Currently Listening / Forum Game

Not music but currently listening to recently re-released sixth and final series of BBC 1950s radio sitcom "Hancock's Half Hour". The final episode, where Hancock is outraged at someone impersonating his voice to advertise a brand of breakfast cereal in a TV commerical, seems very post-modern : "Stone me, I've never been so impersonated" he cries, as his soundalike counterpart intones "Stone me, you'll love them" about some cornflakes. Needless to say, nobody believes it isn't actually him doing the adverts, which leads to a farcical lawsuit to "clear his reputation".

People rave about sitcoms today where "nothing happens" and all the comedy is "in the characters" , but here were writers Galton & Simpson (also creators of Steptoe and Son, so not too shabby at all) and cast Tony Hancock, Sid James and Bill Kerr doing it 60 years ago in amusing and rambling conversations with scant regard for the need to have too much happening plot-wise for it still to be funny. The celebrated one where they spend the whole 30 minutes basically being bored out of their minds sitting doing nothing on a Sunday Afternoon At Home is still a classic (this is Britain in the 1950s when practically everything was closed on a Sunday, and even TV had shorter broadcasting hours, hard to imagine now but may still ring a chord for those of us old enough to remember pre-internet, pre-DVD/VCR, pre-multiple-channel-TV households in provincial towns where nothing much happened).

The Christmas one where it's basically just a two-hander with Hancock and James for the first part, sitting arguing about who should get up and answer the door ( "I'm not going, it's not my turn" ; "It IS your turn"; "You'll steal my chair"; "They'll go away in a minute", "No, they're still there", "I wonder who it is?" ) also seems way ahead of its time, almost daring to see how long they can get away with basically no plot happening.

The likes of Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques appear regularly in earlier series, but were gradually phased out to concentrate on only 2 or 3 main characters as the series go by, which was apparently deliberate and also seemingly fuelled by Hancock's desire to make the programme more "realistic" without fantastical plots and funny voices and catchphrases. He was ultimately self-defeating though in his determination to be a "solo star" without Sid James etc, rather than an ensemble player, not seeming to recognise that a lot of the comedy in his character came from playing off others : he wasn't too successful on his own - some of the last TV series' most celebrated episodes like "The Blood Donor" and "Radio Ham" aside - and after the BBC radio and TV series finished, his ventures into films and other series abroad weren't as well received and he had a sad end in depression and alcohol problems. He seemed to be paranoid about being seen to be part of a team or double act, or relying on Galton & Simpson; presumably because he'd started as a solo stand-up and still thought of himself like that ?
The comedy lives on in the surviving recordings though.