THE DEPARTMENT STORE SANTA

Hancock's Half Hour (Radio) First Series - Programme 7

Forced by the Ministry of Labour to stop drawing unemployment benefit and take a job, Hancock reluctantly becomes a Santa in Sid's department store.

Cast
Tony Hancock
Bill Kerr
Moira Lister
Sidney James
Alan Simpson
Kenneth Williams

Programme Guide

Cashing in early on the festive season, this show, dealing with the trials and troubles of a Father Christmas in a large department store, went out over two weeks prior to the Christmas holiday.

Hancock tries his hand as a store Santa, complete with sleigh, reindeer and fairy grotto. Open to all the whims and wiles of the children coming to visit him for a gift, the well-known, but by now rejected, catch-phrase "Flippin' Kids" from "Educating Archie" would, no doubt, have served Hancock quite well in this role.

The fact that the writers had employed a Christmas theme so early before the event might suggest a shortage of ideas. The team were still getting into the routine of the new format and until the characters were fully developed, in order that situation could develop out of character alone, it was necessary to think of varying situations in which to put the main characters.

It would hardly be surprising, however, if Galton and Simpson hadn't become short of subject matter. For even Tony Hancock admitted, when they had finally given up the trappings of Each Cheam altogether, that they had used up all the possibilities of the Railway Cuttings situation.

Alan Simpson has said that the reason for any variation in the quality of shows from week to week was quite simply due to the heavy workload involved. For instance, the third, fourth and fifth radio series of "Hancock's Half Hour" - each of twenty shows - were interspersed with Hancock's television series. So, maintaining the high standard cannot have been easy by any stretch of the imagination.

Take the period from July 1956 to July 1958, for example. During this time, Galton and Simpson, quite apart from their other writing activities, wrote 40 radio and 24 television scripts for "Hancock's Half Hour": in total, 32 hours of top-class entertainment. Allowing one week to complete each half-hour script and taking into consideration the scripts that didn't work out, it is indeed a sizeable output. This demanding work rate made the finished product all the more worthy, because, among these shows, there were very few damp squibs.

The two writers were in their twenties and thirties when, arguably, their best work was completed and, accordingly, Alan Simpson, once confided that: "Comedy script writing is a young man's game". On the scale and standard produced by Galton and Simpson, few would disagree.