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.

Budd Hopkins - Intruders (1987)

 

I suspect we're all mostly familiar with the one about aliens abducting humans from lonely rural places, sticking things up our bums then wiping our memories, and I'm sure we've all formed an opinion. Intruders seems to be one of the more authoritative works on this, a subject which may seem incompatible with a term such as authoritative; and yet no matter how hard one may have laughed at that episode of South Park, it's a phenomenon regardless of whether one believes the literal testimony of the purportedly abducted, a phenomenon for which the psychological scars at least appear genuine, and which probably isn't going away; and in light of the US government admitting it doesn't know what some of those things up there could be or what they're doing, it seems worth considering that this stuff may be real by some definition.

Budd Hopkins distinguishes himself from many of those sharing the same section of the book store with a surprisingly analytical, almost academic approach to the subject, presenting speculation tempered by an admirable willingness to pull apart his own arguments, to shake that tree as hard as possible and see if it can take the punishment. I'm sure we're all familiar with why abduction by aliens simply doesn't happen - false memory, sleep paralysis, something or other written by Carl Jung, good old honest lying and so on and so forth. Hopkins tackles every possible objection, rigorously revealing substantial flaws in each argument and leaving few possibilities beyond Jung's collective unconscious as some improbable group mind to which we're all subsumed, or that something inexplicably weird actually has been happening to some of us, leaving just the admittedly huge question of what it is and why it happens. Even the tricky subject of claims made under hypnosis is given thorough inspection, with the author throwing in deliberately misleading questions to see whether his interviewees can be induced to reiterate those established tropes of the abduction myth which might contradict their own purported experiences, and everyone here sticks to their story regardless - which proves almost chilling.

Certain questions remain unanswered through being outside the remit of the investigation - notably concerning life on other planets and how it might have arrived here - leaving us with the question of why abduction takes place, assuming for the sake of argument that it does. By incorporating all of the available testimony, rather than limiting his investigation to the claims of most obvious consequence, Hopkins leads us to a conclusion which, although astonishing, makes at least as much sense as anything I've heard on the subject, and actually more given that it emerges naturally from the stated evidence without editorial prompts. As UFO literature, Intruders is delivered with the sobriety of academic rigour and might fairly be described as a dry read given the time it spends on examination of the problems inherent in the traditional means by which abduction mythology is routinely debunked; but it rewards the effort by proposing explanations few of us will have considered in such depth, without either sensationalised accounts or insults to anyone's intelligence.

I wouldn't say I'm convinced beyond all doubt, but on the strength of Intruders, I'm pretty fucking sure there's something out there which we don't understand and which is actually happening.