BOOK OF THE DAY: Stephen Dixonreviews Tony Hancock: The Definitive BiographyBy John Fisher, Harper Collins, 522pp £20
IN A 2002 poll, BBC listeners named Tony Hancock as their favourite British comedian.
Not bad for an entertainer whose last radio series was in 1959, who starred in just two indifferent movies, whose finest television work is in grainy black and white, and who died by his own hand on the other side of the world 40 years ago.
John Fisher's biography is the fifth (and, at 522 pages, certainly the largest) book about the lugubrious comedian.
There have also been stage plays about Hancock and two recent television dramas. He has been referenced in songs by The Manic Street Preachers, Pete Doherty and Pop Will Eat Itself.
For readers to whom Hancock is merely a name from the showbiz vaults or, at best, an iconic image of a grumpy-looking bloke in a sombre overcoat and black hat, and who might be wondering why his appeal seems so very enduring, the wealth of detail in Fisher's meticulous appraisal could constitute a somewhat overwhelming introduction.
Fans already know that Hancock was, of course, an exceedingly funny man, blessed with tremendous vocal subtlety and a unique facial mobility - a dozen instantly identifiable thoughts could chase each other in half a dozen seconds.
He was part of a generation of comedians who emerged from the armed services after the second World War and found his métier on radio, initially as a support act to established favourites.
Fisher's book gets into its stride describing the breakthrough that came in 1954 when Ray Galton and Alan Simpson wrote the first series of Hancock's Half Hour.
This was very much a revolution in radio comedy, eschewing the variety-sketch format and musical interludes of previous shows. Hancock and his writers mined a more intimate, reflective type of humour, often involving the gullible and self-deluding character's relationship with his cheerfully crooked pal, Sid James. Jokes were kept to a minimum, most laughs arising out of character development.
The long-running series transferred to television with spectacular, pub-emptying success. But Hancock's insecurities blossomed with his fame. He was tormented by existential agonies, only semi-understanding that the actual truths of his performance - with which his audience identified so gleefully - involved Galton and Simpson carefully observing the endearing vulnerabilities of Hancock's own fragile personality, then feeding them back to him through the scripts.
His greatness was essentially domestic, unsentimentally probing British mores for comic effect, but Hancock ached to conquer the world on his own, as Chaplin had done. He dropped Sid James then, disastrously, Galton and Simpson.
Floundering, unable to interpret himself acceptably to a loyal but increasingly disappointed public without the help of his gifted writers, he became a chronic alcoholic.
Almost unemployable in Britain, he went to Australia in 1968 for a lifeline TV series, and there took a good look at what he had become. Drink had stolen everything. That wonderfully expressive face had bloated into a rigid mask. Britain's most famous comedian wasn't funny any more. He swallowed an overdose of pills, washed down with vodka, and left a note: "Things went wrong too many times."
He was 44.
John Fisher's well-researched labour of love is staggeringly comprehensive but weighed down with such detail that its fascinating subject is sometimes all but lost.
It might well have been twice the book at half the length.
However, he does identify how Hancock never really left Britain for his distressing appointment Down Under. The small daily humiliations, delusions of grandeur and punctured aspirations that were his forte emerge whenever Steve Coogan does Alan Partridge, or Ricky Gervais does anything.
Today's more thoughtful comedians can still bring us those sad and funny truths, their knowledge of Hancock a kind of embedded race memory at this stage.
That's why he's still around, and why his life was, ultimately, a triumph.
• Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist