by Alwyn Turner
Nation was later to claim that the piece ‘proved very successful’ and was ‘incredibly well received’, but his memory was playing him slightly false. The Guardian’s television critic, Mary Crozier, couldn’t work out whether it was supposed to be a comedy or a farce. ‘It was a queer jumble, and its lack of form and drive made it often just a farrago of rather boring dialogue,’ she wrote. ‘Like so many plays on television this never got a grip, because it was impossible to believe in the plot or the people, and not all the Welsh accents or the character acting could pick it up and put it on its feet.’ Disillusioned by the increasing trend towards new works for television, she yearned to turn back the clock: ‘Why don’t the companies and BBC do more of the many good plays that have been written already, that is from the established repertory of drama for the stage?’ The Daily Mirror, on the other hand, was more taken with Uncle Selwyn: ‘Some of the humour was well in period, smelling of old chestnuts, but the comedy and farce were as continuous as the soft rain on a chapel roof. The fault lay in the many characters who swallowed each other up: no one stood out as a peg on which to hang the main theme of the action.’ The reviewer concluded: ‘I look forward to more of Mr Nation’s humour – but less confused, please, next time by too many actors trying to get a word in edgeways.’
All of this, however, was for the future. In 1961, with the play having been rejected by the BBC, with John Junkin increasingly committed to his acting career, and with only the brief run of It’s a Fair Cop to sustain him, Nation needed work. He found it in the unlikely shape of a film screenplay for Adam Faith.
Faith was by this stage perhaps the biggest pop star in the country (or at least, according to the New Musical Express, he ranked alongside Cliff Richard and Lonnie Donegan as one of ‘the big three’) and, despite his rather lightweight hit singles, he was emerging as something genuinely new in British rock and roll: an intelligent, articulate, sharply dressed performer who was taken seriously by the artistic establishment. The director Lindsay Anderson wanted him to appear in a production at the Royal Court Theatre in London, he won over his critics with an interview on the prestigious John Freeman show Face to Face, where he enthused about J.D. Salinger and Jean Sibelius, and he received the ultimate cultural accolade of a reference in ‘The Blood Donor’, the best-known episode of Tony Hancock’s career. ‘There’s Adam Faith earning ten times as much as the prime minister. Is that right?’ reflected Hancock. ‘Mind you, I suppose it depends on whether you like Adam Faith and what your politics are.’
Faith also harboured ambitions of being a serious actor and sidestepped the standard movie format offered to pop singers – star mimes a handful of hits while trying to save the local youth club from greedy property developer – in favour of more intriguing film choices: the Soho exploitation classic Beat Girl (1960, US title: Wild for Kicks) and the Peter Sellers vehicle Never Let Go (1960), in which he played a petty thief. His third film was perhaps less impressive, but it did have its moments.
What a Whopper was credited as having a screenplay by Terry Nation, ‘based on an idea by Trevor Peacock and Jeremy Lloyd’, though in truth the idea is wafer thin. Faith plays a struggling writer whose latest attempt at a novel has just been returned by yet another publisher. Figuring that his story of the Loch Ness Monster will stand a better chance if there’s a new sighting of the creature, he fakes a photograph and sets off to Scotland with a few friends, taking with him a tape of an electronically generated roar which he intends to play at full volume in the vicinity of the loch. Into this is woven, none too subtly, a sub-plot about the landlord of a guesthouse trying to keep the fruits of his salmon poaching from the local police, while further complications come from the aristocratic and alcoholic father of one of the women accompanying Faith, who mistakenly believes that she’s eloped (though Loch Ness is a considerable overshoot by anyone aiming at Gretna Green). Much comedy confusion, many mistaken identities and some simple knockabout humour ensue.
The film’s producer, Teddy Joseph, was later to declare that What a Whopper was ‘a marvellous family comedy’, though that was a little over-generous. More accurate was Variety’s comment that ‘the British appetite for this type of unpretentious, slapstick comedy appears to be insatiable.’ Faith himself, who celebrated his twenty-first birthday during filming, was apparently not too taken with the end result, for he managed to avoid any mention of it in his autobiography; his 2003 obituary in the Independent was more forthcoming, dismissing the movie as ‘dire’. That was unkind and not entirely accurate, for there is much that followers of British comedy can celebrate, as one would expect from a cast that included Sid James, Wilfred Brambell, Terry Scott and Clive Dunn, accompanied by Freddie Frinton giving his customary portrayal of a drunk. There is also a cameo by Spike Milligan, as a tramp fishing for trout in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, and best of all a brief but fabulous appearance by Charles Hawtrey as an artist who is developing a technique of flinging paint off his palette-knives at a canvas, titled ‘Daphne in the Nude’. When he’s described as a painter, he bristles at the suggestion:’ ‘Not just a painter,’ he insists haughtily. ‘A flicking painter.’ The opening sequences meanwhile foreshadow what would soon become clichés of Swinging London, with a depiction of artistic types sharing a house in Chelsea; virtually the first words uttered by Faith are: ‘I saw a couple of fabulous birds on the King’s Road.’
