The
Galton & Simpson Interview Part Three
George
Murphy concludes his interview with the writing legends.
“An audience, I shall have to rethink my
entire performance”
- Harry H Corbett’s reaction when he
found out that Steptoe would be filmed in front of a studio audience.
ACT THREE: Steptoe & Son
George: How did you get
involved with the Comedy Playhouse?
Ray: When we split with
Hancock, Tom Sloan called us in to the BBC and asked what we wanted to
do next. We said we would like to write a series for Frankie
Howerd.
Alan: He was a great mate of
ours and we thought he was wonderful. Tom said “No, No, No you
can’t do that, he’s finished, his last series was terrible”. We
said it wasn’t Frank, it was the scripts. But he got out all
these graphs to show ratings and what have you and said, “I don’t want
you to do that. I have got ten half hour slots available and I
have a title”. He went on to make us an offer that had never been
made to anyone before or since and never will be. He said,
“That’s yours, you can do what you like with it you can write what you
like, cast it, be in it, direct it anything. A different show
every week”. And we would be the stars of it. ‘Galton and
Simpson’s Comedy Playhouse’. We couldn’t turn it down. One of the
shows we did was called ‘The Offer’
George: Did you have a
hand in casting Brambell & Corbett?
Ray: We’d seen and liked
Harry H Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell. Harry was at Bristol Old
Vic, we sent him the script, he liked it and managed to get a week off
so that he could do it. On the day of recording he walked into
the recording studio, gasped and said, “what are all those seats for,”
we said “for the audience” and he went bananas. “An audience, I shall
have to rethink my entire performance”.
Alan: But we just thought,
“Ah, actors”.
Ray: While Tom Sloan was
watching the rehearsals he said, “you know what you’ve done here don’t
you. You’ve got yourselves a series. ” We said “no thank you very
much, we have just done ten years of Hancock.”. But he kept
on about it and finally we said, “OK, if Harry and Wilfrid agree, we
will do it” thinking that they never would.
Alan: But when it was
offered to them, they both jumped at it. When we started the
second series, Tony had just started his series with ATV. It made
front page of the newspapers. ‘Who was going to win, us without Hancock
or Hancock without us’. But it was no contest, the papers slaughtered
him.
George: I have recently seen
the ‘When Steptoe met Son’ documentary on Channel 4. Was that a fair
depiction? Did they ever get on?
Alan: All this stuff about
Steptoe and Son hating each other… if it was true it certainly came
after the television series. And after the two films.
Ray: There wasn’t much of a
clash while we were working with them.
Alan: There were a few minor
irritations, but you get that working on any show. They were two
different people, but nothing dramatic.
Ray: We did an interview
here with a woman for about three hours. She went back to Channel
4 and they said, “This is all very nice, but it’s not what we
want”. So she told us what they wanted and we said, “well,
we’re not interested.” Then they toned it down and said, “well
it’s not going to be all scandal, just the stuff that happened in
Australia”. So we relented because we thought if we’re not in it it’s
going to look a bit strange. Then we saw it, and of course they made it
as scandalous as possible. We did a follow up interview with one
of the papers afterwards, we gave them the same answers as we are
giving you now, and the paper refused to print it. They said
that’s no good to us, there’s no scandal. Say no more.
George: There was quite a
long break between the black and white Steptoes and the colour ones,
why was this?
Alan: We felt that we wanted
to broaden our own career, which really meant doing some theatre work
and some films. So we did ‘The Spy with the Cold Nose’, and we
were invited to adapt Steptoe for American Television.
George: So you were involved
in Sanford and Son?
Alan: Not really. We
spent two months writing a pilot. But they couldn’t cast it. They
said it was too ethnic and didn’t know where to set it. A while
later we said “why don’t you do it black?” they said, “that’s a
wonderful idea but if they are poverty stricken the network won’t wear
it. Black people have to be doctors or lawyers.” So we came
home. Three years later we got a call asking if we would have any
objection to them doing Steptoe black. We said, “not only have we
got no objection, but we suggested it three years ago!” They
said, “well, three years ago you couldn’t do it, but you can
now.” And they did it, they used some of our scripts in the first
year but after that they used their own.
