Kevin McNally interview
To mark the diamond anniversary of top sitcom writers Galton & Simpson, Radio 4 have re-recorded five of the lost Hancock's Half Hour episodes. These programmes were wiped from the archives after broadcast (in its early days the BBC used to re-use tape, not thinking about the need to preserve history), thus this is the first time comedy fans will be able to hear these funny adventures since the 1950s.
With the original cast no longer with us, it was down to Kevin McNally, Kevin Eldon, Simon Greenall, Robin Sebastian and Susy Kane to play the famous actors. The role of Tony Hancock was taken up by McNally. We chatted to Kevin to discover how he came to be playing the legendary comedian...
Hi Kevin. You've been a fan of Hancock for years?
I originally became a fan of Hancock in the mid-60s I think, when they were re-showing the television programmes - I used to watch them with my dad.
I then discovered what there was of it on vinyl; that obviously mainly being the LP with The Blood Donor and The Radio Ham, and also the small EP which had a selection of the radio shows.
It wasn't until the late 70s, or early 80s, that they started repeating some of the shows on the radio. I then managed to build up a collection of them.
Over the years they've become more accessible to us. The 70s was probably the worst, because it was very hard to hear your hero.
It's great that they are easier to hear now because, with the 60th anniversary, we can all have a real glut of Tony Hancock and remember what a great - what a really great - artist he was.
So how did the 'Missing Hancocks' project come about?
Well, Neil Pearson the actor is also a collector of rare manuscripts. He bought a lot of radio scripts and, in amongst them, he found some Hancock scripts. When he realised he couldn't get hold of the original shows, he did a bit of investigation and discovered that, of the 100+ original radio shows that were made, 20 had been wiped.
Neil tells a rather interesting story: it's totally arbitrary which tapes were wiped. He puts it down to the different height of the people who went in to get the tapes to record over!
So, yes, there was no chance of hearing these scripts unless you had heard them when they first came out. In some cases they were played twice, but that was it. So Neil went to the BBC with the idea of re-recording them, and the BBC were enthusiastic because of the anniversary.
There was then the question of how he'd possibly get the new Hancock. He happened to speak to Andy Hamilton, who I'd worked with many times, and he was kind enough to suggest I might be able to provide the new voice of Hancock.
I was approached at the beginning of the year, which gave me a good four months to work on the scripts before we recorded them... although it also gave me four months to think maybe I'd made a terrible mistake!
I rationalised it eventually by saying to myself that there really was no way of hearing these shows... it's not like we're trying to re-create a TV show you can already see the original person in; and for aficionados, and for people new to Hancock too, it might be nice to hear these scripts.
So I've got my fingers crossed that there are more people thankful we've done it, than are thinking it was a bad idea.
We think these new versions brilliantly capture the spirit of the original shows. You hadn't played Hancock before this though, so how did you know you could do it?
I have wanted to do Hancock for many years and I tried to get a film project off the ground some 12 years ago, when I was young enough to physically play him, but that didn't happen.
The way I thought I had the ability to maybe summon him up is, whenever people came to see me in the theatre, or movies, they'd always say 'oh there's a little bit of Hancock in there somewhere'. I knew that was the case when a friend of mine came to see me here on Broadway in Hamlet. I was playing Claudius to Jude Law's Hamlet, and my friend came back and said 'I loved the bit of Hancock you put in'... I was genuinely un-aware that I had!
I suppose, because I've loved his delivery so much, there can be a little bit of Hancock in what I do in comedy. So now it was just a question of, rather than fighting it, giving over to it completely.
Galton & Simpson (pictured) have commented on how close a representation it is. Did you have to practice a lot to mimic his delivery?
Hancock was born in Birmingham and moved to Bournemouth - I sort of did the opposite. I was born in Bristol and moved to Birmingham. So there are very similar influences in our accents.
The real challenge of doing it on the radio was, when people impersonate Hancock, they tend to do a very singular voice, but of course he actually had a lot of variation.
I was in America when I got the part and had 40 of the radio shows on my computer, so I just started listening to them again. I looked at the scripts and tried to marry up what choices I thought he might have made in each bit of the script, so that the result wasn't monotonous and it wasn't that singular exasperated tone that impressionists do so often.
When you got the part you were on a movie set. You were presumably very happy?
When I got the offer I was so thrilled. I dashed into the make-up trailer and said 'Oh my god! I've just had the most extraordinary offer of my life'. And they're all going, 'Who is it? Scorsese? Is it Spielberg? Is it Tarantino?'... Of course they had no idea who I was talking about when I told them. I tried to give them an American parallel, 'If you were a big fan of Sid Caesar...', but they were all young, so they were struggling with Sid Caesar as well!
So when it came to actually recording the episodes at the BBC Radio Theatre, how did that feel?
It was great! We were recording over a period of three weeks. I'm, invariably, nervous in front of a live audience... but this time I had a thought: this was my life's ambition. They're only 25 minutes long, so I decided to completely ignore the nerves and found myself completely calm in front of the audience, which I've never experienced before. This enabled me to, a) really enjoy it, and b) really concentrate on giving it the variety and energy and the colour that Hancock had himself.
I reminded myself that we remember him as this downtrodden character, but when you look at the TV shows he's such a robust and energetic and confident performer, you really need that to recreate him. You can't be apologetic about what you do.
I'm still thinking about those evening we recorded them, because I had such a good time. Because we wanted to recreate the experience for the live audience of actually being there in the 50s, we were dressed in suits and we had a foley artist in an evening gown doing the noises there, rather than doing it electronically...
We found that it tended to work best when we stayed in character on stage.
If these five are received well, is there scope to record more?
There are more missing, so we could do another 3 years of this and finally get them all recorded...
There might even be more actually - there might be 26 we could do, I'm not sure. Occasionally people find tapes when people recorded them off the radio, which means they're not technically lost any more, but they're not great quality. But we certainly have at least 15 more we could record.
'The Missing Hancocks' are on Radio 4 on Fridays at 11:30am from Friday 31st October.