Wilfrid Brambell

Comedy duos who secretly hated each other

In his 2017 memoir, Matt Lucas recalls "hurling obscenities" at co-star David Walliams during an Australian live tour. The odd blazing row notwithstanding, the pair's relationship has been rosy compared to the bitter feuds that consumed earlier double acts. Here we look back at some of history's most troubled comedy partnerships.

Steptoe and Sons: tears of TV's finest clowns

The story behind the comedy great.

New exhibit shows archive pictures of BBC comedians

Compton Verney exhibition charts 60 years of comedy, from Hancock's Half Hour to Miranda Hart.

5 ways Steptoe & Son changed TV comedy

Galton and Simpson will be honoured with the Fellowship at the British Academy Television Awards at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on Sunday 8 May. Here, Catherine Bray looks at how the sitcom has influenced TV comedies since the Sixties.

Golden age when TV comedy shaped nation's future

To Harold Wilson's way of thinking, the father-and-son rag-and-bone men of Oildrum Lane, played by Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett could cost him the election, if millions stayed at home to watch instead of going out to vote.

Wilfrid Brambell accused of abusing boys

Steptoe & Son actor Wilfrid Brambell last night became the latest BBC star accused of child sex abuse. Two men claimed the late actor molested them when they were children in Jersey in the early 1970s.

In Radio 2's Very Nearly an Armful - a quote from The Blood Donor, as any self-respecting baby boomer will know - the comedy writer Stephen Merchant analysed their lasting appeal, with the help of Denis Norden, Ben Elton, Beryl Vertue and David Mitchell.

It was to Norden and his writing partner Frank Muir that the two working-class lads, thrown together in a TB sanitorium in their late teens, sent their first efforts at comedy scriptwriting. Norden recognised their raw talent instantly and later put them "in a class of their own". They broke more new ground than any of their contemporaries, he said.

Apart from anything else, Galton and Simpson pioneered what Norden called "the jokeless radio comedy", by which he meant a series (Hancock) which relied on situation and character, rather than an endless stream of gags. It was the beginning of the sitcom.

Its apogee was Steptoe and Son, each half-hour episode a perfect little mini-drama of aspiration, conflict and disappointment, distinguished as much by the fine playing of Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H Corbett as it was by the masterly writing of Galton and Simpson.