Born in Liverpool, Lancashire, Handley went on the stage in his teens and after military service in the First World War he established himself as a comedian and singer on the music hall circuit.

Handley's greatest success came in 1939 with the BBC radio comedy show It's That Man Again, which, after an uncertain start, caught the British public's imagination and reached an unprecedentedly large audience.

[2] He was a regular performer on the BBC from 1924 onwards – his biographer Barry Took calls him "a mainstay of its variety programmes" – as a solo entertainer, an actor in sketches and occasionally a producer.

[10] Together they wrote and delivered what Took describes as "a sophisticated crosstalk of quickfire word and idea association"; the combination of the Old Etonian Frankau's patrician tones as Murgatroyd and Handley's fast-talking Scouse patter as Winterbottom became one of the BBC's most popular comedy features.

[13] The new direction and stimulus came with the BBC's need for a replacement for Band Waggon, an immensely successful hour-long variety programme starring Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch.

The three colleagues agreed to set the series on a pirate radio ship, with Handley in charge, surrounded by and coping with a cast of miscellaneous oddballs.

[17] At the outbreak of the war the BBC, knowing that its London headquarters at Broadcasting House would be a principal target for enemy bombing, put into effect plans to move much of its activity to other locations.

ITMA resumed, its running time reduced to 30 minutes, and now Handley and his colleagues caught the public mood with shows that genially satirised many of the irritating features of wartime existence and generated catchphrases that became common currency.

Handley was cast as the Minister of Aggravation and Mysteries at the Office of Twerps, surrounded by a cast of bizarre characters; they included, at various times, the bibulous Colonel Chinstrap, the morose Mona Lott, the incompetent German spy Funf, the formidable charlady Mrs Mopp, the dubious vendor Ali Oop, and the ultra-polite broker's men Claude and Cecil.

The supposed locale and the cast of characters changed over the years, but the formula – Handley as the benign master of ceremonies beset by a gallery of comic eccentrics – remained constant.

[21] Thousands of people lined the route of Handley's funeral procession from the chapel near his London home to Golders Green Crematorium,[22] and packed memorial services were held in two cathedrals: St Paul's on 27 January and Liverpool three days later.

Nonetheless, it was popular in Australia:[25][26] a writer in The Age commented that Handley's "roguish Liverpudlian twang could have made a stock-exchange report sound funny".