Could Tony Hancock have played Victor Meldrew?
The Hancock 'sitcom' started out on radio almost as a kind of surreal revue show with regular comedy characters which Hancock himself found increasingly irritating and frustrating, to the point where the regular 'support' of Hattie Jaques, Bill Kerr, Kenneth Williams and ultimately Sid James were dropped. He was constantly after 'realism' and felt that Kenneth Williams & Co popping up every week in different roles undermined this.
The final series was Hancock on his own and it is this series that contains some of the most highly regarded material - so perhaps he was on the right track after all.
His next step was to part with Galton & Simpson, and from then on he never regained his former success.
Fast forward and twenty-two years after his death One Foot In The Grave starts. In many ways it is the ultimate Hancock vehicle. It has moments in surrealist insanity, but it is essentially one man railling against modern life and his own situation - and has realism in spades. Hancock would have been, at 66, too old to play Meldrew as a victim of early retirement, but forgetting Richard Wilson for a moment, could that series have been what Hancock was actually aiming for all along?
