The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The Story Behind... Stubbed out by Steptoe
Galton and Simpson’s 1960s sitcom subjected its lead to a purgatorial series of defeats – and suffocated the career of a star who had once wowed Gielgud
Harry H Corbett – he of the lustreless, big red-rimmed eyes; “the hulking figure in the tatty overcoat and turned-down gumboots”; the faint rhotacism and a voice that was like a flame, swaying and trembling – was born in Rangoon in 1925. I picture a Kipling background – tough non-commissioned officers in a hot corner of the Empire; a world of duty and service and forbearance; of burdens carried. (“I’m beginning to be a burden, am I?” Albert Steptoe one day challenges his son, Harold, who replies: “No white man ever had a bigger one. But rest assured, I will not fail in my filial duty.”)
George Corbett, Harry’s father, had joined the South Staffordshire Regiment in 1904, became a sergeant in 1911, and saw action at Loos, Ypres and the Somme. He was wounded at Passchendaele, but remained in uniform after the Armistice, serving as quartermaster in Singapore and Burma.
Harry’s mother died when he was a baby, so he was sent back to England to be raised by an aunt in the Manchester suburb of Ardwick, a place he remembered as “poky, cold, leaking”. In time they moved to a different suburb, Wythenshawe,
which was “picturesquely dotted with rubbish dumps”.
Corbett never saw his father again – George died in 1943 at the age of 57. Harry was clever enough to have attended Chorlton Grammar School, but the family could not afford the blazer. He earned his own money from a paper round, as an assistant grocer, apprentice machine-tool fitter and teaboy in a biscuit factory.
In 1942, he enlisted with the Royal Marines, enjoyed the gunnery training and served in the North Atlantic, escorting convoys. After the war, Corbett toiled as an
assembler of prefabs, in a carspraying business, rubbing down the paintwork, and for recreation joined the local repertory theatre company in Manchester, where he met Joan Sims, with whom he would later co-star in Carry On Screaming. They went on tour, staying in terrible digs: “We actually slept in our macks in a damp bed next door to a rest-parlour with a full coffin.”
In 1952, Joan Littlewood, impressed by Corbett’s Andrew Aguecheek, invited him to join the Theatre Workshop in the East End. Under her direction he appeared in Uncle Vanya, The Alchemist, The Government Inspector, Treasure Island and A Christmas Carol. Corbett scored a particular success as the pathetic dreamer Richard II. “It’s absolutely wonderful, and I could never do it myself,” said John Gielgud, puzzlingly.
Like a commissar in Russia, Littlewood told her company (which included Roy Kinnear, Barbara Windsor and Yootha Joyce) “to have a pride in belonging to an ensemble, a group. Everybody equal, no hierarchy”. As there is no room in Utopia for dissent, Littlewood was a total tyrant, like Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm. She was always charging at people, screaming at them, tantrums and tears – and was a premonition of old man Steptoe, wheedling and conniving. “There has to be a destructive as well as a creative art, you know. They go together,” argued Littlewood, when everyone had been lambasted.
When Corbett was approached by HM Tennent, a commercial management, which would at last mean “bringing some money into the kitty”, Littlewood was unforgiving. She left a letter backstage: “Dear Harry, if this is the way you feel, you should go and leave us all, and go off into the West End theatre.” In other words, said Corbett, she was “accusing me of being an absolute traitor and a s---”. Years later she said to his face, “You f--ing left, you bastard.”
By October 1955, Corbett was at the Phoenix Theatre as the gravedigger in Paul Scofield’s Hamlet. He was also the Mexican policeman, pursuing Scofield’s whisky priest in The Power and the Glory. Both plays were directed by Peter Brook, of whom Littlewood said, “I can’t stand him, silly c---.”
Corbett was also in Congreve’s The Way of the World with Margaret Rutherford and he started to appear in television plays for Granada. He played three roles in the Richard Greene series, The Adventures of Robin Hood – Sir Bascom, a knight, Jason, a peasant, and Nicodemus, a monk. It was while rehearsing Macbeth in Bristol that the call came from the BBC, inquiring about his availability for Steptoe and Son. “He persuaded the Old Vic mob to give him a week off,” recalled writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Corbett was to be stuck with the role for the next 14 years.
Steptoe and Son, the opening episode broadcast in January 1962, is on the edge of haunted house territory. Albert and Harold are a pair of bustling ghosts, stuck there for eternity, with their practical jokes and profitless revenge. The first thing to admire is the art direction – the rag-and-bone men’s cluttered premises in Oil Drum Lane. The dangling skeleton, stuffed bear, sauce bottles, mops, sour carpets, gas mantles, iron mangles, lots of brown varnish. “It’s chocolate paint,” says Albert, in an episode from 1972. “Dark green and chocolate. They’re the colours, Last for years. Never show the dirt.”
It is a masculine domain. No feminine hand in the decor. It is meant to be amusing when we see Harold struggling with a Hoover and feather duster. But the point about Steptoe and Son is that I never found it amusing, or remotely comical. Not then, not now. It is as claustrophobic and demoniacal as any story cooked up by the Russian novelists. You look at these clowns and their world is meant to be frantic, broad, madcap. But at the heart of their comedy is ugliness, disorder, suffering, exhaustion, hunger and cold. Whenever Harold tries to better himself, he is rebuffed, thwarted, his hopes endlessly dashed. The nature of his existence is a succession of defeats.
And so was Corbett’s career. Steptoe and Son ran until Boxing Day 1974, then transferred to radio until March 1976. There were feature film spin-offs and an Australian tour in 1977. “He should never have done that s---!” Littlewood said to Corbett’s daughter, after he’d died. He knew this himself, needless to say. “Look at me, stuck in this thing. Still, I’m making a lot of money.” Indeed – he and his wife Maureen lived in St John’s Wood, next door to Paul McCartney. His children were delivered by obstetrician Jack Suchet, the father of David Suchet.
Corbett dwindled into being a pantomime stalwart. Abanazar in Bournemouth, Robinson Crusoe in Lewisham, Cinderella with Twiggy, Dick Whittington with Anita Harris and Dora Bryan, Aladdin in Croydon with Leslie Crowther. He was also in Percy’s Progress (about the penis transplant), Adventures of a Private Eye (“The clever dick who uncovers everybody!”) and What’s Up Superdoc! (“Promises to raise more than a temperature!”).
His fatal heart attack occurred in March 1982 in Hastings – like his father, Corbett was 57. He is buried in Penhurst, near Battle. I found the grave on a Sunday afternoon in January. A dull dark day, not piercingly cold, the wet mossy earth dotted with snowdrops. It is interesting how comedians, always attentive to light and mood, end up in idyllic English spots, with thatched cottages, duck ponds, manor houses in the vicinity – the England of Shakespeare and Falstaff, Eden before the Fall. Frankie Howerd is in Somerset, Spike Milligan in Winchelsea, Wilfrid Hyde-White in Bourton-on-the-Water.
‘We slept in our macks in a damp bed next door to a rest-parlour with a full coffin’