The Curse of Steptoe 2008

Harry H Corbett sits at the heart of a sweeping chronicle that maps the full arc of the televised series, while deliberately skipping the five-year gap between 1965 and 1970 when no episodes were recorded. The story begins with a rising Shakespearean actor, the director Joan Littlewood steering him to greatness, as he plays Richard II at Theatre Workshop in the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and envisions Henry V at the Old Vic, a trajectory that even tempts comparison to the era’s giants and hints at eclipsing Gielgud in time.

Across the city, at the BBC Television Centre, the writers Alan Simpson and Ray Galton are free of their Hancock commissions and set free to craft a distinct form: a sequence of one-off plays that cast actors in the foreground rather than comic performers who must deliver a quip every line. The result is The Offer, the first collaboration in which Corbett is cast, and its enormous success seeds something more intimate and complex—a decade-long comedy partnership that blossoms between the actor and Wilfrid Brambell, a man whose charm masks deeper insecurities and a troubling relationship with fame.

As the partnership deepens, [Harry H Corbett]’s stage career begins to fade, his career narrowed by typecasting, while his first marriage to the comic actress Maureen Corbett strains under the burden of his womanising and restless energy. Brambell’s own demons—heavy drinking and a laid-back, private approach to acting—fuel tension between them, positioning Brambell as a kind of counterpoint to Corbett, often described as a method actor who embodies a rough-edged intensity that some call “the British Marlon Brando.”

Off the stage, Brambell’s secrets accumulate. He becomes secretive about fame, and the worst fears of his private life spill into public view when a public incident in a toilet leads to a police prosecution for persistently importuning for an immoral purpose, with the fallout of a failed marriage laid bare in the newspapers. The cycle of attention and exhaustion follows them, as the show and the actors’ careers are milked dry, with little relief from the pressures that fame and scrutiny bring.

Corbett finds it increasingly hard to secure work outside his iconic cockney rag-and-bone-man persona, and the industry’s appetite for his image dominates his choices. The arc circles back to a stark reminder of his early vow when Richard II’s words—“I wasted time and now doth time waste me”—reappear as a private reckoning; he whispers them to himself as he waits for his cue in a live recording of Steptoe and Son, a moment that crystallizes the gap between promise and reality.

In the end, the tale closes on a note of waning opportunities: Corbett cannot land roles beyond variations of his former persona, and the narrative culminates with the stark reality that his path may be limited to pantomime or a stage version of Steptoe in Australia, signaling the bittersweet cost of fame and the irreplaceable weight of memory in a career defined by a single, towering public image.