George: I’m told you were
going to use a plot line where the old man died!
Alan: Well that was after
our second series. It was an enormous hit and then Wilfrid drops
the bomb shell that he would not be available for the third
series. He had been cast in a big New York musical that they
predicted would run for 2 years, so he didn’t know when he would be
available again. We had to decide whether to pull the series,
wait for him to come back or what. The BBC didn’t want the show
to end, so Ray and I came up with the idea that we would start off
series three with a funeral, kill him off. Then there would be a knock
at Harold’s door and a young lad would say “my mum says that I’m your
son.” So it would be ‘Steptoe and Son’ moved down a generation.
Harold would have adopted all the habits that the old man had, like
saying “what time do you call this?” when he came in at night. We
were going to ask David Hemmings to play the young man because he was
about twenty one at the time.
Ray: Not twenty one stone as
he is now.
Alan: Meanwhile Wilfrid's
show opened in New York and closed the same night. He came back
and said “here I am ready for series three”, so we never put pen to
paper in regard to killing him off. It was just an idea we had.
George: Neither ‘Steptoe and
Son’ or ‘Hancock’ had a final concluding episode as far as I could see,
why was this?
Ray: You didn’t do things
like that in those days. A lot of the time you didn’t even
mean to finish. Certainly with Hancock, we didn’t think this is
the end, no more. But with Steptoe, as far as we were concerned
it was going to be the last one. Because we had done eight series
and like the end of the fourth series, we just felt that we had come to
a natural end.
George: So what happened
next?
Alan: Well, we did a Les
Dawson series for Yorkshire TV plus a series called ‘The Galton and
Simpson Comedy’ starring various people like Arthur Lowe, Warren
Mitchell, Leonard Rossiter, Maureen Lipman, (et al). Then I
retired, Ray carried on of course.
George: What was the
thinking behind the Paul Merton series?
Alan: People were always
saying that we should remake some of the Hancocks, and we decided to do
so five years after he died. We did a pilot of one of the Hancock
scripts with Arthur Lowe. We rewrote the first page to try and
explain the relationship between Arthur Lowe and James Beck who was
playing Sid James and it went like a bomb.
Ray: Very good it was too.
Alan: He had so many of
Hancock’s traits he could have done things like ‘The Lift’ and ‘The
Blood Donor’ brilliantly. But James Beck died, just after the
recording. There were just too many deaths in the family so to speak
and Arthur decided not to do it.
Ray: So when Paul Merton
came up we thought why not? Someone suggested that he do all the
Hancocks. We suggested he did some Hancock’s, and some
‘Comedy Playhouses.’
Alan: We met Paul and he was
enthusiastic. It was a great opportunity for us to work with one of the
best of the new generation of comics. We had admired him for a
long time. We all agreed not to do ‘The Blood Donor’ because it
was too well known, too associated with Hancock.
Ray: We told Paul, “you do
realise that you are on a hiding to nothing here”. But he was
very much up for it and we were delighted.
Alan: Paul got better as he
went on. Not being an actor, like Hancock he had a problem
learning lines, and doing one a week, he was at first more concerned
about what came next, rather then how to say it. But he was
always carrying the Hancock luggage. People were always going to
say “who do you think you are doing this”?
Ray: It may not have
been a critical success, but we are grateful to him for doing it.
In the studio at the time we all thought they were
excellent. He is an exceptional talent.
Alan: And was a delight to
work with. A great experience for us.
George: You have suffered
more than most with the BBC destroying archive material. How do
you feel about some of your work no longer existing?
Alan: All the Steptoe's are
now in existence because we found a bunch in Ray’s basement.