It was not quite Nation’s first foray into the cinema, for he and John Junkin had provided what was described as ‘additional material’ for the 1959 film And the Same to You, a similarly patchy movie that is saved by its cast: Sid James, Tommy Cooper, Brian Rix and – a man who would soon loom large in Nation’s story – William Hartnell. Nor was it quite his first solo venture, for in 1956 he had written a fifteen-minute sketch for his old Cardiff friend Harry Greene and his wife, Marjie Lawrence, who were fresh from staking their claim to television history as the stars of the soap Round at the Redways, the first show made by ITV. Booked to appear in a revue titled Off the Cuff at the Irving Theatre in London’s West End, they had approached Spike Milligan for a sketch; when his contribution was turned down by the show’s producer, the job was passed on to Nation, who delivered within twenty-four hours a routine parodying the movies, drawing on his love of Hollywood. ‘Howard and Marjorie Greene performed with as much carefree zing as though the small, cool audience had been huge and enthusiastic,’ commented The Stage, ‘and after their delicious demonstration of the growth of the film industry, it had at least become enthusiastic.’
But What a Whopper was Nation’s first big solo project and his first full film screenplay. And it revealed some of his strengths as well as some of the flaws that would become familiar to television viewers. On the positive side, there was his Welsh fondness for ornate verbosity, as Wilfred Brambell describes his sighting of the Loch Ness Monster: ‘A terrible sight it was. A yellow mist hung over the waters, and a great brooding silence filled the loch. No breath of wind stirred the air, and as I looked towards the black waters, I saw it! Its terrible head rising slowly and turning towards me, its jaws open …’ There was, too, his refusal to develop a simple situation in a straight line, instead adding new complications at every opportunity, heaping up the material in a way that would find better expression in his thrillers than it did in his comedy. On the negative side, there was a certain loss of concentration, so that later parts of the script start to flounder a little and some loose ends never get tied up (the book that Faith’s character was supposed to be promoting, for example, disappears from the story, once it has done its job of taking the cast to Loch Ness). And then there’s the inescapable, overt borrowing from others: it would be hard not to see in the early scenes, with Hawtrey’s flicking and with parodies of modern sculpture and musique concrète, the influence of Tony Hancock’s film The Rebel, scripted by Galton and Simpson, which had great fun mocking the follies of contemporary art, and which was released just three months before filming started on What a Whopper.
The first project after the split with Galton and Simpson was a movie, The Punch and Judy Man, which Hancock co-wrote with Philip Oakes, and which was an artistic, if not a box-office, triumph. When he was then offered a television series by ATV, one of the ITV franchise-holders, he asked Oakes to be the script consultant. But that relationship, like so many others around this time, collapsed under the weight of Hancock’s increasingly erratic and autocratic behaviour; he was alcoholic by this stage and his marriage was coming to a difficult and sometimes violent end. ‘Without any discussion,’ wrote Oakes, ‘he commissioned writers and scripts which I thought were below par.’ Oakes walked out and, seeking a new writer with whom to work, Hancock alighted on Terry Nation, whom he had encountered in the ALS offices. (These had now moved to ‘a more salubrious address in Cumberland House, Kensington High Street’, and were soon to move again, even further upmarket, to Orme Court in Bayswater, though Nation did not have an office at this final location.)
The interview process for the new position, conducted at Hancock’s house in Surrey, was far from conventional. ‘To my amazement all he wanted to do was talk about the universe and what part we played in the cosmic scheme of things,’ Nation remembered. ‘I had always been interested in science fiction, but Tony’s thinking was far more involved, far more philosophical.’ Evidently, however, Nation made the grade and, the issue of intellectual compatibility having been established, the two men set to work on a Friday night. They were still going the following Monday morning, when Nation had to return home for a change of clothing, having not slept and having combated the soporific effects of alcohol with uppers taken from Hancock’s copious supply of pills. The relationship seemed to work on both sides. ‘He was a wonderful audience,’ Nation said. ‘I would try a joke on him and he would fall off his chair, he thought it was so funny.’ The only problem came with trying to pin Hancock down to anything definite: ‘When Tony first acted out an idea, we would collapse in giggles. When it was on the page in black and white, he went cold. It was as if the act of writing anything down sparked a huge and lingering doubt, first in the material and then in himself to deliver it.’
In October 1962 Nation accompanied the comedian on a series of week-long theatrical engagements in Southsea, Liverpool and Brighton. Officially his role was that of writer, but Hancock’s extreme nervousness about using new material, exacerbated by his dislike of live performances (he woke on the first morning ‘visibly shaking and covered in sweat’, according to Nation), meant that very little of the work actually appeared in the show. Instead Hancock reverted to the music hall tradition of repeating the old favourites from his repertoire, and Nation ended up in an unexpected role as companion and nursemaid: ‘I had finished the writing and he could have got rid of me at any time. But he was paying me £100 a week virtually to baby-sit with him.’
