Steptoe And Me

This junk-yard on Oil Drum Lane is so familiar and I can’t believe I’m stood here looking around it. Old mangles and an ancient gramophone (a Georgian record player?), a grimy cooker and tear-worn mattresses, and here on the right, the outside ‘kaazi’, source of much ‘lavatorial’ humour, and on the left, is Hercules in the stable?

I’m here just in my ordinary duds – jeans and stuff – and I’m about to ‘write’ my way into the life of Steptoe and Son. I’ll just knock on this famous door and I’ll be ‘in it’ as it were.

The door is opened by the ‘dirty old man’ himself. Wilfred Brambell aka Albert Steptoe; the proprietor of these premises. Slight and hunched with a face like a grizzled stoat he asks “’Oo are you and what do you want?” He looks me up and down and a slight look of perplexity crosses his scrunched features but just as soon vanishes and is quashed by professionalism. In all these years he has become inured to theatrical ‘surprises’ and errors. He faults Harry H Corbett for these but everyone on the show knows that it is he, Brambell, who is at fault for the stutters and missed cues. He is often three parts pissed during his performances.

I reply “Is Harold around?” This cues him instinctively to reply “Is Harold around where?” The ambiguity draws a laugh from the capacity audience. These are the days when a flushing lavatory elicits hilarity among the eager-to-be-entertained (or, at least, panned hilarity). I carry on the enjoyable banter “Is it possible to see your son, Harold”. The old man, seeing no joke or retort shouts “’’Ar-old” in time-served manner, an ascending two-note comedy ker-ching.

He turns back and scowls at me. I’m fast becoming a natural and say “nice day for it”, he gives me his best “baah” and moves off as his co-actor and son bounds toward the door and beckons me in. Do I know this character; he acts as if I do.

No sooner than I‘ve sat down than I’m treated to some classic repartee. Brambell hates Corbett; insiders know this well but the viewing public are blissfully unaware. Corbett is often perplexed by his co-stars hostility. He used to attempt to court the older man’s friendship but has long-since given this up as a hopeless pursuit. At any rate, it serves their ‘on-stage’ personas well. It leaves them free to ‘let-it-rip’ as it were. Some of the scenes between them crackle through Brambell’s loathing and Corbett’s resentment.

They start on about a tin bath in the front room. Is it a front room? It’s a room full of Steptoe props; the skeleton on which is draped Harold’s cap and tattered old scarf; the array of optics on the baroque sideboard; the table at which the old man sits rejuvenating ancient batteries “I made a fortune from these during the war – you couldn’t get ‘em!”

Harold feeds his goldfish.

“These days Pater, one does not conduct one’s ablutions in the front parlour. One does it in the privacy of one’s bathroom. I mean for gawd’s sake…” He turns on his father who just gurns disdain and dismissal.

“I mean, Dave, you would agree wouldn’t you, being from the future..?” I wonder how he knows this. He looks at me imploringly, his bulging eyes pleading for my allegiance. For years he has been fighting this same fight week after week, series after series and he rarely wins if he wins at all. Any victories are usually pyrrhic; he gets to move back in after a vain attempt at independence or he beats off an impending Stepmother to leave just the two of them again as if, in some sort of emotionally warped way, this is his chief desire. Once, he attempted to escape to the high seas “sail round the world in a skiff” only to be deemed too old for the trip by his fellow adventurers.

I look at the old man who eyes me threateningly and try to even up the odds for Harold.

“The modern bathrooms are so much more cost and energy efficient” I offer. There is an eerie silence from the audience.

“And more comfortable……..than the tin bath!” I stutter and look for some comic instinct within myself that may save the day.

“It also offers, well, more….privacy”

There is an innuendo here which the old man picks up on.

“Why? What would you be doing in there?” The audience laughs though a little nervously. Harold picks it up.

“Why, any number of things, Dad. Don’t you see? It’s what modern people do. The tin bath belongs in the dark ages.”

“Baah! You lot want it all too easy. I remember back in the trenches…”

“Oh Gawd…!!”

“We didn't even have tin baths. We had to stay dirty or rely on billy cans and stream water…”

This is more like it. Now they’re back in the old familiar groove. Maybe if I just sit quiet and don’t interrupt, I can be just another spectator of this most tragic of comedies. The frustration, the love, the manipulations, the loathing, the sentimentality, the awful bind they find themselves in.

Both of these actors played both of these characters for far too long. It was only supposed to be a one-off Comedy Playhouse. They became addicted to the money and became totally typecast.

It was Corbett who blinked first. Once a budding Shakespearean actor with Joan Littlewood – ‘Britain’s Marlon Brando’ - he became a shambling caricature of what was already a caricature. Long side-burns and paunch and the signs of drink and fags slowly wearing him down. He died a disappointed man, aged 57.

Wilfred Brambell, similar to that other self-pronounced misnomer, Kenneth Williams, was a homosexual who hated being a homosexual. He lived the life of a sad, unfulfilled alcoholic who made, by an eerie comparison, Old Man Steptoe appear happy as a Buddhist with a twelve inch cock.

It is to be hoped they have not resumed their famous roles in heaven.