Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock, 'Tone' to his friends, was a major figure in British comedy during the fifties and sixties. He was a comic master who kept radio and television audiences in fits of laughter. The comedy Hancock gave us is timeless, as funny today as it was over 40 years ago. 

Tony Hancock was a true star of stage, TV and Radio, although he also appeared in several films as well. He starred in "The Rebel" (1960) and had a very funny cameo appearance in "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines." He stared next to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore as an incredulous police detective in "The Wrong Box".

Undoubtedly his best work was done for BBC radio and later on BBC Television. Hancock's own amazing talent coupled with the brilliant scripts of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson produced great, timeless comedy. The half hour television shows were broadcast for several years under different series titles, starting in 1956 on the BBC as "Hancock's Half Hour" and changing to "Hancock" in 1961. A regular audience of 8 million every Tuesday night tuned in their radios to listen Hancock.

The shows moved to commercial television (ATV) in 1963 with different scriptwriters, and continued up to 1967. (Galton and Simpson went on to write for the Steptoe and Son series.) The later programmes dropped the 'sitcom' format and switched to variety shows with sketches.

Many comedy stars appeared with Tony on these half-hour shows, most notably Carry On stars: Sid James, Kenneth Williams, June Whitfield and Hattie Jacques. Other noteworthy appearances were by Patrick Cargill, Bill Kerr, Liz Fraser and Frank Thornton.

Disillusioned with the British comedy scene, Tony went to Australia in March 1968 to work on a television comedy series.
Here he did some interesting work as a Pommy emigrant to Australia. Yet despite this success and still desperately unhappy, Anthony Hancock took his own life in Sydney that June at the age of 44. The world was thus deprived of perhaps its greatest post-war comedian.