Steptoe and Son

The Very Best of Steptoe and Son is wonderful collection of "Steptoe" moments...but not entirely what it claims to be. This selection, is in fact a collection of five episodes from the two surviving series of the four shot in colour in the 1970s--the four black and white series shot in the 1960s are neglected entirely. However by the 1970s, Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett had been playing Albert and Harold Steptoe for almost a decade and the parts of the greedy needy old man and his witty feeble son were second nature to them. One of the best episodes on show here is "The Desperate Hours", which sets the father and son duo off against a similar couple--Leonard Rossiter's escaped bank robber and the old lag who taught him everything he knows--both couples come to understand the shared dynamic of their relationships. The 1970s episodes included more external shots and opened the show out from its original two-hander format--"Oh What a Beautiful Mourning", for example, introduces us to a large selection of the Steptoe clan, played by a variety of well known character actors.

The second volume of The Very Best of Steptoe and Son contains five excellent episodes from the classic sitcom scripted by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who created Steptoe when Tony Hancock dispensed with their services in the early 1960s. The story of the acerbic but hopelessly pretentious Harold, would-be man about town longing in vain to escape from his rag-and-bone yard existence and his "dirty old man" of a father, is one of Britain's greatest sitcoms. Its underlying sadness somehow makes it all the funnier.
"The Bath" is in black and white and features a wonderfully disgusting sequence of old man Albert retrieving pickled onions from his bathwater and putting them back in the jar. The other four episodes are from the 1970s and in colour: "Séance in a Wet Rag and Bone Yard" features a young Patricia Routledge as a bogus medium. "Porn Yesterday" has Harold outraged to discover that the young Albert once starred in a "What the Butler Saw" feature. "And So to Bed" has Harold buying a waterbed to impress a new "bird" and having his romantic hopes literally punctured by his old man. The wonderful "Upstairs Downstairs, Upstairs, Downstairs" has the put-upon Harold getting the better of his dad for once when he discovers that the "perpendicular ponce" is feigning a back injury to keep Harold at his beck and call and plans an excruciating revenge--a bed bath. There's only one shortcoming: completists would prefer these old episodes to be issued chronologically and in full rather than in selective "Best of" compilations.

Fresh from their success with Tony Hancock, writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson originally planned Steptoe and Son as a one-off for the BBC’s Comedy Playhouse. It was quickly turned into a series, originally broadcast in 1962, and the six episodes here (including the Comedy Playhouse "pilot") contain all the classic ingredients that were to keep the show on British TV screens until 1974. Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell are the father and son rag and bone men, constantly bickering, constantly at each other’s throats. Corbett’s Harold harbours ridiculous bourgeois aspirations, hoping to impress the "birds" with asparagus soup or his wine cellar, which has been painstakingly collected by draining the dregs of empty bottles. But all his efforts at social improvement are in vain, thanks to the mean-spirited efforts of his father Albert, who glories in his son’s contemptuous "dirty old man" tag, and who is content with life exactly as it is in the cast-off paradise of their ramshackle junk-filled boneyard.
The show was groundbreaking at the time, depicting working-class people in light comedy instead of serious social drama as was the norm. It also differed significantly from Hancock’s Half Hour and other sitcoms, which featured comedians effectively playing themselves: Brambell and Corbett were real actors whose marvellous chemistry helped ensure the show’s longevity. In our modern throwaway culture, Steptoe and Son provides a window into a bygone era, when men with horses and carts routinely patrolled the streets recycling junk, without the need for government incentives or environmental pressure.