Tony Hancock - possibly the first UK television comedy superstar (and comparable in stature to Phil Silvers for comic greatness). Yet by the time he made this show for Australian TV the magic had deserted him (as had Galton & Simpson). Hancocks best work was made 5-10 years before this stinker.
This show was intended to relaunch Hancock in Australia where he was already well known because of his BBC work. Written, produced and filmed in Oz this show has a great concept (Hancock emigrates down under to inflict his values and opinions on another culture) but is poorly executed. The scripts just didn't shine and the lad from East Cheam himself had lost his comic touch. Tony was intending to make a whole new series but died from a mixture of drink and prescription drugs during production of the series and only a handful of these Australian shows were completed. To be honest they just aren't funny and are a pale imitation of his hilarious BBC radio and TV shows. Hancock was a wonderfully droll and pessimistic comic but this series shows that without Galton & Simpson's brilliantly funny scripts (written specially for him when he was at the BBC) as a platform for his talents he was very much lost.
This series does have the novelty value of being made in colour (prior to this his TV shows were black and white) which was what pricked my curiosity to watch them. However there is also a sadness in watching a great comic actor struggle with such second rate scripts. Hancock died in 1968 so i'm not sure why IMDb has this series listed as 1972 (unless it wasn't transmitted until then).
Do yourself a favour and avoid this series. Get the CD's and DVD's of his BBC radio & TV shows instead. Even his films (The Rebel / The Punch & Judy man), despite being relatively mediocre are more watchable than this painful and sad attempt.
