The book as object in Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s 'Hancock’s half hour' scripts

Abstract

It is common critical practice these days to describe the work of previous generations of critics as idealistic in the worst possible sense, treating literature as though it existed in a realm of pristine ideas when in fact it can only ever exist in material form as one or more textualizations. In this paper I want to consider how the relationship between an idealized text and its imperfect physical embodiment is explored in an unlikely corner of English comic history, an episode of the BBC radio and television show Hancock's Half Hour starring Tony Hancock and written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The episode is called "The Missing Page" and was first broadcast on 11 March 1960 (Galton & Simpson 1960) on BBC television and re-recorded with virtually the same script as an audio performance five years later (Galton & Simpson 1965).