The Missing Page
“Just make sure you don’t get out,” suggested Dan Howells, helpfully, from the other end as I prepared to face the final ball of the innings. It was logical advice which, sadly, came to little effect as a few seconds later I was glancing back at the ground behind me, both bails having been redistributed some distance from my stumps; an inelegant hoick never threatening to add to my solitary run (itself a mistimed slash to third man), or in fact get anywhere near the ball.
Cricket, I’ve since learned, is much like life — there’s a lot of playing and missing, but sometimes you miss by more than others.
As a sports-obsessed twelve-year-old, my failure to grasp this rare opportunity in the school cricket team — albeit at No. 11 in the order — wasn’t even the lowest point that weekend, nor was the Rugby World Cup semi final the day after, when I watched as England’s hopes of reaching a second successive final were steamrollered by Jonah Lomu.
When I arrived home from that cricket match, my sister sat me down in our living room and told me the news I feared was coming. My dad was going to die. Three days later I saw him for what would be the final time.
It was only a week or two before this that my dad had presented me with a gift that’s left an indelible mark on my life since. One weekend afternoon during our latest hospital visit he handed me a cassette case from his bedside. My mum was obviously the one who’d gone out to actually buy it — my dad was in hospital after all — but the implication was clear. “This is from me to you.”
What I held in my hands was a double-cassette release from the BBC Radio Collection, of Hancock’s Half Hour. In the coming months and years, I’d go on to buy many more volumes of the Hancock releases, and other shows too, before tapes were replaced on the WH Smith shelves with CDs, and my interests turned elsewhere (the past twenty years of my life can neatly be summarised with the following ‘progression’ of sorts — comedy geek -> music geek -> comedy geek and music geek).
But this was my first one. And the material contained within it was unlike anything I’d encountered before. I was familiar with TV sitcoms, mostly through the popular shows and re-runs on the BBC at the time. This was different, though. It had never even occurred to me that people in the 1950s would’ve listened to comedy shows on the radio. Radio was the Top 40. The very idea of comedy you couldn’t see was alien to me. And that, along with the recommendations from my dad — and also my grandad, who seemed just as happy with the gift as I did — was what made it so compelling.
For the rest of the summer, I lay in bed at night listening to these tapes. Devouring them. Learning the lines. Trying to stifle laughter. A few years later I’d be lying on my bed listening to John Peel’s otherworldly, unmatched, music treasure troves. But for the twelve-year-old me, it was all about listening in the dark to Hancock on my Sony Walkman. (As an aside, I’m fairly confident that neither Apple nor Google will ever develop anything as satisfying or as futuristic as the auto reverse function on a Walkman.)
I’m not sure at what point I realised that the show’s immortal, tuba-based theme — composed by Angela Morley — was the same tune that my grandad had been humming and whistling for as long as I could remember, whenever I’d visit my grandparents’ house. It had never even occurred to me to ask what it was. It didn’t matter to me then. But now it mattered to me more than anything else. I had someone I could share this with.
I’m not even sure I can pinpoint exactly what it was that first drew me in so much. It took a little time to adapt, and to really comprehend what the show was, but it was a fairly swift, visceral reaction. I got it and I loved it. The four episodes — ‘The Americans Hit Town’, ‘The Unexploded Bomb’, ‘The Poetry Society’ and ‘Sid’s Mystery Tours’ — all showcased different facets of Galton & Simpson’s great writing and the quality of the cast. The latter episode even includes a scene involving a tortoise which predates Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch by a decade.
For sentimental reasons I still own the cassettes with those four episodes, but I got rid of the rest of my Hancock tapes many years ago, replaced by a numbered, limited edition CD set (mine is no. 542!) containing all surviving episodes from the show’s six radio series, housed in a purple velvet box. Along with a few choice family heirlooms it remains one of my most prized possessions.
The twelve-year-old me might raise an eyebrow upon learning that he’d grow up to be the sort of person who analyses comedy rather than just laughing at it, but I’d like to think that I still love the show now for many of the same reasons I did then, even though I wasn’t equipped with the language or knowledge necessary to be able to articulate them back then. The writing, the performances, the structure, the jokes, the infectious laughter from the audience (you know, that thing terrible bores sneer at whenever they hear it in modern sitcoms)…Hancock’s Half Hour was a template for British sitcom, and I don’t think it’s ever been bettered. More importantly, I came across it at a particularly difficult time and the laughter it brought — both the audience’s and my own — was a comfort blanket which distracted me from tougher experiences.
