Richard Webber - 50 Years of Hancock's Half Hour (2004)

 

In my own personal hierarchy of character comedy - where the belly laughs are generated by a performance more than a description or a representation - you have Laurel & Hardy, Hancock's Half Hour, then everything else with a substantial drop off just after Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? and before you ask, no - Young Sheldon didn't make the cut. With the dynamic of the cast and what they achieved in Hancock's Half Hour, the radio show represents something of a lost golden age for me in its faithful preservation of actual working class humour, the sort of stuff which kept us going through many a back-breaking slog in the warehouse, the factory, the car plant or walking the streets. Much of the humour was presumably born from the same battered camaraderie which helped men such as Spike Milligan survive the horror of the Second World War, which also meant that early radio comedy tended towards variety - short improbable sketches interspersed with music replicating how the concert party once kept the troops entertained. The great leap forward introduced by Hancock's Half Hour was its loose concession to realism, favouring recurring characters in short comic plays rather than unrelated sketches punctuated by singing. To call it the first sitcom, as does the author, may be stretching a point, but its long term influence on the genre was substantial and should not be underestimated; and most important of all, it was fucking funny.

Webber does a fantastic job of documenting the show in the context of its era with copious support from the testimony of writers, cast members, and others, while keeping the humour firmly in sight - as opposed to crushing the sheer joy out of the thing by pinning it to the dissecting table. There's also a complete episode guide for both radio and television series along with two untransmitted scripts in their entirety from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. I still regularly listen to what Hancock I am able to thanks to the 2001 release of all surviving episodes as fancy CD boxed sets, because the humour and pathos ages more like a fine wine than jokes cracked seventy years ago; so this tome is probably as close as I get to a Bible.