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We hope you are reading these sleeve notes having purchased this boxed set from a bona fide DVD supplier and not standing next to the second hand video shelf in your local charity shop. Not that we have anything against charity shops. A beautiful overcoat from Harrod’s springs to mind. Green with gold braid. It was a doorman’s coat but once it was dyed you would never know. We take turns in wearing it and are pleased to say it’s got years left in it yet. However the point is that once you have coughed up the requisite conkers you will be the proud owner of the very first compilation of all the surviving episodes of the television career of Tony Hancock, an equally enthisiastic client of Oxfam. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first television broadcast here are the 37 episodes that remain form the original canon of 56. Oh what memories are conjured up in glancing through the titles. Those halcyon days after the recordings when we happily repaired to The Hand and Racquet and brought our beloved star a drink, and waited, and waited, and waited, for him to buy us one in return. And thinking further back when we were teenagers in Milford Sanatorium and wrote a letter to the immortal Frank Muir and Denis Norden, the most erudite and successful comedy writers around, offering to be their tea bots in return for them showing us how it was done. And receiving back the most charming kindly letter ever written giving someone the elbow. They passed the buck by suggesting that we send any ideas to Gale Pedrick the then script editor of The BBC. Which we did. And it worked. Apart from being even more erudite than what tehy were, Gale was a lovely man who got us started and before you could say “Can you hear me mother?” we were professionals. And sometimes getting paid. We are forever grateful to Frank and Dennis for their help on to the ladder, if only for the fact that we still send the same letter to aspiring writers on the basis that it world for us so why not for them? And here we are over 50 years in the business still waiting for the promises of chorus girls and champagne parties till dawn. There’s no doubt we chose the wrong side of the business. As a well known Hollywood screenwriter once said about an aspiring actress “she was so dumb she slept with the writers”. Still we mustn’t be bitter. Let’s face it Irene Handl once winked at us so we can’t complain. Also if we had been on the other side of the camera we wouldn’t have been here introducing the Collected Works of Tony Hancock. So enough of these David Niven type reminiscences. So switch on, insert, and enjoy the fruits of our endeavours while we go while we go off to write the sleeve notes to the complete oeurve of Steptoe and Son which you will no doubt wish to add to your colletion. Ray Galton & Alan Simpson.