OBITUARY Alan Simpson

OBITUARY

Alan Simpson

50% of Comedy Writing Royalty -  Thanks For The Laughs

One half of the writing duo that produced some of Britain’s best-loved sitcoms including Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son

Alan Simpson’s ability as a comedy scriptwriter to make more than half of Britain laugh at the same time was not lost on Harold Wilson.

Mindful of Steptoe and Son’s audience of 28 million, Wilson, then leader of the opposition, asked the BBC to delay transmission on general election day on October 15, 1964, until after the polls closed. He feared that Labour voters, who tended to turn out in the evening, would be lost. The BBC bowed to Wilson and Labour scraped in.

The tale of a rag-and-bone man who aspires to better things, but is held back by his conniving father became the most popular show on British television during its 12-year run from 1962. However, Simpson and his writing partner, Ray Galton, started scripting it only because they had been sacked by Tony Hancock as the writers of Hancock’s Half Hour. That vehicle for the gloomy funnyman, about the frustrations of his mundane life, would later be credited with inventing the sitcom, leading to a “golden age” of classic half-hour comedies on terrestrial television.

Alan Simpson, left, pictured in 1971 with the actress Madeline Smith and Ray Galton, his writing partner

Arguably the most successful comedy writing partnership in British broadcasting began in misery at a tuberculosis clinic. Simpson had the features of a comedian with smiling eyes and expressive black eyebrows. He stood at 6ft 4in and Spike Milligan later nicknamed him “He who blocks out the sun”. However, as a teenager in August 1948 Simpson was a gangling bag of bones consigned to years of convalescence at the Milford TB sanatorium near Godalming, Surrey.

Galton was an equally despairing young patient. Their situation was full of the tragicomic bittersweetness that would make their sitcoms so loveable. While other boys of their age were taking girls to dances, Simpson and Galton were stuck in Ward 14. So much store was put on fresh air to aid recovery that, according to Simpson, “we were in a four-bed room with french windows open morning, noon and night and there was snow on the beds every morning in the winter”.

They found each other laughing at the same jokes while listening to US forces broadcasts from Germany after a fellow patient rigged up a radio from an old Lancaster bomber. Their destiny was sealed when they came to the conclusion that British radio comedy programmes were not as funny as shows from Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Phil Harris and the like. They built a radio room in a broom cupboard and started writing and performing comedy sketches for the other patients. Within five years they were working with Hancock.

Steptoe and Son was watched by an audience of 28 million people

Up to that point, comedy on radio and television was largely based on vaude-villian revue with comedy sketches, funny voices and musical interludes. Galton and Simpson wrote an uninterrupted 30-minute narrative that turned on character, in particular that of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, of 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam. The material was so original that fellow scriptwriters complained that there was nothing to pinch.

Galton and Simpson built on aspects of Hancock’s own personality and produced the morose suburbanite who dreamt of escaping his constricted lower middle-class world, but who was destined never to do so. From 1954 to 1961 they wrote more than 150 Hancock shows for radio and television. Britons noticed themselves in the everyday scenarios, such as Hancock’s visit to a blood bank — a much-repeated classic: “I don’t mind giving a reasonable amount, but a pint! That’s very nearly an armful!”

Eventually, the comedian’s mental instability and descent into alcoholism told. In 1961 Hancock sacked Galton and Simpson and shortly afterwards embarked on an abortive attempt to become an international star. His career never recovered and he committed suicide in Australia in 1968. “Hancock didn’t exist before Galton and Simpson and he didn’t exist after they left,” said their fellow scriptwriter Denis Norden.

The BBC agreed and gave them a lucrative contract to produce a series called Comedy Playhouse. One of the episodes starred Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H Corbett as the permanently feuding father and son.

The seedy realism of setting and character was in total contrast to the happy middle-class milieus of other sitcoms. There was something of Hancock’s aspiration, not to say social failure, in the Corbett character, but the humour was deeper and darker. The pathos was compared to Harold Pinter.

While Harold Steptoe, single and still living at home at the age of 37, longed to escape the emotional stranglehold of his coarse father for a more fulfilling life in which he would be an intellectual, he could never bring himself to make the decisive move from their squalid life. Corbett was better known as a Shakespearean actor and Simpson was worried that he would turn his nose up at the idea. However, when he read the script for the first time, he declared: “It’s practically Beckett.”

Corbett first read the script and declared, ‘It’s practically Beckett’

Alan Francis Simpson was born in Brixton, south London, the son of a milkman, in 1929. He went to Mitcham Grammar School, but hated it and left at 16, taking up a clerical job in a shipping office. He was offered a trial for Chelsea as a goalkeeper, but before anything could come of it he contracted TB, which, before the wide availability of antibiotics, was a killer. After a haemorrhage Simpson was given the Last Rites. He recovered, but shortly afterwards his father died of leukaemia.

Having found comedy “out of desperation” in the TB clinic, he and Galton contacted Frank Muir and Norden, the leading comedy writers of the day. Muir and Norden “sent us a charm letter, giving us the elbow”, which suggested that they submit material to the BBC script editor Gale Pedrick. Their first joke was, “Jane Russell pontoon. It’s the same as ordinary pontoon only you need 38 to bust.” Pedrick liked it and so did the comedian Derek Roy, who used some of their jokes — at five shillings each — on his show, Happy-Go-Lucky.

When they received their first pay cheque in 1951 the friends tried to open bank accounts. When they told the bank manager they were scriptwriters, he replied: “Oh I see, you paint signs on windows.” Explaining that they wrote comedy scripts, he nearly cancelled their application.

Simpson and Galton worked slowly and sometimes days would elapse before a suggestion from one would be taken up by the other. Simpson would commit them to the typewriter with one finger of each hand.

They worked for Frankie Howerd, Sid James and Les Dawson. They also scripted several films, including The Rebel, which starred Hancock as a city clerk who becomes a painter on the Left Bank in Paris. Simpson recalled his last conversation with Hancock days before his drug overdose. “Tony phoned me at eight in the morning, the worse for wear, and said we should get back together.”

Simpson retired from full-time writing after the death of his wife, Kathleen, in 1978. There were no children. A self-confessed “football nut”, he became an active president of the Hampton & Richmond Borough FC.

To the end of his life, Simpson travelled to Galton’s home in Hampton every Monday morning to discuss the latest comedians and sitcoms. Peter Kay and The Office were among their favourites. The bromance was as warm as ever as they struck up a repartee over coffee and biscuits, finishing each other’s lines. They described their relationship as “co-dependency for life”.

Alan Simpson, OBE, comedy writer, was born on November 27, 1929. He died on February 8, 2017, aged 87