By Elliott West
“Harold is not me, Harold only exists on paper”.
Harry H. Corbett
Introduction
When you think of some of the most iconic British sitcoms, Steptoe and Son has to be right up there amongst the best. Written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, this BBC show transcended the era of black-and-white television to colour, running from 1962 to 1974, attracting audience viewing figures of over 20 million. Not too shabby for a premise set around a cantankerous father and a son who was trapped in a paternal stranglehold, trying to make ends meet in a rag-and-bone business in the fictions Oil Drum Land on the Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush. Yet beyond the hilarity of these scripts lies a much darker story. A fractious relationship between Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Bramble and a part that despite all its popularity, would leave a type-casting millstone around Corbett’s neck for the rest of his acting career.
The Odd Couple
Comedy is an odd phenomenon. It often conceals the true bitterness in its craft. In the case of Steptoe and Son, it fused an ageing Irish homosexual with a Burma-born womaniser. A classic example of Never the Twain Shall Meet off-screen. Wilfred used to tell autograph hunters in the street to “fuck off” and was paranoid his sexuality would get out into the public domain. So much so that would sneak away for trips to Hong Kong and brought a Malayan man back to be his valet.
Brambell got worse as the series progressed. Turning up drunk for filming, Wilfred often forgot his lines and his drunken escapades spilled over into the outside world. He once exposed himself to a woman at a party and on a flight back at the end of a tour, he urinated in the captain’s cabin thinking it was the toilet. He had to be restrained and was thrown off when the plane reached Singapore. These episodes were highly likely to be due to how his ‘dirty old man’ image was perceived off-screen and his own paranoia about being gay. It could also be due to his former wife Molly Josephine having an affair with their lodger and subsequently got her pregnant. A revelation that made him howl in his sleep for years afterwards.
Albert and Harold may have been in close proximity on-screen but in rehearsal, the two sat at different tables and in his dressing room, one would be pouring over their lines while the other poured from a bottle at the bar into a constantly half-filled glass. On a tour of Australia in 1976, the two travelled separately by car and never shared a dressing room. The two were chalk and cheese, a character actor known for playing old men in French farces and a method actor who had rave reviews playing Richard II. Harry bought a house in St John’s Wood, holidayed in the South of France and was a regular guest of Harold Wilson. A womaniser who often had several women on the go and attributed this as the only trait that was the same as Harold Steptoe. A percentage that he calculated at twenty percent.
Wilfred on the other hand loved to booze and parade around Surfer’s Paradise, cruising with a feather boa around his neck. He said that Harry was pompous and stuck up. It was a simmering hate that came out in their acting together. An actor who was coming to the end of his career versus one who was enjoying the trappings of success. A world far removed from his childhood of the 1930s when only laughter smothered the desperate poverty of Harry’s youth. The irony was that both the characters and the actors playing them were trapped with each other for six weeks a year, two films and numerous stage tours across the globe. Corbett was shackled, frustrated that his other parts were all based on Harold. He came from a hopeless society that was saved by the munitions of World War II and went on to live in a society in the 1970s where people were trapped by hyperinflation. He joked in an interview that he wanted to play Moses and have one line. That being “it will never float”. It would take two years to film and they would have to drag him out of an Acapulco swimming pool to say the line. A line that caused the interviewer to be reduced to a fit of giggles and his glasses to mist up.
The Final Nail
Some would say that Corbett died of a broken heart. His last appearance was in an episode of Anglia Television’s Tales of the Unexpected in 1982 entitled “The Moles”. He died shortly after filming had finished from a heart attack on 21 May 1982 in Hastings, East Sussex. He was 57 years old. His partnership with Wilfred Brambell had ended several years earlier on their stage tour in Australia in 1976. Apart from appearances in the films The Barged (1964), Carry On Screaming (1966) and Jabberwocky (1977), Harry’s career had little to write home about apart from the massive success of Steptoe and Son. A serious car accident and a life of heavy smoking sixty cigarettes a day paid its toll. Wilfred Brambell outlived his comedy partner, dying from cancer, aged 72 on 18 January 1985. Only six people attended his funeral.