This discovery naturally led me to other comedy, both new and old, TV and radio, and initiated an obsession which quickly and surprisingly overtook my fondness for sport. Aside from a period where it gave way to a growing infatuation with both listening to and writing about music, it hasn’t waned since. It wasn’t long before I discovered the world of live comedy too (I attended my first stand-up show the same summer). My tastes have evolved a lot since then, but I still love many of the programmes I found at the time.
Another thing which came out of my discovery of Hancock’s Half Hour, rather indirectly, is that I’ve started pursuing comedy writing myself. It’s only in the past 4–5 years that I realised this was even a thing I could try. I’ve never really understood why, as someone utterly bewitched by comedy, it took me so long to decide that I should give it a go myself, but I think it took certain events to push me in that direction. I’ve done stand-up and storytelling, have written and performed sketches for a podcast, been credited on BBC Radio 4 Extra’s Newsjack, and have numerous writing projects at varying stages (none of them near completion, because I’m apparently terrible at finishing things I’ve started).
In recent years Hancock has re-entered the public imagination thanks to The Missing Hancocks, the brainchild of Neil Pearson, where a new cast performs the scripts from episodes which are missing from the BBC archives. In addition to the radio broadcasts of these, it was a pleasure to see the cast perform two episodes live at the Edinburgh Fringe this past August. It was The Missing Hancocks which led me to re-join the Tony Hancock Appreciation Society nearly twenty years after I first became a member. (To date, the only competition I’ve ever won was a THAS competition which involved naming the episodes each line of dialogue came from. My prize was a set of glossy prints.)
Perhaps the most important effect, though, was that Hancock provided something for my grandad and I to bond over. (Not for the first time, though, as I have fond memories of watching the TV with him at Saturday tea time when I was very little; me being entertained by Tom & Jerry and him enjoying Laurel & Hardy. I didn’t fully embrace their appeal until many years later.) As I steadily amassed more cassettes for my collection, we’d listen to episodes together, laughing in unison and discussing them afterwards. My grandad even took the bus with me to Birmingham a year or so later, to visit the Hancock statue which had recently been unveiled in Old Square. I’ve seen the statue on many occasions since, but earlier this year I visited it again properly for the first time since that trip with my grandad.
Having lost both my gran and grandad in the past 18 months, I’ve been in fairly reflective mood of late. I’ll shortly be moving into their old house, and this has already led to me wanting to write a series of posts about their record collection. It’s also prompted this post, in conjunction with the fact that Radio 4 Extra has repeated ‘The Unexploded Bomb’ and ‘The Americans Hit Town’ recently. I’d urge you to listen to them while they’re on iPlayer. Incidentally, both of those episodes are from Series 5 of the radio show, which was broadcast during the gap between Series 3 and 4 of its TV iteration. It’s strange to consider that that would happen when contemporary comedies which cross over to TV generally don’t also continue on radio.
One thing I’ve been pondering is whether I love Hancock’s Half Hour because it was a gift from my dad, or would I have eventually felt the same about it anyway? I think it’s impossible for me to know because I can’t now separate the two. My memories of the show — of those first moments of confusion, followed by flickering understanding and then unbridled joy — are inextricably linked with my memories of my dad, and have even allowed me to fill in some of the gaps created by his physical absence from my life; to know more about what sort of person he was and what he enjoyed. It’s been a way for me to understand him, and my grandad, better; to know more about post-war Britain; and it’s been a catalyst for a lot of my tastes and interests which have developed ever since.
I don’t have many genuinely vivid memories of my dad now. There are a few cherished ones while most are lost among thoughts of those last weeks, or locked in faded photographs. But these cassettes will always provide a connection — between 1995 and the present; between three generations of this family; between Comedy Fan/Geek me and (aspiring) Comedy Writer me.
There’s a TV episode of Hancock’s Half Hour called ‘The Missing Page’, where Hancock finds that the last page of a book he’s reading doesn’t exist. In the show this causes no end of frustration for him but also ripples into the lives of his friends (namely Sid), as well. That seems fairly indicative of our preoccupation with endings, but I’m not sure there’s always such a thing as a last page. Stories and histories grow, develop and continue, all the while outliving their origins and outliving us. For as long as these episodes can still be heard, in any form, there will always be another page of the story yet to come.
