Tony Hancock knows all

[The Grave Maurice]

I was just listening to the Hancock's Half Hour episode that was first broadcast on 14 October 1956. In it Tony, Bill and Sid spend a night hanging over a rope in a doss house. And at one point, Tony, feeling suicidal, says that he is headed toward the river, and already has the stones in his pockets.

Both of those topics have been discussed here fairly recently, so I suggest that we all pay more attention to The Lad Himself for answers to Ripper-related questions.

[The Good Michael]

Grave One,

That reminds me that folks may have been doing this armchair detecting for a long time. They may even have been more ardent than we are today. I like to think that we have access to much more, but then again, so much has been lost or thrown out. I wonder what the Hancocks and his predecessors knew that we don't.

Cheers,

Mike

[Graham]

I wonder what the Hancocks and his predecessors knew that we don't.

They knew how to make me laugh, that's what, which is more than most modern so-called comedians are capable of.

Poignantly, Hancock did indeed end his own life at the age of 47 in Australia. He considered himself a complete failure in life and career. Combination of booze and drugs. Sad end to a great entertainer.

Graham

[Robert]

Yes, a tragic end to a great comic actor.

Another thing we can learn from Hancock, is that a very short man can subdue a very tall woman - if he stands on a pile of books consisting of Gibbon'e Decline and Fall, Sir Charles Besthead's history of something or other, and several other worthy tomes.

[Robert]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGQCwUPhCMo

About three minutes in.

[chudmuskett]

I was just listening to the Hancock's Half Hour episode that was first broadcast on 14 October 1956. In it Tony, Bill and Sid spend a night hanging over a rope in a doss house. And at one point, Tony, feeling suicidal, says that he is headed toward the river, and already has the stones in his pockets.

Both of those topics have been discussed here fairly recently, so I suggest that we all pay more attention to The Lad Himself for answers to Ripper-related questions.

I dont get it

[Tom_Wescott]

Me either. Must be a British old guy thing.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Chris]

For a moment there I thought somebody was going to suggest that Magna Carta was a Ripper victim.

[Robert]

I go with Hancock here : Jack the Ripper was Harry Zimmerman.

[John Savage]

Hi Maurice,

"I was just listening to the Hancock's Half Hour episode that was first broadcast on 14 October 1956. In it Tony, Bill and Sid spend a night hanging over a rope in a doss house. And at one point, Tony, feeling suicidal, says that he is headed toward the river, and already has the stones in his pockets."

I believe the first person to refer to Driutt was Daniel Farson and in his book he states that he first became a part of the Ripper story in 1959. Perhaps the lad from East Cheam new more than we realise?

Rgds
John
"Magna Carta - did she die in vain."

[Mayerling]

The Wrong Box

In that wonderful British comedy of wills, tontines, and rival heirs, THE WRONG BOX, Hancock had one of his few movie roles as a Detective from Scotland Yard who does find a dead body in a crate, and who cannot make a coherent sentence to his police staff. One cannot imagine Abberline using him - maybe Anderson would have relied on him. Oh, it turns out the body in the barrel is a mysterious person of sinister demeanor known as "the Bournemouth Strangler". He had been fleeing Bournemouth earlier in the film when he ended up in the same train compartment with Ralph Richardson, a perennial bore who reads a newspaper article about the latest Bournemouth strangling and then insists on discussing (or I should say lecturing) the poor strangler on the subject of murder.

THE WRONG BOX was written by Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson-pal Lloyd Osborner in 1889. The original novel had a character whose body is mistaken by two characters for that of Richardson's character (hence it being packed). The screenplay writers presumably based the change in the character's personality on someone else possibly at large in 1888.

Oh, and Hancock's detective wore his trademark homburg hat.

Jeff

[Robert]

Jeff, I seem to remember a very funny scene in which Peter Cook has to persuade Perter Sellers (playing a doctor) to sign a dodgy death certificate.

I think there was one episode of Hancock's Half Hour where Tony and Sid tore the wallpaper off the walls and scribbled doggerel on the plaster, in the hope of persuading people that Keats or Byron had once lived at the house. I can well imagine them knocking up a poem from JTR.

O wondrous moon with silvery sheen
Who throws his light upon East Cheam
And gazes down on Mitre Square -
Hope you didn't see me there

[Mayerling]

Hi Robert,

Yes, Peter Cook (Morris Finsbury) needs to produce the signed death certificate of a "doctor" regarding his uncle (Ralph Richardson) at the right moment (after Richardson survives his brother John Mills, and inherits a huge tontine). He goes to one Dr. Pratt (Sellers). The introduction is wonderful.

Cook (opening creaky front door to nondescript, decrepid office): "Are you Dr. Pratt?"

Sellers (barely up, with whisky bottles around him): "Are you...are you the police?"

Cook (somewhat surprised): "No...?"

Sellers (the coast is clear): "Then I'm Dr. Pratt!"

The good doctor is inundated with little kittens (he tries to give Cook one), and does have a supply of death certificates for purchase. He also cannot help telling how he fell from Harley Street to here ("You see, the girl was not quite gone - another half hour perhaps...."). Later you hear him announce how a poisoning can be accomplished (Cook has not asked for one), and still later he tries to sign his name to the death certificate with a thermometer.

It was a wonderful comedy - and Wilfred Lawson was good as old Peacock, the servant to Mills and nephew Michael Caine, who makes a turtle look supercharged.

Jeff

[Robert]

Blimey, you know your films, Jeff!

[jason_c]

Whats the name of the episode?