Ray Galton obituary
Half of the supremely talented writing duo who produced popular comedy hits such as Steptoe and Son and Hancock’s Half Hour
Dennis Barker
Dennis Barker
The Guardian
Sun 7 Oct 2018
For three long and bleak years in the late 1940s a teenager with tuberculosis had to endure boredom, depression and a sense of alienation because all the other occupants of his sanatorium were much older. Then another teenager was brought into the ward and one of Britain’s most successful and enduring comedy writing teams was born.
The lonely young man was Ray Galton, who has died aged 88. The other was Alan Simpson. The two boys found they were on the same wavelength and teamed up to become writing partners. Until Simpson’s death last year, they were still making each other laugh. Together they created Hancock’s Half Hour – on radio and later on television – for Tony Hancock, a programme that, in 1954 was one of the first “situation comedies”, based on characters and experiences rather than on gags.
They went on to create Steptoe and Son (1962-74) for Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H Corbett, a TV programme that drew audiences as high as 28 million. They also wrote for the comedians Frankie Howerd and Les Dawson, and lived a Rolls-Royce lifestyle far removed from their working-class roots. Neither took their new wealth entirely seriously. In one room of Galton’s huge house in the grounds of Hampton Court was a grand piano with Liberace-style candelabra on it. Asked by a journalist who played it, Galton replied: “The piano tuner.”
Sun 7 Oct 2018
For three long and bleak years in the late 1940s a teenager with tuberculosis had to endure boredom, depression and a sense of alienation because all the other occupants of his sanatorium were much older. Then another teenager was brought into the ward and one of Britain’s most successful and enduring comedy writing teams was born.
The lonely young man was Ray Galton, who has died aged 88. The other was Alan Simpson. The two boys found they were on the same wavelength and teamed up to become writing partners. Until Simpson’s death last year, they were still making each other laugh. Together they created Hancock’s Half Hour – on radio and later on television – for Tony Hancock, a programme that, in 1954 was one of the first “situation comedies”, based on characters and experiences rather than on gags.
They went on to create Steptoe and Son (1962-74) for Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H Corbett, a TV programme that drew audiences as high as 28 million. They also wrote for the comedians Frankie Howerd and Les Dawson, and lived a Rolls-Royce lifestyle far removed from their working-class roots. Neither took their new wealth entirely seriously. In one room of Galton’s huge house in the grounds of Hampton Court was a grand piano with Liberace-style candelabra on it. Asked by a journalist who played it, Galton replied: “The piano tuner.”
Born to Christine and Herbert Galton, a bus conductor, Ray grew up on a Surrey council estate. He attended Garth school, Morden, leaving at 14 for a job as a clerk with the Transport and General Workers’ Union. In 1947, aged 16, he knew there was something badly wrong. He was 6ft 4in but weighed only nine stone and was suffering from permanent sweats, a bad cough and no energy. His doctor told him to take malt. But his elder brother, Bert, who had just returned home on leave from the merchant navy, insisted that he should have an X-ray and took him to St Helier hospital in Sutton, where tuberculosis was diagnosed. He soon found himself at the Surrey county sanatorium in Milford, near Godalming.
Some of the treatment was nearly as bad as the disease. Liquid had to be removed from the top of his lungs at about a litre a time, which took half an hour. For the first year, Galton was not allowed to get out of bed, even to turn on the radio.
He dreaded undergoing the operations other patients were enduring, and watched with horror when they were wheeled back into the ward. He refused to believe it was the end for him; but the dreariness of the ward, with its yellow walls and elderly patients, became increasingly depressing. It was only at the start of his third incarcerated year that Simpson appeared. Together they would listen to the American Forces Network programmes on the ward radio, enjoying Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Phil Harris and Don Ameche as well as British comedy programmes from the BBC. Soon they began to write their own sketches for the sanatorium’s radio station – housed in a broom cupboard. Their first show was called Have You Ever Wondered? Its review – their first – in the 89th issue of the sanatorium’s Milford Bulletin said: “Slick, up to the minute with a dash of satire, a worthy effort indeed.”
