Steptoe and Son

Many episodes revolve around sometimes violent disagreements between the two men, Harold's attempts to bed women and momentary interest over things found on his round. Much of the humour derives from the pathos of the protagonists' situation, especially Harold's continually thwarted (usually by the elder Steptoe) attempts to better himself, and the unresolvable love/hate relationship that exists between the pair.

Albert almost always comes out on top, and routinely proves himself superior to his son whenever they compete, such as when they played snooker into the night and pouring rain in 1970, and Scrabble and badminton in the 1972 series. Harold takes these games extremely seriously and sees them as symbols of his desire to improve himself, but his efforts come to nothing each time. His father's success is partly down to greater skills but is aided by cynical gamesmanship and undermining of his son's confidence. In addition, Albert habitually has better judgement than his son, who blunders into multiple con tricks and blind alleys as a result of his unrealistic, desperate straw-clutching approach. Occasionally the tables are turned, but overall the old man is the winner.

Harold is infuriated by these persistent frustrations and defeats, even going to the extent in "Divided We Stand" (1972) of attempting to partition the house so that he does not have to share with his selfish, uncultured and negative father. His plan ends in failure and ultimately he can see no way out. However, for all the bitterness there is an essential bond between the pair. In bad situations, Harold sticks by his father, and Albert looks out for his son. This protective bond is shown in several episodes, such as "Full House" (1963) when Albert wins back Harold's money in a game of cards against Harold's manipulative group of friends, and "The Seven Steptoerai" (1974) when they are menaced by a local gangster running a protection racket and team up with some of Albert's friends to fight off the gangster's thugs.

The 1974 Christmas special ended the run and it first appears Harold is once again at the bad end of poor planning, when he books a Christmas holiday abroad, but then finds his passport is out of date. His father must go alone, and Harold, tearfully it seems, waves him off to enjoy a potential good time without him. Harold trudges away, only to jump in a car with a woman to drive off on his own holiday, revealing that he had engineered the whole situation from the beginning.

The two main characters in the show are Albert Steptoe (Wilfrid Brambell) and Harold Steptoe (Harry H. Corbett). They have a large extended family who appear occasionally including many of Albert's brothers and sisters, among them Auntie May (Rose Hill), Uncle Arthur (George A. Cooper) and Auntie Minnie (Mollie Sugden).

Development

The show had its roots in a 1962 episode of Galton & Simpson's Comedy Playhouse. Galton and Simpson's association with comedian Tony Hancock, for whom they had written Hancock's Half Hour, had ended and they had agreed to a proposal from the BBC to write a series of 10 comedy shows. The fourth in the series, "The Offer", was born both out of writer's block and budgetary constraints. Earlier shows in the series had cost more than expected, so the writers decided to write a two-hander set in one room. The idea of two brothers was considered but father and son worked best.

Galton and Simpson were not aiming to make a pilot for a series, having worked for seven years with Hancock. However, Tom Sloan, the BBC's head of comedy, told them during rehearsals that "The Offer" was a definite series pilot: he saw that the Steptoe idea had potential. Galton and Simpson were reportedly overwhelmed by this reaction, and the first of what became eight series was commissioned, the first four of which were transmitted between 1962 and 1965. The last four series were broadcast between 1970 and 1974, in colour. At the peak of the series' popularity, it received viewing figures of some 28,000,000 viewers per episode. In addition, the early 1970s saw two feature films and two 46-minute Christmas specials. In 2005, the play Steptoe and Son in Murder at Oil Drum Lane, written by Ray Galton and John Antrobus, brought the storyline to a close.

Casting

The series employed actors rather than comedians in the principal roles; casting for comedy still tended to favour the former when the series was created in 1962. Galton and Simpson had decided that they wanted to try to write for performers who "didn't count their laughs".

Both of the main actors used voices considerably different from their own. Brambell, despite being Irish, spoke with a received pronunciation English accent, as did the Manchester-raised Corbett. Brambell was aged 49 when he accepted the role of Albert, only 13 years older than Corbett. For his portrayal, he acquired a second set of "rotten" dentures to accentuate his character's poor attitude to hygiene.

