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The two men who understand this better than anyone are sitting side by side on the same sofa, in the august but comfy drawing room of a grand old house near Hampton Court. This house belongs to Ray Galton, but Alan Simpson seems equally at home here — as well he might, since the two of them have been writing partners for over 50 years. And what a partnership! Between them they created two of the funniest (and most poignant) failures in the history of British television: Harold Steptoe and Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock. Many of the early Hancocks were broadcast live and vanished into the ether, while the BBC managed to mislay two series of Steptoe (copies were recently rediscovered in Ray’s cellar, but only in black and white).
‘The BBC saw no future for these recordings,’ says Ray. ‘They never thought they would ever sell them in shops.’ How times change, for Ray and Alan are here today to plug their latest DVD. It’s a re-issue of one of their Playhouse series, a string of one-act plays the like of which you never see on peaktime telly nowadays. Why not? Well, partly because modern telly is far too keen on chasing ratings to risk such a rich mix of one-off dramas (‘They’re not allowed to fail,’ says Alan), but mainly because duos like Galton & Simpson have become a dying breed.
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson grew up in London in the 1930s. Ray’s father was a bus conductor, Alan’s father was a milkman. They met as sickly teenagers, in a TB sanatorium in Surrey. In adjacent beds, with time to kill, they started writing sketches for hospital radio. They’ve written together ever since.
They’re easy to tell apart — Ray Galton is thin and hesitant, Alan Simpson is more tubby and more chatty — and, though they both have families of their own, they act like a happily married couple. They even finish each other’s sentences. Lots of writers are driven slightly mad by the solitary confinement of the typewriter. After half a century together, Ray and Alan seem unusually sane.
Their first big break was reviving Derek Roy’s flagging radio show, Happy Go Lucky, but the show that made them was Hancock’s Half Hour, first broadcast in 1954. These 166 episodes (103 on radio, 63 on TV) revolutionised broadcast comedy, reuniting it with the character-based comedy of Dickens and Wodehouse, and rescuing it from the shallow gagsmiths of variety and music hall.
Hancock’s thwarted everyman articulated the frustrations of the nation, and Ray and Alan’s scripts still resonate with fans less than half their age. Alan was in a restaurant recently when a young woman approached him. ‘I’d just like to say thank you very much for Hancock’s Half Hour,’ she told him. ‘She must have only been about 30,’ says Alan. ‘He’s been dead for 40 years.’ Hancock’s overdose, in 1968, still casts a long shadow over that joyous show. ‘We had the best of him, no doubt about that,’ says Alan. ‘The ten years we worked with him, he was at his peak.’ Yet in 1961, for reasons that remain as unfathomable as his suicide, Hancock dispensed with Ray and Alan’s services, and after that he went downhill. ‘The booze had affected him,’ recalls Alan. ‘His features were becoming less mobile, and one of his great strengths was his beautiful reactions — and his timing. He couldn’t learn lines anymore. That was another problem.’ He still sounds sad about it today.
Unlike Hancock, Ray and Alan went on to even greater things. The BBC offered them their own Comedy Playhouse — 16 30-minute plays, one of which, The Offer, spawned Steptoe & Son. Steptoe ushered in a golden age of British sitcom, transforming situation comedies from flimsy vehicles for stand-up comics into proper plays for proper actors — a TV version of weekly rep. Ray and Alan liked working with actors. ‘They didn’t count the jokes,’ says Ray. ‘They didn’t count how many funny lines they had.’
Ray and Alan found they had more in common with actors — and playwrights — than they’d supposed. When Ray saw Pinter’s The Caretaker he found it wonderfully funny, and recommended it to Hancock. Hancock went to see it. ‘You’ve been doing this for years,’ he told Ray. ‘Most successful comedies depend on relationships,’ says Alan, and in Steptoe they created a relationship whose complexities eclipsed even Pinter’s greatest plays. ‘When we started writing it, we just had two rag-and-bone men,’ says Alan. ‘As soon as we made them father and son, that’s when it clicked.’
Despite Steptoe’s success, Ray and Alan persevered with the Playhouse format, and the series they’re hawking today was their swansong — seven ‘stand-alone’ half hours, first broadcast in 1977 on ITV. Can you imagine such a thing today? They really play around with the genre, in a way that rarely happens these days. One episode, starring Frances de la Tour as a scheming adulteress, even has two different endings, while the episode in which Roy Kinnear tries (and fails) to find a friend to talk to after his wife has left him is one of the darkest TV comedies I’ve ever seen. Arthur Lowe’s Little Englander stuck in a Swiss cable-car is priceless, Richard Briers is cast against type as an aspiring wife swapper, and Warren Mitchell’s West Country card-sharp is a comedic tour de force. And, unlike so much modern comedy, there’s nothing self-referential about the writing.
Why are there no TV writers nowadays who speak with such a universal voice? Well, maybe because nowadays there’s no universal audience to speak to. ‘They don’t sit down as a family anymore,’ says Ray. ‘They watch it in their own rooms.’ As TV channels have proliferated, the audience has fragmented and writers have retreated into their own ghettoes, cracking increasingly cliquey jokes for increasingly cliquey punters. Conversely, Ray and Alan drew upon a huge reservoir of shared experience — the Depression, rationing, the Blitz. ‘We could all laugh at the same things,’ says Ray. ‘It’s far more diverse today, and esoteric.’ Hey ho. The days when everyone watched the same shows are long gone, but at least we can console ourselves by watching Galton & Simpson on DVD, ad infinitum. And who knows? Maybe these hard times, closer to the times they grew up in, will inspire a return to their more communal — and compassionate — sense of fun.
Galton and Simpson’s Playhouse and Dawson’s Weekly are released by Network DVD on 19 January, price £14.99 each. William Cook is the author of Morecambe & Wise Untold, published by HarperCollins.
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