Life imitates art

The other evening my wife came home to find me watching re-runs of Steptoe and Son. The washing up had not been done, and everything was in a state of bedragglement (including Olga, the family dog). ‘How can you bear to watch that stuff? Steptoe’s got a face like a squeezed lemon. He’s perfectly horrible. I’ll go further: he’s perfectly revolting.’

How could my wife not like Steptoe? The series had been a hit from the moment it was launched in 1962 and drew audiences of over 20 million. Ray Galton and his co-writer Alan Simpson combined a seaside postcard sauciness with the cockney menace of Harold Pinter (only with shorter pauses). The series is, among other things, a meditation on human decrepitude and the frustrations of a father-son relationship.

Albert Steptoe and his son Harold are rag-and-bone men toiling in the Shepherd’s Bush area, who appear to loathe each other. With his foul temper and bad teeth, Albert relentlessly taunts his 37-year-old son for his dream of social self-improvement. (‘Saint Tropez? What’s wrong with Bognor?’) Every time Harold resolves to leave the junkyard for good, his father finds a way to thwart him. As Harold sees it, Albert is a conniving, filthy-minded malingerer (‘You dirty old man!’). Yet for all his wish to break free, Harold is doomed to be a nursemaid to his father, unmarried and likely to remain unmarried. What could be more sad?

In spite of the gloom, Steptoe and Son is grimly comic, and comedy hovers round the edges of the parent-child antagonism. The British public loved it. On election day in 1964, the story goes, Harold Wilson was so worried that Steptoe would distract Labour voters from the polling stations that he persuaded the BBC to take it off the box.