Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher

visiting him in a sorry state of health and sustenance in a damp-infested basement flat in Holland Park and leaving with the words, ‘Christ, I’ve got to get you out of here – you’ll die in this bloody room.’ A few weeks later Tony returned: ‘I want you to ring up a fellow called Roy Speer.’ ‘That started my whole career in radio,’ says Stark gratefully. The scripts were transparently bad. Years later Kerr was gracious enough to comment that the only one of them to shine through the morass was Hancock. The most that might be said of the writing was that it allowed him to display a sub-Will Hay kind of desperation. The scoutmaster motif had been worked much more funnily on radio in the 1930s by John Tilley, a comedian of the old school and coincidentally an old boy of Durlston Court at Swanage. There is, too, a limit to the humour that can be derived from woggles, ‘Be prepared’ and outdoor activities of a restricted nature. On the thirteenth and penultimate episode the end-of-pier banality of it all depressed Hancock and Stark so much that they begged for their sketch to be dropped that week. The show was running over by six minutes and the producer did not need persuading. Memos circulated within the BBC that the artists were still to be paid accordingly, in Hancock’s case his 18 guineas fee, as distinct from the 20 guineas basic – that is, separate from repeats – which he commanded for Educating Archie. It was not the last time he and the producer would work harmoniously together, but that producer was no longer Roy Speer.

      During the recording of the eleventh show, Speer collapsed with a nervous breakdown or, in Ray Galton’s words, ‘a diplomatic illness’. In time he was allowed to concentrate on Educating Archie, while the baton of Happy-Go-Lucky was handed to Dennis Main Wilson. Dennis described his predecessor as a true English gentleman. That may be a euphemism for his lack of resilience when confronted by the kind of fiasco into which the Derek Roy show had degenerated. Main Wilson, a ‘fun doctor’ if ever there was one, had no qualms about what medicine was required. With the ruthlessness of Genghis Khan he sacked all the writers at a stroke, although this had no effect on Hancock’s contribution: the scout sketches had been bought up front from a pair of Australians named Ralph Peterson and E.K. Smith, and presumably contractual and budgetary constraints meant they had to be used. Many years later Dennis confessed that he deliberately caused the penultimate show to overrun by six minutes so that something would have to be cut from the show. That week the ‘Eager Beavers’ sketch had degenerated into a tasteless tirade on the subject of seasickness with lines like, ‘I’ve just thought of a little something I should have brought up a long time ago,’ and ‘If I don’t keep this down, I’ll never live it down.’ The sketch was happily consigned overboard.

      Fortuitously around this time two young men who had met in a TB sanatorium at Milford in Surrey, where they whiled away their time by writing comedy scripts for the in-house hospital radio service, had made an impression on the BBC script editor Gale Pedrick. This had led to an informal arrangement between themselves and Derek Roy whereby they found themselves writing jokes for him at 5s. a time. They never forgot the first one he used on air: ‘Jane Russell pontoon? It’s the same as ordinary pontoon, but you need thirty-eight to bust.’ Originally they were beholden only to Roy, not to the BBC. Their names were Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The former was once described as ‘a cross between Svengali and a polar explorer’; the latter had to make do with ‘clean shaven, dark and chubby’, although intermittently he has been known to sport a beard too. Ray has also been given as ‘a bit of a worrier’, with Alan as ‘confident and expansive’, two phrases conveniently indicative of the yin and the yang of the Hancock persona.