Music

Ron Grainer won a second successive Ivor Novello award for the show's theme tune ' Old Ned ', to which he gave a different treatment, one year later, during a Rag-and-Bone Man scene in The Home-Made Car. The series had no standard set of opening titles but the opening sequences would often feature the Steptoes' horse, Hercules. "Steptoe and Son" is the Steptoes' trading name, but as established in the first episode, the "Son" is not Harold as initially believed, but Albert. The name dates from when he and his mother—Mrs. Steptoe—worked the rounds. The first series has the pair as very rough looking and often dirty and wearing ragged clothes, but they were portrayed as cleaner in later series.

Locations

Outside filming of the Steptoes' yard took place at a car-breakers' yard in Norland Gardens, London W11, then changing to Stable Way, Latimer Road, for the later series. Both sites have subsequently been redeveloped with no evidence now remaining of the entrance gates through which the horse and cart were frequently driven.

The pilot episode and the first four series, which aired in 1962–1965, were recorded in the BBC Lime Grove Studios in London. When the show returned in 1970 after a four-year hiatus, the programme was made in the BBC Television Centre studios in west London, as from 1970 the show was recorded in colour.

Notability

During its production in the 1960s and 1970s, Steptoe and Son marked itself out as radical compared to most UK sitcoms. This was an age when the predominant sources of laughter in British comedy were farce, coincidence, slapstick and innuendo. However Steptoe and Son brought greater social realism. Its characters were not only working class but demonstrably poor. The earthy language and slang used were in marked contrast to the refined voices heard on most television of the time: e.g., in "Back in Fashion", Harold warns Albert that when the models arrive, "if you feels like a D'Oyly Carte (rhyming slang for 'fart'), you goes outside." Social issues and debates were routinely portrayed, woven into the humour. The programme did not abandon the more traditional sources of comedy but used them in small doses. The characters, and their intense and difficult relationship, displayed deeper qualities of writing and performance than comedy fans were used to.

Steptoe and Son is rare among 1960s BBC television programmes, in that every episode has survived and exists in the BBC Archives, despite the mass wiping of many BBC archive holdings between 1967 and 1978. However, all the instalments from the first 1970 series and all bar two from the second were originally made in colour and are only known to survive in the form of black and white domestic videotape recordings. Copies were made from the master tapes for the writers by an engineer at the BBC using a Shibaden SV-700 half-inch reel-to-reel video recorder—a forerunner of the video cassette recorder. In 2008, the first reel of a black and white telerecording of the Series 5 episode "A Winter's Tale" (lasting approximately 15 minutes) was returned to the BBC; this is the only telerecording of a colour Steptoe and Son episode known to still exist. Of the 30 episodes produced in colour, 17 exist in their original colour format.

The original 2" Quad videotapes of all the episodes of the original 1962–65 series were wiped in the late 1960s. However, these episodes mostly survive on film transfers of the original videotapes as 16mm black and white telerecordings. The exceptions to this are "The Stepmother", "The Wooden Overcoats", "The Lodger" and "My Old Man's a Tory", which exist as optical transfers made from domestic 405 line reel to reel videotapes obtained from writers Galton and Simpson.

The BBC has released 10 DVDs of the series—each of the eight series, and two compilations entitled "The Very Best of Steptoe and Son" volumes 1 and 2. Two Christmas specials are also available on DVD, as are two feature films: Steptoe and Son and Steptoe and Son Ride Again. A boxed set of Series 1–8 and the two Christmas specials was released on Region 2 DVD by 2entertain on 29 October 2007.

In addition, 52 episodes were remade for BBC Radio, initially on the Light Programme in 1966–67 and later Radio 2 from 1971 to 1976.

A special one-off remake of the "A Winter's Tale" episode aired on BBC Four on 14 September 2016, as part of the BBC's Lost Sitcom season recreating lost episodes of classic sitcoms.

