Hancock: The Assistant
I am starting this post on Tuesday evening, and however long it takes me to get it up on the internet, I hope we all survive that long for everyone to see it. I doubt that by that time even Sir Kid Starver will have found it in him to make a statement about the president of the US threatening war crimes because, well, you know why.
Anyway in the circumstances I think some light relief is in order.
This is an episode of Hancock (1963) which I always mistakenly think was broadcast before Hancock’s Half Hour but of course was afterwards. Tony Hancock was the only regular character and the scripts were written by different writers from Hancock’s Half Hour so it really comes across as very different. The other cast members are a glittering collection of Big Names: normally I don’t really take to familiar faces but I love it in this series because these famous actors are given roles that are really very uncharacteristic and obviously set in the rather absurd world of Hancock. The series was released on DVD some years ago although I have only seen the episodes which are available online. Apparently the quality of the series is considered quite variable, but obviously I can’t speak for the others. We have a bit of a thing for Tony Hancock in Birmingham because he was born here, although only stayed a few years. The illustration to this post is of the statue of him in Old Square (popularly known as Mamba Island, don’t ask why), deliberately placed near where the blood donor centre was when the statue was erected.
The Assistant was actually the first episode, broadcast on 3rd January 1963. The script is by Terry Nation, so we already know we are in quality television territory at once: something that must be said about Hancock is that he was a comic actor rather than a comedian so while absolutely hysterical his performance did depend on the quality of the script.
Hancock is passing a department store where he sees an assistant dressing a mannikin in the window. When she takes the dress off the mannikin he goes to cover up the window with his coat so that the mannikin won’t be seen naked, only to discover, what we have already seen but he hasn’t, that workmen have removed the glass from the window to replace it so that he ends up wrestling with the mannikin on the pavement. He takes it in to the shop and gets into an argument with one of the assistants.
This will not adequately come across from this blog post but tghe delightful thing about this episode is that this shop is a shop where everyone just says whatever they are thinking. It is a sort of anti-Are You Being Served.
Hancock asks the assistant for a coffee because she is eating and ignoring him, and she calls him a dirty old devil because he is carrying the naked mannikin around with him. She gets upset and goes for the manager, played by Patrick Cargill, who tells Hancock that he has upset her and asks him to apologise to her. The assistent suddenly bursts into floods of tears on the shop floor and starts on about the things she’s got going on at home and so the manager tells her to go to the canteen.
The manager tells Hancock it’s impossible to get good staff, and Hancock tells him that the shop has gone right down from when he was a boy. The manager says anyone would be bad tempered who works in that shop. Hancock says he will take his account elsewhere: the manager asks him his name and of course identifies it as a definitely outstanding account. They come to an agreement that if Hancock works in the shop for a week without being rude to one customer they will forget about his outstanding account.
It is the utter unreality of this that mostly appeals to me.
The rest of the episode is the various departments they put Hancock in.
In the packing department he works with a Welshman called Owen Bowen and in fact starts talking with a Welsh accent. He upsets his colleague by asking him if people usually call him Paddy. He also spends quite a lot of the episode dressed in a rabbit costume with the kiddies.
Honestly I do wonder whether Are You Being Served was influenced by this episode.
I don’t have a criticism of this excellent, perfectly-paced quality comedy.
So I have to give the last word to Owen Bowen. When he says to Hancock, ‘You don’t know what the bad times were like,’ Hancock says, ‘What were they like?’, and Bowen of course says, ‘Bad.’
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