IN the Bournemouth hotel where Tony Hancock spent much of his childhood, the men who wrote 166 Hancock Half Hours are recalling the great comedian.

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson were a vital part of Hancock’s success, providing the scripts for his BBC radio and TV series and his first film.

Another key part of that success was co-star Sid James, whose widow Valerie is also in Bournemouth for a gathering of the Tony Hancock Appreciation Society.

The writers recall how terrified Sid was at the first recordings of the radio series which immortalised Railway Cuttings in East Cheam.

“There was a man who had been making loads of films and he was shaking like a leaf,” says Ray, 79.

“He wore a hat and pulled the brim right down over his head and put the script right up so no one could see him at all. After the third recording, he had chucked the hat away.”

Tony Hancock was born in Birmingham but lived in Bournemouth from the age of three. After his father’s death he lived with his stepfather and mother in the Durlston Court Hotel – now the Hotel Celebrity, which hosted the weekend’s fan event.

Much has been written about the depression which prompted Hancock to take his own life in 1968. But Galton and Simpson remember the laughter echoing from the radio studio. “Sid had a really dirty laugh and Hancock had a laugh too,” says Ray. Team their laughter with that of co-stars Bill Kerr and Kenneth Williams and “they didn’t need an audience”, he remembers.

Although Sid went on to the Carry On films and TV’s Bless This House, Valerie remembers: “His biggest love was Hancock, working with Tony and the boys. He said that really made him.”

“He was a professional,” she says of Hancock. “When everybody was congratulating him and saying ‘Tony, what a fantastic show’, he was saying ‘What do we do next week?’ “Sid used to say ‘For goodness’ sake, Tony, let’s have a drink and celebrate the success of this one’.”

Hancock’s writers met as teenage patients in a TB sanatorium in Surrey. After success as sketch writers, they were given the chance to write 30-minute shows for Hancock.

Early scripts featured more outlandish plots, but later in the show they found they could milk comedy from more simple situations, such as waiting for a night bus, paying a hospital visit or enduring a sleepless night.

“It took us quite a long time to get into thinking that we could write shows about practically nothing,” says Ray.

Arguably the greatest ever radio Hancock was Sunday Afternoon At Home. “Thirty minutes of nothing,” says Alan. “Nothing happened, which is funny in itself.”

Did the writers ever expect to be attending fan events more than 50 years after the shows began? “I never thought I’d be anywhere in 50 years’ time,” says Ray.

The BBC didn’t anticipate the longevity of the shows’ appeal either and failed to preserve copies of many radio episodes.

“The first Hancock records were made by Decca,” recalls Ray. “They got permission to use the soundtracks. The BBC said ‘As long as you give us a credit’ – no question of money.”

After 101 radio programmes and 65 TV episodes, Hancock parted company with Galton and Simpson, who went on to write eight series of Steptoe and Son.

Today the shows are enjoying a new lease of life on CDs and DVDs.

Valerie James says: “I listen to them every Wednesday on BBC7. I won’t answer the phone when they’re on and they haven’t dated.”

Alan, 80, believes the radio shows have survived better than the TV episodes. “When you see the television show, it’s shot with three cameras – they go hazy. If you listen to the radio shows, they’ve been digitised and they could have been recorded yesterday.”

Today the writers meet plenty of people who know all those programmes better than they do themselves.

“I saw Junior Mastermind. There was an 11-year-old on it,” says Alan.

“His subject matter was Hancock. He got 15 questions out of 15.

“I could answer four of them, like ‘Who wrote Hancock’s Half Hour along with Ray Galton?’ I thought ‘Hang on, I know that’.”

Ray says: “I get kids coming up to me, sometimes about 10 years old. They absolutely love and adore Hancock.

“I say ‘How do you know it?’ and you know what they’re going to say. ‘My Dad made me listen to it’.”

“Or ‘my granddad’, these days,” adds Alan.

l For information on the Tony Hancock Appreciation Society, visit tonyhancock.org.uk. Galton and Simpson’s website is galtonandsimpson.com.