Cult TV Blog

Strangely, one of the things which gives me most pleasure on this blog is blogging about episodes of shows which no longer exist, such as the posts I've done on series 1 episodes of The Avengers. There is something spectacularly contrary about the cult TV world. The TV stations wipe all their shows (for Reasons) thinking that we won't ever want to watch them again and we spend decades on the internet locating reel to reel off-air recordings and wipe-shaming the BBC into remaking the shows that they made in the first place. We damn well WILL see those shows again even if it's on an odd reel that somehow made its way to Cape Town - it's almost as if the cult TV world *prefers* TV which has been wiped. So we have reconstructed Who, and we have original scripts of The Avengers recorded by Big Finish. Hancock's Half Hour is another show which suffered from junking and has been reconsctructed. If you like the radio shows I cannot recommend The Missing Hancocks highly enou...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . I didn't know this show existed until yesterday but am delighted to have found it. It is Hancock's first venture into television after his previous successful radio series. After achieving massive success with his BBC radio show, Tony Hancock's first television series was not for the BBC, but for Associated-Rediffusion's Jack Hylton Presents strand. Hancock seemed a little lost without his radio writers, Galton and Simpson, in what was a rather variable series, but with the help of scriptwriter Eric Sykes, he managed to get into his stride, aided by the excellent June Whitfield (Hattie Jacques in one episode), and other regulars Clive Dunn and John Vere. Hancock's visual and verbal ability to be himself, everyman, while partly in character, helped offset some weaker material, and the auction sketch in episode 6, with its spontaneous Mr Punch routine, is close to his best. We are constantly reminded that t...

I have written about episodes of Hancock's Half Hour here before. I thought all the episodes of the earlier series just called Hancock had been wiped but have been delighted to discover some on YouTube. Perhaps I should say that they are far from archive quality, but we old TV fans mustn't be too fussy. The key difference from the later show is no Sid James, and of course his presence was the rock on which the show floundered, because Hancock didn't want to become a double act. Here the stooge is played by the familiar face Brian Wilde - at least I knew his face but had to look up his name  He makes a less sharp counterpoint to Hancock than Sid James. Set against the white hot heat of progress which is so often the setting in sixties TV, Hancock becomes the self-appointed expert, both in the old, embodied by the ancient lamp lighter and the modern, embodied by the trend for home improvement. This show is quite heavily criticised on the Internet because of the way it then...

I was very chuffed at the way my last-but-one post kicked off a conversation mainly about British comedians and the difficulty we have exporting them elsewhere. Dominic Bird made the pertinent comment that the only humour anything like ours is Russia's and that it must rain a lot there. Which brings me nicely to the subject of this blog post - Hancock has a cold. In addition to the weather, colds are a British preoccupation. The rumours are true that there used to be a place which researched treatments for the cold, and people would go there on holiday to be given a cold and experimented on. It is only a nation which could support that kind of official centre which could also produce the sort of humour we have in this episode. When you say it, it sounds strange: the object of humour here is a man's illness. Oh dear, how can I live with myself? The joke is, of course, in Hancock's approach to his cold. The rest of us may go to bed for a couple of days if it's bad enough,...

I've been meaning for ages to write a post about Tony Hancock here, and have been prompted into it today by watching some of a DVD called Paul Merton in Galton and Simpson's... which is Paul Merton in a number of plays originally written by Galton and Simpson for other people. I watched most of The Bedsitter, and found there's nothing really wrong with it. I like Merton's persona and acting hugely, but the trouble is the script was written for Tony Hancock and you come out with the impression that Merton is playing Hancock playing the part. So I have returned to watching the original. Surely everyone reading this blog will have heard of Tony Hancock? That name is a legend in British comedy. And of course he was born here in Birmingham, although never lived here for very long. The show is of course Hancock's Half Hour but also features Sid James. The scripts, as I mentioned above, are written by the legendary Galton and Simpson. Have I overdone the words legendary he...