Missing Hancock Fringe shows break radio silence

McNally first noticed the strange effect in the mid-1960s when he was nine years old and growing up in Bristol. At the time, the BBC had just decided to repeat the Hancock Half Hour television shows and McNally’s dad, who was a fan from the first run of the series in the 1950s, told his son he should watch the repeats; Hancock was a funny man, he said. It was then McNally noticed the odd connection.

“As I watched Hancock’s Half Hour,” he says, “I realised why my dad was like he was. He was sort of like Hancock, he’d adopted his personality. So I was brought up with it, not only from Tony Hancock but also my dad talking like Hancock and saying ‘Stone me, son, why don’t you go and do your ‘omework?’”

In the ensuing 50 years, McNally has become a well-known TV and film actor, most famous for playing Joshamee Gibbs, Captain Jack Sparrow’s right-hand man in the Pirates Of The Caribbean films, and his love for Hancock has deepened. He has all the LPs, the DVDs, and he has every surviving episode of the original radio series on his iPod. Last year he also played Hancock himself in five new dramatisations of episodes of the radio show that are missing from the archives and is doing so again at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe with four more.

McNally was always going to be an obvious choice for the role, not only because of his long-time love for Hancock’s work but because of those enduring connections: both McNally and Hancock came from the Midlands, they sound alike and, as McNally has grown older, his face has increasingly taken on the same lugubrious shape as his hero’s. Over the years, McNally has also noticed the effect Hancock had on his dad was starting to show in him too – the comedian often seemed ready to break through to the surface.

“I often speak like Hancock,” says McNally when I talk to him on the phone (he is just back from filming the latest Pirates film in Australia). “I remember a friend coming to see me on Broadway when I was playing Claudius in Hamlet and he said ‘I really like the Hancock bit’ and I thought, ‘Oh, I really wasn’t intending to introduce Hancock into Shakespeare’.”

Distracting as it might have been in the middle of Hamlet, when it came to playing Hancock himself, McNally’s resemblance to the comedian and familiarity with his vocal ups and downs meant he was confident he could pull off the part and he did so in spectacular style. The first episodes went out on BBC Radio 4 last year and so close was McNally to Hancock that if you switched on the radio without warning, you might think you were listening to the original broadcast.

The reality is that a lot of the original broadcasts have been lost – unthinkingly wiped in the 1960s and 1970s by technicians at the BBC who never imagined that anyone would want to listen to episodes of Hancock again, or episodes of anything else for that matter. Many other shows suffered in this way in the great wipe-out, including now extremely high-profile programmes such as Dad’s Army and Doctor Who. Some episodes have been recovered, some are still lost.

In the case of Hancock’s Half Hour, about 20% of the original radio series, which ran from 1954 until 1958, was wiped, and the actor Neil Pearson, who directs McNally as Hancock in the new shows, believes there is very little prospect of them ever being found. It was Pearson who became the driving force behind the new versions last year after he came across some scripts in a job lot of books and papers (as well as an actor, Pearson is a dealer in antiquarian books).

Realising that there was no surviving version of 20 episodes in all, Pearson started out by making five of them for the BBC: The Matador, The Newspaper, The New Neighbour, The Breakfast Cereal and The Hancock Festival, with McNally’s Hancock joined by Kevin Eldon as Bill Kerr, Simon Greenall as Sid James, and Robin Sebastian as Kenneth Williams. The show for the Fringe will recreate four more across two shows: The Winter Holiday, New Year Resolutions, Prime Minister Hancock and The Three Sons.

Pearson, who had his own success in comedy when he appeared in Drop The Dead Donkey in the 1990s, says the aim with the new episodes was not to impersonate the old shows. “I prefer the word 'inhabit',” he says. “Absolutely no one got their job in this case because they could do the voice; everybody in this show got the job because they could do the character and they could do the inter-relationship between those characters. What they do is recreate the event of this show, and it was an event.”

The Fringe shows will recreate that event to some extent – the actors will be in formal clothes, as they would have been in the 1950s, and will stand around microphones with their scripts in their hand. The only added extra will be some dramatic lighting and sound effects. “We will be doing episodes that have not been heard for 60 years,” says Pearson. “In effect, what you are listening to was a brand new series of Hancock’s Half Hour.”

For Pearson, and McNally, the Fringe show is stage two in the attempt to one day record all 20 of the missing episodes, and the effort is driven by a shared love of Hancock and the writers who created him, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Pearson says when he came across the lost scripts for the first time, he was struck by their quality.

“The writing is beautifully crafted,” he says. “When you go back to scripts of this vintage, you worry about antiquated attitudes to race or sex or homosexuality – not a bit it. We didn’t have to change anything and that was the key to the success, because without those attitudes, you don’t have a date stamp on the scripts. It’s universal. It’s a sit-com where the ‘sit’ is extremely strong. He’s a man shaking his fist at the world and it’s funny, in part, because it’s not happening to you.”

McNally has a similar analysis of Hancock’s success, but feels a personal connection to him too. “We had very similar backgrounds. We were both Midlanders, we both came from upper-working-class backgrounds and he seemed to me to so encapsulate the post-war society that I was growing up in – a really bleak, grey place but with lots of hope and aspiration for the future, and some delusions.”

McNally can also see how pioneering Hancock was and how the thread that started with those early Hancock shows runs right through the 1980s and 1990s and into the present day. He makes the case for Hancock being the first sit-com for example.

“Absolutely it was,” he says, “there’s no doubt about that. There had never before been a comedy that wasn’t based around variety acts – even the Goons still had a band. But with Hancock, for a half an hour you listened to people in a vaguely real situation. There was nothing like it before. And as Dad’s Army and Fawlty Towers followed, and right up to The Office, Hancock has been a template for all those characters like Basil Fawlty and David Brent – he is the original, railing Brit against the world and it’s a stereotype that will never die. Every generation will have one, but Hancock was the original.”

As far as playing The Lad Himself is concerned, for McNally it’s about connecting with the inner Hancock that’s always been there, like it was with his dad, but also exposing some of the clichés about the comedian. Hancock famously sacked Galton and Simpson, struggled with depression and addiction, and eventually committed suicide in 1968, and McNally believes that side of the man and his life has rather coloured our view of his comedy, giving it a melancholic edge that was there, certainly, but was far from the whole story.

“I’m playing a real man playing a character, which was an exaggeration of himself,” says McNally. “I remember a rather depressed, melancholic man, but listening to the radio shows and doing it again, what I realised is the incredible exuberance he has as a performer.” Hancock was very high-energy he says, rather hysterical, almost bi-polar, and McNally wants to recreate that, visually, comedically and emotionally.

The first five episodes certainly achieved that, but what was also remarkable was how surreal and tight and fresh they felt. “What’s extraordinary is how relevant they still are,” says McNally, “and it is a tribute to the beauty of Galton and Simpson’s writing that we have no need, as we probably would with anything else from the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, to expunge any gratuitous sexism, racism, homophobia. They didn’t get their humour out of hate – it came from love.”

The Missing Hancocks: Live In Edinburgh! is at the Assembly Rooms from August 5–30 (not 17) with two different shows on alternate days, www.arfringe.com