The generic title of this series for BBC Four is The Curse of Comedy,
featuring the off-stage misery and emotional problems of Frankie Howerd,
Tony Hancock and Hughie Green plus Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell,
aka Steptoe and Son.
Seeing as we wrote everything that Tony Hancock did for nearly ten years
including more than 100 radio half-hours, 60 TV half-hours, a film, a stage
show and a Command Performance, created and wrote every episode of Steptoe
and Son, and wrote several series for Frankie Howerd one cannot but wonder,
“Did we drive them to it?” But then, as nearly all of these problems took
place after we stopped writing for them, should we feel guilty? After all
there is nothing wrong with us. There isn't, there isn't!
We are both very suspicious of the “laugh clown laugh” concept, the Pagliacci
syndrome that underneath the motley all comedians are miserable bastards. In
our experience the most miserable comics were the rotten ones and thus had
plenty to be miserable about. For instance Frankie Howerd, off stage,
providing he was talking about himself, was the happiest man you could meet.
Wonderful company and a genuinely funny man, which is all that matters. His
private life had nothing to do with you, us, or anybody else. His demise
wasn't sad; he achieved more than his allotted three score years and ten and
could have carried on carrying on for years. There wasn't a grey hair in his
wig. As Frank would have said, the only tragedy was that it had to come to
an end.
Tony Hancock was a slightly different kettle of fish. Let's face it, to be a
comedian you've got to have a lot of chutzpah. To stand up in front of
crowds of people making a fool of yourself takes determination. Take Adolf
Hitler. Even with his silly haircut and funny moustache and with an audience
of 20,000 stormtroopers he did all those Nuremberg rallies and didn't get
one laugh. Like them all, he put it down to his writers, blamed the
audience, and went on to almost take over the world.
Unlike Tony, whose dark night of the soul was the first house on Monday night
at the Glasgow Empire. He never enjoyed the theatre but found his niche on
radio and TV. Due to his reputation of gloom, the public conception of him
is of a man who makes Jack Dee look like the Laughing Policeman. This is
totally at odds with our experience. Firstly, he was the greatest laugher
you could imagine. If something tickled him in a read-through he would
collapse in hysterics and roll around on the floor clutching his sides
helplessly. This would make Sidney James, Bill Kerr and Kenneth Williams,
three other notorious guffawers, join in and we would sit there embarrassed
that we had caused all this incontinence.
Tony was a joy to work with. His interpretation and timing of a joke were
always nigh perfect. His only problem was learning the lines. He worked at
it endlessly. He would be up all night with a recording machine. It was his
Achilles' heel. His future battles with the bottle were not yet in evidence.
He never drank before or during a performance, only afterwards did he relax
and allow himself a few bottles of brandy. He went from strength to
strength, culminating in the last series we did with him, which included
some of his best work. The turning point came during the rehearsals of
perhaps his most famous piece, The Blood Donor. He was involved in a car
accident and suffered a mild concussion that prevented him from learning his
lines. The BBC offered him the choice between postponing the recording or
bringing in teleprompters. He chose the latter. It was like handing him the
keys of the prison. He was free. The misery and tedium had gone. It was the
worst mistake of his life. He never learnt another line, his performances
suffered, the bottle gradually took over and a slow descent began,
culminating in his suicide at the ludicrously early age of 44. The most
important and influential comedian of the postwar era was gone.
Steptoe and Son was different again. It was the product of something we had
wanted to do for a long time. Work with actors. There was a simple reasoning
behind this. If, for instance, your main character was an anarchistic
atheist with a penchant for the-love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name, there
wasn't a comic in the country who would have said, “Yeah that's me, I'll do
that.” Whereas an actor would jump at the opportunity, providing the
character had a repository of even darker tendencies to be revealed as the
series progressed and if the money was right. With Steptoe we were lucky to
get one of the most talked-about actors in the profession in Harry H.
Corbett and a middle- aged actor who specialised in playing old men. Wilfrid
Brambell doing what Moore Marriott had done 30 years earlier with Will Hay.
Then followed eight series over 12 years during which the audience peaked at
28,500,000, a figure that has since been claimed by several shows, but ours
was genuine. Oh yes it was!
During this entire period we were unaware of any conflict between the actors
save from the occasional gritting of Wilfrid's false teeth when Harry had
the perceived audacity to give him a little direction. At all other times
they were the acme of professionalism. True they didn't mix socially, being
entirely different animals. Wilfrid was the typical actor-laddie,
immaculately dressed, overcoat draped over the shoulders, trousers with
knife-edge creases, highly shined shoes, gold top cane, but for the part he
would have a two- day growth of beard and put on the rags from the wardrobe
department along with a rendered-down set of teeth, blackened and chipped.
After the show he would change back and emerge from his dressing room like a
peacock - totally unrecognisable to the extent that one evening we had a
call from the commissionaire at the entrance to the BBC Club saying that a
man was trying to get in claiming to be Wilfrid Brambell and he won't go
away. Harry had no such problem. He was dressed better as Harold Steptoe
than Harry Corbett.
And so to the biopics. They are all about parts of their lives to which we
were not privy, so as to the content we cannot possibly comment. They are
all dead now so neither can they. Suffice to say that they all left a great
body of work behind them, which in the final analysis is the only thing that
matters. The first thing that struck us was how well the films are directed,
reminiscent of Ingrid Bergman* at his best, and they are also beautifully
played. That's what we meant earlier about actors: fiendishly clever they
are, the originals couldn't have done any better. And we must not forget the
writers - everyone else does. Well done lads.
Finally, on a personal note, a word about the two actors playing us in the
Steptoe film. We are both 6ft 4in and they're not. But at least they sound
like us. The previous time we were portrayed, in a play about Hancock, one
of us was broad Scots and the other was Australian. It's not right.
BBC Four's The Curse of Comedy season of dramas begins on
Wed, March 19 with The Curse of Steptoe, and continues each week with Hancock
and Joan; Hughie Green, Most Sincerely; and Frankie Howerd - Rather You Than
Me. David Walliams talks about playing Frankie Howerd in next Saturday's
Times magazine
* Yes, we know
