The story of Harry H. Corbett's (Jason Isaacs') decline in fortune, from an aspiring star of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop to a pathetic wreck in the mid-Eighties, reduced to playing pantomime and embarking on a pointless tour of Australia in a stage version of Steptoe and Son, is a familiar one. Although brilliant in his portrayal of Harold Steptoe, he became so typecast that no one could see him performing anything else. Wilfrid Brambell (Phil Davis) experienced no such agonies - as a character-actor, he was glad of the regular work. Nonetheless he had his own personal problems - as a closet homosexual at a time when it was illegal in Britain, he was reduced to making brief assignations in public rest-rooms. Apparently Brian Fillis' drama upset the Corbett family due to its portrayal of the Brambell/ Corbett professional relationship; as a result, the drama is now prefaced with a warning that some of the scenes are fictionalized versions of the truth. One wonders why there was so much fuss: the relationship between the two actors is portrayed as cordial on set, while off-set they chose to lead totally separate lives. Once the series finished in 1974 (on television, at least) they said goodbye to one another quite civilly. The drama suggests that Corbett was in a sense a victim of his own desire for fame and fortune - goaded by Tom Sloan (Roger Allam), the BBC's long-serving head of comedy - he agreed to make series after series, even though he protests to his wife Sheila Steafel (Zoe Tapper) that he will quit as soon as humanly possible. Isaacs and Davis give convincing characterizations; they capture the mannerisms of the two actors quite uncannily.
Review of The Curse of Steptoe
