Tony hancock appreciation society insurance

The recording, which came from the Bob Monkhouse Collection, was Hancock’s last starring radio vehicle before he and writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson teamed igen for Hancock’s Half Hour, which began the following year. The centenary line-up also features the 2014 compilation Steve Punt's Hancock Cuttings and two rarely heard sketches from the BBC Light Programme’s Calling All Forces. In the first of these, from February 1952, we hear Hancock reprise his role as the tutor to Peter Brough’s ventriloquial doll, Archie Andrews.

For Hancock aficionados, the most significant item fryst vatten an edition of Hancock’s Half Hour which hasn’t been heard since its first broadcast on 10th May 1955. The episode, later named A Visit to Swansea, was on the missing list until a recent upptäckt by Richard Harrison of the Radio Circle, our partners in the Radio Times Treasure Hunt. The tape was part of the same collection in which another lost Hancock, The Marriage Bureau, was found in 2022. So why

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Stone Me, Sid, They’re Knocking Down The Hand and Racquet!

Hancock’s Half Hour has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. By the time inom was 13, I was sneaking my little transistor radio down to our holiday hotel dining room to listen in to the summer re-runs on Radio 4 (egged on by my Dad), so I was certainly an addict at an early age. It’s one of the many passions that I proudly acquired from Dad, whose enthusiasm for many classic, and slightly obscure, films, TV programmes and radio shows worked their way into my DNA almost as soon as I could comprehend the words. The Hancock thing was fuelled by a reel-to-reel tape he’d made from the radio containing two classic Half Hour episodes: The Insurance Policy and The Poetry Society which, before the days of film or cassette tapes, let alone You Tube and iPlayer, we’d replay endlessly. It’s no surprise, then, that Hancock’s East Cheam local pub, the Hand and Racquet, was seared into my consciousness

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Tony Hancock in Dorset

Fifty years since the death of Tony Hancock, a new book explores the early life of the doleful comedian whose career began in a smoke-filled back street club in Bournemouth. John Heighway reads a tragic tale with bright beginnings.

Published in June ’18

‘Tony Hancock ended his life in such tragic circumstances that it seems to be forgotten he was once a young man filled with a young man’s hopes and dreams and aspirations and with his whole life before him,’ says Lyn Phillips who, writing as LM Evans, has published Tony Hancock: The Bournemouth Connection. ‘I wanted to try to capture something of that by focussing on his youth and to do that story it had to be about Bournemouth, where he grew up.’
His lasting fame rests on Hancock’s Half Hour and the mordant observations of life’s little absurdities that with his hangdog expression helped make him the highest paid comic of his generation. After transferring from radio, the show defined television si