Hancock & Joan

Maxine Peake showed her abilities with a terrifying performance as Myra Hindley. Considering she was opposite Jim Broadbent as Lord Longford and Andy Serkis as Ian Brady, that took some doing.

Here, she steals the show with a spellbinding turn as John Le Mesurier's wife Joan. Unfortunately, this drama is out of kilter with the rest of The Curse of Comedy series. All the others cover a timespan during which the subjects were at their peak of success. This covers a two year period several years after Tony Hancock was one of the biggest stars on UK TV with Hancock's Half Hour and Hancock, and also after his unsuccessful film career. The events in this dramatisation bring matters to the conclusion of Hancock's lonely suicide in Austratlia. The death scenes were unsatisfactory, as Hancock sees a ghostly image of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, the character from East Cheam which brought him fame and fortune.

A pity we didn't see Ken Stott saying "A PINT? THAT'S VERY NEARLY AN ARMFUL!"

Tony Hancock became one of the key British comedians of the 50s and 60s due to his work on HANCOCK'S HALF HOUR and THE TONY HANCOCK SHOW. Hancock's style is deadpan and miserabilist, and often very funny. He has a hangdog Bilko-like expression, but with none of Bilko's cock-eyed confidence. When Bilko fails, he will try the same lousy idea (changed slightly) the next episode. Hancock is arrogant on the surface but is ultimately a coward who takes all the problems to heart... as if the world is conspiring against him.

In real life, Hancock wasn't far removed from his character. Once the HANCOCK shows ended (mostly due his selfish removal of his double-act partner Sid James, and his growing disgust for the writers), he felt he could make it on his own. But he didn't - or couldn't - and ended up doing three shows in Australia before committing suicide in 1968, with a bottle of vodka and a bunch of amphetamines.

This is just the sort of story that Hollywood would pick up. There's MAN ON THE MOON and RAY and many more biopics about self-destructive outsiders. But Hancock was never big in America, so it was left for the BBC to do the job in a drama-documentary called HANCOCK AND JOAN.

Despite the prestige the BBC has abroad (mostly for its news programmes and natural history documentaries) it has a pretty awful record for TV dramas. Soap operas are the prime-time focus in the UK, but the need to quickly pump out episodes leads to terrible stuff. BBC's higher budget productions are turgid historical dramas which rely mostly on period costumes to try and hide some horribly stagy acting. Dramas set in modern times end up as a shouty low-rent version of Hollywood films and - increasingly - US TV.

All this made HANCOCK AND JOAN a pleasant surprise. There's a little shouting in the film, and only at moments when people are angry. It's not shot with much flair, but there's a few moments that raise above usual TV movies. I liked the little introduction of fantasy when Hancock sees a vision of himself as he commits suicide. The shots inside the drunk-tank are also pretty innovative. HANCOCK AND JOAN - of course - has the annoying washed-out colours emblematic of the British style. But the film has enough other things going for it, you can mostly forgive its bland look.

HANCOCK AND JOAN was part of a series of BBC drama-docs about British comedians who led messed-up lives. One - FANTABULOSA - is one of the most unintentionally funny things you will see... with Michael Sheen over-acting (as he did in FROST VS NIXON, THE QUEEN and everything else) as Kenneth Williams, star of the CARRY ON movies.

But HANCOCK AND JOAN is acted - and written - with real skill. Hancock is hateful at times, but also funny and charismatic. It actually makes sense that Joan (the wife of DAD'S ARMY star John Le Mesurier) would fall in love with him... and that's rare in this sort of thing. I loved the moment where she's screwing Hancock and his mother knocks on the door. "I'm coming!" he shouts. Joan giggles... and so does his mother when he lets her into the room. There's a real tenderness between the characters, based on jokiness and honesty.

The moments of madness - including Hancock drunkenly tearing the place apart during a dinner with Joan's parents - are effectively shocking. Joan is an interesting character, vulnerable yet ballsy. She becomes very likable, and her sink into alcohol abuse to try and keep up with Hancock feels credible. The only duff performance is Alex Jennings as John Le Mesurier, which is very self-aware and parodic of the real life man.

Anyway, this is a once in a decade, complete recommendation of a British TV drama. HANCOCK AND JOAN is well worth checking out, and streets ahead of celebrated British "realist" films like CONTROL and SOMERS TOWN. And it should work for those who don't even know who Tony Hancock was. It's not an all-time classic by any means, but in the context of British documentary-style stuff, it's one of the very few that feel both genuine and engrossing.

Just when you get sick of the barrage of reality TV and the dispiritingly banal shows that seem to make up the majority of TV it comes as a real pleasure to come across a TV drama like this. A deceptively straight-forward account of the affair between Tony Hancock and Joan Le Mesurier (wife of the wonderful John) the film follows their relationship from its tentative beginnings through the problems with Hancock's chronic alcoholism, and its devastating impact on both their lives, to the inevitable ending. This is a well written piece that rarely puts a foot wrong but the real heart and soul of the film are the outstanding performances from Stott and Peake who are both exceptional. Indeed, both their performances deserve to get noticed come the next BAFTA awards.

