Actualités

They made TV history together and were planning their next film – until Tony Hancock rejected their script. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson reveal why The Day Off is now back on

The best review we ever had wasn't from a critic. It was from an artist, Lucian Freud. He said that The Rebel was the greatest film ever made about modern art. The 1961 movie was the first, and sadly the only, film we made with Tony Hancock. It's the story of an office clerk, played by Hancock, who believes himself to be a great but undiscovered artist. When he's fired from his job he moves to Paris, in the hope that the art world will recognise him for the genius he is. Of course, being Hancock, he's a terrible painter, but his ability to act like a genius persuades a group of fashionable young artists that he might be the real deal.

London, Jan 2: The script that led comic legend Tony Hancock to leave his hit writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, is going to be made into a film, more than 50 years after it was first written.

Galton and Simpson, who had penned all of Hancock's television and radio series from the early Fifties onwards, came up with movie script The Day Off in 1961.

But Hancock, who was keen to crack Hollywood at the time, insisted it 'wasn't international' enough.

He then split from Galton and Simpson - a move which is regarded as the biggest mistake of his career. While they went on to write the hit sitcom Steptoe And Son, Hancock succumbed.

The Day Off, by writing team Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, was unearthed during research for a new biography of the duo

They wrote some of the funniest, most memorable British comedy of the 20th century. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson's scripts for Tony Hancock had lines so brilliant, characters so absurd and jokes so sublime that they embedded themselves in the national consciousness.

Fans should prepare themselves for a treat, though, because the best may be yet to come. The Observer can reveal that Galton and Simpson completed a feature-length film script for Hancock that has never been made public. The Day Off, the gut-wrenching tale of a hapless bus conductor who just can't get anything right, has been hailed as a lost masterpiece and "the holy grail of comedy".

"It's probably the best thing they ever wrote," said Christopher Stevens, the author and journalist who stumbled on...