Tony Hancock

The Beeb's drama department has carved out a neat niche with its biopics of beloved British comedy stars: from Kenneth Williams and Tony Hancock to Frankie Howerd and Morecambe and Wise. This latest film, first shown on BBC Four in January, is a worthy addition. Gavin & Stacey's Ruth Jones stars in an acclaimed dramatisation of Carry On star Hattie Jacques's life. Though she played an austere matron on screen, Jacques's private life was actually rather racy. The story focuses on the early 1960s love triangle between Jacques, her chauffeur (Aidan Turner) and her husband, Dad's Army star John Le Mesurier (a heartbreaking turn from Cold Feet's Robert Bathurst) - whom she continued to love, even when she moved her toyboy into their bed. It's a bittersweet story, superbly acted, and followed by a repeat of Jacques's 1963 appearance on This Is Your Life.

He made his name as Tony Hancock's co-star in Hancock's Half Hour and was a member of the bullion robbery gang in The Lavender Hill Mob but cockney comic Sid James will be remembered most as a star of the Carry On films. This profile, first broadcast in 2000, delves into his private life: his widow Valerie recalls how his hectic lifestyle and workaholic tendencies led to a heart attack at the age of 53, an affair with Barbara Windsor at 59, and his death at age 62 after collapsing on stage at the Sunderland Empire Theatre (unaware of what was happening, the audience laughed, believing the events to be part of the show).

In Hattie, Hattie Jacques (Ruth Jones) looked like she might be about to tell This Is Your Life host Eamonn Andrews to get stuffed, before composing herself and affecting modesty: "Oh Eamonn, they don't come much duller than me." Ha ha. What Andrews didn't know was that Jacques had just changed the man in the marital bed, despatching husband John Le Mesurier upstairs and summoning down their lodger.

No one knew this, This Is Your Life passed off without scandal, and in the divorce court, to protect Jacques, Le Mesurier pretended to have been the adulterer. "Thank you for ending our lovely marriage so beautifully," she said.

What a story! How civilised and quietly heroic and terribly British. Well, Le Mesurier was, anyway. The drama gave us nothing of Le Mesurier the actor and not very much of Jacques the actress.

Eric Sykes, in the run-up to BBC4's latest squint under the greasepaint of the great showbiz era, had complained about this.

But Hattie wasn't a sensationalist piece, just sad and moving and told in the usual Beeb 4 way with one classic car (the E-Type Jag driven by the fancy man, not his own), period lampshades, a fug of cigarette smoke, skinny ties, a dollop of casual sexism, a couple of old choons and, of course, a good script and some cracking acting.

Jones did that remarkable thing of making you forget all about her best-known role (Gavin and Somebody) but Robert Bathurst as Le Mesurier was even better, perfectly capturing his vagueness.

Swift production of the martini decanter solved most of his crises, although for having to tell his sons he was finally leaving he tried this sweetener: "I've got you both... pen knives."

I cheered when he remarried Jacques' friend Joan, completely forgetting that the latter's subsequent affair with Tony Hancock had been the subject of a previous Beeb 4 biopic. Pass the martini, old bean.

Has there ever been a more passive and diffident Englishman than John Le Mesurier? Last time he was dramatised was in a film about his best friend Tony Hancock, in which he stood politely by as Hancock ran off with Le Mesurier's third wife. Now he turns up in Hattie (BBC4) as Hattie Jacques's cuckolded husband (she was his second wife). Jacques - played in an exceptional performance by Ruth Jones - took in her used-car salesman lover as a lodger, and maintained a secret affair by the cunning means of slipping upstairs during the middle of the night. The scene in which she was finally discovered by Le Mesurier (a perfectly cast Robert Bathurst) in bed with her lover was a vision of tragicomic poignancy. He apologised for intruding and explained with consummate resignation that he was looking for his book - a James Bond novel. Seldom has the distance between reality and fantasy been so economically or movingly captured.

Will Hattie be the last to get the BBC biopic treatment

Nostalgic retellings of the lives of Tony Hancock, Kenneth Williams, and Eric & Ernie have been ratings winners, but fictionalised accounts can land the Beeb in hot water.

Ray Galton: 'I punched a writer in the face'

Veteran comedy writer Ray Galton has revealed that he punched a writer in the face for suggesting that he took pleasure in Tony Hancock's decline.

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson have been writing together for 60 years and given us classic comedies. If they never write another word we are all in their debt. Radio 2 had a good idea to celebrate their partnership by recreating some of their old scripts for today's new comedy stars. The last in the series was Paul Merton in the role Tony Hancock made famous, The Blood Donor.

Actually, it was written for Arthur Lowe so, in theory, it should have passed easily into another voice. Unfortunately, it didn't. Merton sounded as if he were reading. So did June Whitfield's daughter, Suzy Aitchison, playing the nurse, the role her mother took so memorably 48 years ago. Why? It wasn't the script or the players. It's the art of good comedy production that's gone missing. The technical process has grown easier. The making of words into magic remains a tricky art.

The final programme marking Galton and Simpson's 60-year writing partnership is a new version of one of their most famous works. Originally written for Tony Hancock, The Blood Donor is regarded as a comedy classic, so it's a brave man who would step into Hancock's shoes and take on what is pretty much a perfect piece of comedy writing.

Here Paul Merton takes the Hancock role and, despite seeming a little un-easy at times, comes about as close to anyone as carrying it off.

The script has been tweaked a bit to bring it up to date, but none of the memorable lines have been lost. And in an affectionate nod to the past, Suzi Aitchison takes the role of the nurse - a part played by her mother June Whitfield in the original 48 years ago.

This short comedy season, celebrating the 60-year writing partnership of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson by putting on a quartet of old scripts with new performers, ends on a bold note. Paul Merton recreates The Blood Donor, written for and performed by Tony Hancock in 1961, the classic where our self-important hero answers the call and gets a few surprises. It's bold of Merton to attempt this as, try as he may to present himself as a curmudgeon, everyone thinks he's a nice guy because, unlike Hancock, we feel we know his personality through panel games.

When Paul Merton performed in some rejigged Galton and Simpson comedies on ITV in the late 1990s, he did attempt some of the classic Hancock's Half Hour/Hancock episodes, but wisely steered clear of the classic Blood Donor. No such luck here, as possibly the most well-known episode of Tony Hancock's sitcom stars Merton in the last of this series of radio adaptations. All in all, it's been an odd series - the delivery and content often sounding antiquated and jarring with some of the contemporary updates.