The Stage

Tales from the script - John Antrobus & Steptoe and Son Murder at Oil Drum Lane

Published Wednesday 15 February 2006 at 13:45 by Jeremy Austin

John Antrobus has written for comedy greats such as Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers but his latest task has been resurrecting Steptoe, hears Jeremy Austin

Somehow the sitcom has become the main topic of conversation around the media set’s NW3 dinner tables and in the fashionable columns of trendy broadsheets.

Is it dead? Is it too cruel? Where is the traditional format? It was better/worse than it was in the seventies/nineties. Where is the next Office going to come from?

One thing is certain, there never has been and probably never will be a period to match that postwar golden age when Galton and Simpson, Eric Sykes, Spike Milligan, Frankie Howard, Johnny Speight, Terry Nation and John Antrobus as well as a handful of others churned out classic after classic, first from a rundown office in Shepherd’s Bush and then in Kensington.

Sitting in media haunt Soho House, John Antrobus gazes wistfully out of the window as he remembers Associated London Scripts and the energy and enthusiasm of the collective from where the Goons, Steptoe and Son, Alf Garnett, Tony Hancock and many, many others emanated.

“At that time there was like a renaissance after the war and getting rid of the inhibitions and the poverty of 1945 up to the early fifties,” he recalls. “It was all sort of bursting forth and we were all thrown in together, so that was maybe what made it good for us. Demob happy and bomb happy - a lot of bomb happy producers.”

He continues: “Today, I don’t know, it’s different. It’s strange. I don’t think television is very inviting for comedy at all with BBC and ITV audience research and projection of what people want - I mean we never bothered with that. We had a passion to do what we found was funny and a total belief that it was funny and that it was right.”

And perhaps it was that belief that led him to suggest to fellow ALS old boys Ray Galton and Alan Simpson that it would be a good idea to resurrect Steptoe and Son for the stage.

Although Simpson has been retired for more than two decades, Galton snapped up the idea. Rejecting Antrobus’ idea of rewriting an old episode, Galton suggested that together they write a new story in which Harold, Harry H Corbett’s character, had killed Albert (Wilfred Bramble) and escaped to South America. The play would be set on his return to Oil Drum Lane where he finds Albert’s angry ghost waiting to haunt him.

“Ray was very clear that it had to be newly written, which was so much better, so much more exciting for me to work with Ray doing that, so we went on from there,” says Antrobus.

Murder on Oil Drum Lane opened in York in October and transferred to the Comedy Theatre in London on February 15. Roger Smith directs and Jake Nightingale and Harry Dickman have been cast as Harold and Albert respectively. Antrobus said there is no problem with them taking over roles that came to define the actors who orginally played them.

“Steptoe started as a Comedy Playhouse and in plays you can have anybody you like so I never thought that was a problem,” he says. “When we came to cast it, because of the impact of Harry Corbett and Wilfred Bramble, we didn’t go too far away from the appearance of the two of them and in Dick Nightingale and Harry Goodman we have got two good actors. The same as when they started in the Comedy Playhouse - two good actors.

“We are not asking them to mimic. It is completely different from Round the Horne Revisited when the actors were required to mimic the voices and were actually doing the scripts. We are reinterpreting the characters.”

While Antrobus is probably most closely associated with Milligan, with whom he wrote some later Goons as well as the stageplay The Bedsitting Room, he had worked with Galton on the Peter Sellers film Wrong Arm of the Law as well as Room at the Bottom, the award-winning comedy for ITV.

Indeed, the writers at ALS seemed to hop in and out of bed with one another like a bunch of Berkshire swingers.

“I arrived from Sandhurst, very upper class, and fell in with Cockney, left-wing working-class lads and within in three months I was going, ‘Oh yeah, up the fucking working class’,” he remembers.

“Looking back you think what a time of enchantment. Doing it was great fun and we were full of passion and laughter and thought nothing could go wrong - those were the days my friend, we thought they would never end. But various things happened to various people, in my case alcoholism took hold until it reached a crisis in the late sixties.”

He has been sober now for 36 years and has in that time developed a philosophy that can be summed up thus - you make your own luck. It is this, he says, that has kept him creative and productive for such a long time.

Several years ago he wrote Of Good Report, about his years working at Associated London Scripts, and he has recently finished a play called It’s All in the Mind, Folks, about Peter Sellers. He is also planning to take The Bedsitting Room to this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has a film production company, with which he has a number of projects. What about a return to television? His last show was Get Well Soon for the BBC in 1997.

“I haven’t done that much television. I went through a period of some years really of writing sitcom ideas into scripts and submitting them. It was something in me that was getting in the way. God knows what but it was fruitless and eventually I thought I’ve got to drop this, there is something not working at this time and in this place,” he says, before adding: “It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do television.”

And then he recalls something that will make most comedy fans’ mouths water. “One play that I did which was going to be with Peter Sellers, called An Apple a Day in the seventies. The BBC had originally commissioned it in the Comedy Playhouse format and when I sent them this bizarre - to them - comedy, they turned it down,” he says.

“Peter Sellers a couple of years later picked it up and loved it and the television people bought it all over again and they were setting up for production. At the last minute Peter dropped out and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, they got them in, Spike Milligan, Ken Griffith. A lovely cast. If anyone has got the tape please!”

Please indeed.

• Steptoe and Son Murder at Oil Drum Lane is at the Comedy Theatre from February 25-March 1