Bounder! The Biography of Terry-Thomas by Graham McCann

Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography by John Fisher

CONTRARY TO WHAT the books and the TV clip show might assert, there are few heroes in comedy. Heroism is fundamentally unfunny. The comic figure is usually either dishonourable or a failure or both. In his famous essay on the saucy seaside postcards of Donald McGill, George Orwell pointed out that humour is a sort of refuge from having to be good: “A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion ... So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage.”

Tony Hancock and Terry-Thomas, the subjects of these two biographies, were in their pomp in at roughly the same time, the mid-1950s, though these biographies are quite different, even in appearance. Graham McCann's work on Terry-Thomas is giddy, irrepressibly retro and bears a picture of its subject at his most raffishly caddish. Its title is Bounder! complete with bumptious exclamation mark. Fisher's is called simply Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography; you could stun an ox with it and it is dense and ballasted with footnotes, though super-bly readable nonetheless.

My point is that though both men embody a kind of very British turpitude, they have come to be seen differently. Terry-Thomas is loved and his films will brighten many a rainy Sunday afternoon for years to come, but he is not, and surely will never be, afforded the same stature as Hancock by dint of the latter's compellingly tragic descent into oblivion. Sheer good humour will never get you that kind of cachet. It's like comparing Tom Jones with Kurt Cobain, Beryl Cook with Rothko.

Unlike “the lad himself”, Thomas Terry Hoar Stephens, as he was born in Finchley 1911, seems, according to McCann, to have been remarkably similar to his comedic persona known to the world through films and TV. He was, it seems, a charming rogue, halting proceedings on Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines to dispense G&Ts from a bar in the boot of his car or taking a wicker hamper of chablis and foie gras with him when travelling by plane.

Hancock, though, embodied - in fact helped to create - the cliché of the tragic clown, spending half an hour in his dressing room berating and abusing himself to “get my shoulders to drop” before going onstage. Fisher doesn't shy away from the darkness but he doesn't wallow in it. The co-operation of many of Hancock's family and friends in what is a pretty magisterial work ensures that there's a joyous tone to the book as well. Lest we forget, Hancock was an often happy soul and a comic genius and, as Fisher says, “the tragedy that befell Tony Hancock clouded only the last few years of a 21-year career”.

There are revelations here too. Fisher addresses the suggestion that Hancock may have been gay. There are rumours of him frequenting discreet gay drinking clubs in London and even propositioning the singer Matt Monro on a train. Fisher comes to no real conclusion here. This isn't a failing on the biographer's part just an acknowledgement of another side to the man who was also seemingly irresistible to women, evoking protective and maternal as well as frankly sexual feelings.

Fisher's Hancock, though, is a man beset by demons, veering between arrogance and crises of self-confidence. He paints a picture of a man whose frequent and infamous bad behaviour masked a frightened child. In Australia, where he went when his drinking had made him well nigh unemployable, the tough love doled out by people at Channel 7 (“one more drink mate and you're on the first plane back to bloody Blighty”) did not work. Fisher discusses how suicide had often figured in Hancock material in The Rebel and Hancock's Half-Hour. That said, he doesn't regard Hancock's end in a Sydney apartment strewn with pills and vodka bottles, a cigarette in one hand and a ballpoint in the other, as inevitable. There are a “nebula of explanations” for Hancock's death, he concludes, as well as many “imponderables”.

Terry-Thomas's demise was natural but just as sad. Parkinson's disease had left him a cadaverous husk of his former self, reduced to living on hand-outs. Bob Monkhouse reportedly said that he thought Terry-Thomas was living comfortably in Spain and sent him £1,000. The Daily Mirror chipped in with socks, a toaster and a new kettle.

Though neither story has a happy ending, both books, McCann's breezier but still detailed, Fisher's more learned in tone, avoid that hoary stuff about the tears of clowns and such. The latter's account is celebratory as well as unflinching, concluding of its flawed and complex subject: “Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.”

Bounder! The Biography of Terry-Thomas by Graham McCann
Aurum, £16.99; 320pp Buy the book

Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography by John Fisher
Harper, £20; 480pp Buy the book

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