The Tony Hancock Special

Tony Hancock - possibly the first UK television comedy superstar (and comparable in stature to Phil Silvers for comic greatness). Yet by the time he made this show for Australian TV the magic had deserted him (as had Galton & Simpson). Hancocks best work was made 5-10 years before this stinker.

This show was intended to relaunch Hancock in Australia where he was already well known because of his BBC work. Written, produced and filmed in Oz this show has a great concept (Hancock emigrates down under to inflict his values and opinions on another culture) but is poorly executed. The scripts just didn't shine and the lad from East Cheam himself had lost his comic touch. Tony was intending to make a whole new series but died from a mixture of drink and prescription drugs during production of the series and only a handful of these Australian shows were completed. To be honest they just aren't funny and are a pale imitation of his hilarious BBC radio and TV shows. Hancock was a wonderfully droll and pessimistic comic but this series shows that without Galton & Simpson's brilliantly funny scripts (written specially for him when he was at the BBC) as a platform for his talents he was very much lost.

This series does have the novelty value of being made in colour (prior to this his TV shows were black and white) which was what pricked my curiosity to watch them. However there is also a sadness in watching a great comic actor struggle with such second rate scripts. Hancock died in 1968 so i'm not sure why IMDb has this series listed as 1972 (unless it wasn't transmitted until then).

Do yourself a favour and avoid this series. Get the CD's and DVD's of his BBC radio & TV shows instead. Even his films (The Rebel / The Punch & Judy man), despite being relatively mediocre are more watchable than this painful and sad attempt.

It's a sad watch. But totally indispensable to own. Hancock was in bad shape while making this series. And it shows.

The script is very average and the actors are very average. Tony tries hard but he fails to repeat his past greatness.

I like seeing it in colour. And I love owning it. I'm not sure if it's available on DVD, I have it on wonderful VHS!

It was a great idea: Hancock Down Under, but it needed a much better script and a much less self conscious TH. All the other actors seemed to be just mediocre at best.

Do try and watch the early classics written by G&S they are indeed wonderful and TH is at his greatest.

A sad decline and a sad end. RIP Tony Hancock.

I found this on sale in a cheap book/CD/video shop in the UK a few years ago. Despite its reputation I thought I should make up my own mind and paid my money. Unfortunately its reputation as a sad and rather tawdry last gasp to what had been a great career is well-deserved.

The scripts are those of a sub-standard sitcom. The writer attempted to copy the style of Galton and Simpson (with their blessing), not just the self-important pomposity of the character but actual situations such as trying to find a particular plastic toy in a packet of cereal to complete a set. These work to Hancock's strengths but his performance only serves to show that the script and his skills are shadows of the glory days of ten years before.

As for the performances, Tony Hancock himself is the best performer in the cast but is well past his best. Apparently, after a disastrous pilot where he was out of it on drink and pills, he was told to dry out or else. He stayed sober until the night when he used vodka to take an overdose. His delivery is clear and crisp (not always the case in his last UK work) but his timing and reactions are slow and laborious (he is also obviously using auto-cues and his eyes are constantly glancing towards them, especially during monologues). Watching a scene played between Hancock and Don Crosby you feel like checking your watch while they pick up their cues. The Australian supporting cast are not in Hancock's class and give very stilted performances.

As 'trevorwomble' says, the three episodes Hancock filmed in May and June 1968 were finally transmitted as a 90 minute TV film in Australia in 1972. Giving it the title 'special' is just a cruel irony. When Tony's brother Roger saw the show he almost begged BBC and ITV not to buy it for broadcasting in the UK. Both organisations thought it amounted to grave robbery and wouldn't touch it. The video I bought had very poor picture quality and I have learned since it was probably taken from an unauthorised rough-cut. It doesn't really matter, because I didn't want to see it twice.

And not much else. This is a collection of skits of Hancock, back in the caricature of himself he long wished to abandon since Hancock's Half Hour (that shallow pomposity and wearing the homborg hat and coat), themed around his journey to and arrival in Australia. The lowest point was Hancock fooling around with a fully automatic kitchen. That seemed to go on a half hour alone.

Hancock also doesn't play off of any interesting characters who are kind of funny in their own right. He also spends alot of time reacting to things while alone which might have worked with better jokes thrown in.

Mostly, all he has here is physical comedy and his reactions to events to fall back on which does work for him but it isn't enough to make this worth seeing beyond the morbid curiosity.

This show is entirely overshadowed by the state we know the comic actor is in during filiming and their releasing it 4 years after his death changes nothing. Hancock looks very thin and not in a healthful way. In fact he looks like a man in his early to mid 60s instead of 40s. The knowledge of his impending suicide haunts all you will see and the fact that the show isn't good means the viewer isn't distracted away from it. He killed himself about a week after his second divorce was finalized, with deteriorating health, not to mention the state his career was in and the effect that must of had on his professional pride all weighing on him. He was someone who once dreamnt of international stardom. I can assume since he couldn't quit drinking, that he felt he was doomed to face a death along the lines of F Scott Fitzgerald or how Jack Kerouac would die a year or so later, bledding out while sitting on a toilet. An ugly and terrifying experience in itself but then to face it in a foreign country all alone....