Comedy writer

Born: November 27, 1929;

Died: February 8, 2017

ALAN Simpson, who has died at the age of 87 of lung disease, was one half of perhaps the most important comedy writing duo in the history of British radio and television.

In conjunction with Ray Galton, Simpson wrote scripts for Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, Peter Sellers and Les Dawson and created one of the greatest of British sitcoms, Steptoe and Son. So popular was the series it even became an issue in the 1964 general election.

In their work on Steptoe and Hancock’s Half Hour before it, they also established some of the core themes of the British sitcom that have continued to the present day in comedy series such as Only Fools and Horses and The Office; class, entrapment and failure. In doing so, they offered an outline of just how ambitious the form of the situation comedy could be.

Simpson was born in 1929 in Brixton in London. Growing up, he wanted to be a sports journalist just so he could get into football matches for free. In later life he would be president of Hampton and Borough FC. But rather than journalism, he ended up working as a clerk in a shipping insurance agent.

On his way to work one day Simpson, then in his teens, began coughing up blood. He was suffering from tuberculosis. Later that day he suffered a haemorrhage and was given the last rites. He survived however and was sent to a sanatorium which was where he met Ray Galton.

They both loved comedy and began to write sketches for the hospital radio. They then sent a skit to a BBC talent spotter which led them to being hired to write one-liners for radio. Soon, frustrated by the gag format, they began to stretch their comedy writing into a sitcom format. The result was Hancock’s Half Hour.

The series was a huge success and soon graduated to television. In all, Galton and Simpson would write 101 radio episodes and 63 TV scripts. The series played on the image of Hancock as a bumptious, pretentious fool, both pathetic and yet full of pathos. At its best, in episodes such as Sunday Afternoon at Home, the writers captured the stultifying narrowness of life in 1950s Britain. As the academic David Rolinson has pointed out Hancock was a “comic inversion” of the angry young man phenomenon then so prevalent in the plays of John Osborne.

The Hancock that appeared on the screen, Simpson later said, was a Mr Everyman. “He had all the failings of mankind rolled up in one and people recognised that.”

So popular were episodes such as The Blood Donor that people would come up to its star in the street and quote episodes to him. Hancock came to hate hearing people parrot the line: “A pint? That’s very nearly an armful.”

That line, however, was also indicative of how much care Galton and Simpson put into their work. Like everything they wrote, they crafted it meticulously until they felt they had the rhythm correct. “One syllable too many and the laugh’s dead. It’s gone,” Simpson later said.

Hancock divested himself of his writers after the relative failure of the film The Rebel, a satire on modern art, in 1961. As Hancock’s drinking became increasingly a problem, he rejected a number of scripts by the writing duo who, after six months of unpaid work, moved on to write a series for the BBC entitled Comedy Playhouse.

The fourth episode, entitled The Offer, was a two-hander about a father and son in the rag and bone trade played by Wilfred Brambell and Harold H Corbett. The show was an immediate hit. A reviewer in The Times noted approvingly its “almost Chekovian ambience.”

Galton and Simpson themselves said: “We think we’ve written a little piece of Pinter here and we can’t repeat it.”

But the BBC saw it had potential and eventually Steptoe and Son would run for eight series and two feature films and at its height attracted audiences of 26 million. Indeed so popular was it in the early 1960s that Harold Wilson was said to have asked the BBC not to broadcast an episode of the series until after the polls closed for fear that Labour voters would stay in and not go out to vote.

Steptoe and Son was remarkable in the way it captured the push and pull of familial bonds, the sense of the ties that bind and the frustration of lives not lived. In many ways it was a counterblast to the then emerging myth of swinging London. Harold Steptoe (as played by Corbett) was desperate to swing but circumstances (and his father) kept getting in the way. It is hard to think of another sitcom that so readily and artfully combined humour with a kind of domestic horror.

“The Steptoes remain human beings,” the renowned TV writer Dennis Potter once noted. “There is a flow of sympathy between them, a pathos which hardly ever topples into easy sentimentality.”

While Hancock and Steptoe remained their most familiar creations Galton and Simpson also wrote other sitcoms including Clochemerle and Casanova ’73, but nothing else had quite the impact of their first two successes.

Over the years, Galton and Simpson were recognised for their achievements. He was appointed an OBE in 2000 and the duo were awarded a Bafta fellowship last year.

The writing partnership – but not the friendship – ended in the late 1970s when Simpson, in the middle of marital problems at the time, decided to stop. “I didn’t mean to retire,” he told Mark Lawson on a BBC interview in 2008. “I meant to take a year off and then come back.”

It wasn’t to be. But his work never disappeared. Both the Hancock and Steptoe sitcoms have regularly been revived and lost episodes have even been recreated using other actors. For characters who seem so much of their time it turned out there was a timelessness to them as well. Simpson always believed that. “The characters we write are not of any particular era,” he once said. “It’s about people aspiring to better themselves – and that’s not just particular to the 1960s. The Hancock character is there in Dickens. People can still identify with these characters, they’re recognisable."

TEDDY JAMIESON