ALAN SIMPSON By Michael Wal

Alan Simpson, the man who co-wrote the two biggest comedy successes on British TV Hancocks Half Hour, and Steptoe and Son has just turned seventy and revelling in it. He explains :I have reached that age where I can do what I like. And what he likes is touring France in his Rolls Royce Corniche convertible, definitely not flying, and being President of non leagiue soccer side Hampton and Richmond. He started comedy writing with his script partner Ray Galton when the paid left a TB sanatrium at Milford near Godalming. He says : I went back to work in a City shipping office for a year, but by then Ray and myse;lf were getting commissions for scripts for radio shows. I remember my mother saying that I could leave work and write full time if I paid her thirty shilling a week for a month. If I didnt earn enough to do that then I would have to go back to the shipping office, where I was a Customs and Excise clerk.Fortunately we sold two sketches to the Derek Roy show for eight guineas each and I was safe.. In fact he never looked back, and the Hancock Half Hour series came from writing radio sketches for Hancock. He recalls : For some reason Bob Monkhouse and Dennis Goodwin gave up writing this hour long radio show called Calling All Forces in the 1950s with six shows to go, and the BBC asked us to take over.Hancock wanted us to write for him, and said that he would pay us half of what he was paid. That meant we got 25 guineas a time. We were rich ! We then said we would like to do a half hour storyline for him. It was before the days they called it Situation Comedy. We went on to write 101 radio episodes and 60 TV episodes. The Television series ran from 1956-61. Strangely the radio series hadnt started out all that well. It went out at the primetime on radio in those days at Sunday lunchtime, and repeated in the evenings mid-week.I suppose it was heard by 18-20 million people. Alans next success Steptoe and Son, was to prove even more successful than Hancock. Alan remembers: We were called into the BBC and told they were starting a series called Comedy Playhouse. It was a series of half hour TV comedies and we were to write all of them. We could also direct them and act in them if we wished. It was the first and only time writers have been given such freedom. To tell the truth we got stumped, but then we started to write a piece about a couple of rag and bone men .Wed had enough of hiring comedians, because they were so mean and hadnt paid us well in the past, so we hired a couple of actors Harry H Corbett, a straight Shakespearian actor and Wilfred Brambell. We wrote the first show, which was the first of our ten Comedy Playhouse comedies, but when we took the script in the BBC said this is your next series. They had to see if Harry and Wilfred would do it. But they came back immediately ands agreed. We found out years later that they agreed because before they had been on Drama contracts at £90 each, and now they were on Light Entertainment contracts at £1,000 each. There were about 60 episodes of Steptoe written, and even this year in the New Millenium they were still being repeated.Alan says that he gave up writing original scripts 20 years ago, but admits that he has been doing quite a bit of re-working past work with Ray Galton. Paul Merton re-did a lot of the old Hancock scripts, pretty appalingly as far as I was concerned. And both Hancock and Steptoe scripts are still very popular in Scandinavia. His real love these days are his visits to France in the present he bought himself four years ago a Rolls Royce Corniche convertible. He told me : I do not fly anymore since on my first flight to Los Angeles there was an emergency landing. The next flight there was all right. But I decided that was the end of it, and I returned on both occasions by train across America, and boat to England. It does make the world you visit smalled. But then the great German philosopher Kant only ever travelled 90 miles from where he lived during the whole of his life. I bought Kants book, by the way, and couldnt understand a word of it. A friend told me to buy a Pelican book that was an introduction to the great philosopher. I couldnt get past the first page. I used it in a Hancock script when he was shown reading a book by Bertrand Russell, and just the same happens to him. He ends up reading a book called Dead Dames Dont Talk, and needs to look up the dictionary before he can understand the first page. Alan decided to learn a language properly when he was 24, and called in a private French tutor.Now he tours there up to eight times a year, always seeking out the best in food and wine. He has become an expert and is pretty dismissive of Enlgish food and restaurants. Saying : A lot of self deception goes on in the English food industry. Just because you get a lot of chefs on TV people think there is a renaissance in British food in restaurants, but go around the country and they are absolurte rubbish. He backs up his disdain of the British food industry by pointing out that in Paris alone there are seven restaurants with three Michelin stars,22 with two stars and 50 with one star.. In England, he argues there are just five with two stars. In France you go into a tiny little village and get a wonderful meal. In the English provinces eating in a hotel is like 30 years ago. Its probably the same chef, the same menu and the same food.

Bookmark with:

• Delicious
• Digg
• reddit
• StumbleUpon

Don’t know what this is?

Read the 50connect Guide To Social Bookmarking.