Tony Hancock

Fair play to any comedian who, even by implication, places himself next to Tony Hancock. This fond tribute comes from the amiable Ben Miller, who wisely keeps himself firmly out of the story.

Miller doesn't seem the agonised type, whereas Hancock redefined the notion of the sad clown during his sadly truncated life. And, as Miller explores his hero's career, he finds plenty of betrayal, disappointment and dysfunction. 'A moody perfectionist with a great interest in money and no sense of loyalty,' was the BBC's verdict.

Still, while Hancock's output isn't characterised by any great consistency, his finest moments suggest a true original. As he retraces Hancock's footsteps through life and meets various of his comedy co-conspirators, Miller's excited engagement with Hancock's traces becomes palpable. Enjoyment of the resulting film will still largely depend on your feelings for Hancock himself but, if you're a fan, this will be a treat.

Radio Times review

Ben Miller perfectly describes his dolorous comedy hero, the incomparable Tony Hancock, as "carrying a sheep-like despondency and a cuddly intellectual misery". Miller first fell under Hancock's spell as a child, when his dad told him he had to watch The Blood Donor, arguably Hancock's finest half-hour. "I'd never seen anything so funny in my life."

In this sweet tribute Miller potters through Hancock's life, visiting the hotel in Bournemouth where he was brought up and chatting to his biographers. Best of all, he visits Hancock's writers, the brilliant Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who had a sometimes fractious relationship with a difficult man. And Miller has some fun with papers from the BBC archives that describe the volatile Hancock as "a moody perfectionist with a great interest in money and no sense of loyalty to the Corporation". Ouch.

As a slip of a lad, Ben Miller fell under the lugubrious spell of Tony Hancock, the legendary comic actor whose hit radio series Hancock's Half Hour, followed up by a TV version called simply Hancock, propelled him into the ranks of Britain's all-time comedy greats.

So what was it about the perpetually grumpy Hancock that touched the funny bone of the young Miller? Here he explains how watching Hancock's classic sketch The Blood Donor changed his life.

Using comedians to sing the praises of the performers who have inspired them has offered an interesting perspective to the usual documentary format and this occasional series ends tonight with a new tribute to Tony Hancock.

"His attitude to life infuses all of British comedy," says Ben Miller, which explains why the clips from Hancock's Half Hour, and Hancock which followed it, still have a timeless appeal.

To find out where that iconic character came from - the pompous, despondent failure - Ben meets Hancock's writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.

And he revisits the various stages of his career: from the six shows a day in the London revue club where his act was just an interruption to the naked ladies, to his stab at serious drama in The Punch And Judy Man - by which time his drinking had gone beyond a joke.

Review - My Hero: Ben Miller on Tony Hancock

Homage to a genius of yesteryear works despite flimsy telly tropes.

I used to enjoy, very much, listening to Count Arthur Strong. But that was when it was on the radio, and I was in the bath. Six-thirty of a pm, the purple glower of dusk, risotto glooping away gently on the stove, and life doesn't get much better than that. I fully appreciate that expectations can vary hugely according to, for instance, personal childcare needs, personal mental health, local proliferation of guns, wholly imagined threat of incipient alien attack, etc. But the programme used to make me smile. Now, instead, it's on my television, and that is, I think, a mistake, and not just because of the cricked neck and spilt Radox as, bath-bound, I crane my head towards the living room.

It wasn't bad. It was co-written by Graham Linehan, of Father Ted fame, which you would expect to have accorded it some comedy chops, and original creator Steve Delaney, who played the titular count, a pompous, bumbling malaprop-trap from Doncaster. The problem was this: it wasn't at all funny. There's recent history here, in the form of executives merely thinking a "name" is enough - in this case, Linehan; a couple of months ago, and in a far, far worse case of unfunny, Ben Elton - to create, as they probably say, albeit with knowing cynicism, comedy gold. In the end, it was just a something about a pompous bumbling man from Donny. Quite why it ever worked on radio I'm now struggling to understand.

