They also told him that he’d be fired if took another drink. He was boozing hard and TV bosses were forced to send him to a drying out clinic. Professionally and personally he was all washed up and had little hope of reversing the situation.ĭuring that spring and early summer of 2008 in Australia they managed to get a handful of programmes in the can but Hancock’s new start was already looking decidedly shambolic. Soon after reaching Australia, ostensibly to record a new series of career-reviving shows, he was beginning to face the bitter truth. Worse still he sacked Galton and Simpson believing that he would do better writing his own material. In Hancock’s head there could be only be one star. He dropped long-standing support-star Sid James fearing that their winning partnership was making them look like a double-act. He hit the bottle and slowly as the booze robbed him of his talent he became more and more paranoid. Dogged by depression and haunted by self-doubt, the more successful he became the more terrified he was of failure. Sadly the real-life Hancock, although desperate for success, was unable to cope with his fame. Stop any dozen people in the street and the chances are they could tell you his fictional address – 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam – without a second thought. They laughed with him and they laughed at him. The inspired sit-com Hancock’s Half Hour ran for 100 episodes on radio and 76 on TV before spawning a one-man spin-off called simply Hancock.īased on the life and times of a pompous, misanthropic, down-at-heel suburbanite, the character of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock caught to perfection the prevailing mood of post war austerity. It was a tragic and lonely end, thousands of miles from home, for a man who just a handful of years earlier had been a huge TV and radio star, a household name loved by millions.ĭuring the 1950s and early 1960s Tony Hancock’s extraordinary comic-timing paired with brilliant scripts by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson made him the BBC’s most popular entertainer. Lonely and depressed, he ended his life with an overdose of drink and drugs in a rented flat in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia. If you or anyone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please call 988, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-80 or go to /resources.Fifty years ago this week one of Britain’s greatest comedians, Tony Hancock, committed suicide. F1dQEjT5GVĪt time of death, Knight had recently wrapped filming on “First Time Female Director,” the feature directorial debut of Chelsea Peretti, which was his first film credit. Jak Knight was a hysterical and honest comedian. On television, he performed on shows such as “The Meltdown With Jonah and Kumail,” “Adam Devine’s House Party” and His half-hour stand-up special premiered on Netflix in 2018 as part of the streamer’s “Comedy Lineup” series. He performed at the 2015 Oddball Comedy Festival, and opened for comedians such as Dave Chappelle, Joel McHale, Eric Andre, Moshe Kasher, and Aziz Ansari. He was also credited as a writer on seven episodes of the show’s second season, which aired this May.Īs a stand-up, Knight was named a 2014 Comedy Central Comic to Watch and a 2015 New Face at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival. Starting in 2021, Knight was a producer and regular performer on “Pause With Sam Jay,” a late night show hosted by his fellow comedian Jay. Moving Company,” and as an executive story editor on a season of “Black-ish.” He wrote for Bill Burr’s Roku Channel sketch comedy series “Immoral Compass,” and began working as a writer and producer on “Big Mouth” in 2018, for which he also voiced the character of DeVon, an arthritic 13-year-old. Prior to “Bust Down,” Knight worked as a writer on the 2013 Fox animated series “Lucas Bros.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |