TV Review: The Curse of Steptoe, BBC Four, Wednesday 19 March, 9pm

In my childhood, Steptoe and Son was mandatory viewing. Little did I know that I shared this experience with more than half the UK population. At the height of its fame, the archetypal sitcom enjoyed an audience of 28 million. Also hidden from me as a young lad was the fact of Harry H. Corbett's rising fame prior to Steptoe, and his aspirations to become as renowned a Shakespearian as his contemporaries. But with those two nuggets, the revelations of this poignant opener to BBC Four's "Curse of Comedy" opener had only just begun.

Even though Corbett was a rising star of the stage, his head was turned by the first Steptoe script from the incredibly fertile and prolific minds of the famous writing duo Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. "It's practically Beckett," he enthused. But of course that first script was but one in a set they wrote for Comedy Playhouse. It was never intended to be the start of a series. In fact Galton and Simpson had insisted they didn't want to write another sitcom series having only just escaped from Hancock's Half Hour.

Brian Fillis' hour-long look into the truth behind the myth of Steptoe and Son was a brilliant portrayal of how a leviathan can be created by popularity, and suck everything down with it to the bottom of a deep pit, banishing all thought of opportunity beyond its purview. Corbett, who watched with studied indifference the successes of his contempories such as Finney, who achieved great acclaim with the Shakespearian roles for which he secretly yearned, and Brambell, shown as a repressed and lonely individual, pathologically late and unprepared owing to a secret fondness for the bottle, achieved something together that neither of them could have done alone.

The early scenes of them goading each other into developing the characters from the lifeless page to the live studio performances (where strangely the audience appeared to be identical from one week to the next) were superb, but the real magic for me lay through the windows we were given into the lives behind the characters. Comedy acting is well known for taking a terrible toll on its most successful practitioners. Or is it just that those who live their lives on the edge are drawn to comedy acting? Either way, neither Corbett nor Brambell enjoyed as much success in their private lives as they did when they were making 28 million of us roar with laughter.

Galton and Simpson, brilliantly brought to life by the impeccable Burn Gorman and Rory Kinnear, scratching their heads to wring yet another comedy classic from what they always thought of as a limited format (even though they managed to keep it going for 57 episodes over 8 series), added another dimension to a most impressive start to this series, which promises to become one of BBC Four's major successes of this year.

Posted by johnberesford on March 19, 2008

Original review here.