The Curse of Steptoe on BBC4 this week was a real treat.  Although I can remember the programme I don’t think I really appreciated it properly at the time: I was only 12 when it finished it’s last season.

There were lots of things I knew about it but didn’t really fully understand before, and this programme made them much more real.  For example, I had heard how Harry H. Corbett  was a well-known serious actor before becoming Steptoe but I wasn’t even born at that time.  The whole point of him being in the original play which eventually became Steptoe and Son was that he was a ‘proper’ actor and not a comedian or comic actor, because Galton & Simpson were trying to do more realistic plays instead of sitcoms.

The performances were fantastic and made the whole thing so much more believable. At times Jason Issacs as Corbett looked like Robert Lindsay, Kevin Spacey and even Timothy Dalton but gradually he became more and more like Harold Steptoe.

The parallel between the TV series and real life were tragically ironic.   Harold Steptoe is tied to his father, who can’t understand why he would want to get out of the rag & bone lifestyle which was good enough for him., but no matter how hard he tries he just can’t escape.  In the same way the Wilfred Bramble character was moaning about ‘all this method-acting bollocks’ and couldn’t see the point of getting into character before getting on stage, and Corbett was frustrated by the older man’s half-hearted approach to read-throughs and rehearsals.

But ho matter how frustrated he was he was trapped in Steptoe and Son, doomed to continue being thrown together with Wilfred Bramble.

You often hear actors talk, usually complaining, about being stereotyped.  This is the first time I have seen the effects of it so clearly demonstrated. I already thought that Steptoe and Son was loaded with pathos and more like a Pinter or Beckett play than a sitcom, but now I can see how the actors’ situation so closely resembled it it is even more pathos-laden.

Not only was this a good drama in its own right, but it helps to show Steptoe and Son  as the truly great programme it was – and how good to see the writers, Galton & Simpson portrayed seriously too.