Obituary - Ray Galton, writer known for his work with Alan Simpson on Hancock and Steptoe & Son

Died: October 5, 2018

RAY Galton, who has died aged 88, was a scriptwriter for television, radio and film who was most famous for his enduring writing partnership with Alan Simpson. Between the early 1950s and the late 1970s the pair were so successful that they became household names, and two anthology television series were launched bearing their own names, 1969’s Galton and Simpson Comedy and 1977’s Galton and Simpson Playhouse.

They were primarily known for their work with Tony Hancock, arguably the most popular British broadcast comedy performer of the day, on various shows of his, including the classic radio and television hit Hancock’s Half Hour (1954 to 1961), and his film The Rebel (1961). They also wrote Steptoe and Son, the series about a father-and-son rag-and-bone-man team comprising Wilfrid Brambell’s “dirty old man” Albert Steptoe and his painfully aspirational son, Harry H Corbett’s Harold.

The show was a hit, capturing a perfect pair of loveable comedy grotesques and commenting with wit and subversive style upon the class system. Across eight series, three specials, two feature films and a decade-long radio series, Steptoe and Son ran from 1962 to 1965, and then returned between 1970 and 1974.

Galton and Simpson’s other hit was the first two series of the long-running BBC series Comedy Playhouse. Airing between 1961 and 1963, the format was a series of weekly one-off comedy plays which showed off the pair’s singular ability to come up with great comedy situations - they wrote 16 episodes in total, which starred a roll-call of British comedy talent, including Eric Sykes, Stanley Baxter, June Whitfield, Warren Mitchell, Dick Emery and Frankie Howerd.

They also wrote for Hancock’s regular comedy partner Sid James’ show Citizen James between 1960 and 1962, and – following their split from Hancock late in 1961 – regularly for Frankie Howerd. Other, less well-remembered Galton and Simpson works include the 1970 film adaptation of Joe Orton’s play Loot, with Lee Remick and Richard Attenborough, and the Peter Ustinov-starring television series Clochemerle (1972), in which the inhabitants of a French town attempt to get a public urinal erected.

Their career kept them at the top of their business for three decades, but the pair did not manage to create as big a hit as Steptoe and Son. When Galton and Simpson’s Playhouse failed to yield any new commissioned series, Simpson retired from screenwriting in 1978 to pursue his business interests, and Galton continued to work. He struck up less successful partnerships with contemporaries such as Til Death Us Do Part creator Johnny Speight (on Spooner’s Patch, 1979-82, a sitcom about a corrupt police station) and John Antrobus (on Galton’s last sitcom, 1997’s Get Well Soon, about the time he met Simpson).

Born in Paddington in London in 1930, Raymond Percy Galton worked for the Transport and General Workers’ Union when he left school. In 1948, at the age of 18, he contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium in Surrey, where he met a fellow sufferer, shipping clerk Alan Simpson. Neither was expected to survive, yet they regained their strength enough to complain about the quality of comedy on the hospital radio service, and were told to do it themselves if they thought they could do better. They did, and sent sketches to the BBC upon their release.

Within four years they were writing for the radio sketch show Happy Go Lucky, and soon after that for Hancock. Despite the split in their partnership, Galton and Simpson, who died last year, remained close friends into old age, living near one another in Surrey and meeting for tea every Monday. Both were awarded OBEs in 2000, and BAFTA fellowships in 2016.

DAVID POLLOCK