HANCOCK: THE BEDSITTER (1961)

      BBC

      One man, one room, twenty-five minutes – comedy stripped bare.

      COMEDY HAS TWO POLES: far-out fantasy and close-up reality. Both have their problems and rewards, but only one almost guarantees critical esteem by its mere presence. Possibly because of its superficial kinship with drama, the realistic sitcom is often regarded as the superior comic format. No-one became more thoroughly wrapped up in this dogma than Tony Hancock.

      On the radio, Hancock’s Half-Hour distinguished itself by playing to Hancock’s strengths as a reactive, deadpan performer, as opposed to the standard issue, wisecracking clown. Writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson gradually moulded the programme to fit Hancock’s sullen, defeated spirit, relying less on cohort Sid James’s zany schemes and more on the mundane frustrations of real life. The less Hancock did, the funnier he got. The radio show’s zenith was the episode Sunday Afternoon at Home: the dreariness of a wet, post-war Sabbath distilled into a litany of bored sighs, circular conversations and desperate inanities. The farce of a life going off the rails was replaced by the tragicomedy of a life waiting to start.

      Hancock’s television life was equally motionless. Ray Galton admitted the only concession they made to the visual was that ‘instead of saying “pick up that bucket”, we’d say “pick that up”.’79 What was new was Hancock’s face. Framed by a heavy Astrakhan collared coat and homburg hat, by turns boyishly jovial and froggishly depressed, its athletic malleability perfectly augmented Hancock’s innate sense of comic timing. For once the weather-beaten putty features of Sid James were not the centre of attention.

      For his seventh (and final) BBC television series, Hancock rationalised even further, dropping Sid and moving from East Cheam to an Earl’s Court bedsitter. The new series, titled simply Hancock, was presented as a break with the old style. ‘Ah yes, it’s goodbye to all that black homburg and Astrakhan collar rubbish,’ he confided to the Radio Times. ‘Knowledge and self advancement are the things.’80 The new Hancock was introduced with the creative bar set higher than ever.

      The two-hander, an entire episode featuring just two characters confined to one set, is often seen as the hallmark of sophisticated character comedy, a rite of passage for ‘quality’ sitcoms. This tradition began on ITV in October 1960. Bootsie and Snudge: A Day Off by Marty Feldman and Barry Took saw the eponymous gentleman’s club lackeys aimlessly passing the time on, again, a Sunday afternoon. (That pious ennui remains Christianity’s lasting contribution to comedy.) Despite constantly making plans, they never left their shared dormitory, encountering no-one else save a rogue pigeon. Seven months later, The Bedsitter also centred on entertainment endlessly deferred, going one better, and one fewer.

      The premise was simple: Hancock, gay bachelor in bedsit-land, idles his way through a wet afternoon (weekday unspecified), tries and fails to improve himself, accidentally secures then loses a hot date, and generally mucks about. Keeping a solo Hancock funny for 25 minutes was a tall order (aside from fleeting glimpses of Michael Aspel on Tone’s dodgy telly, no-one else appears), but the mature Hancock persona was more than rich enough to fill the space – Galton and Simpson’s first draft ran twenty minutes too long.81

      The logistics of filming one man alone were intricately worked out by director Duncan Wood and designer Malcolm Goulding, ensuring the cameras could follow Hancock wherever he wandered.82 Hancock himself became increasingly keen to exert his influence on the show beyond performance, and persuaded a grudging Wood to let him direct a handful of shots per show himself.83 Rehearsals were rigorous, and by the time of recording Hancock was on rare word-perfect form. From Noel Coward impersonations to an elaborate TV reception ballet, he barely put a foot wrong.

      At times in his frivolous soliloquy Hancock almost – but not quite – catches the camera’s eye. There must have been a temptation to break the fourth wall in this episode, but the dedication to realism stopped it going down the Burns and Allen route (an episode of which followed Hancock at 9.25 p.m.). The early TV Half-Hours were awash with self-reference. In the very first, a couple watching Hancock’s television debut annoy him so much with their snide comments he leaves the studio and enters their front room, smashing up their set, and finding himself doing the rest of the show live from a hospital bed. It wasn’t a classic, and such gags were soon dumped.

      A few episodes after The Bedsitter, a serious car accident started Hancock’s well-documented decline. Galton and Simpson went on to take the two-hander to ever greater heights with Steptoe and Son, and the minimalist format remained a sitcom goal, attained by shows as diverse as Porridge and Benson. The solo feat has never been equalled, not even by the lad himself – ATV’s lacklustre 1963 Hancock series tried to ape the formula in The Early Call, in which Hancock booked a wake-up call and fretted about it for the entire night. But the star was in the descendent and the script was second rate – in place of Tone’s epic struggle with Bertrand Russell’s Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, we got some uninspired business with a chest expander. The closest contender is perhaps a 1973 episode of All In the Family, Norman Lear’s reupholstering of Johnny Speight’s Till Death Us Do Part, which locked central character Archie Bunker in the cellar for a night of drunken self-loathing, with only token appearances by other characters.

      The cult of the one- and two-hander holds more weight with writers than audiences, but its role in sitcom craft is considerable. The cult of realism is more problematic. Hancock’s obsessive pursuit of it began with him shedding the unnecessary (trad jokes, wacky situations) and ended with him dropping the necessary (Galton, Simpson). He was not the last performer to lose his comic perspective chasing after a phantom seriousness – conversely, lesser talents have used ostentatious naturalism to bolster feeble scripts. A reviewer in 1960 observed, ‘Mr Hancock teeters on the verge of tragedy: it is only his fine sense of the ridiculous that holds him … on the narrow path of sanity.’84 In the quest for realism, that sense can be fatally neglected.