Andrew Vine: Golden age when power of great TV comedy helped shape nation’s future

WE’LL never know for sure if that canny son of Huddersfield, Harold Wilson, fell about laughing at the television one cold January night 50 years ago this week.
Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett in Steptoe and SonWilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett in Steptoe and Son
Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett in Steptoe and Son

Perhaps he settled down in front of the box with wife Mary, his preferred glass of claret and a fine cigar – the trademark pipe being strictly for public consumption – and for half-an-hour beginning at 8pm set aside his plans for evicting Sir Alec Douglas-Home from number 10 and moving in.

Or maybe his ambition in an election year was too all-consuming to allow time or such frivolousness, and he worked that evening.

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But whether or not Wilson watched an episode of Steptoe and Son called The Lodger broadcast on January 17, he was certainly aware of it. He could hardly fail to be. That evening, more than half of Britain’s population, 26 million people, tuned in, one of the biggest audiences ever recorded for an entertainment programme.

And the memory resurfaced for Wilson in autumn of that year as election day, October 15, approached. In the Radio Times, there they were again – Steptoe and Son, due to go out at 8pm. The country loved them. Playgrounds, offices, pits and factories rang to amateur mimics declaiming “You dirty old man.”

It goes with the territory for a 21st century politician to be acutely aware of the power of television, its pitfalls and opportunities, but half a century ago, Wilson was ahead of his time in understanding what it could do and had shrewdly exploited it to cultivate his dependable, man-of-the-people image.

And to Wilson’s way of thinking, the father-and-son rag-and-bone men of Oildrum Lane, played by Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H Corbett could cost him the election, if millions stayed at home to watch instead of going out to vote.

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So in an episode that could have come from a situation comedy, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition put his Gannex raincoat on and went to see the Director General of the BBC, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, to express his concern that Steptoe and Son could affect the electoral outcome in a dozen marginal seats. Could something be done?

Yes it could. That week’s episode of Albert and Harold squabbling in their junk-strewn living room would be moved back an hour and go out at 9pm, the time that the polling stations closed. The nation cast its votes before that unforgettable clip-clopping theme tune began, and sent Wilson to Downing Street.

He’d already been given a helping hand by the younger Steptoe, actor Harry H Corbett, a Labour supporter and one of the most popular men on television, who had spoken at a party rally.

The 50th anniversary of a show that set a high-water mark for audience enjoyment – and left an unexpected fingerprint on political history – is one of the happier milestones we’ll see in 2014, when commemorations are dominated by remembrance of conflict and its human cost, rather than laughter.

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Television chiefs can only dream of viewing figures of 26 million people these days, in a world where multiple channels and a myriad of other home entertainments have fragmented the old mass audience of an age when comedy shows of the quality of Steptoe and Son, or Morecambe and Wise – who at their peak on one glorious evening in 1977 drew 28 million viewers – were a unifying force in Britain.

They brought millions together as families gathered in front of the television, not to watch some ghastly bear-pit reality show, but brilliantly conceived and executed comedy from master writers like Steptoe’s Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, or Morecambe and Wise’s Eddie Braben.

There’s little to compare now, and we’re the poorer for it. The traditionally-minded comedies of that golden age when families could sit down together in the certain knowledge what they were about to see would be fit for children and older people alike to watch has gone the way of black-and-white televisions and having to adjust the horizontal or vertical hold.

The occasional echo is still to be heard from the heyday of the great television sitcom, as on Boxing Day, when 10 million people watched Still Open All Hours, the revival of a much-loved series from the past, written by Yorkshire’s own comic master, Roy Clarke.

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The studio audience roared with laughter, and the viewing figures made it one of the top Christmas shows, demonstrating that there’s still an appetite out there for comedy that finds its laughs without offensiveness.

Other hit shows, though, rely on bad language, and an audience coarsened by long-term exposure to the cheap and crude laugh like drains, as they do at the country’s current top sitcom, Mrs Brown’s Boys, where the laugh in line after line depends upon the F-word.

Eric Morecambe’s son, Gary, reflected recently that if his father saw a comic or a show on television that he considered was descending into the gutter in search of a laugh, he would shake his head and mutter: “Lazy comedy.”

Eric and Ernie were never so lazy as to do that, and nor were Steptoe and Son.

As the distant laughter of half a nation united in enjoyment echoes faintly from 50 years ago, television comedy should listen and learn.