Comic's show will go out on YouTube to avoid the regulators

A Tony Hancock show unseen for almost 70 years is to be released on YouTube after being deemed too offensive to air on regular TV.

Vintage Freeview channel Rewind TV is currently airing the comedian's first TV series, Jack Hylton Presents: The Tony Hancock Show, for the first time since it originally aired between April and June 1956.

However, the broadcaster says the second episode of the sketch show would be banned under current TV rules

It features a story called The Large-Headed Grink which involved Hancock and June Whitfield heading an expedition to Africa. Scenes feature a white actor playing a tribal chief in full-body black-skin makeup, who ultimately takes Whitfield's character as a slave.

In an introduction to the programme, which will be released online on Sunday, a voiceover tells viewers: 'You're about to watch a half-hour slice of classic British comedy from 1956 that we're not allowed to broadcast on our television station here in the United Kingdom in 2025. 

'This episode includes language and portrayals that would not be commissioned today, and we're showing it uncensored because we believe TV history shouldn't be airbrushed.

'We share it with respect for all viewers and cultures, so we can learn from the past without erasing it.'

Online content does not come under the remit of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.

Written by Eric Sykes with regular Goon Show co-writer Larry Stephens contributing to this episode, the show also featured Clive Dunn in the core cast, with Dick Emery making a guest appearance in this programme.

The show was broadcast live on ITV, with Mark Lewisohn writing in the Radio Times Guide To TV Comedy that it 'had a rough and ready approach that, although amateurish, somehow added to the charm'.

Just over a month after the first season aired, the BBC launched Hancock's Half Hour, the narrative show created by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, that would cement the comedian's reputation.  

Rewind TV – which is on Freeview 81 and Sky 182 – is airing Jack Hylton Presents: The Tony Hancock Show at 3.30pm on Sunday afternoons. Hylton was a theatre impresario known for the venue The Talk Of The Town, who had an exclusive deal to make all the entertainment programmes for ITV's London franchise holder Associated-Rediffusion.

Other comedies in Rewind TV's schedule include working-class period drama parody Brass, the Barry-Cryer fronted panel show Jokers Wild and the sitcoms Please, Sir and Game On.

Published: 28 Aug 2025