Comic genius, warts and all

See Jerry Seinfeld, see the successful comedian playing a less successful version of himself in a halfhour show that never has a plot line. Look again, maybe it's just Hancock's Half Hour tarted up and flown over to New York. See Have I Got News For You and the lugubrious expression of Paul Merton as he sardonically surveys all that surrounds him. Look again, and maybe he's just a close neighbour of the man who used to live in one of the comedy world's most famous addresses, 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam: a certain Anthony Aloysius Hancock. And why the writers of Hancock's Half Hour, Galton and Simpson, never sued over the character of Victor "I don't believe it" Meldrew, remains a mystery.

If imitation is flattery, Tony Hancock should have been killed by kindness and not by an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates aged 44. Hancock was the finest comic actor of his generation (and a few more besides) and his suicide re-enforced the hackneyed "tears of a clown" myth, something which has preoccupied all previous commentators on his life - much to the detriment of his protean talent.

This book, though, is different. Author Cliff Goodwin has good comedy credentials. His 1995 biography of Sid James (Century, £15.99 stg and highly recommended) was in many ways the starting point for this doorstopper of a book - Sid James was Hancock's sidekick on radio for many a year. If Goodwin has developed a reputation for iconoclasm, it's hardly of the Albert Goldman variety and more to do with his unearthing of uncomfortable facts about the lives of cherished British comedy institutions like James and now, Hancock.

For people whose only knowledge of Hancock was watching Paul Merton (surprise, surprise) re-enact his classic sketches in a series of television specials three years ago (by way of homage to the great man), there's enough here to convince that he was a British suburban net-curtain version of the early (i.e. good) Woody Allen. Take away the classic Jewish neuroticism and the New York vernacular and you're looking at two performers who built a career on being constantly disappointed by life.

Hancock's vaguely lower-middle class, better yourself ideas saw him become a type of comedy "Everyman", someone who suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on our behalf. In these days of fragmented and niche comedy, it's difficult to appreciate Hancock's pan-generational and cross-class populism.

Born in 1924, Hancock came of professional age in the unsettled mood of post-war Britain. He was the perfect comic link between the bleak 1950s era of austerity and National Service and the sproutings of the Swingin' Sixties with Lady Chatterly, The Beatles and Mary Quant just around the decade's corner.

While people struggled with the significant cultural change, Hancock acted as a conduit and on his public's behalf, he tested the waters of this brave new world - with well-scripted comic mayhem following at every turn.

Early on, Goodwin makes great play of how Hancock was profoundly influenced, personally and professionally, by another Birmingham-born comic, the great Sid Field. The evidence is compelling: Hancock apparently made the decision to become a comic after seeing Field performing one night and also emulated Field's way of combating stage nerves: drinking massive amounts of alcohol before each show. "If it (drink) was good enough for Sid, it is good enough for me" was how Hancock would rebuke anyone who questioned his drinking habits. Both men were addicts and curiously enough died at roughly the same early age.

Despite all of his impressive radio work (particularly Educating Archie), Hancock is still best remembered for his TV series Hancock's Half Hour - even allowing for the fact that Harry Secombe frequently had to replace him due to his drinking problem. The writers of the show, Alan Simpson and Ray Galton, (who later wrote Steptoe and Son and are rightly credited with "inventing" British sitcom) found a perfect vehicle in Hancock for their ground-breaking sketches - The Blood Donor and The Radio Ham sketches, in particular, remain classics - and in the show's 1960s heyday it regularly attracted viewing figures of 20 million and Hancock became the first British comic to earn a then unheard of £1,000 a week.

If he could hold it together professionally, he couldn't control his personal life. Depression, drink and drugs were the order of his day and he became a very violent person with his second wife, Freddie Ross, bearing most of the brunt. According to Goodwin, Hancock beat Freddie routinely, breaking her nose and on one occasion piercing her eardrum. This brutish violence was apparently Hancock's reaction when Freddie tried to stop him drinking.

Entertaining notions of becoming a film star, he began to discard friends and collaborators, treating them to a verbal equivalent of the physical mauling he handed out to Freddie Ross. Valuable colleagues like Kenneth Williams, Eric Sykes and Sid James were all ostracised as, most significantly, were Galton and Simpson. His film career was nigh on disastrous with star vehicles like The Rebel and The Punch and Judy Man flopping. He fell back on "nostalgia" tours of Australia (where he was as famous as he was in Britain) where in 1969 he died from excess.

Hancock's dramatic rise and fall is exhaustively chronicled here. Goodwin has obviously tapped into the right people but more importantly, asked them the right questions. Thankfully, he spares us any rather pat "demons inside" pseudo-analysis of the reasons behind the man's decline but admirably there is enough evidence on show to let the reader draw his/her own conclusions without feeling led by the author.

With its classic ingredients of fame and success pitted against depression and addiction, at times this reads more like a fable than a biography. It's everything you ever wanted to know about a comic genius . . . along with a few things you didn't.

Brian Boyd is a freelance journalist.