How Galton and Simpson made Britain

Underlying all the specific outrages, scandals and gloomy prognostications that have characterised the first few months of the UK’s new Labour government, one persistent theme has come to the fore – a certain humourlessness, one that I can’t help feeling is more unforgivable than the very great deal that Keir Starmer has to be humourless about.

‘As a race’, said Barry Took, ‘the British have one peculiarity that sets them apart from the rest of mankind: that extraordinary sense of humour; their ability to laugh at others, to laugh at the sublime and the ridiculous, to laugh at disaster and triumph, to be indifferent to the subject of the joke but to seek and find humour in everything.’

Of course, citizens of all nations are guilty of some absurd chauvinism, of cherishing some attribute of which they are inordinately proud, some characteristic they are absurdly confident cannot be matched elsewhere. That they are the best lovers in the world, the best cooks, the best footballers, the best at wrestling bears in the snow.

Still, very few would deny the British our claim to have a singular sense of the ridiculous, of the fundamental cosmic joke. You see it not just in the wit and invention of our professional comedians, but also in the vernacular. The gift of finding misery, pain and catastrophe just unutterably droll.

In this particular register, the maestros were, I think by common consent, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Their twin towers of grim British hilarity, Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son, established so many of the ground rules for British sitcom that it is easy to forget that they needed writing in the first place.

According to Tony Hancock’s biographer, John Fisher, the first traceable use of the term, ‘situation comedy’, in Britain was in a BBC memo about Hancock on 31 March 1953, suggesting it would be an ideal format for his comedic style. Coming a few years later, Steptoe and Son was the first sitcom to feature proper actors, rather than comedians using it as a vehicle for their stage act. These were epochal innovations.

More importantly, they established the default tone. The fateful inevitability of failure. Of protagonists forever circling the same drain, making defiant but futile gestures towards freedom, daring to dream of even basic agency, but never quite able to escape.

Galton and Simpson’s mastery of social realism is unchallenged. It has long been commonplace to discuss them in the same breath as Pinter, Osborne or Beckett. It is perhaps more urgent to remind ourselves not just that they confronted, unblinking, the bleak existential horror of postwar Cheam, but that they also remained unfailingly funny while doing so.

Their best lines still make me laugh, though I might struggle to say exactly why. ‘I thought my mother was a bad cook but at least her gravy used to move about a bit.’ Why is that so perfect? An awful lot of the comedy came from the gaps. The pauses. The faces as the penny drops.

Their comedy was not marbled with the erudition, the waspish Enlightenment wit of the exasperated intellectuals that characterised the satire boom and the Footlights school. Galton and Simpson did not meet beneath the dreaming spires, nor gather over crumpets, chortling and squirming with the tantalising delight of their own brilliance and daring anti-establishment scorn. No. Galton and Simpson met in the tuberculosis ward at the Milford Hospital in Surrey – an almost painfully close analogue for Britain itself in those years, at least for the sub-Oxbridge masses.

And it showed. The excavated spoil of a consumptive lung was never very far from Albert Steptoe’s filthy handkerchief, nor the malevolent damp from Hancock’s prospects as he gazed out over the railway sidings.

On these foundations was built so much of the television that made life bearable on our rainy island for the next half-century. Basil Fawlty. Norman Stanley Fletcher. Margo and Jerry Leadbetter, Tom and Barbara Good. Del Boy and Rodney Trotter. Hyacinth Bucket. Edmund Blackadder and Baldrick. Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker. Rigsby. Reggie Perrin. Arkwright. Victor Meldrew. Compo, Clegg and Foggy, and Nora Batty. Patsy and Eddy. Mr Humphries and Mrs Slocombe. Frank Spencer. Terry and Bob. Alf Garnett. Lofty and Gloria. And Mainwaring, Wilson, Walker, Jonesy, Godfrey, Frazer and Pike. Every single one, trying desperately week after week to escape their certain fate, and ending 28 minutes later right back where they started.

Last Saturday at the annual Battle of Ideas festival, I was privileged to join a balloon debate, to establish the greatest comic talent of all time.

If readers are unfamiliar with the concept, a balloon debate imagines an over-laden and fast plummeting hot-air balloon, and demands that the speakers make the case, one by one, that their chosen candidate be not the one ejected from the basket, in order to slow and perhaps even reverse the descent.

I decided to propose Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and was quietly satisfied that I managed to keep them in the balloon right up to the final cut, when they were finally heaved over the wicker brim in favour of John Cleese. I’ll happily concede Cleese’s unique gifts. But given that, from a purely logistical, altitude-maintenance point of view, G&S were the only double act on the bill and a hefty couple of lads at that, I regard my close finish as something of a moral, pound-for-pound victory.

For me, the major takeaway from the whole event was just what an extraordinary legacy this country has to be proud of in the field of taking the piss. Let alone over a period of apparent national decline.

Stand-ups, sitcoms, sketch shows, columnists… Britain has punched so far above its weight in virtually every category of comedy that it should probably make itself available for hormone tests.

And not just in comedy, of course. In everything from rock and pop music to literature, comic books, TV and film, to the most popular sports league in the world (the Premier League is broadcast in 212 territories to 643million homes, with a potential TV audience of 4.7 billion), Britain’s ‘soft power’ remains mind boggling. Economically, politically and militarily, we are clearly much diminished, but our cultural reach and heft remains miraculously intact. And this is largely a grassroots phenomenon.

Even while our Empire quietly made its excuses and let itself out, our far-called navies melted away and the vast majority of our pomp of yesterday became at one with Nineveh and Tyre, our postwar cultural vitality refused to get the memo, and die.

This is why it is so depressing to see our present government so characterised by flat, humourless scolds. Put them all in the balloon, I say, and the sooner it crashes the better.

Meanwhile, none of those battling it out on Saturday should have been thrown over. Every single one of them has contributed, and contributes still, to the levity of the nation, not its hurtling Earthward descent. Let the grim, bleak, existential howls of laughter continue, until morale improves.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.