In my life, if I'm being honest, I have a few obsessions.
Anthony Hancock is just one.
To most people he was a flawed genius, a brilliant comic actor who had it all and threw it all away. Ending his life, alone in Sydney, in June 1968 at the age of 44.
That's the story everyone knows, but there was so much more to East Cheam's finest...
In 1962 Tony Hancock began working with a writer called Terry Nation for a two man show he would tour with Matt Monro. As the toured progressed Hancock and Nation would write scripts, rip them up and start again. This went on night after night, another thing that went on night after night was that the two men would drink and talk into the wee small hours as they bandied ideas about.
One of the ideas they came up for was for a film. The plot involved the human population being destroyed, only for the planet to be governed by robots. It was in the design of the robots that Hancock, no doubt fuelled by alcohol and good humour, was in his element. His favourite design was of an inverted cone, covered in table tennis balls with a sink plunger sticking out of it's head.
When the tour ended, Terry Nation returned to writing television scripts, including a commission for a new Science Fiction series on the BBC called "Doctor Who".
When Hancock saw the Daleks for the first time on screen, he pointed to the tv and shouted, "That bloody Nation, he's stolen my robots."
Next week, How Arthur Askey invented the Cybermen.
5 comments:
Well, I wouldn't have guessed his involvement in the genesis of Daleks, very interesting.
As robots go, apart from the eggwhisk on the front, their menace for me lies in the fact that they don't just look like a man in a metal suit, which seems to be the usual TV approach to robotic representation.
It's not robots that frighten me, these days I'm more concerned about statues and scarecrows.
That's really interesting. Watching Doctor Who, Tony Hancock is the last person you would imagine to have had an involvement.
Doctor Who has certainly used scary statues and scarecrows in its time. I'm not surprised that you would think twice about approaching one.
Did you see the episode Blink? It made me jump and squeal like a girl twice. The second half of this series is getting better and better.
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