First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

The last few weeks have been a terrific time for BBC4. Having bought ‘Mad Men’, one of the most interesting new American drama imports, they have built a series of interesting documentaries around it on Sunday nights. Now Janice Hadlow has commissioned one of the cleverest drama ideas for years — a series of short dramas about some of the most popular figures of 1960s comedy and entertainment and has again built a set of evenings of clever programming around them. This is exactly what BBC 4 for meant for and confirms its place as the smart channel on British television.

The drama series began with last night’s hour-long drama about the story of the actors behind ‘Steptoe and Son’, ‘The Curse of Steptoe’ (BBC4, March 19). David Barrie’s documentary, ‘When Steptoe Met Son’ (Channel 4, 2002) already told much of the story of the off-screen relationship between Harry H Corbett and Wilfrid Bramble, culminating in their disastrous tour of Australia in 1977. The cleverness of Brian Fillis’s drama is that it captures the sense of entrapment and failure in the relationship between the actors and connects it to the relationship between the Steptoes in the BBC series. Corbett and Bramble were tied to each other just as Harold and Albert were. They just couldn’t get away. And Fillis weaves both of these claustrophobic relationships in and out of the stories of the actors themselves. Phil Davis plays Bramble as a heavy-drinking old-time actor, something of dandy and a deeply sad and lonely figure, unable to find any joy in his homosexuality. Jason Isaacs plays Corbett as a frustrated actor, torn between ‘proper’ acting, playing Shakespeare on stage, and TV work which brings in the money and paid for Corbett’s town house in St. John’s Wood and holidays in the South of France. In between, trapped between the two increasingly bitter actors, are the writers, Galton and Simpson, who had managed to escape from the tyranny of writing for Tony Hancock (1954-61) only to end up just as trapped by these difficult actors. All four men are shackled to each other like convicts in a chain gang, producing one of the great TV comedies, which ran for eight series from 1962-65 and then from 1970-74. Perhaps the key words in the play come from Corbett early on, when he’s just read the first script for what was intended to be a one-off comedy, part of ‘Comedy Playhouse’ (1962). ‘It’s practically Beckett,’ he says, ‘Bloody tragic.’

Yet from this tragedy came brilliant comedy. The most thrilling moments of the play came when Jason Isaacs begins to invent the character of Harold. Bramble hasn’t learnt his lines and clings to the script. He hasn’t found a voice or a look and then, suddenly, during a rehearsal, he snaps back at Harold, and that familiar old snarl is there. Albert Steptoe appears in all his awfulness. It was one of the great moments of recent TV drama.

Much great comedy is about failure and entrapment. The key to a long-running series is that characters can’t get away from each other, whether husbands and wives (’Fawlty Towers’) or fathers and sons (’Steptoe’, ‘Frasier’). But watching the first pilot episode (’The Offer’), shown after the drama, you realise how much more there is to ‘Steptoe and Son’. It comes to us from another world. It’s more like something from the long 19th century than from the Sixties. Harold in his horse-drawn cart, his face seamed with dirt, his world full of rubbish and clutter and that voice. No one has ever sounded like Harold Steptoe. We remember how full of rubbish and old debris many of the classics of early 1960s British TV are. ‘Steptoe’, of course, but also the first episode of ‘Doctor Who’. It’s as if the Britain of Alec Douglas Home was still full of the accumulated rubbish of the past, weighed down by clutter. Harold brings back the rubbish but then old Albert hoards it and won’t let go and keeps it piled up in his yard in Shepherd’s Bush. We are a million miles away from the modern images of young people enjoying the new liberations and prosperity of the Sixties depicted in the recent BBC 4 documentaries about advertising. This is another Britain. More Miss Havisham or ‘Dombey and Son’ than Carnaby Street and the Beatles. Never mind Swinging Britain or the white heat of technology. This is a Britain completely stuck, still horse-drawn.

And more stuck than anyone is young Harold, the son, 37 and still living with his old father,dreaming of futures which we know will never happen. His bits of rubbish are symbols of the future he will never have. He holds a golf club and speaks of all the business deals that are done at golf courses. Perhaps. But not by him. And the car battery is for the chauffeur-driven car that will never be his. He will be forever left behind, stuck with his father, in a world that time forgot.

And this is part of the generational conflict that inspired some of the best comedies of the 1960s. Harold is 37 (just as Harry H Corbett wa sin 1962), only 13 years younger than Bramble, but he plays old Albert Steptoe as if he’s Gagool, some ancient, decrepit thing, with his scummy teeth and thin, bony face. This battle between young and old is the same as in ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ and it’s what drove the satire of ‘Beyond the Fringe’ and ‘TW3′. It’s there in the Beatles film, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (in which Bramble played Paul McCartney’s grandfather) and in Wilson’s campaign against Home (who looked even older than Albert Steptoe).

But whereas Alf Garnett fought his daughter and son-in-law over politics and values, the Steptoes fight a different kind of battle. It’s about aspiration and mobility. Young Harold wants to be part of a world he knows is out there, a world of fine wines, pretty girls and fast cars. Old Albert scorns his son’s aspirations, drizzles on his every parade, won’t let him go. ‘I’m going,’ Harold keeps saying, ‘I’m going to strike out on my own. You’re not going to stop me.’ But he will never go. The cart will always be too heavy. The panelled library, ‘with books right up to the ceiling’, will never be his. ‘If I don’t go now,’ he says, ‘I’ll never go’. He’s right. He never will. He was still there in 1974 when the series finished. This pilot perfectly caught the tragedy of young Harold Steptoe who will never break away from his father and his Miss Havisham world of debris and clutter and failure. But it also captures the conflict of the time between a young Britain wanting to move forward and leave the old world of complacency and conservatism behind and another Britain that doesn’t want to move, that is stuck in the past. Steptoe’s cart, immovable, one of the great images of British television, stands for both kinds of immobility, for the impossibility of movement. Brian Fillis’s play caught the same sense of immobility in the lives of the two actors who brought Galton and Simpson’s characters so unforgettably to life.