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
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—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
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