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Steptoe & Son Steptoe & Son at the Palace
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Hodder & Staughton |
Hodder & Staughton | |
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The blurb on the back:
Ray Galton says: "Please buy this book, it's filthy." The ceaseless struggle between the obstinate invincibly possessive Albert and the long-suffering Harold - ever poised for flight but doomed to share a life of frustration with Dad - has become part of the national scene. Their robust humour may be broader than it is long, but pathos and humanity also have their places in these down-to-earth, hilariously funny tales. When Ray Galton and Alan Simpson first got together to write comedy sketches, they wrote to Frank Muir & Denis Norden - then the kings of radio comedy-writing - asking for some tips. Muir & Norden knew better than to get involved, so they wrote back suggesting that Gale Pedrick, a script editor at the BBC, was the man to contact. As Pedrick later remembered it:
Curious then that some 13 years later Pedrick should be the man drafted in to flesh out some of Galton & Simpson's Steptoe & Son scripts for the sake of a paperback book of 'the TV comedy hit of the century'. (No kidding, that's what it claims.) He does a pretty fair job of it, as well, as you'd expect from a man whose writing experience stretched back as far as George Formby. As is normally the way with these things, it's virtually all dialogue, which isn't a bad thing in this instance, given the masterful scripts, but Pedrick's opening description of the house is pretty good, and I liked the idea of the two of them sitting at a table in silence, separated by 'a huge brown teapot, rather like a squat, menacing referee waiting to see fair play.' A decent piece of work then, augmented by Steptoe & Son at the Palace, which followed two years later (and cost a shilling more - proper inflation we had in those days), except... ...except that I have my doubts about Steptoe. I grew up listening to my dad's reel-to-reel tapes of British comedy and, while Hancock was always my favourite, Steptoe had a place in my affections as well. But now I find the TV shows almost unwatchable, and the radio shows hard going as well. The writing is superb, and the acting was tremendous, but - be honest - it's not really funny anymore, is it? And in the absence of laughs, it becomes horribly depressing. Galton & Simpson were probably the most intelligent writers in the history of British sitcom, but in Steptoe they veered off into the territory of modern drama: the sheer misery of Harold's inability to leave home is the stuff of Pinter or Beckett. And it's just as miserable here.
ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 2/5 HIPNESS QUOTIENT: 3/5
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