Unfortunately a lot of the Hancock’s (TV) are not. There are 37
‘Hancock’s Half Hours’ in existence out of 60 I think. The first
series of Hancock was live, so they don’t exist at all. Luckily
most of the radio shows exist and have been issued in six boxed sets,
one for each series.
Ray: But a lot of the other
stuff was deliberately destroyed, because the BBC didn’t have the space
for it all. They didn’t know that the world was going to be
dominated by repeats of this that and the other, with a big market in
DVD’s. It was all because of storage.
Alan: Of course now you can
store 100 episodes on one tape.
George: Do you still listen
to the episodes?
Alan: Sometimes. Ray’s
son still listens to the Hancock stuff when he is working around the
house. We hear him laughing so we know it’s either Hancock or
‘Round The Horne’.
George: What comedy do you
watch yourselves these days?
Ray: ‘The Office’ is very
good, ‘Alan Partridge’, Rob Bryden’s ‘Marion and Jeff’ and Peter Kay’s
‘Phoenix Nights’.
Alan: ‘Seinfeld’, ‘Frasier’
and ‘Larry Sanders’ are all incredibly good. It’s funny how
‘Cheers’ started it all off. ‘Frasier’ is obviously a direct spin
off, but if you watch the credits of ‘Seinfeld’, it’s amazing how many
of the same names creep up. ‘Larry Sanders’ could go a bit
further because it was cable. You can always tell. The
shows where characters keep saying “Fuck”, are cable shows. The other
networks wouldn’t let that happen.
George: What are your
future plans?
Ray: Well I am writing a
play with John Antrobus based on Steptoe.
Alan: And I’m enjoying my
retirement.
George: Ronnie Barker once
said he would only return to show business if he was offered a cameo in
the greatest film of all time, starring DeNiro and Pacino and all the
best actors in Hollywood. In the middle of the scene the camera
would have to pan to him and he would deliver his monologue. Is
there a dream deal that would get you two to write together again?
Alan: Well, (Laughs) show me
the deal. Give me a million pounds up front and I will think about it.
Ray: Do you know what the
number one comedy show in this country is in terms of ratings?
George: I would say some
rubbish like ‘My Family’.
Alan: It is.
Ray: It’s not my cup
of tea but it was created by an American who worked on Seinfeld and
Frasier, so they’re not all infallible.
EPILOGUE
And this
is where we continue to discuss the decay of British television comedy.
Like the Empire, a once great all powerful star that can now only
muster the occasional twinkle. Not least, because the calibre of
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s writing is something aspired to, but
never matched.
New
Merchandise
Hancock's
Half Hour Season Six (Radio)
The
long awaited Sixth Series is the only one to have all it's episodes
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exciting in The BBC's archives, and what episodes they are.... Some of
the all time Hancock greats are included here, like 'Sid's Mystery
Tours'
where Hancock invests in a dubious walking tour of East Cheam. 'Fred's
Pie Stall' Where the gang try to save old Fred from losing his
livelihood
and 'The Childhood Sweetheart' in which Hancock meets the girl of his
dreams
when he was seven. Also included are four episodes recorded for the BBC
Transcription Service, a 1958 Christmas special, and the recently
rediscovered
Series 4 episode 'The Stolen Petrol'. If you are viewing this page,
this
is a must have.
Season
Six is available in all good music stores and at www.bbcshop.co.uk
Steptoe
& Son - By Ray Galton & Alan Simpson with Robert Ross
Fully
authorized by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, the book chronicles the life
of the programme in a biography format, based around exclusive
interviews
with the show’s creators, as well as surviving members of the cast and
crew, and illustrated with never-before-published photos from the BBC
archive.
Behind-the-scenes secrets, unearthed from official BBC correspondence,
reveal how Wilfrid Brambell’s old man Steptoe was almost killed off
after
the first series, and how a swinging Sixties icon was almost drafted in
as a hip new ‘son’ for the programme.
Sreptoe
and Son - The Book is available in all good music stores and at www.bbcshop.co.uk
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