Hancock’s hubris

Television feeds upon itself, which isn’t surprising. Watching TV is by a huge margin our most popular — or our most time-consuming — leisure activity. It’s surprising there isn’t more television about television. We have the occasional oleaginous tribute show to some ancient trouper, a few quizzes about television, and those endless Saturday-night marathons on Channel 4 — Your 100 Most Loathsome Television Moments. Not much else. There is a terror about revisiting the past. TV people must always be moving forward for fear the audience will think ‘we’ve seen all this’ and drift off to something new and exciting, such as talking to each other, or going to the pub.

But currently BBC4 is running a series on the miserable lives of the great TV comedians and this Wednesday we had Tony Hancock. It was an unremittingly bleak 90 minutes. I have seen cheerier Greek tragedies. I thought that at least they could have recreated some of the programmes to show younger viewers his astonishing talent and the monumental hubris it took for him to destroy it.