Here's a thought. All generalisations are dangerous, even this one, but: few programmes migrate well from radio. There's Have I Got News For You, a spin-off from the (still extant, and wickeder than ever) News Quiz; and Tony Hancock's finest half-hours were actually on the screen. But executive shoes corridor-crunch on the ossified bodies of "hit" shows that died on the transition to screen. Just a Minute became just a dirge. Famously, Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's... was a roiling trough of rhino poop. Not even that lovely Martin Freeman, in the marginally better movie, could pull it off, and the original TV series was a travesty. The phrase "Zaphod Beeblebrox had two heads" works fine-ish as a line in a book, or spoken on the radio (actually it wasn't that funny, ever) - when we can imagine it, in the bath, in the wonder of the mind's eye. On TV, some poor actor was actually given a kind of "ball of saggy painted calico, with eyes" to waggle on his shoulders as a second head. It's the difference between having to show it, and trusting the listener/reader to, basically, "insert image here": and, incidentally, the reason why Lucky Jim, the funniest book of the 20th century, has never been filmed, other than execrably. Surreality, wordplay and extended interior monologues would seem particularly vulnerable to becoming lost in transition: but I don't know quite why I'm banging on about things that don't work on TV, when there were so many last week that did. It's just that I... well, I quite liked lying in the bath. Imagining.

After works about Spike Milligan, Tony Hancock and Dad's Army, writer Roy Smiles once again plunders Britain's comedy heritage for this play about Ronnie Corbett (Aidan McArdle) and Ronnie Barker (Robert Daws).

Smiles uses the device of one of Corbett's monologues and parodies of their sketches to explore the differences in the two men and how they first met. The re-creation of the sketches has a novelty value for those who remember them, but often only serve to remind us how good the original Ronnies were. And having to explain gags that worked on screen ("you've thrown your drink over me") is plain uncomfortable.

An interesting curiosity, but the uneven structure and wayward impersonations ultimately make it rather disappointing.

Tony Hancock's Bournemouth connections recalled

Forty-five years after he took his own life, comedian Tony Hancock is still regarded as one of the pioneers of British television comedy. His childhood spent in Bournemouth provided the inspiration for his famous comedy routines and persona, and he is still revered in the seaside resort.

Another episode in The Many Faces of... strand on BBC Two, narrated by Sally Philips, focused on a comic actor famed for his laugh, his acting skill, and his rather wrinkled looks.

Broadcast to mark the 100th birthday of Sid James, which is in a few weeks, this documentary it has to be said didn't start well. This was nothing to do with James or the programme's production, but more to do with the fact that in the third cut-away you discovered that one of the talking heads featured in this programme was Chris Moyles.

But this aside, the other contributors, including Nigel Planer (busy week for him then) were good. There were also some rare outings of comedies now rarely seen such as Citizen James, which was basically Hancock's Half Hour without Tony Hancock, and looked like a decent show in its own right. There was also his straighter acting, which included appearances in a Quatermass film.

The Carry On films were the main area of covered, but for me the most interesting bit was the coverage of ITV sitcom Bless This House. I was unaware of how popular it was. It was one of the most watched comedies of its day, although this was helped by the fact that the show on the BBC at the same time was Panorama. This just goes to prove that what you really need to make a good sitcom is the right timing - not just good comic timing, but good scheduling too boot.

Despite his fame and success, it's not difficult to cast Eric Sykes - who died earlier this year at the age of 89 - as the unsung hero of post-war British comedy. Unlike his sometime cohorts Tony Hancock and Spike Milligan, he was never wholly taken to the nation's bosom. There are no stories, as there are of Hancock's Half Hour, of the pubs clearing as everyone rushed home to catch his latest show. But none of this is to disparage a brilliant, raging comic mind that contributed to the Goon Show scripts, wrote for Hancock and developed his own TV show Sykes: a twisted kaleidoscope of '70s suburbia that ran from '72-'79 and pitched him against the formidable Hattie Jacques. Forming the basis for BBC2's Eric evening, The Late Great Eric Sykes promises contributions from Eddie Izzard, Russ Abbot, Michael Palin and Bruce Forsyth, with a screening of a classic Sykes episode and a 2001 Arena profile rounding things up. So pull up the floorboards and have your rhubarb at the ready!