The Two Of Us - Written & Read By Sheila Hancock <AudioBook>

When John Thaw, star of The Sweeney and Inspector Morse, died from cancer in 2002, a nation lost one of its finest actors and Sheila Hancock lost a beloved husband. In this unique double biography she chronicles their lives - personal and professional, together and apart. John Thaw was born in Manchester, the son of a lorry driver. When he arrived at RADA on a scholarship he felt an outsider. In fact his timing was perfect: it was the sixties and television was beginning to make its mark. With his roles in Z-Cars and The Sweeney, fame came quickly. But it was John's role as Morse that made him an icon. In 1974 he married Sheila Hancock, with whom he shared a working-class background and a RADA education. Sheila was already the star of the TV series The Rag Trade and went on to become the first woman artistic director at the RSC. Theirs was a sometimes turbulent, always passionate relationship, and in this remarkable book Sheila describes their love - weathering overwork and the pressures of celebrity, drink and cancer - with honesty and piercing intelligence, and evokes two lives lived to the utmost.

Review of Book from The Times
This book starts badly. Really badly. There’s a glutinous dedication followed by two verses from the song by Stephen Sondheim that gives Sheila Hancock her title (It Takes Two). Apart from Bernie Taupin, Sondheim is the most overrated lyric writer ever to draw breath. There is then an overwritten prologue and the narrative itself begins with an irritatingly arch construction — “I, the girl, Sheila Cameron Hancock . . . He, the boy, John Edward Thaw”. Clutching a bucket and a litre of Pepto-Bismol, I settle down for all the worst excesses of a luvvie-fest.

But it doesn’t happen. Suddenly everything gets better. Well, not everything. The writing still dies now and then (in the real world nobody “hones” their skills or “dons” clothing), Hancock’s kneejerk luvvie-left politics keep intruding and actors in general are routinely elevated to the status of minor gods. But, leaving that aside, The Two of Us turns out to be startlingly good. There are two reasons for this. The first is Hancock’s writing, when it settles down, the second is John Thaw.

Thaw was one of those characters (Joanna Lumley and David Jason are others) who possess, to the British nose, an intrinsic fragrance. They are, almost irrespective of what they actually do, national treasures. This is inexplicable to the non-British. Jason is a great actor and both the others are pretty good. Lumley is beautiful, and Thaw, I gather, had huge sex appeal. But there are plenty of sexy, glamorous people and we have dozens of great actors. Local, British stars like these have something else entirely.

Thaw played two big television parts: Regan in The Sweeney and Morse in Inspector Morse. The first was a tough cop with no culture, the second a soft cop who loved classical music. But they had a lot in common. Both were deeply but ambivalently bonded with their male sidekicks and, to both, women were simultaneously a lure and a threat. Both were driven by an unarticulated sense of rightness, if not exactly justice, and both (and this was due to Thaw’s superb performances) exuded vast and impenetrable self-containment.

Hancock rightly draws attention to a shot in the last episode of Morse in which the newly unemployed detective sits alone in his flat. The camera slowly zooms in and Thaw does nothing. We know the terms of his suffering but, true to character, he will not let us share it. Like all the best actors, he leaves us wanting more. To be exact, he leaves us, via Morse, wanting more of him.

This, I think, lies at the heart of Thaw’s appeal. We want to know him, but we know he won’t let us. Or we think we know him because we identify him with Regan and Morse. The question for Hancock, therefore, is: does she, posthumously, allow us to discover Thaw the man?

The answer is yes, almost. The book is, after the opening, a well-constructed narrative of their lives, initially as they spiral towards their first meeting, then through the course of their marriage. Italic passages intervene that detail the course of Thaw’s final illness, his death and the aftermath (strangely, both Hancock’s husbands died of cancer of the oesophagus). Hancock handles this complex structure well because she is remarkably good at evoking period and place, and because she notes curiously gripping oddities: “Crewe station on a Sunday was a bit of a treat. Only actors and fish travelled on Sundays and all our routes seemed to cross at Crewe. The buffet was open and stars mingled with the riffraff. We exchanged gossip and crossword clues and laughed over [Kenneth] Tynan’s latest vicious review.”

This is fine and exact, a quick and considered glimpse of a way of life. As a social historian, Hancock benefits from the fact that she was nine years older than Thaw, so we get a vivid double exposure of the life of the aspiring actor in the 1950s and then in the early 1960s. Both went to Rada. She was still in the midst of the old world of received pronunciation and velvet smoking jackets. He was on the verge of regional accents and donkey jackets. His close friend at Rada was Tom Courtenay, the supreme exemplar of the new wave.

Surprisingly, Hancock evokes Thaw’s background almost as vividly as her own. Crucially, she pursues the story of the mother who left him. She was a flighty peroxide blonde whose departure may have had much to do with Thaw’s air of emotional impenetrability. Hancock wisely does not make the link too explicit, but the possibility hangs in the air.

Her account of their marriage is dominated by his long phase of drink and depression, from which he was finally saved by a counsellor, Udi Eichler, and by the extraordinary “miracle worker” Beechy Colclough, a Harley Street Irishman who seems to have a way with theatrical drunks. Thaw worked on through his drinking, which is a remarkable testament to his physiology and his professionalism. But then he always said acting was “just a job”; in other words it gets done, no matter what.

Meanwhile, Hancock herself pursues an odd career. She had a body for glamour and a face for “character” rather than beauty. Joan Littlewood saw and encouraged her best qualities. But she seemed destined for humbler things. In 1962, for example, she made a folk album with Sydney Carter full of anti-bomb anger, all of which was ignored when a filler track (My Last Cigarette) was released as a single and was a hit. As an actress, she became almost exclusively known as a television comic, even though she repeatedly turned in fine stage performances. In the book she seems happy to be eclipsed by her husband.

And Thaw? Well, we see a good bloke with, as they always say, “inner demons”. He’s not Regan or Morse, but something softer and slightly more penetrable. But, still, the portrait is incomplete. Something masculine evades her woman’s touch, something that is suggested by the drinking bouts in the basement with his old Sweeney mate, Dennis Waterman, or, even better, by that shocking ending of Inspector Morse when the reviled and grumbling Geordie sidekick Lewis leans over his boss’s corpse and kisses his brow. Then we know: the inner demons of men that lie beyond the reach of women are always other men.
Reviewed By Bryan Appleyard