The introduction of new medicines got them both out of the sanatorium after Galton’s fourth year. But in a sense, they wrote themselves out of it, emerging with expanded mental horizons.
Simpson returned home to Mitcham, south-west London, and became involved with a concert run by his local church, St Olave’s. He asked Galton if he would co-write some sketches. After this the pair began writing gags for the comedian Derek Roy’s Happy Go Lucky BBC radio programme at 5s (25p) a time. They were soon put on the programme’s payroll at eight guineas a week each. They ended up writing all the shows, an hour every fortnight, for 20 guineas each.
The pair wrote to the most famous writing team of the time, Frank Muir and Denis Norden, offering their services. They then sent a script direct to the BBC and were put in touch with the comedian Tony Hancock, who offered them 25 guineas a week. Between 1954 and 1961, they wrote 160 radio or TV scripts, which appeared under the title of Hancock’s Half Hour or simply Hancock.
For seven years, Galton and Simpson wrote every word uttered by Hancock, a difficult and touchy man who embraced the illusion that he could do better than his writers, and parted company with them. His career never fully recovered.
Galton and his writing partner, now part of Associated London Scripts, a co-operative writers’ agency, along with Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes and Howerd, were rescued by the BBC TV series Comedy Playhouse, a vehicle for individual plays. They contributed number four, The Offer, featuring an old rag-and-bone man and his deluded and snobbish son. Both writers thought these characters too good to waste and saw the comic possibilities of a series. It became Steptoe and Son.
Soon they were working side by side at antique desks in Mayfair. In 1977 they worked for ITV on a Galton and Simpson Playhouse series while the Steptoe programmes were flourishing, with local actors, in Scandinavia, Portugal and Germany. But in that year their partnership ran out of steam. Simpson took to exploring French vineyards in his Rolls while Galton collaborated with Johnny Speight, in Spooner’s Patch – set in a police station and starring Donald Churchill and Patricia Hayes, from 1977 to 1981 – and with John Antrobus in Room at the Bottom, from 1986 to 1987. “I really have no other interests,” Galton explained.
Like Simpson, he stuck to working-class failures as his stock in trade. And the sanatorium had not been forgotten. In 1997, he wrote a television series called Get Well Soon, two years after his wife, Tonia (nee Phillips), whom he had married in 1956, had died from cancer. The cast included a young Eddie Marsan.
Galton and Simpson came together again professionally in 1998 to adapt some of their work for the BBC radio series Radio Playhouse. The plays were Cliquot et Fils, Nought for Thy Comfort, A Clerical Error and The Offer. They never ceased to be friends, living within a couple of miles of one another, and seeing each other every week. In 1996, Paul Merton revived some of the duo’s best scripts for a TV series.
Among the awards Galton received, jointly with Simpson, were the Guild of TV Producers and Directors’ scriptwriters of the year in 1959, the Screenwriters’ Guild best comedy series for Steptoe and Son four years running from 1962 to 1965, the Screenwriters Guild best comedy screenplay in 1972, and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain lifetime achievement award in 1997.
To celebrate the pair’s 60-year anniversary as a team, in 2009 BBC Radio broadcast a series of updated plays, called Galton and Simpson’s Half Hour. The casts included Frank Skinner, Mitchell and Webb, Rik Mayall, June Whitfield and Paul Merton. And in 2016, the 60th anniversary of the first TV episode of Hancock’s Half Hour, the BBC remade an episode that had been lost, The New Neighbour, with Jon Culshaw and Kevin McNally.
That same year, Galton and Simpson were awarded a Bafta fellowship. Galton said: “We are happy and honoured to accept this award on behalf of all the blood donors, test pilots, radio hams and rag-and-bone men of the 20th century without whom we would probably be out of a job.” Galton was appointed OBE in 2000. His son, Andrew, daughters, Sara and Lisa, and five grandchildren survive him.
• Raymond Percy Galton, comedy writer, born 17 July 1930; died 5 October 2018
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