Before he found fame hosting Room 101 and comedy game show They Think It’s All Over, Nick Hancock was part of the double act Hancock and Mullarkey with Neil Mullarkey, who is a founder member of The Comedy Store Players and former comedy partner of Austin Powers and Wayne’s World star Mike Myers.
As a double act, Hancock and Mullarkey are best remembered for a single routine that they performed on a number of TV shows in the late 1980s, called TV Themes Tunes On 45, in which they acted out spoofs of the title sequences from a number of popular TV shows, accompanied by the theme tunes.
As regular readers will know, The Cathode Ray Choob is a big fan of TV theme tunes, so this routine has always been a favourite.
The version I saw was performed on Channel 4’s Saturday Live but this recording comes from a 1988 edition of After Ten With Tarbuck.
In case you don’t recognise any of them (some are VERY old), the theme tunes they are acting out come from:
1. Hawaii Five-O
2. Top Of The Pops
3. Ironside
4. The Horse Of The Year Show
5. Kojak
6. Colditz
7. Alias Smith And Jones
8. Mastermind
9. The Big Match (ITV football (soccer) highlights show)
10. Doctor Who
11. Tales Of The Unexpected
12. The test card
13. Grange Hill
14. Callan
15. Animal Magic
16. It’s A Knockout
17. Mission Impossible
18. Black Beauty
19. The Onedin Line
20. Dad’s Army
The Cathode Ray Choob 
Another storming find, well done.
I remember seeing these two on the great Saturday (or Friday) night live with Ben Elton.
God it brings back memories of staggering back from work via the pub to watch what was the funniest programme on TV at the time (after Tiswas of course).
Cheers
Yeah, it was the Saturday/Friday Live version I remember, too. It was a better performance that the Tarby show one, but unfortunately doesn’t seem to be online anywhere.
I’m sure I have an off-air recording of it on a old videotape somewhere – but I fear that cataloguing and digitising my ridiculously huge stock of VHS off-air recordings (about 20 years’ worth) would take the rest of my life!