has not always been only a com-edian-he played a season in Noel Coward’s Peace In Our Time, and he did all sorts of chores in a tour of Ralph Reader’s Gang Show that lasted over a year. Last year he played his first’ straight radio role when he became The Man Who Could Work Miracles for the BBC. Newcomers to the new series are Andrée Melly and Kenneth Williams. Andrée began her stage career with the Liverpool Repertory Company in 1949, Three years later she made her radio debut in the leading role of Marie in T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose. Since then she has appeared on television, in films, and at the Old Vic. Kenneth Williams, a versatile character actor, graduated to the London stage through the ranks of the Royal Engineers and Repertory. His first major appearance in London’s West End was as the Dauphin in Shaw’s Saint Joan. In 1955 he played a fourteen-year-old schoolboy editor in the London musical play by Sandy Wilson, The Buccaneer.