If they hadn't got TB and listened to the hospital radio together, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson might never have created a host of characters that remain among the best-loved in comedy, they tell BRIAN LOGAN.
GOOD OLD tuberculosis. Where would the British sitcom be without it? Hancock would never have got his Half Hour, and Steptoe and Son would never have set up shop.
The year was 1949, and two teenagers – Ray Galton, a postboy, and Alan Simpson, a shipping clerk – caught TB and ended up in the same sanatorium in Surrey. They became friends, developed a love of radio comedy and wrote their first sketches for a hospital radio broadcast. It was the beginning of an extraordinary comedy-writing partnership.
“I would never have known I could do anything,” says Simpson, “if I hadn’t got TB and met Ray.”
Galton and Simpson know everyone who was anyone in postwar British comedy. Their conversation is peppered with references to Sid (James) and Tony (Hancock), Kenneth (Williams) and Frankie (Howerd), and Les (Dawson) too. The cast list for their new DVDs – The Galton and Simpson Playhouseand Dawson's Weekly– released to mark the 60th anniversary of their partnership, is a who's who of classic British comic acting: Richard Briers, Leonard Rossiter, Warren Mitchell, Frances de la Tour and, of course, Les Dawson. Some of the jokes, it must be said, are as whiskery as Arthur Lowe (who also stars), but several episodes are gems of TV farce, as evocative of the 1970s as cheese'n'pineapple canapés.
The Comedy Playhouse, a series of one-off comic playlets, was commissioned after Galton and Simpson's split with Hancock. Galton recalls: "The BBC said to us, 'You can write anything you like each week. You can cast it, you can be in it. Do anything.' We thought they were mad. But we did it."
The fourth playlet, The Offer, featured two rag-and-bone men who would go on to get their own series, Steptoe and Son. Its writers hoped to enjoy similar success with Dawson's Weekly, a 1974 sitcom.
“Les said in his autobiography that it was the best thing he ever did,” says Simpson. But the show, made for Yorkshire TV, was broadcast at different times across the UK. “Half past seven in London, half past eight in Yorkshire, nine o’clock in Scotland.”
“So it never got in the ratings,” adds Galton.
BUT IT’S HANCOCK for which the pair are best remembered. Seated in the front room of his home in west London, where he has lived since the 1950s, Galton reprises the show’s one-liners with undimmed affection: “Magna Carta – did she die in vain?”
It seems unlikely today, but their idea – a half-hour comedy unimpeded by songs or variety acts, first on radio, then on TV – was an innovation. Few thought that this format, soon to be called situation comedy, could succeed. It almost didn’t.
“We said there’d be no jokes as such,” says Galton, “and an uninterrupted storyline. We’d get the humour out of the situation.We promised no catchphrases and no funny voices. But we cast Kenneth Williams in the first episode. As soon as he said ‘stop messin’ about’, people laughed and our resolve was shattered.”
For Steptoe and Son, Galton and Simpson wanted to work with actors, not comics. This was because, in that innocent age, TV audiences did not always distinguish between fact and fiction.
“You couldn’t have well-known comics putting a girl up the duff,” says Galton, “or supporting a political party.”
That was no use to the writers, who had real-world tragicomedy in store for their flea-bitten heroes. Steptoe and Sonpioneered the despairing humour for which UK sitcoms are now famed.
“British people don’t find success funny,” says Simpson. “In America, [sitcom characters] are all good-looking and live high off the hog. There are very few silly arses in American comedy. But here, it’s all upper-class berks or lower-class idiots. We’re attracted to losers.”
Galton and Simpson identify with those losers, people condemned to live on the margins.
“The business of scriptwriting wasn’t known back then,” says Simpson. “When Ray and I got our first cheque from the BBC, we went to the bank to open an account. And the manager said, ‘What is your profession?’ We said: ‘We’re scriptwriters.’ And he said: ‘What? Sign-writing for windows?’ He couldn’t believe there was such a profession.”
Times have changed, thanks in no small part to Galton and Simpson. But neither wants to claim too much credit.
“I’ve always believed,” says Simpson, “that there’s a load of people out there who could be brilliant at something or other. There are concert violinists on the buses going past, and they’ll never even know – because they never learned how to play, or haven’t been born into musical families.”
Only fickle fortune, that bastion of many a comedy script, saved Galton and Simpson from a similar fate.
“Had we tried anything other than comedy writing,” says Galton, “I’m sure we would have been failures”.
– Guardian service.
The Galton and Simpson Playhouse and Dawson’s Weekly are out now on DVD
