Alfred Molina managed to convincingly play a comedian who died 25 years earlier and was more than a half a foot shorter than him. I like the blend of humor and drama and in a purely fictional sense, this is a good movie to watch if you want to understand clinical depression which is the most accurate thing about this biopic. I remember reading that Spike Milligan once said of Tony Hancock that he was a man who got rid of everyone in his life and that eventually he was going to get rid of himself. No truer words sum up severe depression. That is why group therapy is key for treating the illness instead of just drugs , people who are sick tend to isolate themselves and it's better they share their ordeal if only to remember they're not unique with it. Misery doesn't necessarily love company, many prefer to cut themselves off and suffer alone until they can't bear it anymore.
The tv movie gets several things wrong while trying to be totally accurate in other ways. It starts with a good rendition of the Blood Donor, a snippet of Hancock's standup act, a scene from the Punch and Judy Man. It misrepresents The Festival Hall show which implies he forgot the whole thing and did his old stuff to fill time. The biggest issue people have with this is how it implies Galton and Simpson quit working woth Tony Hancock when the truth was Hancock fired them. There is a scene in a cab toward the end which sounds like it came entirely from a line from the one man play The Last Half Hour. I picked up a few other things that originally was in the one man play but in a different context.
Biopics are lousy if you think they are faithful interpretations of reality. I remember Harold H Corbett's daughter's reaction to the Steptoe and Son biopic. Again, it was hardly a faithful interpretation of reality. Dramatic license gets stretched a little more every year for the sake of sensationalism and laziness on the part of the script writer.
