The themes tackled by this novel, the world of comedy and the relationship between celebrity and identity, are intriguing ones. We are fascinated by great comics because of their heroism. It's heroic of them to face up to the things the rest of us are busily trying to forget and then stand up alone in front of the crowd and not merely confront us with so many unpalatable facts, but also make us laugh in the process. In the Hancock's Half-Hour sketch about the longueurs of Sunday, Hancock became an English Sunday enfleshed and personified. He was the infinite tedium of a world that had closed for 24 hours. This was truly Britain's day of rest in the 1950s, but it was also - hence the humour - a protest against it. Hancock came to feel trapped by the format of the Half-Hour sketches. He believed they imprisoned his talent. He wanted instead to go on the road as that contemporary existentialist figure, the stand-up comic, not restricted to a script, or at least not one scripted by others. He went on to do precisely that, and his final half-hour came not long after, in a suicide induced by an extended orgy of squalor and humiliation. By then the tears of that particular clown were 95 per cent proof.

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