This is the Modern World: Hancock's Half Hour edition

[gilbertharding]

Listening to HHH recently, it struck me that one of the treats (for me) is hearing The Lad just casually dismissing those things that obviously denoted modern degeneracy - eg: Frothy coffee.

In yesterday's episode, he complained that Hattie Jacques was seduced by the American Airmen offering her 'a stick of chewing gum and two packets of long fags'.

I mean, these aren't jokes as such, but as observations they're brilliantly funny. And now 65 years later what are they? What do they evoke?

Dunno. *presses post*

[neveragain]

Peep Show was good at picking up on recognisable, often mundane aspects of modern life.

[Armin Meiwes]

Listening to HHH recently, it struck me that one of the treats (for me) is hearing The Lad just casually dismissing those things that obviously denoted modern degeneracy - eg: Frothy coffee.

In yesterday's episode, he complained that Hattie Jacques was seduced by the American Airmen offering her 'a stick of chewing gum and two packets of long fags'.

I mean, these aren't jokes as such, but as observations they're brilliantly funny. And now 65 years later what are they? What do they evoke?

Dunno. *presses post*

Amazing that he was 30 when HHH started and still well off 40 by the time it finished given that he played a kind of curmudgeonly middle aged cynic often raging (or at least quietly sighing) at the modern world. Mind you I suppose 30 basically was middle aged back then so maybe not that surprising.

Best episode I can remember for specifically bemoaning the changing times was Fred's Pie Stall.

[gilbertharding]

Galton and Simpson were even younger than him, of course...

Just remembered his withering assessments of whatever Sid is wearing... winkle pickers, drainpipes...

[famethrowa]

One that sticks with me is our Tony complaining about pine needles on the Christmas tree... "I come running down in my rope sandals, and my feet look like pin cushions!" Such petty and wonderful sniping.

[crowsfeet]

Best episode I can remember for specifically bemoaning the changing times was Fred's Pie Stall.

"Oh dear...how plebeian."

One of the finest episodes

[Autopsy Turvey]

Not really sure what the OP is looking for, but I still wonder at how relatable HHH seemed to me as an adolescent in the late 80s. There's a recurring theme of the susceptibility of identities to cultural influences, like Hancock listening to the Archers and getting all Arcadian and rustic, and Miss Pugh "coming out of the pictures after seeing Marilyn Monroe, swinging your hips with your mouth half open trying to look sultry."

Or that pre-war copy of the Tailor & Cutter in the dentist's waiting room; every time Hancock has a tooth filled he behaves like Noel Coward for a fortnight.

That all feels very modern in a way.

[Theoretical Dentist]

Best episode I can remember for specifically bemoaning the changing times was Fred's Pie Stall.

Fred's Pie Stall was on Radio 4 Extra today and it reminded me of this thread, although I didn't realise the episode had been mentioned. But yeah, it's all about modernity enroaching on Cheam high street. A probably incomplete list of things Hancock or the others cite as (mostly) unwelcome modern intrusions:

• Potatoes grown with fertilisers
• Coffee houses
• Shish kebabs
• Omelette Valenciana
• Croissants au beurre
• Café staff with green fingernails and omnibus editions of Ibsen
• Apple strudel
• Cappuccino
• Open sandwiches
• Foreigners
• Brown sugar
• Frankfurters
• Ravioli

And the old-fashioned things they're displacing, or that have already disappeared:

• Meat pie stalls
• Butchers' shops with meat hanging outside
• Pease pudding and faggots
• Saveloys
• Pigs' trotters
• Stale cheesecakes
• Rolls with butter

I think it's interesting how much of this you could still imagine being derided today. It would be framed more in terms of gentrification or pretentiousness than modernity, but even in the 65-year-old episode there's a sense of that.

[kalowski]

Listening to HHH recently, it struck me that one of the treats (for me) is hearing The Lad just casually dismissing those things that obviously denoted modern degeneracy - eg: Frothy coffee.

In yesterday's episode, he complained that Hattie Jacques was seduced by the American Airmen offering her 'a stick of chewing gum and two packets of long fags'.

