Long before Basil Fawlty, Victor Meldrew, Norman Stanley Fletcher and their like, the laureate of disgruntlement in British broadcast comedy was Tony Hancock. Those successors all drew upon Hancock's brilliant disgust, just as his own work had incorporated the various bafflements of older comics: Will Hay, WC Fields and Sid Field. For about a decade, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, everybody knew the Hancock manner, and a whole generation acquired from him the habit of greeting the world's idiocies with glum unsurprise. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Stone me.”

He was born Anthony John Hancock, but when his greatest scriptwriters, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, presented him as “Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock”, most people readily believed in those bombasticised names. One observer who was fooled, surprisingly, was John Freeman, the smooth interrogator who put Hancock through the wringer in an infamous Face to Face television interview in 1960. Evidently believing his “unusual names” to be authentic, Freeman asked whether there were “any special family reasons” for them. Hancock corrected the error, and kindly forbore from teasing his tormentor for it. Among Freeman's recent interviewees in the same series, incidentally, had been Bertrand Russell, Dame Edith Sitwell, Carl Jung and King Hussein of Jordan - a measure of the cultural importance already assigned to Hancock in those days.

Hancock (1924-68) was born in Hall Green, Birmingham, but moved in infancy to Bournemouth, where his parents kept the Railway Hotel. His father, Jack Hancock, worked on the fringes of showbusiness, even achieving a couple of broadcasts in the earliest days of BBC radio. Then he died, and it was a long time before young Tony glimpsed again even the small-time glamour that his dad had represented. The family was further bereaved during the war, when Tony's older brother, Pilot Officer Colin Hancock, went “missing presumed dead” over the North Atlantic. There was plenty here to encourage a melancholy world- view, and some of the desolation resurfaced in Tony's depressive seaside film, The Punch and Judy Man (1962).

Yet a buoyant ambition carried him through the post-war struggle, past the Ralph Reader Gang Show, which taught him the responsibilities of a stage-troupe member, and the Windmill Theatre, where every laugh was a triumph, extracted as it was from a male audience interested solely in the nudie interludes. On radio, he first scored heavily as tutor to a ventriloquist's dummy in Educating Archie (an audience of 20m couldn't miss him), but arrived in 1954 at Hancock's Half Hour, the defining show of his career, still sporting a high-pitched “funny voice”. The speedy discarding of that voice, in favour of his everyday Eeyore tones, was an essential move, but it also marked the beginning of Hancock's doomed search for pure truth in comedy.

As John Fisher remarks, if Tony had played a character called something other than Hancock, things might have been different. But self-obsessed as he was, he found that “pure truth” only in an excavation of his own weaknesses (strengths being, on the whole, anti-comic). Galton and Simpson blamelessly accelerated the process in their superb scripts, by feeding back to him a sometimes barely exaggerated version of himself. On several occasions - outstandingly, the television episodes The Bedsitter and The Radio Ham - they exposed him in a virtual monologue, with triumphant results. But it was never enough, and Hancock “moved on”, to worse scripts by blunter writers, and to deeper draughts of alcohol.

Sheer weight of detail bulges Fisher's argument out of shape, but he makes a good case for Hancock's neglected stage career, and in particular his surprising, almost gymnastic mobility. Hancock was a nervous stage performer, though, and never a confident learner of lines (unlike Sid James, “the most selfless ‘straight man' that ever was”, who emerges from this book as a professional paragon). Had Hancock beaten off his alcohol demon, he would still have faced that problem - except on radio, his old home.

Not too much emerges of his home life - he had no children to open up that story - though it's easy to imagine it deteriorating with his alcoholism. His first wife, Cicely, ended up as hopelessly addicted as he, and his second marriage, to the publicist and agent Freddie Ross, happened in a daze. Though still alive, Freddie clearly didn't contribute to these pages. A present-day verdict from her would have been helpful.

I remember Hancock's last couple of years with pain. We occasionally see these spectacles of collapse - we had it with Oliver Reed; we're getting it now with Paul Gascoigne. In the end, most of us look away. To save us the trouble, Hancock went to Australia and killed himself there. He had recently been sober, and working. But the last pure truth of comedy recognised by him was the fact that, with his marvellous mobile face frozen by toxicity and dread, he was no longer funny. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Stone me.

Tony Hancock by John Fisher
HarperCollins £20 pp544

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