Hancock & Joan (2008)

Very disappointing...

A lot of fun.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

By the time Joan Le Mesurier got together with Tony Hancock, he was already long past his brief heyday, which had started with a radio series, so good it could empty the pubs, later adapted for TV, and still selling videos wherever English is spoken.But his descent had been swift and steep, following the impulse-sacking of all his most talented colleagues, leaving him lonely and lost among the confusing signs of the 60's, a decade that somehow wasn't his, and whose end he would not live to see.So this is a minor-key drama, based around two alcoholics who were also best friends: John Le Mesurier of the languid, lazy charm, and Tony Hancock of the wild drinking-bouts, alternating with bitter introspection. And caught between them is Joan.Alcohol does not make a very good topic for drama, quite dreary and repetitive to the sober spectator. Not everyone is amused by smashed bottles and foul language, or riveted by diagrams of a swollen liver. What really steals the show is Ken Stott's uncanny gift for replicating Hancock's voice - if this is not too patronising to a Scots actor whom I had found unremarkable as Edinburgh detective Rebus. Not many people actually spoke like Hancock, surprisingly well-educated, with a few "Yeah mates" and "Flippin' kids" thrown-in for demotic effect. Yet both in accent and in tonal register, his delivery is astonishingly faithful to the original. On top of this, he and his lighting-team even manage to capture the facial expressions, both the hopeful smile and the weary resignation. Stott simply is every inch The Lad Himself.As for Maxine Peake, she is able to convey the basic ordinariness of Joan's character and background, further pointed-up by Tony's embarrassing visit to her strict petty-bourgeois family. Since it is unlikely that this dramatised documentary could have gone ahead without Joan's assistance, we can't quite tell how much of it is her own unconfirmed story. She admits that John was the decent and responsible husband, sandwiched between two of the bad-boy types who really got her heart racing. We know that John was surprisingly understanding about being cuckolded, (but as a double divorcée, he might have been). What we can't judge is her claim that Tony would still be alive, but for the postal strike that deprived him of her letters in Australia. Even in those days, a top TV star would have been able to establish a telephonic link home; still, we hear extracts from their correspondence, presumably historical, including his own lament (after the silence he thought was deliberate): "I gather you don't share my feelings any more" - supposedly triggering the overdose. But we can believe her agonised outburst on hearing the news: "I'd rather it was John who'd gone, not Tony."At any rate, both parties seemed to sense that Australia would be the end. He can be heard trying to bluff it out: "We'll bring back the old Hancock - Homburg hat and all!" It would prove a hollow boast. A press review (again, presumably historical) had presciently called his one-man show 'a form of suicide'.Directors often demand a lot of laughing and giggling to signal a close relationship, but there is altogether too much of it here. Tony's mother is well-played by Lesley Nicol, although just one year older than Stott. Alex Jennings resembles John physically, but not in character or personality. Julia Deakin is triumphant in cameo as a Ramsgate landlady. Finally, we didn't need that year's Eurovision winner 'Puppet on a String' as an establishing device. The whole story covers less than two years. How many of us managed to achieve so much by 44?

My dad's favourite comedian was Tony Hancock although I'm too young by some years to remember his early 60's popularity or mid 60's eventual decline and fall into alcoholism and an early death. Ironically taking its title no doubt from the Hancock character's defiant assertion midway through this gritty drama that he shared billing with no-one, this in fact is a three-header with a fine understated well-measured performance from Alex Jennings as the cuckolded husband, celebrated English actor John Le Mesurier (best known as Sgt Wilson in BBC's perennial "Dad's Army"). He gets his accent and mannerisms right and conveys tellingly Le Mesurier's weary passion-less effete-ism which effectively drives his passionate wife into the arms and bed of best friend Hancock who he unselfishly invites into his home to boost his spirits (talk about bringing the wolf to your door!). Given that the two leads get to act out a doomed affair, born of lust and fuelled by insecurity, depression and above all alcohol, their performances are naturally the dramatic centre-piece here and their at times heightened but always believable playing contrasts very well with the rest of the cast's down-home (or as Hancock has it, "provincial") playing. Ken Stott, for once not portraying a TV cop, also copes well with Hancock's accent and physical attributes and demonstrates his range with an emotionally charged performance as the hapless, parasitical, tortured yet still just lovable enough egoist in the main title role. The writing requires him to display the full gamut of pathetic emotions a drowning alcoholic must experience until they hit rock bottom and either sink or swim. Maxine Peake is at least as good as the adulterous wife, drawn helplessly but willingly into Hancock's fading orbit. She only just survives even as she combines the separate weaknesses (so we are told) of Hancock's previous two wives into one as she turns drunkard and suicidal to try and shock Hancock back to reality. The two fantasy scenes work very well, both at the death (literally), with firstly Hancock making peace with his typecast comedic past in a dream sequence where he is becalmed by his "Lad from East Cheam" alter-ego before his overdose and especially Joan's stoic external reaction to the news of his death contrasted simultaneously to the passionately emotional outburst she suffers inside which she could never exhibit in front of her passive husband Le Mesurier. This was an engrossing and illuminating insight into the last days of a major British comedic talent and an interesting and imaginative study of the damage that these difficult people inflict, sometimes unwittingly, on those lesser mortals who innocently stray into their extreme lives.

Maxine Peake showed her abilities with a terrifying performance as Myra Hindley. Considering she was opposite Jim Broadbent as Lord Longford and Andy Serkis as Ian Brady, that took some doing.Here, she steals the show with a spellbinding turn as John Le Mesurier's wife Joan. Unfortunately, this drama is out of kilter with the rest of The Curse of Comedy series. All the others cover a timespan during which the subjects were at their peak of success. This covers a two year period several years after Tony Hancock was one of the biggest stars on UK TV with Hancock's Half Hour and Hancock, and also after his unsuccessful film career. The events in this dramatisation bring matters to the conclusion of Hancock's lonely suicide in Austratlia. The death scenes were unsatisfactory, as Hancock sees a ghostly image of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, the character from East Cheam which brought him fame and fortune.A pity we didn't see Ken Stott saying "A PINT? THAT'S VERY NEARLY AN ARMFUL!"

This was the second of the BBC's 'Curse of Comedy' dramas and perhaps the seediest. Based on the memoirs of Joan Le Mesurier about her self-destructive and selfish affair with Tony Hancock in the final years of his life, this does not do any of the characters any favours and, despite fine performances from Maxine Peake, Ken Stott, and Alex Jennings (as John Le Mesurier), places the story firmly in the tatty seaside setting (where in fact the two mismatched lovers go to live at one point).I'm never quite sure what's achieved by taking the real-life problems of TV icons and putting them so baldly on the screen. 'Hancock and Joan', although engrossing and oddly moving at times, felt like an intrusion into private lives which should have stayed private.