I mean, these aren't jokes as such, but as observations they're brilliantly funny. And now 65 years later what are they? What do they evoke?

Dunno. *presses post*

They were crafted perfectly for his timing. Even though I don't remember the episode, I can hear the Lad Himself saying that line. Just fantastic.

[gilbertharding]

I think, maybe... I was born a few years after Hancock died, but I still think of it as Post War... the mention of brown sugar (for your frothy coffee) reminds me that if you were from a certain background, or part of the country, you could still be being impressed (or upset) by that sort of thing even as late as the mid 80s.

Thinking about it even further, it's the same seam of observation later mined to great effect by Victoria Wood.

[neveragain]

I find it funny there are still people who complain about fancy types of coffee.

[Brundle-Fly]

There are some great lines in A Sunday Afternoon At Home. I love some of Hancock's old fashioned turns of phrase. "That is by the way and nothing to do with it." Nobody talks like this anymore.



Griselda Pugh: Ooh look! It's started raining!

Hancock: That's all we wanted. You watch, it'll go dark in a minute, we'll have to switch the lights on. I think I'll go to bed.

Griselda Pugh: [reproachfully] You've only been up an hour...

Hancock: That is by the way and nothing to do with it. I might just as well be in bed, there's nothing else to do. I wish I hadn't got up now. Your dinner wasn't worth getting up for, I'll tell you that for a start!

Griselda Pugh: Well I don't know, I ate all mine.

Hancock: That is neither here nor there. You also ate Bill's, and Sid's, and mine! I thought my mother was a bad cook but at least her gravy used to move about. Yours just sort of lies there and sets.

Griselda Pugh: That's the goodness in it!

Hancock: That's the half a pound of flour you put in it!

Kenneth Williams (Clark): Not a very nice afternoon, is it?

Hancock: No.

Kenneth Williams (Clark): It's raining you know.

Hancock: [sarcastically] Oh so that's what's making the roads wet.

[gilbertharding]

I find it funny there are still people who complain about fancy types of coffee.

I still, deliberately, refer to 'expresso', because that's definitely what it was called when I first heard of it. The fact that it makes people younger than me think I'm faintly ridiculous is a bonus.

[Toki]

Peep Show was good at picking up on recognisable, often mundane aspects of modern life.

'I'm the one whose laughing, because secretly I love brown toast' is my favourite example of this.

[famethrowa]

I thought my mother was a bad cook but at least her gravy used to move about!

I've never forgotten this line, it's always with me.

[lauraxsynthesis]

I wanted to post that sketch The Trap did recreating the Seinfeld episode about not masturbating but as an episode of Hancock's Half Hour, but I couldn't find a recording of it. I guess it wouldn't really fit with the topic of the thread anyway. But if someone has that sketch I wanna hear it again.

[Armin Meiwes]

There are some great lines in A Sunday Afternoon At Home. I love some of Hancock's old fashioned turns of phrase. "That is by the way and nothing to do with it." Nobody talks like this anymore.



Griselda Pugh: Ooh look! It's started raining!

Hancock: That's all we wanted. You watch, it'll go dark in a minute, we'll have to switch the lights on. I think I'll go to bed.

Griselda Pugh: [reproachfully] You've only been up an hour...

Hancock: That is by the way and nothing to do with it. I might just as well be in bed, there's nothing else to do. I wish I hadn't got up now. Your dinner wasn't worth getting up for, I'll tell you that for a start!

Griselda Pugh: Well I don't know, I ate all mine.

Hancock: That is neither here nor there. You also ate Bill's, and Sid's, and mine! I thought my mother was a bad cook but at least her gravy used to move about. Yours just sort of lies there and sets.

Griselda Pugh: That's the goodness in it!

Hancock: That's the half a pound of flour you put in it!

Kenneth Williams (Clark): Not a very nice afternoon, is it?

Hancock: No.

Kenneth Williams (Clark): It's raining you know.

Hancock: [sarcastically] Oh so that's what's making the roads wet.

