The title tells all. Barricaded in his Sydney hotel bedroom with plentiful stocks of vodka, the lad from East Cheam casts a bleary eye over his wrecked career and marriages before swallowing the last handful of pills. Hancock’s Last Half Hour is written by someone who knows and loves his subject, and has the technical skill to cut across chronological time and re-create Hancock entire, through the inflections, attitudes and verbal shorthand which Hancock gave to English speech.

Hancock’s battered mind jumps dazzlingly about, through the wilderness of comic theory including Freud (“How would he go down second house at the Glasgow Empire?”) teasing the reader, confiding to a stags head on the wall, and sending up disconsolate prayers to Bertrand Russell, even though, as he finally observes, “There’s not a clown in the sky.”