If television is the idiot's lantern then the subjective opinions of someone unqualified to write about television must surely be the idiot's lectern.

The Curse of Steptoe

BBC4

BBC4’s new strand of dramas will be taking a look behind the curtain at some of our best loved and most troubled comic performers. It isn’t a new idea – the image of the clown as a depressed martyr has been around for decades – but following the success of the writer’s "Fear of Fanny", we’re getting another round of them. Inevitably there is one about Hancock – he and Peter Sellers seem to be the obvious candidates for docu-dramas about troubled British comic geniuses. But the other three look more original – Frankie Howerd, Hughie Green (who I thought was Ted Ray in the trailers and gave the makers kudos for delving deeper than most would) and for the first film, Steptoe and Son.

I’ve never liked Steptoe and Son. It was always too dirty, too nasty and too bleak for me. It was all of those things by design of course and it was a huge success but it wasn't for me. This play didn’t change that – it didn’t make me want to watch Steptoe and Son. The reconstructions looked authentic enough but they weren’t funny. Even the bits the audience were laughing like donkeys at weren’t funny. Which may have been the point. Speaking of the audience, they cut to the live studio audience a few times over "the years" and I’d swear it was the same group of people in the same clothes in the same places every time. If it was, what a marvellous bit of business. To Harry – the man looking out over the audience – they are the same people every week. The same jailers overseeing his imprisonment.

The play follows two main strands in its sixty five minutes. There is also a minor theme about Galton and Simpson – the writers of Steptoe and Hancock just in case you didn’t go to school – feeling trapped having to write the same old stuff week after week having briefly tasted freedom when the BBC gave them an anthology series (i.e. a series of pilots as far as the Beeb were concerned) in the aftermath of Hancock. The major strand is Harry H Corbett (the H standing for "h’anything", added when Equity said there already was a Harry Corbett (the Sooty guy) and one Harry Corbett was enough for them). Before Steptoe he was a rising stage actor. He believed in theatre. He was doing Shakespeare play by play until he was ready for The Dane. Some had dubbed him the British Marlon Brando. This was a serious actor. Then a script arrived – a gritty script about the tortured relationship between a son who wants to leave but has nowhere to go and a father who wants to keep him but not out of love – and he agreed to do it. It was a smash hit. A series followed. Then another. Then another. The BBC had over twenty million reasons to keep Steptoe and Son in production. Corbett became trapped in the public’s perception of him as Harold. We see him in his first film role being forced by the director to play the part with a totally unsuitable Steptoe accent.

Wilfred Bramble on the other hand was trapped by his sexuality. At first we see him as someone disgusted by it – going into a lavatory and breaking up a rendezvous. Then he is lured into the same lavatory by a gentleman and – without a word being said – arrested by that gentleman who turned out to be an undercover police man. The way it was played was blatant entrapment and yet Bramble’s only defence – that he wasn’t homosexual and had been married – was dismissed by the judge. It was this constant need to suppress his real nature that drove him to drink. And to hiring (male) prostitutes. There was some clunky dialogue towards the end of the play where Bramble’s costume man – also apparently gay – announces that being gay is now legal, hooray. He made it sound like everything was fine now but the lack of enthusiasm on Bramble’s face betrayed the reality – that everything Bramble was doing (lavatories, whores etc) was still illegal. And the public was still prejudiced. And being openly gay was still a career killer.

So he did what any man trying to hide from his gayness would do – he went to star in a Broadway musical. This gave the writers chance to revisit the premise of Steptoe and Son. Albert would be killed off but that same day Harold would be visited by a boy who announces that he’s Harold’s son. Instantly, the show is revitalised with new opportunities and new blood. Corbett is shown loving the idea (in reality he apparently hated it) and work begins on a new chapter. Then disaster – the musical closes and Wilfred is back.

One thing which jars about this play is that suddenly everyone has long hair. Steptoe and Son ran from 1962 to 1965 and 1970 to 1974. This five year gap is ignored (there is one scene where the producer enthuses about the move to colour – something that would’ve happened around 1969 had the show still been in production then) except for the suddenly long hair. The story they wanted to tell – that Corbett was trapped doing Steptoe and couldn’t get any work apart from Steptoe – wouldn’t be helped by a five year gap in which he presumably did something (according to IMDb a few films, a couple of TV series and of course Carry On Screaming). The play gives the impression that Steptoe’s run was continuous from pilot to finale – I understand why they did this but it undermines the credibility of a supposedly faithful dramatisation when something so important is ignored. Corbett must’ve had a reason to go back to Steptoe in 1970 – it would’ve been nice to know what that was. Was it money? Or was he still enjoying it when it ended in 1965 and was happy to go back in 1970 (after which presumably it went sour)?

The good thing about this play – and I know I’m about to praise it for ignoring facts when I’ve just criticised it for the same thing – is that it doesn’t dwell on the allegedly terrible relationship between Corbett and Bramble. In the play we see Corbett occasionally frustrated by Bramble forgetting his lines when in reality (so most sources claim) they loathed each other and wouldn’t speak outside of takes. Indeed, in this play, when Harry has decided to leave once and for all, it is Bramble he tells. "Let’s not do this any more" he says in a private moment between friends. It would’ve unbalanced the play to have had feuding co-stars on top of everything else. Though it would’ve added more to the "why did they carry on making the show when it was doing so much harm" angle, it would’ve made the play all together nastier. It would also have inevitably made one of them the bad guy and that is something the writer goes out of his way not to do.

The Curse of Steptoe isn’t the unpleasant film it could’ve been – typecasting and artistic suffocation aren’t as glamorous as hatred and alcoholism and yet it is the former that they run with – and one of the nation’s favourite sit coms comes out pretty much unscathed. The public as a whole don’t understand typecasting (even though they are guilty of it most of the time) and have little sympathy for actors who complain about being in successful series. This play will have gone some small way to showing what typecasting really is and what it can do. The rewards of success are great in the short term but they don’t last. The final scene is Harry getting a phone call long after the series has finished. He’s having a bit of a bleak patch and needs work – his agent has good news - a tour of Australia. Marvellous. What’s the job? A stage version of Steptoe and Son. Fade to black...