Radio Series Episodes
Most of the radio episodes were recorded between one day and three weeks in advance of broadcast, except for Series 6 which was mostly recorded during a three-week period in June 1959 in order to avoid clashing with the recording of Series 5 of the television show.
Galton and Simpson never gave any of their Hancock scripts, for radio or television, titles; this was usually left to the girl who filed the scripts at their office, who gave them names that were a reminder of what the script was about. So when Roger Wilmut came to write his book 'Tony Hancock - Artiste' (first published 1978) he took the liberty of inventing titles where necessary and these titles, a combination of the file names and Wilmut's own, have become the accepted ones ever since, with the approval of Galton and Simpson and the BBC.
The regular cast members generally played "themselves", in that the characters were called by the actor's real name. However, there were exceptions:
- Kenneth Williams played a series of unnamed characters referred to in the scripts—but not on air—as "Snide". He also played the very occasional roles of Edwardian Fred (a criminal associate of Sid's) and Hancock's Vicar, as well as various other characters.
- Alan Simpson played an unnamed man who listened patiently to Hancock's long-winded stories in early episodes. His lines would frequently be restricted to simply "Yes", "Really?", "Mm-hmm", or "I see".
- Hattie Jacques played Griselda Pugh, Hancock's secretary.
Two wiped episodes of the radio series—"The Blackboard Jungle" (series 3) and "The New Secretary" (series 4)—were recovered in 2002 from off-air home recordings made by listener Vic Rogers.
Read more about this topic: Hancock's Half Hour
Famous quotes containing the words radio, series and/or episodes:
“... the ... radio station played a Chopin polonaise. On all the following days news bulletins were prefaced by Chopin—preludes, etudes, waltzes, mazurkas. The war became for me a victory, known in advance, Chopin over Hitler.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)
“Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)