That one is great, definitely one of my favourites, a whole episode of them just sitting around moaning about how bored they are. Between that and The Sleepless Night they were doing actual shows about nothing like 40 years before a certain other show was claiming to be.

[Autopsy Turvey]

The use of language is phenomenal. See Hancock fretting that Sid's going to kill him with the bread knife: "Oh no, not that! Twelve inches of cold Sheffield across me tonsils!"

[Brundle-Fly]

The use of language is phenomenal. See Hancock fretting that Sid's going to kill him with the bread knife: "Oh no, not that! Twelve inches of cold Sheffield across me tonsils!"

"A mouthful of signet rings!"

[Brundle-Fly]

That one is great, definitely one of my favourites, a whole episode of them just sitting around moaning about how bored they are. Between that and The Sleepless Night they were doing actual shows about nothing like 40 years before a certain other show was claiming to be.

That one episode basically invents the entire conceit of The Royle Family.

[FredNurke]

On the language front, as I've mentioned before, Hancock's Half Hour propagated (the modern sense of) the word 'codswallop'.

[gilbertharding]

I wanted to post that sketch The Trap did recreating the Seinfeld episode about not masturbating but as an episode of Hancock's Half Hour, but I couldn't find a recording of it. I guess it wouldn't really fit with the topic of the thread anyway. But if someone has that sketch I wanna hear it again.

I've never heard it, but would like to.

Is it in one of these episodes: https://fourble.co.uk/podcast/potom?

[Senior Baiano]

"Started out as a fag, worked me way up to head cigar"

[JesusAndYourBush]

I remember listening to a cassette of Fred's Pie Stall in the 80's.
There's the line "Lift up the crust and whop in a saveloy".
I asked my Dad what a saveloy was and his reply: a cockney sausage!

[lauraxsynthesis]

I've never heard it, but would like to.

Is it in one of these episodes: https://fourble.co.uk/podcast/potom?

Thanks! I ended up asking Dan Mersh on Twitter and here it is!

[neveragain]

That was wonderful, I loved the of-the-time references. Performances weren't bad either.

If memory serves, Peter Serafinowicz made a skit called 'The Eye Donor' where he voiced Hancock and the rest consisted of lines from the actual episode. I distinctly remember someone else in the waiting room (Frank Thornton?) responding, "I've donated twelve times already."

[thenoise]

I find it funny there are still people who complain about fancy types of coffee.

Everyone who was ever a 'barista' has heard it, usually multiple times a day, from some elderly 'character'
'I just want a normal coffee!! Do you sell normal coffee?'
Yes of course we do.
'I don't know what any of that "latte" stuff means'
I point to the picture on the wall with all the coffee definitions alwith pictures showing proportions of milk, coffee, foam etc. But they remain uneducated.

[Moj]

Everyone who was ever a 'barista' has heard it, usually multiple times a day, from some elderly 'character'
'I just want a normal coffee!! Do you sell normal coffee?'
Yes of course we do.
'I don't know what any of that "latte" stuff means'
I point to the picture on the wall with all the coffee definitions alwith pictures showing proportions of milk, coffee, foam etc. But they remain uneducated.

If I ran a cafe, I'd keep Nescafé under the counter for them, along with tiny UHT milk cartons. And charge them £7 for it.

[TheAssassin]

I find it funny there are still people who complain about fancy types of coffee.

Not a complaint, but I detest the people that drink these "fancy" types of coffee.  You know that people aren't drinking tea because nowhere actually can prepare or sell a good tea.

[Toki]

Not a complaint, but I detest the people that drink these "fancy" types of coffee.  You know that people aren't drinking tea because nowhere actually can prepare or sell a good tea.

Is this a Hancock quote? I've been trying to figure out how the logic of 'people drinking fancy coffees because there is no alternative are detestable' and I can't work it.

I distinctly remember someone else in the waiting room (Frank Thornton?) responding, "I've donated twelve times already."

Sure you're not thinking of Hugh Lloyd? It's been a while since I've seen it, but he's the one who walks off with Hancock's sweets after.