Nation described his job as properly starting when they got back to the hotel. ‘They would leave cold food for us, and some booze, and we’d sit up until about two in the morning. Then we’d go to bed, and he insisted we share a room, so we could go on talking. And we would talk about the meaning of it all, what was it all about, all these things. And I would finally fall asleep, and the next thing it’s eight in the morning and he’s called for hard-boiled eggs and champagne. That’s how the day started and we were off again.’ Those all-night discussions would range from ideas for sketches that never materialised right through to the current international situation, at a time when the Cuban missile crisis was causing many, including Hancock, to believe that the third world war was about to break out; like Nation’s other comedy mentor, Spike Milligan, he was much troubled by the spectre of nuclear conflict.
On a more personal level, there was the unfortunate incident after the final performance in Liverpool. The party were returning to London on the overnight sleeper train, somewhat the worse for drink, when Nation was awoken by a disturbance in the adjoining compartment occupied by the singer Matt Monro, who had been opening the shows. ‘When I got to Matt’s compartment, Hancock was naked and cowering in the corner,’ recalled Nation, describing the episode as ‘more shocking than surprising’. Monro was threatening not only to quit the tour but also to prosecute for sexual assault, and Nation was obliged to calm the situation down. ‘I had to work very hard to get him to change his mind. In the end we agreed never to mention the incident again.’ Hancock appeared to have no memory of what had transpired, though he was full of his usual apologetic concern the next morning: ‘I didn’t offend anyone last night, did I?’ Nonetheless the story evidently did the rounds of showbiz gossip, for a decade later Kenneth Williams was to record in his diary a conversation with Sid James in which the latter related the anecdote: ‘Matt Monro told him he’d woken up one night to find Hancock going down on him for the fellatio, and that Matt had “given him a right-hander”.’
The live appearances were supposed to be part of Hancock’s preparation for his return to television, some eighteen months after the screening of Hancock, his final, triumphant series for the BBC, which had contained such classic episodes as ‘The Bowmans’, ‘The Radio Ham’ and ‘The Blood Donor’. Nation ended up writing four scripts for the new ITV show, also confusingly titled Hancock, and acting in an unofficial script-editing capacity. It was an irresistible opportunity for an ambitious writer – a huge step forward from providing scripts for Ted Ray and Jimmy Logan – but, as everyone recognised, taking on the country’s best and best-loved comic was a poisoned chalice.
Quite apart from dealing with Hancock’s insatiable pursuit of perfection and his consumption of alcohol and drugs, there was the weight of expectation that came with the job. Even Philip Oakes, who could justifiably point to The Punch and Judy Man as one of Hancock’s most impressive pieces of work, referred to Galton and Simpson as his best-ever scriptwriters’, and Nation could only agree: ‘I was never, ever as good as Galton and Simpson. They were Tony Hancock. He was wrong, in a way, to abandon them.’ They cast a very long shadow, out of which no one was ever truly to emerge. As Ray Galton said of those who followed: ‘They were on a hiding to nothing. The greatest writer in the world would have a job coming in and assuming someone else’s character that had taken nine years to develop.’ Nation, of course, was not the greatest comedy writer in the world, but he did rise to the challenge and there were moments on Hancock that were of a higher standard than anything he had previously produced.
The series opened on 3 January 1963, and Hancock was in confident mood in that morning’s papers. ‘I don’t want to be quite so common as in East Cheam,’ he
explained, distancing himself from his earlier incarnation. ‘In this series I’m a little more posh. I live on a small allowance from my aunt. But I’m still the same, mate.’ The newspapers were also able to report the unfortunate coincidence whereby the second series of Galton and Simpson’s new show, Steptoe and Son, started on the same night. IT’S HANCOCK V. STEPTOE IN THE BIG FIGHT FOR LAUGHS, read the headline in the Daily Mail, though it was not actually a direct clash: Steptoe finished at 8.25 p.m., allowing viewers just enough time to make a cup of tea before Hancock started at half past eight.
The first episode was ‘The Assistant’, credited as having a script by Terry Nation with ‘original story by Ray Whyberd’ (this pseudonym concealing the identity of Ray Alan, better known as the ventriloquist who worked with Lord Charles). Perhaps it was the mixed parentage, but the plot didn’t make a great deal of sense. Hancock complains about the rudeness of a shop assistant in a department store and the manager, trying to explain how hard it is for staff to maintain their manners, challenges him to work there for a week without losing his temper; if he is successful, then the long-standing arrears on his account with the store will be cleared. It’s a transparent device to put Hancock into a new situation – or rather a sequence of situations, for he goes on to work in three different departments – and even allowing for his desire to change his style, the implausibility of the premise sat ill with everything an audience expected of him. Galton and Simpson had taken great care to ensure that their plots, at least in the latter years, were rigorously logical, rooted in reality; here the business of the wager is so weak that, having kick-started the plot, it isn’t referred to again, and the episode ends without reference to who has won the bet. In short, it’s a story with a beginning, several middles and no end. Being more charitable, one might view it as a series of sketches rather than a sitcom, though nothing in the rest of the series suggests that this was intentional.
