Anthony John Hancock, best known as Tony Hancock was a major figure in British television and radio comedy in the 1950s and 1960s.

Hancock was born in Birmingham, England, but raised in Bournemouth where his mother and step-father ran a small hotel formerly known as the Durlston Court, but now known as the Quality Hotel. He was educated at a boarding school in Swanage and Bradfield College, Berkshire.

Hancock left school aged 15. In 1942 he joined the RAF Regiment and following a failed audition for ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) ended up with The Ralph Reader Gang Show. Following the war he gained regular radio work in shows like Workers' Playtime and Variety Bandbox, and in 1951 he gained a part in Educating Archie, where he played the tutor and foil to the real star, a ventriloquist's dummy. Here he developed a catchphrase — "flippin' kids" — that was to earn him real recognition. In 1954 he was granted his own BBC radio show: Hancock's Half Hour.

Working with scripts from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson the show lasted for five years and over a hundred episodes, featuring Sid James, Bill Kerr, Kenneth Williams and over the years Moira Lister and Hattie Jacques. In the radio series the James character would often be dishonest and exploit Hancock's apparent gullibility, rather than be the friend of the television series.

Hancock was an enormous radio star. Like few others he was able to clear the streets while families gathered together to listen to the eagerly awaited episodes. His character changed slightly over the series but even in the earliest episodes "the lad himself" was evident. Later episodes were regarded as classics, even in their time. "A Sunday Afternoon At Home" and "Wild Man of the Woods" were top rating shows and were later released as an LP.

"A Sunday Afternoon At Home" is not only the very best of the Hancock ensemble pieces but it is also a near perfect evocation of those 1950s afternoons. A time when things really were "all shut up" as some sort of puritan and/or wartime rationing hangover.

Hancock's experiences were based in reality and on observation and no more so than in this episode. Comments about English cooking and the TV service of the day may seem rather broad today but for the time they contained more than an element of the truth. Grown men did like watching the Flowerpot Men; partly because of the novelty of just watching television, remember this was the time of the potter's wheel and the fish tank!

Hancock's television career as star began in 1956, initially on ITV, but it was the BBC-TV version of Hancock's Half Hour (later Hancock) that established him in the medium.

The classic Hancock characterisation referred to himself as "Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock" — being a larger-than-life version of Hancock's real self. In the TV series the regular cast was reduced to Hancock and James, allowing the humour to come from the interaction of the two men. James was the realist of the two, but also with an unpretentious personality who would puncture Hancock's pretensions. Hancock was to become anxious that his work with James was turning them in to a double act, and the last BBC series in 1961 was without James. Despite the contemporary criticism of Hancock, many consider this to contain the best of Hancock's BBC work.

Two of the episodes of Hancock's last BBC television series are probably his best-remembered work. The Blood Donor, in which he goes to a clinic to give blood. This contains famous lines such as, "A pint? Why, that's very nearly an armful!" (The doctor's response: "You won't have an empty arm... or an empty anything!") Another well-known episode is The Radio Ham, in which Hancock plays a ham radio enthusiast who receives a mayday call from a ship in distress, but his incompetence prevents him from taking its position. Both of these episodes were later re-recorded for a commercial 1961 LP in the style of radio episodes, and these versions have been continuously available ever since. The original TV versions have since been released as part of VHS and DVD compilations, and the soundtracks have also (a little confusingly) been released on CD.

Hancock was the cause of two important milestones in comedy. The first was that he was the first TV artist of any genre to be paid more then £1000 for a single half-hour program. Second was the way that comedy was made.

Up until Hancock’s TV series, every comedy show was performed live. In the Jimmy Edwards series 'Whacko', in which he played the Headmaster of a Public School, the scenes were intercut with shots of the school clock. This was because the studio only had one set of cameras, and the insert shot of the clock gave them ten seconds to move the cameras into position on the next scene. Temperamentally, Hancock's highly strung personality made this impractical, with the result that the programmes came to be pre-recorded, initially as telerecordings and later recorded on 2" video tape. The cost of this horrified the executives at the BBC, but they agreed to give it a try. All of a sudden, making a sitcom became more like making a film. The difference this made to the flow and continuity was immediately apparent, as well as the ability to do location shots. With a few years it had become standard practice to work in this way.

In early 1960 Hancock appeared on the BBC's Face to Face, a half-hour in-depth interview programme conducted by former Labour MP John Freeman. Freeman asked Hancock many searching questions about his life and work. Hancock, who deeply admired his interviewer, often appeared uncomfortable with the questions — but answered them frankly and honestly. Hancock had always been highly self-critical, and it is often argued that this interview heightened this tendency, contributing to his later depression.

Hancock’s self-doubt led to self destructiveness — he slowly sacked all those who rose to stardom with him -Bill Kerr, then Sid James, Kenneth Willaims and Hattie Jacques, and finally his script writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. His reasoning was that to be truly international he had to ditch the catchphrases and become realistic. His classic example, once you had launched him on this subject, was Kenneth Williams. He argued that whenever an ad-hoc character was needed, such as a policeman, it would be played by someone like Kenneth, who would come on with his well known oliy' Good Evening' catchphrase. Hancock said the comedy suffered because people did not believe in the policeman, they know it was just Kenneth doing a funny voice.

So he slowly got rid of all his friends. His final TV series, was performed with ordinary actors playing the comedy parts, and by doing so, he created a new way of doing comedy. After the last BBC series he sacked Galton and Simpson. As compensation, the BBC gave them a series of one off comedy shows, one of which was called 'The Rag and Bone man', the forerunner to the epic, classic comedy Steptoe and Son, played (as Hancock would have approved) by two straight actors, Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett.

He moved to ATV in 1963 with different writers. Godfrey Harrison was the main writer of these series and had found success first on radio then television with A Life Of Bliss (starring George Cole) but had also scripted Hancock's first ever regular television appearances on Fools Rush In (a segment of Kaleidoscope). Harrison had trouble meeting deadlines, so other writers assisted including Terry Nation.

Coincidentally, the series clashed in the television schedule with Steptoe and Son written by Hancock's former writers, Galton and Simpson. Comparisons were not flattering.

Hancock continued to make regular appearances on British television until 1967, but by now alcoholism had dissipated much of his talent. Hancock went to Australia in March 1968 and he committed suicide in Sydney in June.

There is a statue in his honour in Birmingham and a plaque on the wall of the hotel in Bournemouth where he spent some of his early life..

Hancock's first wife died as a result of her own problems with alcohol in 1969, the year after her former husband. Freddie Hancock has been based in New York City for many years.