• In 1962, Brambell and Corbett appeared as Steptoe and Son in a short sketch written by Galton and Simpson on the BBC's annual Christmas Night with the Stars programme, broadcast on 25 December 1962. There are no known recordings.
• In 1963, they appeared on the ITV Royal Variety Performance in a sketch written by Galton and Simpson featuring Steptoe and Son totting outside Buckingham Palace, the telerecording of the live show, broadcast on 10 November 1963, still exists. The audio of the sketch was also released on a 7-inch single.
• On 31 December 1963 the BBC broadcast an edition of It's a Square World which featured a cameo by Wilfrid Brambell as Albert Steptoe witnessing the launch of BBC TV Centre into space. The sketch was included as an extra on the special edition DVD release of Doctor Who: The Aztecs
• In 1966, they appeared on the BBC series The Ken Dodd Show in another live on stage sketch written by Galton and Simpson featuring Steptoe and Son on Blackpool beach, with Ken Dodd in the last two minutes as a strange golf professional. A telerecording of the show, broadcast on 24 July 1966, survives.
• In 1967, they appeared in character in a short filmed sequence for the BBC's annual Christmas Night with the Stars programme. The black and white film sequence featuring Steptoe and Son, broadcast on 25 December 1967, still exists.
• In 1978, they recorded a Radio 2 sketch, referred to by fans as "Scotch on the Rocks", produced especially for a show titled Good Luck Scotland. This was again written by Galton and Simpson and had a basic premise of Albert wishing to go to Argentina to watch the Scottish football team play in the 1978 World Cup as the "Good Luck Scotland" title of the programme referred to Scotland's chances of winning the World Cup that year.

In 1977, Brambell and Corbett appeared in character for two television ads for Ajax cleaning products, recorded during their tour of Australia. In 1981, their final ever appearance together was in a UK advert for Kenco Coffee.

Audio

A number of LPs and EPs featuring TV soundtracks have been released.

Books

To tie in with the original series, two novelisations were written by Gale Pedrick:

• Steptoe and Son. Hodder & Stoughton. 1964.
• Steptoe and Son at the Palace. Hodder & Stoughton. 1966.

In 2002 BBC Books published Steptoe and Son by Galton, Simpson and Ross, which comprehensively covered the television and radio series, films, Royal Variety Shows, commercials and the Sanford & Son spin-off.

• United States:

During 1963 Jack Paar screened an episode of "Steptoe and Son" during one of his one-hour Friday night shows on NBC. Paar was an anglophile and frequently spotlighted British culture on his show. Later in 1963 he screened a film-clip of The Beatles, their first appearance on U.S. TV.

In 1965 Joseph E. Levine produced a pilot based on The Offer for the American market with Galton and Simpson. Starring Lee Tracy as Albert and Aldo Ray as Harold, it was unscreened, and did not lead to a series. The pilot was released on DVD in the UK in 2018. The concept was later re-worked as Sanford and Son, a top-rated series that ran for five years (1972–77) on the NBC network.

• Sweden; Sten-Åke Cederhök and Tomas von Brömssen starred in Albert & Herbert. The pair lived at Skolgatan 15, an address in a working-class neighbourhood of Haga, Gothenburg.
• The Netherlands; Stiefbeen en Zoon ran for thirty-three episodes. It was awarded the 1964 Golden Televizier Ring.
• Norway; The 1975 Norwegian film, Skraphandlerne, starred Leif Juster and Tom Tellefsen. The names of the characters were Albert and Herbert, the names of the characters in the Swedish remake.
• Portugal; Camilo & Filho Lda., starring famous Portuguese comedian Camilo de Oliveira, with Nuno Melo as his son.
• South Africa: Broadcast on the South African Broadcasting Corporation's commercial radio station Springbok Radio (now closed down) as "Snetherswaite and Son" in 1980. The run of 56 episodes was produced in Durban by veteran radio comedy producer Tom Meehan. It starred Tommy Read as Albert and Brian Squires as Harold. The name Steptoe was changed to Snetherswaite for the South African series, a recurring character Tommy Read played in the SABC version of "The Men from the Ministry" called Humbert Snetherswaite.

Steptoe and Son

In 1972 a film version was released of the show proving highly popular. This first film, also called Steptoe and Son focuses on Harold getting married but still not being able to get away from his father.

Steptoe and Son Ride Again

Due to popular demand and the commercial success of the first film, another film, Steptoe and Son Ride Again, was released in 1973.

• List of films based on British sitcoms

• Steptoe and Son at IMDb
• Steptoe and Son at Laughterlog
• Steptoe and Son at BBC Online
• Steptoe and Son Appreciation Society
• Steptoe and Son at BFI Screenonline
• Steptoe and Son at BBC Online Comedy
• Steptoe and Son at British Comedy Guide
• Steptoe and Son radio show at BBC Online
• Steptoe and Son Collectors Archive (archived)