My dad's favourite comedian was Tony Hancock although I'm too young by some years to remember his early 60's popularity or mid 60's eventual decline and fall into alcoholism and an early death. Ironically taking its title no doubt from the Hancock character's defiant assertion midway through this gritty drama that he shared billing with no-one, this in fact is a three-header with a fine understated well-measured performance from Alex Jennings as the cuckolded husband, celebrated English actor John Le Mesurier (best known as Sgt Wilson in BBC's perennial "Dad's Army"). He gets his accent and mannerisms right and conveys tellingly Le Mesurier's weary passion-less effete-ism which effectively drives his passionate wife into the arms and bed of best friend Hancock who he unselfishly invites into his home to boost his spirits (talk about bringing the wolf to your door!).

Given that the two leads get to act out a doomed affair, born of lust and fuelled by insecurity, depression and above all alcohol, their performances are naturally the dramatic centre-piece here and their at times heightened but always believable playing contrasts very well with the rest of the cast's down-home (or as Hancock has it, "provincial") playing. Ken Stott, for once not portraying a TV cop, also copes well with Hancock's accent and physical attributes and demonstrates his range with an emotionally charged performance as the hapless, parasitical, tortured yet still just lovable enough egoist in the main title role.

The writing requires him to display the full gamut of pathetic emotions a drowning alcoholic must experience until they hit rock bottom and either sink or swim. Maxine Peake is at least as good as the adulterous wife, drawn helplessly but willingly into Hancock's fading orbit. She only just survives even as she combines the separate weaknesses (so we are told) of Hancock's previous two wives into one as she turns drunkard and suicidal to try and shock Hancock back to reality. The two fantasy scenes work very well, both at the death (literally), with firstly Hancock making peace with his typecast comedic past in a dream sequence where he is becalmed by his "Lad from East Cheam" alter-ego before his overdose and especially Joan's stoic external reaction to the news of his death contrasted simultaneously to the passionately emotional outburst she suffers inside which she could never exhibit in front of her passive husband Le Mesurier.

This was an engrossing and illuminating insight into the last days of a major British comedic talent and an interesting and imaginative study of the damage that these difficult people inflict, sometimes unwittingly, on those lesser mortals who innocently stray into their extreme lives.

By the time Joan Le Mesurier got together with Tony Hancock, he was already long past his brief heyday, which had started with a radio series, so good it could empty the pubs, later adapted for TV, and still selling videos wherever English is spoken.

But his descent had been swift and steep, following the impulse-sacking of all his most talented colleagues, leaving him lonely and lost among the confusing signs of the 60's, a decade that somehow wasn't his, and whose end he would not live to see.

So this is a minor-key drama, based around two alcoholics who were also best friends: John Le Mesurier of the languid, lazy charm, and Tony Hancock of the wild drinking-bouts, alternating with bitter introspection. And caught between them is Joan.

Alcohol does not make a very good topic for drama, quite dreary and repetitive to the sober spectator. Not everyone is amused by smashed bottles and foul language, or riveted by diagrams of a swollen liver. What really steals the show is Ken Stott's uncanny gift for replicating Hancock's voice - if this is not too patronising to a Scots actor whom I had found unremarkable as Edinburgh detective Rebus. Not many people actually spoke like Hancock, surprisingly well-educated, with a few "Yeah mates" and "Flippin' kids" thrown-in for demotic effect. Yet both in accent and in tonal register, his delivery is astonishingly faithful to the original. On top of this, he and his lighting-team even manage to capture the facial expressions, both the hopeful smile and the weary resignation. Stott simply is every inch The Lad Himself.

As for Maxine Peake, she is able to convey the basic ordinariness of Joan's character and background, further pointed-up by Tony's embarrassing visit to her strict petty-bourgeois family. Since it is unlikely that this dramatised documentary could have gone ahead without Joan's assistance, we can't quite tell how much of it is her own unconfirmed story. She admits that John was the decent and responsible husband, sandwiched between two of the bad-boy types who really got her heart racing. We know that John was surprisingly understanding about being cuckolded, (but as a double divorcée, he might have been). What we can't judge is her claim that Tony would still be alive, but for the postal strike that deprived him of her letters in Australia. Even in those days, a top TV star would have been able to establish a telephonic link home; still, we hear extracts from their correspondence, presumably historical, including his own lament (after the silence he thought was deliberate): "I gather you don't share my feelings any more" - supposedly triggering the overdose. But we can believe her agonised outburst on hearing the news: "I'd rather it was John who'd gone, not Tony."

At any rate, both parties seemed to sense that Australia would be the end. He can be heard trying to bluff it out: "We'll bring back the old Hancock - Homburg hat and all!" It would prove a hollow boast. A press review (again, presumably historical) had presciently called his one-man show 'a form of suicide'.

Directors often demand a lot of laughing and giggling to signal a close relationship, but there is altogether too much of it here. Tony's mother is well-played by Lesley Nicol, although just one year older than Stott. Alex Jennings resembles John physically, but not in character or personality. Julia Deakin is triumphant in cameo as a Ramsgate landlady. Finally, we didn't need that year's Eurovision winner 'Puppet on a String' as an establishing device. The whole story covers less than two years.

How many of us managed to achieve so much by 44?